Who doesn’t like some good old summertime BBQ? What better to have at a BBQ than Hot dog socks from the latest collaboration piece by Mr. Hsieh x Ashi Dashi. Pick up The Hot Dog Sock at the Mr. Hsieh Market or at Ashi Dashi.

I was hungry and had remembered the recent news about a heart-stopping meal, known as the KFC Double Down Sandwich. So I headed over the the fast food chain for an after dinner snack. Talk about an overhyped product.

The box looked large and the greasy bag felt heavy. I was excited to unwrap all the goodness that I imagined was in the box. Juicy, flavorful, savory are words that I would have used to describe my expectations. Much to my dismay, none of these were quite true. The sandwich was much smaller then I expected. The meat was dry and proportionally overwhelming to the other ingredients. The bacon was not noticeable in flavor. It tasted like your standard fare KFC chicken piece with cheese on it. Good thing I had some ranch to help me choke it down.

Overall this sandwich was bland and unoriginal in flavor. It’s no McGriddle. My advise, save your money and skip this meal. Up next for me to try, burger with donuts for buns.

This past weekend an idea came up, and we just had to do this mini shoot/shot. Whenever you see bank robberies, high speed car chases, or anything news-worthy and caught on camera, its always interesting to see what they are wearing. A tee that I designed previously was actually worn by a bank robber, and his whole heist was on surveillance tape! It’s crazy that there are people out there committing crimes with these logos on their clothes. So, to showcase our Mr. Hsieh ski masks, we wanted to set up a scene where wearing our stuff was a criminal faux pas.

Shooting inside a convenience store was a pain in the ass. The lighting was terrible, and there was no good way to control all the sources of light. The store was overly cluttered, and it was difficult to get that clean and staged look I was trying to go for.

To top that off we were racing against the clock, and customers kept trying to come in. Most of those customers were initially shocked when they walked in, thinking that they had just stepped into a real robbery. We did have signs posted at the front door, but it just goes to show that no one really reads these days.

I think that next time if we had better lighting and more prep time, we could do a better job. Check out our ski masks and balaclavas here. Enjoy!

So I caved in a bought a 32GB wifi iPad. I was always an iPad hater, calling it an enlarged iTouch, but after playing with it at the store, I had to have it. Now, after owning this “magical and revolutionary” product (or so it says on the ads) for a couple of days, I got to know this newest apple product fairly well and here are my findings.

The iPad is smaller then most people would expect, just slightly smaller then a 8.5”x11” piece of paper. This size is perfect, with its large display. This display is what makes the iPad so fun to use. You can watch larger movies, you can play iPad specific apps, and browse the web with ease. There’s more room to do everything. The iPad is super thin and very light. It’s great for using on the couch, in the car, on the train, meetings at work, and of course, in bed.

After opening the iPad and putting all my movies and music on it, the next thing to do was download apps. There are a lot of apps out there for iPad, but the problem is that not a lot of free ones. There were only about twenty free apps that I downloaded. The rest of the apps were pretty damn expensive, ten dollars and over. Hopefully the publishers will lower their prices when there are more apps and there is more competition in the marketplace. Here are some of my favorite free and paid for apps out there now:

FREE
Virtuoso Piano Free 2 HD – Full keyboard and tons of options.
Marvel Comics – Read comics in amazingly vibrant colors. Download 6 free comics to start. ‘Nuff said.
Tweetdeck – Get all your status updates and tweets in one place. Pulls in all social feeds.
Box – Send your files to a cloud server for access later from anywhere.
Pukk HD – It’s like pong for up to two players and it has awesome tron-like graphics.
Tap Tap Radiation – a slight twist to the classic tap tap.
Adobe Ideas – A digital sketchpad.
Voice Memos – This should have been included with the iPad. Hell the iphone has the app stock. It’s okay, this one is free.

PAID
Words With Friends HD – If you like “Words with Friends” for the iPhone, then you have to buy this HD app for the iPad. It’s pretty much like Scrabble but with other iPhone and iTouch users.
Pages – If you need to take notes or want to open Word docs, you’ll need this app. All the iPads at the store were loaded with this app so I thought the iPad came with it. No such luck.

The iPad has great children’s apps too. Lots of read-along apps and soundboards to help kids learn. I think that the amount and types of apps out there can only get better with age.

There were seriously tons of things to do with the iPad and even using the thing on and off for two days, it still had 30% charge left. The battery life is amazing, way better than either of the Macbooks or iPhone that I own. Everything about the iPad was great except for one glaring thing that kept happening.

I would be surfing the app store or watching a video clip on YouTube, and all of a sudden a little window would popup notifying me that the iPad could not connect to the network. I would either hit refresh or try the action again, and then it would work. This happened only at certain wifi locations. At some places it would work great, others my internet connection was interrupted. I read through the Apple forums here, and other iPad owners were having the same issue. Apparently there was a connectivity problem to various older model routers.

Ultimately I returned the iPad because if it’s wi-fi issues. I couldn’t deal with constantly dropped wireless connection and don’t want the headache. I’m going to wait for more widespread HTML5 adoption, multi-tasking, more apps, a webcam, and a software update to the wi-fi issue. Hopefully all this will happen by the time the 2nd gen comes out, when I will be back on the iPad train.

To promote our first baby product, we’ve created this wonderful free papercraft panda for everyone to download and print out. All you have to do is print out the image on your home printer, cut out the shapes, cut slits, and assemble. There is no need for tape or glue. This figure comes with hammer and uzi accessories, as well as the classic logo fitted hat. Download papercraft toy here. Hope you all enjoy it and remember to pick up our extremely limited (only 10 per size) baby onesie here.

Get your sticky on with the latest designs from Mr. Hsieh. Check out the happy hammer wielding uzis or the Mr. Hsieh seal of approval. Both together as a sticker pack available for purchase at Mr. Hsieh – The Market.

Sample caps just came in. Hot fabrics and patterns. Check out the hat preview. This is just a sneak peak of the line for 2010!

The skateboard pays homage to the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. This tribute skate deck, titled “Rainy Day in Neverland”, features a scene from the Neverland ranch, including a merry-go-round, a ferris wheel, and MJ’s chimp, “Bubbles,” holding a banana. Rainy Day in Neverland is one of the five parts of the designers limited release of 200. Get them now at Mr. Hsieh’s Wood Shop