So, Omni’s been here for a while, and in that time, we’ve accumulated a bunch of… stuff. For your edification and delight on this All Hallows’ Eve, I quote you this 100% real email which was circulated today.

(Edit: said email was circulated by Molly, our operations manager. She threatened to slap me with a plagiarism suit and/or a licensing fee unless I gave her a byline.)

Items that were moved to the garage today and are ready to be either claimed or recycled include:

• True Lies poster
• Mad Dog & Glory poster
• Episode 1 poster (framed)
• Disco Light
• Assorted Super Soakers/Nerf Guns
• Plastic Millennium Falcon
• Assorted Halloween decorations
• Assorted Halloween hats … or everyday hats if that’s how you roll
• Easel pads
• Red glass Xmas tree balls
• black leather ottoman
• sundry toys
• pots n pans
• fish tank
• broken vacuum
• broken steam cleaner
• green iMac … strangely this particular iMac also has a case?
• Fixin’s for a fountain
• Robotics set
• Xmas tree stand
• lightbulbs
• car cleaning supplies
• box ‘o bar clamps, hammers, and other sundry tools

So there you have it. A little slice of OmniLife, as in the slice that’s full of the stuff that we stick in an attic for ten years, cover with dust and the detritus that comes with repairing the roof without moving said items (getting roof-crud all over them), and finally just giving it all to a nice company that promises to recycle as much of this stuff as can possibly be recycled.

Fear our packratting, for it is legend.

Fairly often here at ye olde Omni Group we get breakfast for lunch, and when it occurs there is much rejoicing. I myself am a simple man, eggs and sausage (or bacon: sweet, lovely, bacon) and some form of breakfast potatoes are all I require. Pancakes (or flapjacks or hotcakes) are a special treat for me, and I love them dearly.

So, last week we were fortunate enough to have french toast (a rare delicacy here due to the nature of preparing them) and we all got on with our favorite breakfast foods.

Tom and Brian proved to be big fans of aebleskivers. (Brian claims that they are both a breakfast food and a home defense technology)

Michaela thinks that poffertjes are the best ever, offered in hot-dog style carts in Amsterdam.

Liz in turn started craving maandazi (apparently hailing from Africa, Wikipedia has let me down here).

Much discussion of breakfast potatoes transpired (I like me some home fries, Rowan prefers the Potatoes Deluxe from the Streamliner Diner on Bainbridge Island (where he used to work).

Bill wanted more pancakes, going so far as to recommend pankeggs which some thought involved beer of some kind, Brian pointed out that McMeniman’s stout is used in a recipe at the Kennedy School in Portland.

So, what’s your preference for breakfast goodness? Let us know and we can try to convince Terry to serve it up some time.

For those who might be interested, Ken recently answered some interview questions over at MacApper. Topics include Ken’s Old Skool Programming Street Cred (respectably nerdy!), his thoughts on being Omni’s CEO, and upcoming development plans.

Check it out when you get a chance!

Our intrepid James has been toiling behind the scenes for many weeks now to convert Omni’s website into something a little less baroque, content-management-wise. I don’t know all the technical details, but he seems to have streamlined a giant pasta-dish of code into a far more accessible system that can actually be updated without doing the web version of Twister. Plus, we have finally gotten rid of the dreaded FRAMES that earned us one of the more entertaining flame mails I’ve ever read (it involved many, many exclamation points).

Please take a look around when you get a chance, we’re hoping you let us know if you encounter any glitches.

Here’s the question I’ve been asking myself this week: am I too old to understand the appeal of Twitter, or not cool enough?

I’m not sure I like the answer either way.

Anyway, since I don’t have any exciting product news at the moment, I thought I’d ask you folks to share some entertaining website distractions. Because it’s, um, Omni Mouth Link Day! Oh, you didn’t know about Omni Mouth Link Day? It’s like Thursday, only with more links.

I’ll go first:

• The ColorJack Sphere; handy for all kinds of design projects

• Giant microbes! Aw, who’s a little Borrelia burgdorferi?

• Fantastic video of someone’s entire wedding party doing the Thriller dance

• Kent Rogowski’s Bears: gosh, it looks like the perfect baby shower gift (”Hm, he doesn’t normally cry like that . . .”)

Okay, blog readers—your turn. Spill your latest web finds, in the name of Omni Mouth Link Day!

To celebrate the launch of OmniPlan, the Omnis went to the Lynwood Skate and Bowl, where we had way too much fun. What we discovered is that Ken has an alternate life as a professional roller skater (or something), and proceeded to skate circles around the rest of us (usually backwards, on one skate). He then took us to the bowling alley, where he showed me how to throw many strikes in a row. I did not fare as well, but at least I beat my old record of 27.

