Charpie

Microsoft has aired their followup to ‘Shoe Circus.’ The four and a half minute ‘New Family’ segment is no doubt thoroughly entertaining and stays true Seinfeld’s ubiquitous ‘a show about nothing’ genre. So what is it, a campaign about nothing? I think most viewers would think so. I say, “who cares?” It’s entertaining and fun, something Microsoft is not very well known for unless you count Xbox which they were afraid to put their name on for years.

The story, however, is taking a bit of a turn. Apparently, Microsoft is dropping good ol’ Jerry. Sources across the interweb say the move was planned by Microsoft from the beginning, but it seems a bit fishy that it comes after a buttload of not so positive feedback toward the campaign’s first two spots.

So, I really tried to give Microsoft credit this time. I thought the spots were fun, even though they didn’t really bring any hard substance to the table. Turns out they may be as lame and out of touch as I initially wanted them to be.

It will be interesting to see where the $300 million plan heads now.

Just completed! To help launch the new Redline ‘Redefine’ campaign we’ve completed this quick, action packed animation. It will be used to tag on to existing Redline videos while we continue our work to bring everything up to speed with the new look. Charpie teamed up with fellow production crew Dandy Dwarves and Mike Goubeaux to make it happen.

Dandy Dwarves | Mike Goubeaux

This week will mark the beginning of a brand overhaul for Minnesota-based Redline Performance Products. The company had been widely known in the performance vehicle industry for their snowmobiles, but they’re letting go of the snow-chained vehicles for a more dynamic, all terrain genre. They call it a Sport Terrain Vehicle (STV). Think of a dune buggy after a case of Red Bull, throw in some Fox shocks, a 72hp Weber engine and hit the trail; be it dirt, snow, or sand. These machines truly rock any terrain, and they do it right out of the box.

I got an opportunity to ride one of these devils a couple weeks ago. It’s a thrill that has to be experienced. I’m not a skilled enough writer to even attempt putting it into words. I can say that I about crapped my pants on the first jump I took at the company’s two and a half mile test track. I was not expecting to get the air that I did and was definitely not expecting such an easy landing. It was as if I shot into space and came back down on a cloud.

Getting back to business, the above type treatment utilizing the new campaign tag ‘Redefined’ is the first snippet of an all out makeover. What’s to come? New print pieces, a dealer kit, online video campaign, and a few other surprises. Stay tuned. This will be a fun one to watch.

You can find awesome Obama artwork here.

Yesterday I made the data storage switch and put my worries in the hands of a robot, Drobo. For those of you that don’t know, Drobo is similar to a RAID setup only it makes RAID look like it was designed by the Bush campaign. Oh slam! No really, Drobo is smart. Basically, it’s an enclosure that accepts any SATA I or SATA II drive. You just snap your drives in from the front and Drobo handles everything else. There’s literally zero configuration beyond that, unless you’d like to get into more advanced features with the included Drobo Dashboard software.

This is not the coolest part of the device, though. What is? The fact that your data is redundant and space is expandable. Let’s say you stock it with two 1TB drives. That effectively gives you 1TB of usable storage, because the other terabyte is used to backup data. It’s not a 50-50 deal, however. To figure out how much space will be used for backup purposes, you subtract the largest drive. So, if you have three 1TB drives that gives you 2TB of usable space and leaves 1TB for redundancy. If you have two 250GB drives and one 500GB drive, you get 500GB of storage. Get it?

Let’s say you need to add more space? Just pop in another drive in one of the empty bays, or replace one of the drives with a higher capacity one. You can do it on the fly, while it’s on, and even while your computer is reading data from Drobo! It will reconfigure everything for you, transparently. You can even configure Drobo to email you alerts should a it reach capacity or sense a drive failure.

How does it do all this? Probably magic. That’s my guess.