Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

A comment came in to The Wisdom tonight on my Fridge Pack 2.0 piece:

Fantasic work. I am sure it is just a matter of time before the mainstream media picks up this story and runs with it. Perhaps you can help me figure out a few more pressing soda issues. Do Coke and Pepsi use the same purity of aluminum in the manufacturing of their cans and if not, does this cause any appreciable difference in flavor, cabonation loss over time or ability of the can to retain its temperature? These questions have been in my mind ever since I read a facinating blog on the innovative forming, rolling, binding and capping process developed by the Fanta Company in the early 70″s. It was truly revolutionary and resulted in many copy-cat canning process being developed overseas causing Fanta to file a rash of lawsuits, some of which still have yet to be resolved.

Sass, it seems. And not particularly clever sass at that.

Of course, I like to see what sets people off when they feel moved to put The Cap”n in his place with such a searing attack.

As is typical, this brave soul posted as “Anonymous”, lest The Cap”n be able to challenge his or her superior intellect. But the clickpath reveals some curious details.

First of all, this person came to The Wisdom via Cox Communications in New Orleans. I guess these days this would narrow down the potential list of culprits to about 50 people.

But most curiously, this person arrived through a search for “CAPN KEN” at a major search engine. So this wasn”t a random visit. This person was aware of The Cap”n and sought out The Wisdom just to lay the lame smackdown.

My best guess is that this could be somebody associated with Metroblogging New Orleans, where The Cap”n wrote an anti-FEMA welfare comment that somehow never made it live last week. Sweet revenge, perhaps, for my attempt to voice an opinion that buying new homes for everybody in New Orleans might not be the best use of federal dollars?

Hard to say. But Anonymous, if you come back to The Wisdom to see what kind of havoc you have wreaked with your very sharp barb (yes, I”ll know), how about a little more context?

Also, I find it really amusing that Anonymous posted the comment 18 minutes and 29 seconds after clicking on the Fridge Pack comments link. Seriously? 18:29 crafting a comment and that”s the best you could come up with?

I drink a lot of Coke Zero. Kroger”s “Limit 6 with additional $15 purchase” policy during Coca-Cola sales is aimed directly at me. One time, I actually took $15 worth of stuff out of my cart and came back for it just so I could get another 6 Fridge Packs. It was a really good sale.

So a change in Coke”s refrigerator-friendly 12-pack is not going to go unnoticed by The Cap”n.

If you”re not familiar with the Fridge Pack, it offers two basic improvements over traditional 12-pack cartons that make it ideal for storing and retrieving cans from a refrigerator:

- Instead of stacking cans in three rows of four, the Fridge Pack is two rows of six cans, thus making the package lower and longer - the depth of a standard refrigerator shelf, in fact.

- The top front section of the package is perforated, so you open the package by ripping off the corner. This turns the package into a handy dispenser. I actually met the guy who designed the Fridge Pack a couple of years ago. It was at some Atlanta marketing awards thing (yes, The Cap”n was up for an award for a product at TWMBIC), and among the things being recognized was the then-new Coke Fridge Pack. Free lunches must be hard to come by at Coke headquarters, because the Fridge Pack Guy actually attended the awards thing. Of course I took the opportunity to say hello and praise Fridge Pack Guy for improving my life.

[editor"s note: The Wisdom staff understands that Coke"s adoption of the "Fridge Pack" has been the subject of a patent-infringement lawsuit and would like to note that nowhere on the current packaging is "Fridge Pack" mentioned. The use of "Fridge Pack" in this article is for the common man"s understanding of the packaging"s design and functionality.]

The wife came home from Kroger last week with a fresh supply of Zero, and the Fridge Packs were a mix of the usual flimsy design and a brand-new version apparently rolled out with Coke”s Olympic promotion. A closer examination was clearly in order.

There are three major changes to the Fridge Pack that each solve a particular problem experienced with Fridge Pack 1.0.

