Tonight we had a saleswoman come to our house to make a pitch for a company called Town and Country Foods. Basically they deliver organic food to your house every six months. The quality of the food seems to be extremely good. The price is reasonable (if not great) for the quality of food they are selling. So why am I probably not going to sign up? It comes down to money. It would cost about $100 more per month to purchase this food. Our food budget is very tight, and we just don’t have any extra money for this premium product. Although she hit all her talking points very well, I think there are a few things she could have done differently to increase her chances of landing the sale. Here is some advice to any other salesmen that decide to hit up the Hanft family:

1. If you aren’t willing to convince the skeptic, you are wasting your time.
In our family, that means if you want to sell us anything, you have to convince me. When I know I am hearing a sales pitch, I automatically go on the defensive. I don’t hide this fact. I sit with my arms crossed, and maintain a serious look on my face. My wife is the opposite. She is much more polite and open to the idea of spending money. The woman from Town and Country Foods made the mistake of directing her pitch to my wife. She really needed to convince me.

2. Don’t tell me what I need.
The sales woman thought she knew what we needed, and put all her effort into selling us that. Unfortunately, she was pushing a square peg in a round hole, rather than trying to find something that we might actually buy. She came to sell us food, and never stopped pushing a freezer for storing the food even after we showed her our spare freezer!

3. Make sure the numbers add up before you start writing them down.
The weakest parts of her presentation were when she got specific with numbers. I have seen this problem before. The sales person starts writing numbers down thinking that these scribbles will help make your point. Unless you have great math skills, clean handwriting, and the ability to explain your words visually, this can only hurt your presentation. The scribbles just make me think that you think I am too stupid to realize that your doodles don’t make any sense.

4. Don’t overstay your welcome.
I was expecting a 20 minute presentation. She stayed for well over an hour. If you can’t make the sale in a half hour, you are wasting your breath. When you sense that I need time to think things over, back off. When we told this woman that we needed more time, she asked us why, and then proceeded to tell us why other people usually need more time. Shortly after this, I excused myself to go for my run before it got dark.

5. Don’t insult me.
I asked if we needed to sign up for anything tonight. Her response was, “No, but 85% of people do sign up after the presentation because it is really a no-brainer.” In other words, I am an idiot if I have to think about it. Bad move, lady.

We have a “No Soliciting” sign on our door for a reason. If you are fortunate enough to be invited into my house to tell me about your product, consider it an honor. Hopefully these five suggestions will get you to the next step: making a sale.

When the check engine light came on well over a year ago, I promptly took my Tercel to the dealership. The diagnosis was carbon buildup. After several attempts to remedy the problem I was forced to make a decision. Either I spend $800 to have the part machined out or drive with the engine warning light on. Since the carbon buildup wouldn’t damage the engine I opted for saving money and driving with the engine light on.

For about a year the light would mock me. Just as I started to gain confidence that the engine wasn’t going to die and leave me stranded on the side of the road, the light found a new way to torment me. You can’t imagine my delight when one day I turn on the car and the light didn’t turn on! Could it be? Is the problem fixed? The light stayed off for about a day and then it came back on. I didn’t think there was anything more annoying than a check engine light that never turns off. I was wrong. Now every day when I start my car, there is a 50% chance the light will be on. It has become a kind of bizarre little game.

I suppose the worst part about that wicked little light is that it has a tendency to set the mood for my entire day. I drive about 25 minutes to work each morning, and staring at that little light for the entire drive has a tendency to put me in a bad mood. Isn’t it stupid how little things like that can affect our attitudes? It’s not like the engine is fixed one day, and broken the next. And yet I can’t help but be a little more cheerful on the days when I “win” the battle against that little light.

Surely I am not the only person that plays this kind of game with my car. From Herbie, to Knight Rider, our culture regularly assigns personalities to cars. I have very distinct memories of people in our neighborhood that I thought looked exactly like there cars. Tomorrow I am taking my family to see Cars at the theater and it should be fun to see the personalities that the different cars have. I wonder if there will be a pesky little Tercel that likes to play games with its check engine light…

