There is not a lot of pomp when un-boxing one of these babies. We are as far from an Apple product as you can get as far as flare and elegance. But you know I really liked opening the lid of the box, pulling off a piece of styrofoam and getting down to business. Sometimes it’s nice not to have to deal with a chinese puzzle box of flaps and folds before getting to enjoy the product.

Condition wise the unit looks and works perfectly. The only sign of wear is on the rubber corners that you can see beneath the clear base. Otherwise no scratches or dings.

So earlier today, seeing that the machine had been delivered, I decided to make lunch at home with it. Stopping at the grocery on the way, I walked in, setup the machine and prepared my first smoothie all that and still making it back to work in under an hour.

Lets get down to brass tacks. It’s operation is straight up destruction. This machine does one thing and it does that one thing very well. Whatever food stuffs you might have laying around that you want pulverized, liquified or churned into a silky cream, this is the machine that will do it. It spools up instantly and if you are not careful with the settings you can turn your fine chop into soup in less than 10 seconds.

The Go Green smoothie tasted great for lunch and held me over till dinner (though barely). For dinner we made Tortilla soup by leaving the blender on high for 5 mins. The Vitamix actually cooks the soup! Comes out hot and ready to eat. After that we dumped a bag of frozen peaches in there with a little vanilla extract and using the tamper pushed the frozen chunks down into the blades for 1 min. Presto. Perfectly smooth and creamy sorbet.

So far I do not regret the purchase at all and am already planning on some ways to make using it even easier. By pre-packing measured ingredients in the fridge I can just come home and dump them in, hit the on button, and have a nutritious, healthy and quick lunch without any hassle. If you thought I sounded like an infomercial before just wait till this next bit. Cleaning the Vitamix is super easy. You put a drop of soap and fill it half way with warm water. Turn the blender on high for about a minute and you are done. Just rinse out the container and it’s spotless.

More updates to follow…

I joined the Tech Crunch Hackathon with fellow Designer Kate Proulx as part of the Design Trust. We were there to act as a service bureau for the groups of developers who might not have the time or skills to focus on the artwork, UI / UX and logos for their ideas. After hearing several pitches for “Rapture Apps” and something that would help telemarketers call more people we decided to seek out a group we wanted to work with rather than having them come to us.

It didn’t take long to find the boys at Mashery. We were immediately taken in by Neil Mansillas idea to create a “Google Killer”. Let me clarify that statement a little bit. When you want to find out more about a new email contact or friend what do you do? Google them, of course. But we all know that this can be hit or miss and provide a lot of irrelevant information. Our goal was to create a simple web interface that would not only give you a basic biography but would also provide you with what this person likes. I don’t just mean what they ‘like’ on facebook. We give you, with one click of a button, specific subjects and products that this person is very likely interested in a variety of areas such as Movies, Fashion, Books, Health and Beauty.

The first part of this is easy. By scrapping data from several APIs such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn we could give you a pretty basic portrait of who this person is. The real magic came from harnessing Hunch’s powerful API and recommendation engine.

Just with a Twitter name or email address you could pull down not just basic facts about a person but a comprehensive picture of who this person is. To pull a quote from High Fidelty: “…what really matters is what you like, not what you are like… Books, records, films — these things matter.“