Month: April 2006

Jones’ Sugar Free Green Apple Soda is Awful

Ashley Bischoff6 Comments

Jones Soda is a self-described alternative soda company started in 1987 which is famous in part for its unconventional flavors such as Blue Bubblegum and Watermelon. In any case, they’ve recently achieved distribution at Target and that’s where I first ran across them. The first flavor of theirs that I tried was their Sugar Free Cola and, to be fair, it was pretty good. It’s sweetened with Splenda and even my sugar-soda drinking chum Matt was pleasantly surprised.

Recently, though, I thought to try their Sugar Free Green Apple. Oh, what a mistake that was — it’s almost undrinkable:

  • Color — The first thing I noticed about the soda was its color as I poured it into a glass. Roughly speaking, it very similar to the color of a lime green popsicle. And, if that’s giving you the heebie-jeebies already, you’re on the right track. Needless to say, subtlety is not this soda’s string suit.

  • Taste — This was the soda’s downfall for me. The color should have been a warning sign to me, but, yes, it pretty much tastes like carbonated Kool-Aid. If you’ve ever had the Green Apple flavor of Dum Dum Lollipops, I believe that precise flavoring was used here.

That’s not to say that all Jones Soda should be avoided. In fact, their Twisted Lime sounds rather tempting. All the same, I’d stay far away from their Green Apple; it wasn’t their flavor scientists’ finest hour.

Aye, It’s a Sunken Cost!

Ashley Bischoff4 Comments

I was familiarized with the idea of “sunken costs” during Jason Fried’s 2005 panel at SXSW on How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams. I had heard the term before, but didn't entirely grok its meaning until Jason went over a few anecdotes (in the context of small teams, natch). One example he gave is that a small company may buy a new server with the expectation that they’ll need it as part of an upcoming project; however, when it comes to the stage in the project, if it no longer makes sense to use the server, then it shouldn't be used (since the money is gone, either way).

I've internalized this thought process for my personal life, to some extent, but I haven’t really been able to explain it well to others. I ran across an entry in Wikipedia on Sunk Costs which I thought explained it fairly well:

Economists argue that, if you are rational, you will not take sunk costs into account when making decisions. In the case of the movie ticket, there are two possible end results. You will either have:

  1. Paid the price of the ticket and suffered watching a movie that you do not want to see, or;
  2. Paid the price of the ticket and used the time to do something more fun.

In either case, you have “paid the price of the ticket” so that part of the decision should cancel itself out. If you regret buying the ticket because you do not think the movie is worth the money then your current decision should be based on whether you want to see the movie at all, regardless of what you have paid for it — just like deciding whether you want to go to a free movie. […]

Or, put another way, here’s a scenario that may have occurred to you in real life. Suppose that you go out for dinner, enjoy the entree, and afterwards order a slice of chocolate cake from the dessert menu. Perhaps your eyes were bigger than your stomach, though and you start to become full halfway through the cake. At this point, there are two ways this could end up — either you will have:

  1. Paid for the chocolate cake but eaten all of it anyway, or…
  2. Paid for the chocolate cake but refrained from finishing the slice

Either way, you’ve paid for the cake. So, you may as well base your decision on whether to finish eating the slice on factors other than whether you’ve paid for the cake :).

Nifty Attachment Reminder Extension for Thunderbird

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

I think we’ve all e-mailed someone — or a group of people — but forgot to attach the file that we referenced in the message (d’oh). Well, thanks to a handy extension for Thunderbird that I ran across, that may be a thing of the past :). AttachmentRemember checks a message for keywords before it’s sent; and, if it finds any of those keywords but the message doesn’t have any files attached, a warning dialog pops up.

For example, suppose you set it up to look for the word “attach” (which will also catch “attachment” and “attached”, for example, since AttachmentRemember does substring matches). Anyhow, if you were to then write a message with the subject line “Proposal attached” but click Send before attaching any files, a little dialog box would pop up asking if maybe the message should have an attachment.

The idea seems obvious, now that I’ve heard of it, but I’m not sure I would have come up with it on my own. If you choose to download it, though, just be sure to edit the extension’s options before using it (Tools → Extensions → AttachmentRemember → Options) as the list of keywords that it looks for is empty by default.