There were unconfirmed reports of some morning-after sickness which may or may not have been related to the food, though apparently people not even present had some problems, which tells me that the food served was of a truly spectacular and long-reaching variety.

Liz decided that she didn’t need her wrist guards that she uses for rollerblading, she was wrong:

You know, it’s tough to be a marketing weasel in a company like Omni. I’m forbidden from telling outright lies, or padding product copy with too much rich, delicious, creamery hyperbole. I can’t email all of our customers with Enticing Limited Time Offers because Omni has this totally RESTRICTIVE belief that spam is evil and only people who deliberately join mailing lists should hear from us and even then, I’m forbidden from using the phrases “reverses aging” or “consolidate debt”, and the word “enlarges”. (Which is too bad, because I had this great campaign idea about OmniPlan Enlarging Your Productivity 2 To 5 Inches, but apparently that’s a NO GO.)

Omni actually cares about being as genuine as possible, and not dripping sales-slime all over the place as we conduct our business. Then again, we are a business, and even though we don’t want to trick people, even though we want you to make your purchase because you’re happy with what we’re offering, we do sort of have to, you know, ask for the sale.

So I’m hoping you can give us some feedback on an issue we’ve been struggling with lately. As you may know, we offer demo versions of all our software. Currently, we’ve got a few different unlicensed-mode strategies going on: OmniWeb lets you try everything for 30 days; OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, and OmniPlan limit you to 20 items or less, and OmniDiskSweeper disables the “delete” button. You can download one-day trial licenses for any product on our website, too.

Here’s our challenge:

• We’d like to have a consistent approach to these demos
• We’d like to allow a potential customer to adequately try the features of a given app
• We don’t want to be too annoying
• We do want to encourage people to make the purchase if they like it
• We can’t let people use our software for free (well, except for OmniDictionary)

What are your thoughts? When you use demo software, what system works best for you—that is, doesn’t drive you nuts, helps you determine whether you like it, and ultimately makes it easy for you to buy it?

Molly found these very very small office supplies that somehow or other came with the booth at the Macworld Expo or perhaps were secreted into our space by tiny molemen who visit us from another dimension, at this point I am completely unsure.

The set includes a small stapler, a tiny tape dispenser, and a half-pinted hole punch. Not shown are the petite post-it notes and the confusingly normal-sized paper clips and rubber bands.

Bill is of the opinion that they resemble the application icons of Panic, and I tend to agree — Cabel, if you ever decide to start making office supplies instead of awesome software, it looks like you may have a little (snicker) competition.

I’m all for miniaturization, but please, let’s do so with small (another snicker) doses. Surprisingly, the word nano doesn’t appear to anywhere near the small case these came in.

The Omni Group is looking for a System Guru Ranger to help maintain our Mac OS X servers and workstations. If you’re interested, read through the System Guru Ranger section of our jobs page and send us your resumé!

Recently I was reading about the ad agency that came up with the original AFLAC duck campaign. It’s one of those amazing marketing success stories: AFLAC went ten years struggling to figure out a way for people to remember their name, and with Kaplan Thaler’s commercials their brand awareness went from 12% to 90%.

The duck was the perfect solution to their problem — who doesn’t know the word AFLAC now? — and since the commercials were so memorable and entertaining, they also did a great job of drilling home the secondary message (Hey, we sell health insurance! Ask for it at work!).

Companies usually put so much effort into having their branding campaign tell a story, sometimes with huge budgets and fantastic success (Target’s commercials, for example: We sell all kinds of crap! It’s sparkly! We’re fresh and hip and appealing to a young affluent demographic, unlike that grody old Wal-Mart!), sometimes by creating a revolting animated hunk of snot to act as company mascot (I’m looking at you, Mucinex) — it’s kind of refreshing to see an ad whose main goal is simply to sear the company’s name into your head. AFLAC!

Of course, that concept can be taken too far. You know, that certain product…the one that you apply…directly to your forehead?

Anyway, I was thinking about Omni’s overall brand and what we’re known for. We do try and create continuity in our marketing communications, but I wouldn’t say we adhere to a particularly rigid brand strategy. Which is nice, in a way, because you never hear anyone in Omni’s building utter the words, “Well, I don’t know, that’s not really on message.”

But I do think we could use a lovable, curmudgeonly talking animal of some kind. Perhaps a star-nosed mole!

Or…not.

So what do you think of, when you think of Omni? Do you think of one particular application? A style of interface design, maybe? A group of old-school Mac nerds who still have a pile of NeXT machines in the basement? Why do you like (or dislike) Omni?