I was flipping through a local magazine this morning called, Mr., and came across this unattributed photograph.

It carried the headline, “How To Know That Your Ass Is Too Small,” and I thought it was hilarious!

Technorati Tags: flying, donkey, cart, heavy, karachi, pakistan

I'm becoming more and more addicted to blog-reading. It's a great way for me to deal with the lack of adult human contact that I'm faced with, now that I'm freelancing full time again.

Here's some of the posts I've read of late that I feel would interesting/beneficial reading for a lot of people:

Full post: adliterate - Separated by a common language

Extract: My first love is design.

I got into advertising by accident. I was all set to become an industrial designer, when irresistable lure of Geography took me away from the path of righteousness (which is another story). And a love of design is handy these days since it is looming ever larger in the lives of advertising people.

Full post: Noisy Decent Graphics - Advice: Always do it for real

Extract: As a designer, if you're asked to put some hand writing onto a brochure of a document, do it for real. DO NOT use a hand writing font. (How can you have a hand writing font, anyway?) Write the text out and scan it in.

If you need some distressed type, then print the type out, screw it up, photocopy it, re-screw it up, re-photocopy it and so on and so on. Distress it for real, DO NOT use a distressed type font.

Full post: Mark Bixby - Your Domain Sucks.com

Extract: Following an abysmal interaction with PNM‘s customer service department (New Mexico’s public utility company) I went online in search of a consumer advocate group with whom I could share my despair.

Knowing it was a long shot, I pointed Firefox to PNMsucks.com with the hope of discovering a vocal opponent to these “evil-doers”. No such luck. Interestingly, a quick domain lookup revealed that PNM was fully aware of their negative perception, and had preemptively purchased the domain… for ten years.

Full post: Graphic Design Blog - I Want it Free and I Want it Now!

Extract: Imagine you walk into a electrical shop. “Hello Mrs/Mr Smith” says the shop owner, “How can I help you today.” You know Mr Brown, the shop owner quite well as you buy a lot of your electrical goods from him. “Its my friends birthday, I’d like an MP3 player please,” you say. “Of course says the shop owner and shows you his complete range. You choose the one you want, take it and start to walk towards the door. “Ummm.. Mrs/Mr Smith, you’ve forgotten to pay.” “No, I’ve bought a lot of stuff from you so I’m having this for free,” you say.

I was talking to a checkout clerk at D-Mart (a chain of large-size supermarkets in Karachi) this afternoon and I asked him why there’s never anyone manning their big and blocked off cigarette counter. He answered with a really dejected look on his face,

Why even have such a big supermarket when you’re not going to hire enough people to run it?

I went on to suggest that they should just remove the counter and make that area self-service, just like the rest of the place, to which he replied,

These people are only interested in making money, so they sell off everything (meaning that the area is sponsored). We can’t remove the counter because it’s got a big logo on it (Marlboro’s logo, incidentally).

He went on to add that their isn’t even any point in forwarding customer complaints to management, because they’ve never done anything about it in the past, so why would they start now.

This guy’s pretty pissed off with his employer!

I’m a pretty regular customer there and I know that not a lot gets done there to improve the customer experience. Sure, it’s a lot more like foreign markets, with it’s wide aisles, air conditioning and bright lighting, but it really stops there. You can’t do your monthly groceries there because they won’t have everything you want. There are always a few things that one needs which are always going to be missing. For example; ziploc-type sandwich bags, aluminum foil, mortein refills, etc.

And to top it off, you’ve got staff so disgruntled that they’ve decide to let customers in on the problems. It feels very much like a “Don’t tell me, I just work here.” vibe. Someone in management has to figure out that their staff are the people shoppers interact with and if they’re not going to be taken seriously, then that indifference is going to be passed on in the staff’s interaction with people like me.

To be honest, I’ll still go there because I’m a supermarket whore — I love the places — and D-Mart’s fun for my kids to roam about in, but I’ve got it in the back of my mind now that this place isn’t well run and its staff aren’t really happy campers.

The chain’s not been around long enough and hasn’t launched any activities build up any real consumer loyalty either, so this really isn’t the best time to have things go astray.

Technorati : d-mart, demoralised, dmart, management, morale, staff

Wow, A post I wrote about Joost got Dugg by someone! It got lost in the all the day’s Diggs at their site, but at least I know that someone actually reads what I write. Woohoo.

Technorati Tags: digg, dugg, joost,

It sucks when you know, in advance, that you’re going to miss the boat on what seems like really cool technology.

I’ve been reading about Joost for a while now, watching various sites to see how things play out. How it may end up stealing a ton of buzz away from YouTube, simply because the media often likes to play them off each other, even though they seem to have little in common.

But I can’t get over the fact that this is another cool thing that we, in this part of the Third World, are going to be bystanders on. It’ll come, get talked up like crazy to the point where everyone will want to use it — and we won’t have the bandwidth to see what all the hype is about!

I recall reading somewhere that the folks at Joost are saying that it’s going to require a 512kbps connection, at least, and we’re a few years away from that being a “standard’ speed — 128kbps is the norm right now.

Just like it is right now with YouTube — we Pakistanis click play and then pause, go away, wait for the damn thing to cache in the background and then come back in 10 minutes to watch that 30 second clip which, most of the time, proves to be underwhelming.

From the Joost blog: The software downloads about 320MB per hour (as a maximum) and uploads up to 105 MB per hour. The more popular the content is on our platform, the more sources it can be pulled from and the less redundant data we send; that number can be as low as 220MB per hour of viewing.

From what I’ve deduced so far, and the service is no longer shrouded in mystery, so I may just be a little thick, but it’s basically TV-on-Demand on your computer.

They’re signing up content distribution deals steadily, with the Viacom agreement being the biggest noisemaker thus far, so there will be some mainstream stuff to start with, but I imagine that the Joost early adopters will use it for the more obscure shows, since they’re probably all well-versed with BitTorrent and know how to download the latest episode of CSI.

Though I imagine this will evolve pretty quickly, I came across a channel listing at Wikipedia.

The technology works a little like BitTorrent, in that the shows are initially distributed by Joost, but the bandwidth burden quickly gets passed on to users who have already downloaded and watched them, thereby minimising the need for massive server farms at Joost’s end. These are the guys behind Kazaa and Skype after all — they know you don’t use most of your upstream bandwidth, so they’ll use it for you!

It all appears to be really cool in its implementation (full screen, good quality, nice interface, extensible via widgets) and the offering is compelling for people like me who already use their PC for a lot of video entertainment.

TV viewing is a habit and people want to do it sitting in their lounges in front of their big TVs, not at their computer. I wonder how watching CSI on your PC will prove to be a attractive proposition in the short run, because if Joost doesn’t gain traction quickly, it’ll probably be surpassed by something that does it quicker, better, more convenient, etc.

Basically, the key to this thing succeeding will be the variety and quality of content and whether that will be enough of a pull to get users to change their viewing habits and locations.

Technorati Tags: Joost, TV, Television, YouTube, Skype, BitTorrent, Karachi, Pakistan