This is an apparel ad on Taipei’s metro. As autumn and winter approach, fleece jackets become popular in the sub-tropical city; so this Japanese apparel maker use the pun of cold/fleece and freeze/fleece to remind people of the weather change.
However I don’t think this wordplay would work well in the Chinese-speaking city; since people here are not so sensitive about “cold” in the 85-degree F autumn, and Taiwanese people pronounce “fleece” in a way somewhat different from Japanese folks.
In Japan, they read “freeze” like “fleez”; so it’s quite understandable to make a connection between the two words while the exclamation mark adds bank-robbing fun to the shopping experience.
“Fleece!”
Will you pay upon the threat?
Orion and Sapporo
The Japanese beer brands I like are incidentally of two extremes; not about taste or price but demography. One is Orion from Okinawa, the most southern islandic prefecture of Japan (so south it used to be an independent state), and the other is Sapporo from, well, Sapporo, the capital city of Hokkaido, Japan’s northern tip.
The two brands share a common character: pale, by European standards. I don’t dislike stouts or ales but I usually drink pale beer where available. Pale beers get me drunk slower and go well with most food, and Japanese beers work out with Japanese cuisines such as raw fish and sushi like a charm.
Well, some midnight thoughts and they shouldn’t be further pursued. Good night. :)
More on democracy and mediocrity
Last time I said:
In business decisions, sometimes democracy just leads to mediocrity.
Well, I think I may have to elaborate more on that.
Democracy is not always bad from the business decision perspective; you hear from colleagues, subordinates and customers, you get a better idea of what things should be like (I didn’t mention top executives, since you have to listen to them by default).
However, democracy (again, business) doesn’t mean you should have everyone nodding before you can roll out a product, not everyone’s voice has the same weight either. The thing is not to get everyone’s opinion, but to distinguish the important ones from others and even to refuse the noise.
A “well-balanced” choice is usually a mediocre one. That’s what I meant.
In business decisions, sometimes democracy just leads to mediocrity.
La guerre est un état naturel.
I like iPhones, but I really don’t give a damn about white ones or whatever color issue.
The Simple Best: The Problem With Androids
Near the beginning of Star Wars, Luke’s Uncle Owen decides to buy C-3PO and a little red astromech droid from the Jawas. The red astromech droid blows its motivator—deliberately, according to some Expanded Universe sources—and Luke, at C-3PO’s encouragement, points out to his uncle that R2-D2…
Adobe's Digital Publishing mistake
The following situation described in the “The Simple Best” Web site is what we’re actually facing now and in the future. I wish Adobe can come up with a more realistic model that addresses the need of smaller publishers, especially the ones — the ones like us — that are not in a economic-scaled market like the United States.Perhaps it’s foolish of me to be surprised by the extortionate software prices set by Adobe — it’s certainly their usual practice — but the shocking aspect is that Adobe are going to charge recurring fees on top of the standard software price. That’s totally understandable, since releasing an iPad magazine incurs a hosting overhead (primarily for in-app purchasing), but these fees are astronomical. Here are some of the figures quoted by MacUser, based on current approximate currency conversions:
- £3636 per year (fixed) for the ‘Platform Fee’ required for in-app purchasing.
- £3367 per year (minimum) for the’Distribution Service Fee’, which is effectively a downpayment for the £0.16 per issue Adobe will charge, starting at the minimum commitment level of 25,000 downloads (even if you hit nowhere near that amount).
That equates to £7003 per year as a minimum spend — irrespective of how many copies you sell, or how regularly you publish — and that’s on top of the one-off charge for the new 5.5 version of InDesign: £94 as an individual upgrade from CS5, £238 for a suite upgrade from CS5, and considerably more if, like me, you’re upgrading from CS4: £190 for InDesign on its own and £619 for the whole suite. Brand new, InDesign CS5.5 costs £714 and the suite costs £1810. That’s what you’ll be paying to Adobe. On top of that, there’s the 30% per-download charge publishers are required to pay to Apple (which, for the record, I regard as fair, especially as it’s considerably lower than what physical shops take for stocking your magazine).
To put that into perspective, if we released an iPad version of 8 Faces and charged £4 per issue, we would have to sell around 2700 downloads before we broke even, and that doesn’t even take into consideration the time needed to actually create the app, which I’d put at around three weeks. These fees may be a drop in the ocean for large publishing houses, but for those of us who publish on a more independent scale, we’re effectively being priced out of the market.
Many people seem to have the ‘I am not saying I’m smart, but all you guys are just downright stupid’ syndrome.
An undesirable experience with GoDaddy.com
I wrote about my bad experience with GoDaddy.com a while ago, and today LifeHacker came up with an article named “How to Jump Ship from GoDaddy to a Better Web Host and Registrar”; this is exactly what I want.
Regardless of your feelings about GoDaddy’s moral standing, their service is frustrating and restrictive. If you’re sick of paying for crappy hosting and want to jump ship, here’s how to leave GoDaddy behind for one of many better web hosts on the net.
The following is my article posted elsewhere:
