Yongfook - Web Producer - imported from yongfook.com

Business / Food in Singapore ~ My Report

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:43:15 +0900

I'm back. I'm also exhausted, slightly more tanned and now with an even fuller belly than from Kuala Lumpur last month. I was in Singapore for the last 7 days for a few reasons - the main reason was to speak at Blogout '09, an event organised by The Digital Movement. Then I had a few other reasons, mostly involving the words chilli and crab. Here's what I got up to...

Howie and Claudia of TDM met me at the airport when I arrived. It was great to see some smiling faces for once - I'm so used to arriving at airports and shuffling alone into a cab or onto a train with a bunch of silent strangers. We zoomed off into town and seemingly within moments of landing I was gorging on Murtabak:

Pic by su-lin

My stomach, having been shrunk from Japan-sized food portions, struggled to even eat half of it. The taste and satisfaction though (along with the yummy Teh Halia - a type of pulled tea infused with ginger) were the best kind of welcome mat there is, though. We sat in the open air cafe - the city buzzing past - talking about social media and the Singapore web industry, whilst some of their friends joined us. It was refreshing to hear how there was so much going on in Singapore. Lots of web-related events, lots of people with fingers in various pies. The atmosphere was great - out in the warm, eating good food, in a city small enough that you can call up friends and they will be with you within minutes. Cold, monolithic Tokyo seemed less and less an appealing home to go back to...

Howie and Claudia shuttled me off to my hotel. I booked myself into the St. Regis, a supposed 6-star hotel. I wasn't aware that such things existed (at least in any official capacity) so I presume this is some kind of unofficial self-labeled badge of excellence. They deserve it though - it is hands down the best city hotel I've stayed in. Design-wise it's kind of that old-worldy style of interior which I'm usually not into, but St. Regis managed to pull it off without looking cheesy (something that hotels like this often fail at, I feel) and kept things elegant with nice touches of new-world, such as the buttons to softly alter the room lighting's mood, the sound system that delivered sound from all four corners of the room, the amazing shower that sprayed water infront of you and from above (I will really miss that - never felt so clean before) and... well I won't go on too much. Needless to say, I'm going to be staying there again.

Above: the black square on the mirror in front of the bathtub is a TV :)

Above: even the toast was fancy.

The level of service was noticeably speedier, more polite and more accommodating than any other city hotel I've stayed in. The pool and spa areas were beautiful. Location-wise it's not exactly right in the middle of Orchard Road (a popular and central location in Singapore) - it's just round the corner. Within about 5 minutes of walking you're basically smack in the middle of downtown. Anyone got any other Singapore hotel recommendations? Other than the St. Regis, I'd recommend the Fairmont Singapore (previously Raffles the Plaza) - it's right on top of an MRT station, connected to a shopping center so you have fast access to a food court, and it's near the bay area where the Esplanade is, so it's a slightly different vibe to downtown Orchard Road.

I spent my first day pretty much practicing my presentations in my room. I've given many presentations before but this was the first on unknown territory, so to speak. In Tokyo it's easy - usually I'll know a chunk of the audience, or they will know me. In Singapore I was expecting a crowd of unfamiliar faces, and lots of people asking "so who is this guy?". I had to make sure my content spoke for itself.

I met up with an old friend from Tokyo for dinner, who is now living in Singapore. It was partly an opportunity to catch up and partly an opportunity to probe her for intel, seeing as I am planning to make the same move in the near future. I took her to Iggy's for dinner, a restaurant I had been wanting to visit for some time.

Above: the receipt is inside... a rather frightening sum, but well worth it for an experience in fine food that is seldom found in Singapore, where street food still seems to be the country's forte.

Iggy's is one of those places where the menu is set by the chef and that's what you get. It's a tasting-style menu that changes monthly, using seasonal ingredients / influences (seasonal meaning other countries' seasons, I guess - Singapore doesn't have seasons...). Some highlights from our menu included a crab bisque on top of steamed egg (like a deliciously rich chawan mushi), an egg-yolk pasta drenched in truffles, a very light kanpachi done in a kind of carpaccio-style, with warmed, finely-chopped konbu sprinkled on top. Overall I thought it was an excellent meal - the dishes were creative yet still made sense, and your palate experiences a wide spectrum of flavours.

At the end of the meal Iggy himself came out to chat. An unexpectedly humble Chinese fellow - it was great talking to him about food and his thoughts on the meal we just had. With a permanent smile he wrung his hands and cocked his neck to the side in the most meek of ways, contrasting to the magnificent feast we had just devoured.

Right, now for some actual work

Yeeeeeeees before you start thinking I was there on holiday, I honestly wasn't. The first order of business was attending the Blogout '09 event. It was split into two days, one for a more corporate crowd and one for a more casual, blogger-type crowd. I gave two different presentations:

Social Media ROI - Measuring the Unmeasurable?

This presentation dealt with the issue many marketing / PR teams might have of trying to measure (and thus justify expenditure on) success and returns of social media marketing campaigns. My presentation was about knowing what you need to track, setting specific success metrics that undeniably and positively translate into a business context, and then setting goals based on those metrics. In the last part of the presentation was showing real life examples of social media campaigns and then figuring out how we could track the success of these.

Social Media ROI

View more presentations from yongfook.

