Brand specialists and consultants talk mostly about brand loyalty and meeting expectations when they speak of brand images. The Boagworld podcast talked about an incident when a customer of innocent smoothies wrote the marketing team a genuine feedback email. It didn’t contain any particular positive nor negative comments, but simply a sharing of appreciation.

Well, after a week long of homemade lunches, I opted for a lazy bought lunch. But what a fantastic idea the veg pot is, as not only have I had a lazy lunch, but a healthy one!

The best part of this is that I can now happily have fish ‘n’ chips for tea. Well done! The added bonus to this is that our local fish ‘n’ chips shop is busy on a Friday that sometimes it’s necessary to wait, which of course, is best done at the local pub.

Yours truly,

Carolyn

Like Paul said, you don’t get people writing to IBM with that tone of voice. So here’s something to think about when planning brand strategies. How would you like your brand to be perceived by your customers? And more importantly, how would you like to perceive your customers? This is how innocent does it (within 1 working day):

Hello Carolyn,

Thanks for getting in touch. Without sounding too full of ourselves, we’re rather proud of our veg pots too. But the only opinion that really counts is that of people like yourselves, so it’s great to know that you’ve been enjoying them so much.

I’m going to forward your email onto the lovely ladies in our product team who make them. As I know, they’re really keen to hear what people think. You’re no doubt have put a big smile on their faces as well, so good on you!

In fact, hell with it. Take it back. Carolyn, you rule!

Stay funky monkey. And don’t park on the double yellows. The paint burns your tyres.
(This might not actually be true.)

“…what are the three prerequisites for an ideology to be considered a religion?”

“ABC,” one woman offered. “Assure, Believe, Convert.”

“Correct,” Langdon said. “Regions assure salvation; religions believe in a precise theology; and religions convert nonbelievers.”

Interestingly, the first image that popped into my mind was the various Apple retail stores.

I’m a Mac user myself. I admit loving the product and what Apple has achieved in integrating great software with beautifully performing hardware. However, I can’t help thinking how the brand has become a religion (or how the Apple Stores have become more of a Temple than of a retail store):

1. Apple assures softwares that just work;
2. Apple believes in making your life easier and seamless;
3. Apple converts PC users.

More precisely, according to Russell Belk, a consumer behaviourist at the University of Utah:

“This religion is based on an origin myth for Apple Computer, heroic and savior legends surrounding its co-founder and current CEO Steve Jobs, the devout faith of its follower congregation, their belief in the righteousness of the Macintosh, the existence of one or more Satanic opponents, Mac believers proselytizing and converting nonbelievers, and the hope among cult members that salvation can be achieved by transcending corporate capitalism.”

Religion, Belk said, is a belief structure that helps people make sense of the world. The “cult of Mac” is a set of beliefs about Apple and the Mac that make sense of the world of technology. It also imparts the community with a quasi-religious character.

Worshipping at the Altar of Mac, Wired

At which does a brand become a religion? Or more importantly, how can a brand successfully become, if it was ever a good thing to be, a religion?

I think it all comes down to consumer experience and expectations. When a brand reaches a point where promises are being delivered consistently, brand loyalty can easily become a cult-like mindset.

I think however, an altar or temple-like space such as a retail store or online community is also essential in this transformation. For a long time, mankind has been prone to forces of the community. Being able to see and feel the growth in the number of believers certainly strengthens the idea that one is walking the right path.

What do people think?

之前住的地方，沒什麼風格，不過在玄關旁的走廊倒是有三副威尼斯帶回來的面具，而房間裡也有一對空白面具。問我，我是不是對面具有什麼特別的喜好，其實也不是，只是剛好有很多，所以拿來裝飾。其餘，因為去年一直不想佈置房間，只想簡單地點綴裝飾，其實房間也是一團亂(羞)現在住的地方呢，更是簡陋 XD 所以呢，決定回味一下 AS-Level 時在 St Lawrence College 的房間。

