New Subway Taiwan TV Ad

For January and February 2008 we are promoting the Chicken Teriyaki Sub in Taiwan with the following TV commercial:


http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=a7VUs2_QL84

When you buy a Chicken Teriyaki Meal you can win one of four prizes: 1) Trip for two to Las Vegas, 2) Coca Cola duffel bag, 3) Buy one get one free 6″ sub 4) Free small soda.

Pizza Now Available


Click For Larger Version

Personal Pizza is now available at select SUBWAYâ„¢ Taiwan Restaurants for $180 each: Cheese, Veggie, Sausage or Pepperoni, with extra topping options such as bacon, meatball, double meat or double cheese.

This is a test product which will be available at limited locations to test market response. The test stores are:

Available Now: SUBWAYâ„¢ Qingcheng Restaurant (Nanjing E. Rd. MRT)
Available This Week: SUBWAYâ„¢ Tianmu Taipei American School Restaurant, SUBWAYâ„¢ Minquan/Longjiang Restaurant
Available In Coming Weeks: SUBWAYâ„¢ Dunhua/Civic Restaurant, SUBWAYâ„¢ Xingtian Temple Restaurant

(Product availability may change without notice.)

Youtube Popularity

I don’t really understand how videos manage to get popular on Youtube. At current count my videos have been watched a total of 7,293 times. I’ve made no effort to promote them and have only posted links on my blog and a couple of times on Forumosa. Three of the videos are of the English version video explaining the driver’s license test in Taiwan which have been up for a while and are actually useful, so I can understand why they’ve been viewed a lot, as they are actually useful.

But the most popular of my videos is a not terribly exciting video showing a bit of surveillance video from my restaurant during an earthquake. It has no editing, no sound, no titles, and to be honest the it’s far from the most interesting earthquake video on Youtube (see my favorites for some better ones). I don’t mean to sell it short; I do think it is interesting and worth watching. It’s just that I’m boggled that it currently has been watched 3,255 times. And all it shows is some ads and lights swinging gently for a minute.

The only external link that shows up other than my own stuff is a link from taggy.jp which seems to be some sort of Japanese version of Digg or Delicio.us. Apparently the video currently has 8 points there. Other than that the only thing it has going for it is a good subject and tags in both English and Chinese and a decent description (only English though; my Chinese doesn’t do well at long stuff). But still, 3,255 views. Wow!

twquake 1.5.1

We had a couple of quakes today, including one that woke me up at 6:54 am this morning:

M 5.0 46.0 km ENE of Yilan City 2007-11-08 06:54 #074 (1108065450074)
http://www.cwb.gov.tw/V5e/seismic/Data/quake/EE1108065450074.gif
http://www.cwb.gov.tw/V5e/seismic/Data/quake/EE1108065450074.txt

A smaller one this afternoon which I didn’t feel brought to my attention a few minor bugs that I hadn’t resolved in a while in my twquake perl script which fetches earthquake data from the Central Weather Bureau. That led me to other bugs and cosmetic issues and eventually spawned a new version of the script. Behold: twquake version 1.5.1. (I also noticed that I never posted version 1.5.0 which fixed a major bug. Well, actually the bug is in LWP::Simple but I had to convert to using LWP::UserAgent instead to avoid the bug.) If anyone actually uses this program besides me, please download the new version!

For those who are interested, I also run two mailing lists which send out alerts with the information on each earthquake reported in Taiwan. There’s an English version and a Chinese version:

Sign up for Taiwan earthquake alerts:
English: http://lists.jameslick.com/mailman/listinfo/twquake-alert-en
中文: http://lists.jameslick.com/mailman/listinfo/twquake-alert-zh