A few weeks ago I decided to take a random family trip to Yosemite. It’s about 3.5 hours away from where we live. Surprisingly, most people thought Yosemite was a lot farther. While not an insignificant amount of time, it’s well worth the time.

I saw a photo at the store the other day, a tree silhouetted against the sky. I live just over the hill from Joseph D. Grant Ranch, close to San Jose where similar trees stand perched on top of small hills. I’ve tried taking photos of them in the past with little success. Today, we went for a short hike with the family and had my Canon PowerShot G9. The photo above was one of the more successful attempts. I experimented with a sepia treatment, but the contrast between the tree and the blue sky was so much more striking and less cliche than the silhouette.

• Disneyland vs Great America
• Target vs Walmart
• Smart&Final vs Costco
• Circuit City vs Best Buy vs Fry’s Electronics
• Apple vs Dell/HP/Microsoft

While Smart & Final vs Costco seems a bit odd, S&F is positioning itself as the alternative to Costco… it’s a lot like Budget Rent-a-car comparing themselves to Hertz. It’s an extremely long, steep hill to get people to think about these companies as equal or better than the dominating company. However, in terms of experience, each one of these companies elicits certain positive and negative mental experiences… it’s those experiences that customer’s walk away with and those customers have the potential of influencing the experience of those who have never visited these businesses.

I think this is what separates companies like Apple and Disney from the rest of the pack. Sony’s pretty good, particularly after they launched their Sony Style stores — they are able to control the experience of how their products are displayed and sold. Apple hit it on the head decades ago with their emphasis on user experience and industrial design.

The latest trend I’ve been seeing is branding campaigns from Dell and HP. For me, Dell will always be Dell, but I’ve been impressed with HP’s “The computer is personal again” branding campaign, and their introduction of lifestyle notoriety like Shaun White, Gwen Stafani and Jake Burton. Their latest campaign for the HP TouchSmart PC is particularly impressive — where HP tries to evoke the magic of Disney’s Fantasia by equating the touch screen experience to magic (and it is a pretty cool experience). The question for me is whether or not HP will be able to deliver the magic.

On a lighter side, when I saw this, I thought about how unintentionally, Walt Disney might have predicted the world of tomorrow’s transportation — gridlock. While still tons of fun, he was even able to simulate what it would feel like having to wait to get to the end of your destination

The Animal Planet Expo was in San Jose so I decided to bring my son there. Mostly, I was interested in getting an autograph from Jeff Corwin but got nixed from the line… like the person in front of me got to get a Corwin autograph… oh well, them’s the breaks. So we both decided to wander around and came across the Planet Green exhibit. Mostly county fair stuff… but we got a cool/cheesey photo of a bunch of people on a couch with us badly Photoshop-ed in… can you find us? We’re really hard to miss…