First, Coke has improved the opening mechanism by adding an “OPEN HERE” tab (the new package is on top):

With the old package (at bottom), opening the thing was a four-finger job. You had to get even pressure across the whole top perforation to avoid crushing the whole thing.

Second, the design of the front opening has changed completely - and very much for the better:

The old package opened nearly all the way down the front, which not only automatically ejected the first can (which isn”t always what the user wants to happen), but resulted in a very real risk that you”d rip open the entire front of the package and dump cans all over your kitchen floor.

The new package”s front opens only down to a level slightly higher than the bottom of the top can. Profile and head-on shots of the two open Fridge Packs show the difference:

Getting cans on the bottom row out of the new package is slightly harder, but the added package stability is worth it.

The last change is the most fundamental and addresses the other main cause of Fridge Pack failure. The old package was sealed down the middle of the bottom panel, which greatly amplified the weakness of the deep-cut front opening. If you didn”t pull the perforation off cleanly, you were basically splitting the entire package in two. And sometimes the seal would fail before you even opened the package, again dropping cans all over the place.

The new Fridge Pack is sealed at the edge of the bottom panel, which appears to give more stability to the package both in its natural and open states:

The introduction of the Fridge Pack was a fundamental shift in how consumers buy, store and access beverages. Version 1.0 had some major flaws, but it”s good to know Coke”s on the case (so to speak) to improve the experience.

So thanks, Coke. For making my Fridge Pack better - even if you don”t call it that anymore.

I posted a comment over at Metroblogging Atlanta Friday about the “McMansion” controversy here in town, and a couple of hours later got this comment through the fancy new Contact The Cap”n email form:

Nice comments on the zoning issues. You sound intelligent but I lost total respect after checking out your lame perv webpage. It seems you give a little more respect to real estate issues then how to treat people right. Your life would probably be a lot more enjoyable if you actually liked your wife or pretended to and weren”t such a big perv. Nice going , buddy.

Damn, you”re really going to have to narrow that down, pal. This brave soul (in Miami, apparently) didn”t see fit to include an actual email address with his note, so I”m left to ponder which post or posts left my new friend with such distain for The Cap”n.

My logs show he never made it past the first page, so it had to be something recent. He knows I”m married and was at The Wisdom for 10 minutes and 40 seconds, so I guess he spent some time reading. The two “perv” references give an indication of where his outrage lies. But the only slightly perverted thing that would have been on the homepage during his visit was my reference to that smokin-hot Miss Georgia in Breaking News: 72,000 coal miners not trapped yesterday. But that”s hardly a “perv” thing (at least by my high perv standards). No, the Get Out! girls weren”t on the homepage today.

So I”m thinking the “perv” stuff was a red herring facilitated by my reference to that smokin-hot Miss Georgia (24-year-old Monica Pang of Conyers, by the way). I get the feeling the “treat people right” part is what really set him off.

And I”ve cornered the market in not treating people right. Maybe it was my insensitivity toward those two trapped miners. Or Miss Montana”s wardrobe. Or the Securities and Exchange Commission. Or that greedy old bitch in Buckhead. Or USC fans. Or Soledad O”Brien. It”s been a busy month, so it”s really hard to say.

If my new friend had left an actual email address, my reply back would have included the standard Wisdom disclaimer - which I guess I should re-post here on the site:

WARNING: The Wisdom is not for the weak of spirit, faint of heart, feeble of mind or those who are sickly, portly, barren, jaundiced, lactose-intolerant, ugly or spastic. Consult your physician before reading.

The wife and I sat down to watch Miss America last night - mostly so I could ogle the hot ones and we could both make fun of the horsey, cockeyed, big-foreheaded and otherwise less-than-perfect ones.

When the cut went from 10 to 5 (sadly eliminating Miss Florida, who we”d hoped to see in the talent portion since we figured her “talent” might involve her pet pig), I saw the writing on the wall.

