Month: June 2006

CD, Baby!

This is really what CDBaby.com wrote on my receipt:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Wednesday, June 28th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year’. We’re all
exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Press, Release!

My friend’s new business, AsianParent.com has issued a press release:

AsianParent.com’s New Website Helps Parents Preserve Chinese Culture and Language for Their Children

AsianParent.com launches to help parents share the Chinese language and culture with their children.

San Jose, CA (PRWEB) June 28, 2006 — AsianParent.com today announced the launch of their new website designed to provide a large selection of books, DVDs, and educational products to help parents to educate their children in their native language and share their cultural heritage.

(more…)

Bonanza

Today saw a bonanza of deliveries, with a bundle of US magazines from my mail forwarder, books and CDs from Amazon, and the aforementioned Fatboy Slim CD/DVD from CD Japan. Other CDs include Zero 7’s new release The Garden, Tina Dico’s In The Red, and Meshell Ndegeocello’s Plantation Lullabies. Books include The Tipping Point, Parable of the Talents, Against The Odds, and Learned Optimism.

Another good week

I just finished up the weekly paperwork and we had another good week, though not nearly as good as last week. The upcoming week will be interesting. My manager is taking 10 days off to go see his wife in mainland China. We have two employees who will be taking on most of his responsibilities, but I’ll need to come do the daily paperwork each night, and inventory next Tuesday.

Why Try Harder?

Fatboy Slim last week released a greatest hits album “Why Try Harder?” If you just want the audio CD version, the UK or US versions are pretty much the same. However, there’s also a limited edition version out which is packaged with a DVD of Fatboy Slim videos as well. This version is available in a European and Japanese version. For those of you in the US, I’d recommend getting the Japanese version. It’s already in NTSC format as opposed to PAL for the European version. The US also uses NTSC, so you wouldn’t need to worry about if your player can convert the video. It also includes one extra audio track and one extra video not on the European release. Amazon.com lists a DVD only package that will be released in the US, but no firm release date yet.

FATBOY SLIM: The Greatest Hits – Why Try Harder [w/ DVD, Limited Edition] (Japanese version from CD Japan.)

What I’m listening to

I’ve been playing around with WordPress today, customizing the Ocadia theme I use a bit (mostly just small tweaks). The big change is I added a plugin to show the music I’m listening to.

My first attempt was to use my last.fm account to generate charts. Unfortunately after a lot of searching I couldn’t find a theme that I both liked and also would fit in my sidebar. The only one I was happy with didn’t use transparency, so it looked stupid on Ocadia’s sidebar background.

I then settled on using the WP iTunes plugin along with iTunesBlogger. WP-iTunes actually does a bit more than I wanted, so I hacked it up a bit to take out the Amazon features (which didn’t work too well with my diverse music library anyways) and changed the presentation routine.

It’s surprisingly easy to hack on WordPress. I’ve only done a little bit of PHP programming before but it’s like a cross between C and Perl, so it’s pretty easy to make it up as I go along.

What I’m having problems with now is the CSS features on how the song information is displayed. I know so little about CSS now that I was only able to make a fairly crudely formatted list. I kinda know what I want it to look like, I just don’t know enough CSS to do it.

I also need to look into adding a spell-check plugin.

Ooh… Scary!

From the US Embassy American Institute in Taiwan:

A number of political demonstrations are scheduled to take place in
Taipei and Kaohsiung in the coming week. The American Institute in
Taiwan urges all U.S. citizens in Taiwan to exercise caution and to
avoid large political gatherings. Even protests intended to be
peaceful can quickly turn into confrontational situations. While
there is no indication that demonstrations will turn violent or that
American citizens or foreigners would be the target of any political
violence, U.S. citizens traveling or residing abroad should exercise
good personal security awareness including maintaining a low profile
and avoiding areas where large gatherings/demonstrations may occur.

Business update

I haven’t updated on how the Subway store is going in a while. Some of you assume that this is because I’m busy. The actual reason is that really, there’s not a whole lot of interest to say.

Things have been going pretty well. We’re at the one month anniversary today. Yesterday finished our fifth business week (Subway business week is Wednesday through Tuesday). Our first (partial week) we lost money, the second week we broke even, and the following two weeks had a decent profit.

I just finished the paperwork for last week and it was the first one where we ended with a very good profit. It’s also the first week that I made more than my manager.

There’s two main factors that made it a good week. First, productivity has increased through a combination of workers performing better and the work schedule being more efficient. The second is that sales have been steadily increasing.

It also doesn’t hurt that the weather has been pretty good, except for some afternoon rain.