All posts by Drew

BenSpark.com is about my life through photography. Each image is a gateway to a story about my daily life. Occasionally funny, inspiring, interesting or creative BenSpark.com is real life in photos. With over 4200 consecutive days and many different cameras BenSpark.com has documented images from the mundane to the amazing.
Photo-A-Day, Toys, Transformers

Photo-A-Day #683 02/20/07

Mr. Potato Head at Hasbro

Today I went to the Hasbro Company corporate offices in Pawtucket, RI. It is a 15 minute drive from my house. My cousin’s wife works there and she invited me over to go to the Hasbro Employee Toy Store. I was all excited on Friday night because I thought I could take a picture of me with the Giant Hand from the movie that is holding the timer, however come to find out we would have needed special permission from Senior Management to take photos inside the building. So today’s photo is from outside the building in the visitor parking lot.

The waiting area was so cool. There were toys all over the reception desk and to read there were G.I. and Transformer’s comic books. I poked through them for a bit as I waited for Annie to come get me.

When Annie got me we went down this hall of history that had tons of classic games and toys. There was also a display of upcoming toys and games. I saw a couple of things for Transformers but they were mostly puzzles and board games, no new toys.

Before we went into the toy shop we had lunch in the cafeteria. They have a very nice cafeteria there at Hasbro and a friend of Annie’s was a manager of the food service and he brought us out some cookies. They were tasty and big with great chocolate. But I was too excited to eat. I was rearing to go check out the toys. On the way in we saw some of the upcoming Spiderman toys and Annie worked on the packaging of those toys.

After lunch I hit the toy shop and got myself 4 transformers and a toy for Allison. I picked up three Transformer’s classics and a Transformers Cybertron figure. And as we left we ran into one of Annie’s friends Forrest who is a copywriter for, you guessed it, Transformers. We chatted with him a bit and then it was time for Annie to get back to work. I had to get home and put up my photo from the trip and write up this blog post. And now I’m going to play with my new Toys.

Grab Bag

Accurian iPod Docking Alarm Clock.

On Saturday I went to Radio Shack with my friend James to pick up the Accurian Docking Alarm clock for iPod. I had seen this and I though it looked great. It looks like an old time alarm clock and it is small enough to fit comfortably on the night table. So last night when we got home I took it out of the box and set it up, set it so the iPod would recognize the Docking Alarm Clock, or was it the other way around. Regardless I got it set up. The clock charges the iPod as it is docked and the speakers are located under the buzzer bells and the volume is on the back. You push also push the volume button in to make it shut off the sound.

But here is the problem. The iPod screen never shuts off. Never. You can try and shut it off but it won’t. So your choices are to lay it face down or not use it as the intended alarm clock that it is. Those iPods throw a lot of light at night in the dark and it was so annoying that I took the iPod out of the Docking Alarm Clock and woke to the alarm sound I set on the iPod anyway.

I thought I was solving the problem of having two different sets of wake up times for Allison and I, instead I purchased a funny looking set of speakers for my iPod, because this certainly cannot be used as an alarm clock if you intend to get any sleep.

Why won’t you shut off!