Ben Benner’s Blog

I was going to start this post with the usual sort of ‘I am sorry for not blogging more.’ type of apology. But in an interest of being different, I am just going to say that I have been hella busy.

At the beginning of the year I made the decision that I needed to be more social, get out of my comfort zone, etc. As part of those efforts I started ‘hanging out’ on Twitter, which led me to hearing about ProductCamp. I heard rumor about the 2009 Winter camp about 2 weeks after it had been held. So when I saw folks chatting about the upcoming Summer 2009 ProductCamp on Twitter, I decided to jump in and volunteer.

Right about this same time I happened to see something about about a company known as ‘Tech Ranch’ doing something in Cedar Park. I immediately took interest, given that i live in Cedar Park and Tech Ranch is a company that is in the business of fostering, growing and accelerating the entrepreneurial community. I re-tweeted some announcements about their upcoming town hall meeting. Due to my re-tweeting, I was invited to come on down to the Ranch (of Tech) and meet with the founders.

The Tech Ranch folks were looking for a ‘Wrangler’ or a ‘Mobilizer’ to help build and foster an entrepreneurial community in Cedar Park.  I volunteered to help them and the City of Cedar Park build the community.

ProductCamp was GREAT! Over 300 product development/marketing related professionals showed up to the UTC building down on August 15th. I showed up to the planning meeting back in June and had the intention of just volunteering to help with something minor, but instead I ended up volunteering to the be the Volunteer & Logistics Coordinator.

I recruited and organized all of the volunteers for the event. However, I cannot take all of the credit, I had some absolutely fantastic team leads that helped pull it all together. At several points during the process of trying to pull it all together, I might have thought that I never wanted to volunteer for anything again. In the end though, I am looking forward to the helping with the organization of the Winter 2010 ProductCamp.

I have been working on a few side projects, so my evenings have not been filled with the usual TV watching and video games, it has been filled with coding and having Hulu on in the background. I found a couple of great shows, Defying Gravity and Greek.

To be completely honest, there has been a little bit of video game playing. They released Civilization Revolution for the iPhone, which is a very good port of the game in comparison to the Nintendo DS version, which in turn was a fairly good port from the XBOX-360 edition.

I have still been baking bread, my last few loaves of Pepperoni-Cheddar bread were good, but I think I still need to find the perfect ratio of pepperoni and cheese. My last batch of Rye bread was GREAT. This evening I baked up an artisan loaf of mustard seed wheat bread. I also prepped a batch of pizza dough.

It is really late and I need to get to bed.

bdbenner Personal, baking, video games baking, catching up, video games

“See the bay and buy a Wii!”

So last year Gina and I saw that the Traverse City Meijer’s had several Nintendo Wii video game systems. We didn’t buy one when we saw it, stating that we were planning to be back in Traverse City the next day and if they still had some we would buy one then, because then it would be kismet.

However, we did not make it to Traverse City the next day, and therefore did not purchase the Nintendo Wii at that time.

This past Monday, we went to the Traverse City Meijer’s with the intent of purchasing groceries for the bbq tomorrow and some other foodstuffs. Before we set out on the trip north Gina and I had stated that we would need to check to see if that Meijer’s in Traverse City had a Nintendo Wii available, as there have been NONE available in Austin. (They sell like hot cakes, or are secretly diverted off to eBay.)

Well, they did have a Nintendo Wii available, two of them in fact. We purchased one, it is still in the box. Since they were having a sale we also purchased a second Wii-mote, that came with the latest Wii-Sports game disc.

I asked the clerk if they get regular shipments of them (Wii systems) delivered. She told me that they get a delivery about every 3-4 weeks, and that they usually get 20 units. However, this last time they got 50 units.

From what I have been able to get out of some (ToysRUs, GameStop, etc) clerks down in Austin, they get a shipment every 1-2 months and only a handful of units (5-10). So 20 units being shipped to a Meijer’s in a town that is a decent size, but known for being a resort town seems to be a little off.

But as I tried to say with a straight face to Gina, “It is a by-product of attempting to have an equal distribution of product across a chain of stores without taking into account the the regional demographics.”

I said that mouthful before I found out that the latest shipment had 50 units, of which they had already sold 48, err 49 with our purchase. So regardless of Traverse City’s reputation for being a resort town, that Meijer’s can sell some video game systems. The clerk informed us that one lady purchased three systems. Leaving the store and returning each time, therefore fulfilling the “limit one per purchase/visit” policy.

So I definitely think that given the trouble the tourism industry is having in northern Michigan, that Traverse City should do a promotional campaign and promote the fact that the Traverse City Meijer’s has Nintendo Wii’s available (fairly regularly) as a way to bring in more visitors to the city to have them see the Grand Traverse Bay.

Ok, time to shutdown and go to bed.

Laterz

bdbenner Wii, travel, vacation, video games meijer's, nintendo, nintendo wii, traverse city, vacation, video games, Wii