倦自書卷生

一年三個學期，我記得第一學期時就被指定為其中一個 Dorm Captain：簡單地說，就是跟麻煩的六個 Year 9~10 的學弟睡同一間房然後照顧他們。想當年，我在 Year 9 的時候的第一個DC，是個會在熄燈後把我們叫起來作俯立挺身和仰臥起坐的傢伙，然後在週末的時候會從外面帶酒回來給大家喝。酒量，果然是要從小訓練。

當 DC 其實除了在學弟的寢室會給你一張床以外，在宿舍的頂樓會給你一間書房，讓你可以讀書用。與書房同層樓的其他房間，有些一樣是書房，有些則是寢室，都是給我們高年級用的。跟學弟的寢室比起來，大部分的時間，我還是都在書房度過。那時候給的房間不大，可是我很任性地將我所有的家當都塞進了那書房裡面。至少，書房有個鑰匙可以讓我鎖房間，覺得自己的東西都安全很多。另外，我們高年級也比較少跟低年級的有多少互動。

那時的「房間」實在是很小，畢竟要把一個小小的書房當作是一個「沒有床的寢室」來用，實在是有點擠。因為宿舍頂樓剛好在閣樓的關係，所以連屋樑跟窗台，都被我擺滿掛滿了衣物。當然，那個時候房間佈置最大的主題，就是柯南(心) 柯南的海報，從門外開始，就滿滿地貼到了房間裡的每一吋：這算是我的房間最特別的個性吧。

短暫的欣歡

第二個學期，舍監給了我一間自己的房間，也包括書桌與盥洗台。老實說，因為家父服務於建築業，本身該對空間有點概念，但是我卻說不出房間大概有多大。羞愧。

不過呢，房間那時真的是挺大的。除了一張單人床以外，一張書桌、一個書櫃、兩個滿滿的衣櫃，這樣大概只佔房間的一半左右吧。空間那麼大，是因為那時候我的書桌並沒有排張椅子。我把書桌直接對在床的尾部，這樣我可以直接坐在床上，坐在書桌前。讀累了書，就可以直接往後躺。沒話說，就是很好。

床旁邊放了一個矮矮的小沙發。這樣別人來我房間問功課或是聊天的時候，可以直接坐在那邊。我對客人還是很照顧的。當時房間的音響跟喇叭，已經不記得是怎麼佈置的了。有這麼舒服的讀書環境，那一整個學期可能沒有注意到音樂的部分。

那時的房間，算是至那時以來住過最豪華的房間，但歡樂的心中卻不知在第三個學期房間將被大大地降級(囧)

衣中有書　自有藏金屋

到了最後一個學期，大概是應消費者需求，我又跑回去當 DC。而這次老師給的書房，比第一學期的還要小。小到…我兩個衣櫃還要減為一個衣櫃，然後把剩下的衣服在房裡到處掛，因為我還是不喜歡把東西放在寢室內。衣服掛的滿滿的，通常走進我房間看不到我在哪裡。而衣服的掛法，基本上只要確定房間的燈跟我的書桌之間的光線沒有被擋到就是了。雖然小到整個有點寒酸，不過我還是挺喜歡待在那房間裡，或是找客人來閒聊，也有幾次晚上沒有回寢室就睡在書房裡。

雖然說 A-Level 時讀書並沒有很認真，但是待在這種簡陋又擁擠的房間，要讀書時還是挺麻煩的。考試期間，反而比較常到公用的書房或是電腦房來讀書，甚至借用教同學讀書的機會，來待在朋友房間讀書。結果，那年成績反而是最好的一年。這大概跟我大學二年級愛玩但是成績又好的邏輯差不多吧：該讀書的時候還是會努力的。

宅的地方，果然還是要有點個性。而書卷之地，也還是要跟睡覺的地方分開來。4月多可能會搬家，不知道新家會是什麼樣子…

Ever since the launch of co-creating the future, Tom has been doing quite a good job as an editor to keep it alive. Almost every time I walk past him he’d be drafting up something for the blog – or at least it catches my attention when I see the Wordpress interface on his screen. So I thought as a blog owner, I should be doing a better job at keeping StillLive.NET, well, alive. As busy as I do get at times, I should certainly regard ‘blog keeping’ as part of the house keeping.