I could be wrong, but I think many people don’t realize how easy it is to romove digital rights management (DRM) from songs downloaded from iTunes. While it is extremely difficult (if not virtually impossisble) to strip the DRM code out of an iTunes mp3 manually, fortunately that isn’t the only way around the problem. All you have to do is burn an audio cd of the songs and then import the newly burned cd back into iTunes. The newly created songs will be free of DRM and you can play them on virtually any computer or mp3 player. If you burn an entire iTunes album, iTunes will even recognize the album and label the tracks for you! The only disadvantage is that the quality of your files will be slightly degraded from the original pristine files. To some this is a big issue, but I would wager that 99.9% of the population couldn’t tell a difference. I suppose this method falls into a gray legal area because the DRM free files can be easily shared with friends. My personal opinion is that DRM is a desperate last attempt by the music industry to salvage some income after the digital revolution rendered them obsolete. I read a great analysis on [Daring Fireball](http://daringfireball.net/2006/06/drm_interoperability) that sums up the absurdity of the music industries insistence on both interoperability and DRM quite nicely:

“The music industry’s insistence upon DRM is what put the ITMS in the position that Apple now enjoys; the record industry is decrying a lock-in advantage that they themselves handed to Apple so they could deny their customers (i.e. us, the people who listen to music) the interoperability they now say they want.”

As absurd as DRM has become, it seems that it is here to stay, and that is ok. If it weren’t for DRM, Apple wouldn’t be able to have the catalog of music that it has. I hope this little trick to remove DRM is helpful to some of you. Use it responsibly!

I am finally getting around to checking out the mash-up music scene. I thought mash-ups were just funny tracks that took two tracks with similar melodies or rhythms and forced them together. Boy was I wrong! These are highly skilled artists that have created a new genre of music. Since the new art contains copyrighted material, it is illegal for the tracks to be sold. That means that this incredible music is only available by download - if you can find them. It would be easy to get caught up in the legality of mash-ups, but you can’t deny that the music is amazing. If anything, it shows just how absurd copyright law has become.

I think the interesting thing that I discovered as I listen to this magical music is that I don’t have to feel guilty when a “made for radio” song appears in one of the tracks. I would never listen to Madonna, but when it is mashed together with Death Cab for Cutie, it somehow has music cred. Dolly Parton? Forget about it, until it is mashed into an incredible “Stairway to Heaven” track by DJ Earworm. This isn’t vandalism, it is a public service! It takes the garbage created by mainstream music corporations and turns it into something worth listening to. It reminds me of the graffiti artist who makes his marks by cleaning the city rather than damaging the property.

Here are a few of the artists I have been enjoying as I dig into the new genre:
Party Ben
Mark Vidler
DJ Earworm

If you know any, please point me to some of your mash-up artists!

Comments are my favorite part of blogging - usually. On my photography blog, Found Photography, I just reached a new milestone. I passed the 50 comment mark on one of my entries. If you had to guess, which entry do you think it was on? The logical guess would be the tutorial about the camera I made out of Legos. After all, it was featured on Boing Boing, Metafilter, Engadget, Make, Flickr’s blog, Digg, and over a couple hundred other sites. I am telling you this not to brag (ok, well maybe a little) but because this ISN’T the post with the most comments. That honor goes to an entry I made reviewing a piece of garbage camera called the Philips Keychain Digital Camera. I basically just wrote about how worthless the camera was and urged people to avoid wasting their money on it. So why has this post become so popular? The answer is because a camera this junky isn’t supported by Phillips. Nearly everyone who bought this camera does a Google search and finds my entry near the top of the results. The typical comment goes about like this:

“hey I bought this phillips camera its very good do you know were I can download the software because I lost mine
Please email me back.”

There is a huge temptation for bloggers to tailor their writing to match what they think their audience wants. While this seems logical, it leads you to base the concept of your “reader” on the kind of comments your site is getting. Based on my blog’s comments, I would make the mistake of thinking my readers were inconsiderate fools that blatantly disregard capitalization, punctuation, grammar, and common sense. Since I know that isn’t true and since I have no ambition to write reviews of crappy cameras, there is this conclusion: Blog comments don’t represent the readers.

The vast majority of the people who read blogs don’t leave comments. Unfortunately, that means that there isn’t a reliable way to know what your reader’s want. So how do you know what to write? Easy. Stop writing what you think people want to hear, and write what you care passionately about. Not only will it be easier to write, but it will also be more interesting and attract more readers. Don’t let the loud commenters persuade you to change your style. Don’t get mad if your blog’s comments don’t reflect the kind of reader you want. The readers you want will find your site. They might be silent, but they are there.