Left in the pageant were two traditional big-haired girls (Oklahoma and D.C.), a little redneck girl from L.A. (Lower Alabama), a Greek girl from Virginia and my sure-fire winner: our own Miss Georgia.

Monica Pang. She of the Chinese father and blonde-haired, blue-eyed American mother. The perfect representation of modern America.

Here, just past the dawn of the 21st Century, Miss America would represent our future. Modern, smart, multi-cultural, and really smokin-hot. OK, so most of America is not modern, smart, multi-cultural or smokin-hot, but Miss America is supposed to represent our ideal, right?

This would be a defining moment for America. We would declare for the world to see that the U.S. is at its best when cultures come together to create that modern, smart - and smokin-hot - future. It”s our Manifest Destiny of the Technology Age.

When the final countdown began, it was all falling into place. Gone were the girls from D.C. (representing big government), Alabama (the agrarian South) and the Greek (a civilization millenia past its prime) girl from Virginia.

We were left with a stark contrast: Miss Oklahoma - the big-eyed, All-American buxom beauty from the oil patch - and Monica - the sleek, smart, pretty new-world Asian-American girl. It was Exxon/Texaco vs. Yahoo/Google. The past vs. the future. The old-boy network vs. the new economy.

America would declare, right there on that Las Vegas stage, what we”re all about in the 21st Century.

Oklahoman Crowned Miss America

OK, that”s not technically correct, but how fucking ridiculous is it that certain U.S. Senators are now complaining that “family tier” cable TV packages leave out ESPN?

Can you blame cable executives - who are currently cowering under the notion that the government might start regulating them if Little Johnny sees a tit now and then - for not including a network that in the past has produced shows full of sex and drugs? And ESPN now shows the NBA, for Jesus” sake. That”s some of the most offensive programming on TV.

Whether it was because of their “don”t be evil” thing or the more typical practice of guarding “trade secrets”, hats off to Google for telling the U.S. Government to stuff their subpoenas of URLs and query terms where the sun don”t shine.

Maybe on its face there”s not a privacy concern with giving the feds a sample of queries (without user information) run on Google”s service - but remember who the folks are who want this information. If one of those random queries was “kid porn with horses”, do you not think that goes into a file somewhere so a U.S. Attorney can draw up a new subpoena for the ID of the user who did that search?

And watch your ass if the Christians actually get more political power.

Many readers of The Wisdom may not realize just how much The Cap”n knows about you - and how you got here. My personal credo is “don”t be evil if somebody”s watching”, so you really don”t have much to worry about. But consider a visit from earlier today as recorded in The Wisdom logs:

If you can”t make out what I”ve circled in red, this visit came from someone using a popular search engine to find “massage parlors and buford, ga”. This person was in Buford on the Adelphia system (I”ve redacted the specific IP address as well as the URL of the site this person used to find The Wisdom). And this person uses Windows XP, IE 6 and has a screen resolution of 1024 x 768.

And in the grand scheme of things, I really don”t have much information about this user compared to most of the big search engines. But if the government had this information and a reason to find this person, they have plenty enough to go on.

The post this person found was my mundane account of checks I wrote in 2005. TCL made some comment about massage parlors on buford highway, which is how it became a search match. This person didn”t stay long at all - obviously my check-writing habits were not exactly what this person was looking for.

I”m sure this was a dedicated Christian minister researching the plague of massage parlors in northern Gwinnett County. And until Gov. Ralph Reed is sworn in, we probably don”t have to worry about this kind of thing raising questions. Sure, surfing sexual sites will be illegal in Georgia, but what are the chances they”ll notice if I don”t report all suspected violators in my montly user report to the state?

The point is that the government, in the name of “protecting minors”, “fighting terrorism” or - surely someday - “fighting online indecency”, will want to know more and more about who is doing what online. Every time an organization gives up a little information without a fight, they get a step closer.

So it”s good to see there are organizations that are willing to fight from the outset.