So here we have it. Thursday is now: Blog Day! And because I only decided to do this less than 24 hours ago, I haven’t really thought a great deal about what to write. I guess I’ll start with Launch48!

Last Wednesday, I picked up Adil’s tweet on Launch48, and registered to attend. According to the Launch48 website…

The aim of Launch48 is to bring together participants from different backgrounds and levels of experience in the web industry to think/plan/develop and launch one or multiple web apps in one weekend. That’s right, in 48 hours! 

Compared to perhaps watching one or two films over the weekend, and perhaps writing a blog post or two, I decided this would be quite a good learning and networking exeprience. And I was right! Friday night started with a round of 21 pitches. Bravo to all the people who had a go at it. I would’ve had a go at it, except my main concern back then was: would I be doing design, developing, or marketing? When 21 pitches came down to LocalCoupon (now VouChaCha), Charity Pie (now MyCharityPie), i like u coz, and Decisions Decisions, we had to go our separate ways and decide on an area of expertise. At the end I decided to try out the design department. Why? I wanted to try taking a pure design role in a  project, and see what that’s like really. Then, I joined the Charity Pie team. (For more descriptive information on the projects, you can check out the blog posts on the Launch48 blog.)

The next day, Julian from Dennis Publishing kindly showed us to our individual ‘HQs’. The team introduced ourselves to each other, and work started to get delegated.  Not that taking on work for other departments would’ve been a wrong choice, but choosing to go into the design team was definitely the right move. I LOVED IT! The design team was absolutely awesome, and the nature of the ‘job’ itself brings me instantly to a state of flow. Thus, I’m temporarily not considering taking on hardcore developing work, but will still be interested in learning the development side of web design and applications. At the moment, MVC and AIR/Flex would be the top of my list. As for the design side of my to-learn list: Adobe Illustrator is, although quite complicated as a Photoshop user, interestingly fun. Definitely have to learn how to use it more professionally.

Despite being pushed to launch an app prototype by the end of Sunday, quite a few people did wander about to see what other teams are up to. Well, at least people from other groups did come up to our design hub quite a few times. As anticipated, the Launch48 event was short of designers. I can’t quite imagine graphic designers to be interested in this kind of event, unlike UI and UX designers. That’s why we were all grouped together as ‘designers’. So, having hogged 4 designers in our team (which is a large design team compared to i like u coz who didn’t have any designers), all the other teams ended up coming to us for one form or another of design work: logo, UI, graphic etc. Too bad we couldn’t help everyone to the end, but taking on multi-mini-projects at the same time was quite an experience in itself.

By the end of of Sunday, most teams finished their app in their own ways. VouChaCha had a working Java application developed and installed on a Nokia N95. i like u coz and Decisions Decisions both had a working platform. As for MyCharityPie – I guess our idea was bigger than what we wanted to achieve in 48 hours, which was bigger than our team – we had a working back end system, and a thought through UX and UI design, but didn’t manage to string them together.

Too bad.

Still, it was a lot of fun. The teams continue to carry on with their design, development and marketing campaigns, and the networking opportunity was priceless. Thanks again to Adil and Ian, and we’ll see everyone again on March 20th when all teams come together again to meet angels and VCs!

Oh, did I mention that the design team ROCKS!?

今天早上在弄早餐的時候，Chloe在上班路上傳了個簡訊說外面在下雪(然後她差點滑倒XD)。我興奮的咧!

起床把電腦、硬碟、桌燈和音響關掉，然後把咪咪丟出門外，我想好好地聽聽下雪的聲音。

沒有聲音。

果然是沒聲音，不過，外面實在是安靜得有點詭異。雪，似乎把一切的聲音都帶走了。沒有風聲，沒有車響，沒有鳥叫，更沒有人煙的迴聲：一種很真實的安靜。

我喜歡這種安靜。

Professional

1. Lean to use Illustrator to an intermediate level
2. Create a simple Flash-based website/webapp

Using the pen tool on Photoshop has always been a weakness for me, so in 2009 I plan to practise using the pen tool a lot more with Illustrator, creating vector graphics. And as I continue to embrace the power of JavaScript libraries, I think it’s only fair that I allow myself to dabble in Flash as well and see what it can do apart from creating animations and play video.

