Food, Design, and Marketing.
The past week has been. Yes. That’s it. It’s gone now. It was a shorter week in terms of school due to Chinese New Year eating into the first day of the week, and similarly I will have an extended weekend this time (not sure why the next Monday is being eaten). I decided not to give a technical post today as I myself haven’t been doing very technical things very article-worthy about. The minor technical tweaks that all Gentoo-users undergo that some might be interested in are all documented in my Twitter feed.
Well, it’s another rapid fire post. It’s basically what I put when I have a post to kill. Basically it includes random tidbits that aren’t meaty enough for a post of their own. The first thing I’d like to share is hardly meaty. It’s more soupy and buttery and full of disgusting preservatives. It’s what our wonderful school canteen company Sodexho serves us at lunchtimes. Sodexho is a monopoly at our school. Being the only caterer, they charge inconsistent (high) prices, give us leftover food, generate longer queues than the Malaysian immigration, and present all of this not with a smile, but more of a grimace as they attempt to operate their pocket calculators. The following fine specimen is a rarely found combination of slightly separated immiscible butter (which forms a strangely greenish coloured coagulated buttery oily soup), and leftover spaghetti noodles, the purpose of which is to play hide and seek as you fish for these slippery items with your bent plastic fork. In case you missed the point, here is a plate of butter and spaghetti. Emphasis on butter.
Of course, how could Sodexho survive with such pathetic food being distributed? Simple – effective marketing (akin to Microsoft). As you can see, each day we are greeted by a finely decorated menu of what the day’s special is. The scrumptious descriptions leave nothing but mouth watering thoughts egging us throughout the day to beat the lunchtime queue. These guys have embraced the seventies notion that “Less is More”. Ah. Yes. Simplicity:
Well, that’s enough food for thought – any more and you’d be sick. I also have to share a twisted derivative of the historic “Mojave” experiment. For those that don’t know, the “Mojave” experiment was carried out by Microsoft with one aim: to prove that the problem wasn’t with Vista – it was with the customers. People wanted to hate Windows. What they did was change a couple pictures in Vista, named it “Mojave” and got consumers to test what they thought was the upcoming Windows version. What happened? More consumers said it was an improvement. Of course, nothing was said about the supercomputers they ran it on to prevent lag, or the debugging team all SSHed in ready to correct any errors that might arise. This new experiment was similar: what some people did was take a computer with Linux and KDE 4.2 installed on it, and showed it to random people on the street, telling them it was the new Windows 7. Let’s take a look at what happened.
In other news, I’ve also been working on the new Perspective issue. It’s ready for publication and should be printed and distributed soon. However, here is a small screenshot showing the new design for the front cover. Of course there isn’t any text on it yet, but all in a good time. Here it is:
Ok, that’s enough for today’s rapid fire. Lots of articles in the drafts queue, none of which are just quite finished :)
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p. says: (7 February 2009)
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