Fredish Smörgåsbord

This is an apparel ad on Taipei’s metro. As autumn and...

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:18:00 +0800

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

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 02:11:00 +0800

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

Tue, 31 May 2011 22:51:00 +0800

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."

Mon, 23 May 2011 19:50:00 +0800

“In business decisions, sometimes democracy just leads to mediocrity.”

"La guerre est un état naturel."

Fri, 20 May 2011 00:45:19 +0800

“La guerre est un état naturel.”

- Napoléon Bonaparte

"I like iPhones, but I really don’t give a damn about white ones or whatever color issue."

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 22:47:10 +0800

“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

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:07:43 +0800

The Simple Best: The Problem With Androids:

thesimplebest:

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

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:00:00 +0800

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’..."

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:02:08 +0800

“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

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 15:40:52 +0800

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:

Having one of my worst online commerce experiences with GoDaddy.com.

Making a long story short: I bought a domain name there at a special price, and I scanned through the Web page to make sure I didn’t check anything I don’t want (it’s actually a good practice when buying stuff online), and off it went.

A month later, I received an emailed invoice saying that I needed to pay for a service called “WebSite Tonight Economy - 5 Page Web Site - Renewal”. No, I’d never need a “5-page Web site” from GoDaddy, and I was quite sure I didn’t ask for it.

So I politely explained the situation to the customer support rep, and the guy generously agreed a refund. Wonderful.

Another month passed. This afternoon I found a sub-domain of it stopped working, and the main domain. So intuitively I checked out GoDaddy’s DNS Manager. Guess what? The domains were gone. Nothing left, zip, nada.

Out of panic, I wrote an email to the customer service hoping for another wonderful experience. Time slipped by and nothing appeared in my inbox, and I had to go out; a short moment later my assistant forwarded me GoDaddy’s Twitter account. Great, that’s the true beauty of Web 3.0 (whatever). So I started a brief, rapid conversation with someone in Arizona (or Mumbai, whatever). The polite rep told me the domain won’t be grabbed by others for now, but I have to go back to my computer for the rest of the work.

Returned to my desk, I logged into GoDaddy again just to find that I have a $400 charge waiting for me in the shopping cart. “External Redemption Fee for 5 domains”, the item says. What? Is that word pronounced as “ransom”?

The rep claimed I “canceled” my domains a month ago, and I said no, I just asked for refund for a service I didn’t by and never heard of. If purchasing the service was the premise of getting a cheap domain name and I’ve ignored the fine prints, I am fine with that; everyone needs to make some hard cash. However if it’s really it, I do deserve a kind reminder when I was asking for the refund.

“I’m sorry sir, but canceling the service you didn’t notice will kill your domain too; think twice about it.” This is what I expect to hear from the polite rep, and I might swear to myself and pay for my own poor eyesight. But I went though all the communications but found no pre-strike warning. I am doomed.

In the last mail, I kindly asked for being waived from the $80 (for the only one domain I’d like to keep) “redemption fee” since I didn’t have the intention to cancel my domains and no one can prove that I did. “Ignorance” was the word I use: someone’s ignorance caused me trouble and my business suffered loss, and I don’t think I am not the one who’s really responsible.

So, here the story goes and I’m still waiting for the reply from the nice Dave (or Raj, whatever), and I’ll definitely think more than twice before giving my business to GoDaddy again.

The last shot before getting back to work.

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 23:48:05 +0800

The last shot before getting back to work.

Totally understood.

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:48:08 +0800

Say something different.

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 00:22:55 +0800

Patricia Ryan spoke in TED saying “Don’t insist on English!” Ironically, it’s only said by an English-speaking teacher to attract more attention than many others who had said the same thing before her in other languages.

Of course, this is a cultural, economical and even a political thing that goes against the real voice by people who speak something else.

IMHO, the ability to speak another official language is not enough to be proud of. If you can speak a dialect in a different culture, that really means something: you skip the things that the officials want you to know, you overcome language and cultural barriers to understand some other people who have been ignored by the majority.

You’re really into something that can be called “exotic” in terms of intellectual and life.

I wish I could.

Test posting from email

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 22:27:32 +0800

Test posting from email

Lone time no see.

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 11:34:48 +0800

Well, the title is no mistake. It’s been a while I’ve not landed on this page. As time goes by, there comes a distinction between “crowded and alone” and “alone but crowded”, and I am looking for a way to bring them together.

This is why I came back and take a peek. Stay tuned.

Hot at Mo!relax.

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:29:34 +0800

Hot at Mo!relax.

My speech at TaipeiMac gathering. #2

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:35:00 +0800

My speech at TaipeiMac gathering. #2

My speech at TaipeiMac gathering. #3

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:35:00 +0800

My speech at TaipeiMac gathering. #3

My speech at TaipeiMac gathering. #1

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:34:00 +0800

My speech at TaipeiMac gathering. #1

「歷史研究」（A Study of History）by Arnold Toynbee

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:31:10 +0800

「歷史研究」（A Study of History）by Arnold Toynbee