Personal

1. Get into a regular sleep routine
2. Exercise 3 times a week

2008 has been a rather ‘unhealthy’ year for me. Having moved out to live on my own, working at home has meant that I’m pretty much working at the oddest hours, and sleeping too. Adil gave me a nickname: ‘napster’ at one point for the number of times he’s heard about me taking long naps during the day even before he met me. The Lent attempt to drop the habit of laying in failed. I’ve also been less engaged with the dance rehearsals and lessons. Now with Virgin Active charging me £64.95 per month, exercising 3 times a week is only fair.

Side projects

There’re a couple of projects that I want to either round off some existing projects, or start on a couple that I’ve been having in my mind.

1. EnTrip mobile See Entrip.
2. Weight-gain tracking Although it’s not a resolution to gain weight, I believe a regular sleep and exercise routine will allow me to put on weight anyway. So, I spent a couple of hours last night puting together an application to track my progress. This should be rather interesting.
3. File transfer interface This is to allow myself to upload/download/share files that I wish in an unlimited way with public/private privileges.
4. Something that uses the Twitter API It’s possible that I might put this together with the file transfer interface, but it’s uncertain right now.
5. StillLive.NET rebrand A major rebrand and site-wide redesign is on the way…

How about everyone else? Any resolutions for the coming year?

On finishing the reading, I stumbled upon an entry that the Director Ryan Carson posted:

If you’re educated and wealthy enough to be reading this blog (which is true as you’re reading a computer screen), then you’ve got a massive advantage in life. You have the power, the wealth and the education to actually choose what to do with your life. Most of the population of the entire world doesn’t have that ability. You and I are lucky to not be fighting to stay alive day-to-day. So if you’re not doing something that you believe in – something you can be passionate about – then do something for me.

Quit.

Don’t waste time @ Carsonified

The good thing is, I’m already a believer in the notion that you should do what you are passionate about in life. The bad thing is, it seemed to have got me into a situation with two pitfalls.

1. I’m doing too many things because I love them all, and it kind of drains me out a bit.
2. I’m not doing enough on any particular ‘thing’ to make sure I get somewhere with it.

The first one is recently starting to get to me because I know I’m only going to get interested in more things, and before I know it I’d be trying to build a home studio to do some recording. A bit luxurious, but it’s been at the back of my mind for some time.

So I gathered together the kind of things that are occupying most of my time at the moment:

• Web design & development: project work, general read-and-learning, and an upcoming site-wide redesign
• Dancing: teaching, rehearsal, and some upcoming performances & competitions with the FuNkoLoGy crew
• Brand strategy consulting: regular contract work with Promise and a looking out for career down that path

And this is where the second pitfall comes in. At the rate in which the economy is going down, I can’t be thinking about doing all those things when the one that I’m most experienced in – dance – isn’t really getting myself much well paid except the huge amount of joy I get out of it.

(Fortunately) Promise contacted me yesterday for another short contract to work on some new projects. The projects sound interesting already, although I shouldn’t really be taking on something else to delay the other projects on hand. Too bad the recession is hitting everyone quite hard and I couldn’t get a guaranteed longer contract, but I think the early January start with them will be a great opportunity for me to push myself on getting the other web design projects finished beforehand, and really start balancing bits of my life and look out for myself.

1. Develop locally

Be it Mac or PC, make sure you have the complete suite of softwares. If your work is more graphical than technical, make sure you have softwares such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash etc. If it’s the other way round, you’d need a fully equiped developing environment.

For PHP and MySQL developers, WAMP is very well recommended for PC users, and MAMP for Mac users. Without any surprise, LAMP is probably ideal for Linux users. In whichever case, a good HTML editor is required for CSS manipulation, and no one does it better than Dreamweaver. I am yet to try out the new Dreamweaver CS4, but CS3 suffices for most of my job requirements. One may argue that you can do all that Dreamweaver does with Notepad, but there’s no harm relying on the auto-complete, colour coding, and code management features.

