The Star, Sunday July 29, 2007

As I said, vultures circling above him.

Can't they see he's doing his best?

Quote of the day

I kinda prefered the Wannabe Fansub translation through.

Of Harry Potter and money

Reading time of this article: who knows?
Prerequisite: watch this.
Assumed knowledge: understanding of the price war on the last Harry Potter book.

This is not a article on harry Potter. Neither are they any spoilers in this post.

So, after looking at the mad crowds and letting the dust of the hype settle, I can finally lean back with a sigh and pen my thoughts on the price fiasco of the last Harry Potter book in Malaysia.

I have no sympathy for the "major bookshops". Selling the book at RM110 is anyway is outrageous. My question is, what is the recommended retail price (RRP) of the HP7 book in Malaysia?

Even I, with my limited business knowledge, can tell you that Tesco and Carrefour will not sell something to make a loss. They may be big international chains. They may have big profit margins. But I can tell you, they will not sell something, even if it's as internationally acclaimed as the HP7 book, at a loss. Think about it. The probability of someone buying it is 1. The probability of excess stock is 0. If I were Tesco/Carrefour, I would go along with the flow, and sell it at RM110. Why not? It's a greater profit margin.

Guess how much the HP7 book is in Australia through? The RRP price is A$ 29.90. But I got my hands on it, and so did the rest of the crowd, for $25! And I didn't queue outside Big W. I didn't camp out outside Borders/QBC/Target. I went to Angus and Robertson. And picked up one that was labeled $25. Now if a "normal" bookshop can do this, I was wondering, just imagine the profit margin of these big chains with so much lower overheads!

Even if you take the RRP of A$30, and looking at the AUD rising faster than and the RM dropping like a rock, that still only translates to RM 90. And maybe I didn't look hard enough, but I couldn't find anyone selling it for $30. And A$ 25 is only about RM75. I could buy the HP7 book, ship it to Malaysia within 3 working days, and still have change from Rm100.

Now consider these "big chains". They are buying the books BELOW selling price. They are buying in bulk, so they get an even lower price. They're shipping in bulk, so they don't get charged A$ 18 per 500g like me. Just imagine the profit they make selling at RM110!!!

In this aspect, Tesco and Carrefour are selling it at the right price of RM 70. But that's only half the story. Now, how much do you have to work just to buy one? Normally, you'd be lucky to get paid RM 2/hr working part-time back home. At RM 70, that's still 35 hrs work. Assuming you work 8 hour days, it'd take you about 4 days just to have enough dough to buy the book.

Here in Australia, the minimum wage is $10/hr. One only has to work for less than 3 hours, to earn enough money for a copy of HP7. And we wonder why Malaysians don't read.

So, no. I do not have any sympathy for anyone saying that they're being undercut.

Sometimes, we need to see things from a foreign perspective to understand our-self's.

Highlighter for Firefox

Well, it's back to uni. Sem 2. And what better way to kick start, by introducing a new handy nifty feature to help you get past all that inevitable reading.


Highlighter for Firefox!!!!!!!

With all that reading one has to do, and with almost everything in digital format, it can get a bit tiring on the eyes, with all those words swimming around in your vision. Sometimes, you just wish that there was a good ol` highlighter to highlight the key points as you read, to help in your revision and referencing.

Unfortunately, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the HTML specification, highlighting (understandably) wasn't in his mind. But it is in mine. When I'm ploughing text after text, page after page.

It's quite simple to use really. Just install it from the mozdev site, reboot the browser, and you're on your way! On the surface, nothing has changed. But highlight a chunk of text, and hold down the "shift" key while right-clicking on the text, and......


Tada!

You get a nice new box called "highlight", which gives you a choice of colors for one to introduce emphasis in a sea of text!



And you can have as many colors as you want in one text, through to be honest I've never had to use more than 3 colors.



It's not permanent, and it doesn't show up when you print the page out to create a hard copy. Still, I find it a massively handy tool when reading up and/or doing research.

It's a simple program, so I doubt there are any major bugs or flaws in the plugin. My only gripe is that it is only available with Firefox. What about SeaMonkey? And does anyone know something that will do something like this in Opera?

This is called in introduction?!

This is a link to a while paper, called "An introduction to data mining".

An introduction?

An introduction!?

School Rumble on Animax

If you live in Hong Kong, at least.

First Trailer.


And the Initial D version:


I have a feeling that the English trailer took a leaf from the first one through. And I don't even understand Cantonese.

Bad English and maintainence

Saw this here:


Spelling error no 1: "Nigth"
Spelling error no 2: "guess"? It's guest！

Malaysian's are hopeless, aren't there?



Oh, and is the lift still under repair?