The Safeco Field bargaining market

Posted by Otis Kimzey on Jun 30, 2007 in Random | 1 comment

Last night I went to the Mariners game with some friends and had a great time.  We had originally decided on this game as it was Alumni night and if you reserved tickets through the UW Alumni association (which my friends belong too) you would recieve a purple and gold t-shirt.  Since these tickets were sold out we decided to go anyways, even though we wouldn’t get a free shirt.  Even without the free shirt we still got there early enough to receive a free Kenji bobble head statue, neat, but nothing that exciting for myself since I didn’t have the other two bobble heads they’ve released this year. 

When we were at the game we saw two kids that were not UW Alumni, they were probably 12, and decided to try to buy their shirts off them.  We ended up getting the shirts at a reasonable price and were happy with our purchase.  But to make it even better, we ended up being approached by different people wanting to buy our bobble heads.  One sold for $10, the next sold for $5, and the third sold for the steep price of $20.  So all in all, we went to the game and got our UW Mariners shirts paid for by selling the bobble heads that we weren’t overly excited about.

I never knew there was such a secondary market taking place above the Mariners bullpen along the rail.

TRANSFORMERS!!

Posted by Otis Kimzey on Jun 28, 2007 in Random | Comments Off

Just saw Transformers tonight at a sneak preview premier… a full week before it premiers!  It was a GREAT movie.  It captured Transformers so well in my opinion and I loved it.  Seriously, the fight scenes reminded me so much of how I would clash Megatron and Optimus Prime together and send them spinning every direction.  The cars were cool, the action was put together very well, and the Transformers came to life.

If you played with Transformers as a kid I HIGHLY recommend this movie.  It’s alot of fun.

(This is filed under gadgets, because I guess Transformers were the first “gadgets” that I owned.  Think about them, they were small, had moving parts, and they were robots.  That’s just like the iPhone of 22 years ago.)

Deadspin’s New Look

Posted by Otis Kimzey on Jun 27, 2007 in Marketing, Sports | Comments Off

Falling in line with the rest of the Gawker blogs Deadspin today changed their look.  WOW.  Most of the changes didn’t bug me that much other than one cheap gimmick, fishing for page views.  Deadspin gets a ton of traffic daily and has really shown other companies (ehem, ESPN) that sports blogs are something to take seriously.  What they did today was add a “read more” link about 100 words into each post forcing the reader to go onto the next page to read the rest of the entry.  The change really annoyed me for a few reasons.

First, they don’t need the page views other than to pat their stats and increase their ad revenue (more page views more CPM $’s)

Second, the loyal readers don’t want to have to view 20 pages (10 stories a day, two page views per story) to get the humor from Deadspin.

Third, it’s just annoying.

So I wrote Will Leitch, and too my surprise he wrote back saying that he was with me and that the changes wouldn’t last long.  The “read more” button was used less and less as the day went on, it was great to see.  Also, to have Will actually respond shows that he’s running a great show over there as I’m sure he probably got 100′s of emails on the site redesign.  Let’s hope I can have the same issue  with my redesign.