Oh and of course, for Firefox users (and I don’t see why you shouldn’t be using Firefox), Firebug comes to the top of the list for one of the must-have plug-ins for local development. It features a full range of features for editing, debugging, and monitoring HTML, CSS, and JavaScript live in any web page.

2. Reduce, Reuse & Recycle

According to Web Designer Issue 150, 82% of readers would affect how they advise clients over using Flash content with Google’s capability to index SWF content. I personally started with JavaScript libraries a year ago when I first came to touch with being a web designer. It pretty much creates most of the effects and features that I wanted, and I was also happy with the fact that it runs fully on iPhone Safari when Flash content isn’t supported on the device. If Flash was also supported on iPhone, which I believe will only be a matter of time before it is, I’d definitely change my view on using Flash content.

Meanwhile, for the lovers of JavaScript libraries, be it MooTools, jQuery, Prototype, or script.aculo.us, make sure you have a latest copy of them in your computer. And I mean all of them, uncompressed. I started off as a happy MooTools user, but it was only a matter of time before any developer encounters a less than familiar language/framework that he or she must work with. As is the case for one of my clients, It has recently been required for me to learn to use the jQuery library. Fortunately I am still in the realm of JavaScript libraries, and it wasn’t too hard to pick it up. Good thing was that I had a full copy of it in my computer, and when I wasn’t too sure of any syntax or features, I can always go back to the original package, and check how the features have been built. Having said that, you’d need a reasonably good understanding of the language.

The main point is, when you need to produce any piece of code or layout, or when you are unsure about how to use a feature, go back to another piece of code that will show you how. As simple as it is, you’ll find yourself not relying on Google so much and gaining a deeper understanding of the tool that you use.

3. Plan ahead and use your online time wisely

The most common sympton for overly internet-reliant web developers is that they feel the need to upload everything of every phase of their project to a test server and test it. I used to be like that, before I one day wonderfully bumped into WAMP that is. The truth is, as long as you are aware of bandwidth issues with internet connections, you’ll do fine with a local server and Firebug.

As precious as £2.50 for 1 hour of internet time, make sure you plan your phases before you show the clients your work. If you need to, type the emails on Notepad before you hit the internet cafe, and schedule the phases and meetings with the clients. Normally this would also help in making sure you cut the slack and get the work done on time.

Bonus cake – Back up your work.

Taken from Internet Duct Tape:

“Hey, can you check out the latest version of this file to see if my changes work?” Except it’s never just one file, and the changes never work the first time. Checking code out into your working copy is not just an interruption, but can lose an entire afternoon trying to re-achieve the state you were at before updating that “one file”. Having multiple directory trees (hard drive space is cheap) can remove this problem.

Now I generally keep my code in three batches: Working, Stable, and a Current version that is kept in WAMP’s ‘www’ folder. In cases where a code goes horribly wrong, at least you’ll have something to revert to.

現在搭乘捷運從淡水要回台北，也終於有點空寫些什麼。最後一個晚上，可能會去喝一杯，也有可能會回家去看新的霹靂遊俠。

總之這次回台灣行程很倉促，雖然說想吃想見的大部份都有吃到見到，但是基於惰性還有大部分的人都忙著工作的緣故，還是有幾個朋友沒約出來。妙麗，特別是妳，等我下次回來再約妳出來！(要不然妳趕快來倫敦啦~)

至於對台灣的想法：天氣很熱，來了兩次颱風很衰，幾米音樂劇很讚，豆漿、小籠包、蘿蔔糕、火腿蛋餅、燒酒螺、干絲、醃小黃瓜、紅燒牛筋麵、東區粉圓、花生豆花、胡同日式燒烤、麥當勞玉米濃湯、五更腸旺、麻辣鴨血、炒牛肉漢堡、雞肉飯、田雞湯、滷肉飯、花枝粳、大腸包小腸、碳烤臭豆腐、糯米腸、孔雀蛤…還有很多家常說不出的菜都很好吃，下午茶店很悠閒，誠品很優靜，Primo很酷，柯南很好看，房裡冷氣很涼，Q-be 跟糖糖都很可愛，三重很遠，工作很多，高鐵很快…

嗯，暫時就先這樣 =P