Fire Your Boss!

This slightly more casual presentation was based around the idea that we shouldn't feel bad about charging for things that have value. Somewhere along the way during Web 2.0 we decided everything should be free, and that doesn't scale down well to small businesses or bloggers with small, niche audiences. In the presentation we talked about what users might pay for (the key is being niche and authoritative) and then looked at some real world examples of blogs that offer free content but also have a very profitable paid, premium content area that people are happily paying for.

Fire Your Boss

View more presentations from yongfook.

Above: Blogout '09 - pics shamelessly stolen from www.flickr.com/photos/sgentrepreneurs

Howie, Claudia and the TDM team did a great job of organising the event. The presentations had the right balance of professional insight and entertainment value, the emcee Joe Augustin was hilarious - even the catering was drool-worthy :) It was great to meet the other presenters such as Joel Postman from Intridia and Preetam Rai a traveling blogger with a great sense of humour and a heart of gold - as well as meeting all the interesting attendees, lots of web startups, government ogranisations, big PR firms. My head is still spinning a little, but it was great meeting everyone :)

Here's what other people have been saying about the event:

Phew.

After Blogout, I had a few free days before I was due to head back but somehow those free days filled up...

On Sunday I visited the offices of Mediacorp - the rather Orwellian name given to the all-seeing and all-knowing main broadcaster in Singapore. I met Joyce and her friend Chelsea for an interview, which will be broadcast on 938 Live at some point.

Poor Chelsea. She didn't even work at Mediacorp and was just visiting her friend, but since she was there, she was relegated to holding the mic for our interview. Sorry!

After the interview we all went to the Adam Road hawker center which, I am ashamed to say that on day 4 of my time in Singapore, was the first time I had set foot in a hawker center that trip. I had the "big" prawn mee which was apparently famous. It deserved the reputation. Gigantic prawns that in Japan would be called lobsters, a flavourful and slightly herby broth, with perfectly cooked al-dente egg noodles. I would happily eat that every day. Sadly no pics as I guzzled it down before realising I had my camera on me :/

The next couple of days I spent walking around town and re-acquainting myself with Singapore. The last time I was there was in December 2007. Some things never change. The ice-cream sandwich sellers along Orchard Road. The blind busker in the underpass from Tangs. The fact that you can hear or see construction from wherever you choose to stand at any point in the island. And because of that last point, it's also a place that is constantly changing. I visited The Sail, a brand new development out by Raffles Place featuring a 70 story glass tower reaching up into the sky and billowing out like a sail. Possible home when I move to Singapore? We'll see...

I'm loving the new Chatterbox at the Meritus Mandarin, relocated to the top floor. Street food with service, in air-conditioned comfort - some people say it's overpriced for what you get but it's all about the indirect costs/benefits for me. You don't have to queue, you're assured a certain level of quality as it's a cash cow for the hotel, the service is friendly, there's a bar downstairs, it's open 24 hours a day and well, the chicken rice is pretty damn tasty. I can see this being a late-night haunt for me in the future...

Above: Wanton mee which my adorable friend requested with beehoon. She didn't realise how blasphemous this is.

Above: Beef hor fun

Above: There's a surprising amount of green around the city. I thought they had long since turned all the green into high-end condominiums?

On Tuesday it was time for work again (kinda). Pat Law kindly invited me along to speak at an Ogilvy event in the evening. A casual event with beer (oh yas) and nibbles, with a crowd of bloggers and industry folk.

8 Profound and Life-changing things that have happened because of my blog

The message here is that blogs are a journey - yes it's about conversation, interaction, people, and even marketing; but over a long period of time (in my case a decade) a blog can shape and influence a person's life. This presentation was about how my blog shaped my life, and perhaps you can draw some parallels with yours. It was a bit more wordy than slidey, so if you need me to expand on these slides, ask in the comments!

8 Profound and Life-changing events that have happened because of my blog

View more presentations from yongfook.

Above: With Pat Law and the very funny Toysrevil.

Above: Looking teh emo.

When I went to bed after this event, suddenly it hit me - this would be my last night in Singapore :/

It's unusual for me to feel a sense of attachment to a place on holiday / business to the extent that I feel sad about having to go back to Tokyo. Usually I'm all for it, I'm raring to get back and get stuck into work. This time I wasn't feeling it.

I was approaching my trip to Singapore this time with more open arms than previous times I had been there (which are many). I was asking myself "could I live here?" at the end of every day. The answer was always yes. The events helped me see that there is a vibrant web community in Singapore. Lots of entrepreneurial spirit, lots of people with two business cards ("this is my day job, this is my startup") - I think that's awesome. On a personal level I met a whole bunch of nice people who I would be happy to call friends should they let me in the future :) Foodwise (and of course, this is a huge consideration for me when deciding where to live), I know I'm always going to be happy in Singapore with hawker fare, but it was great to see that Singapore can still surprise me with a fine dining experience.

I have no hard plans, but I know my next step will be in Singapore. I won't spend too much time thinking about it right now as I just started product development on Rippl3 but certainly once that has launched I will be making more concrete plans.

On my last day I walked round town with my friend Rita (the beehoon girl) and we decided to go for foot reflexology...

This was the single most excruciatingly painful thing I have felt in my life. It is an INTENSE, pressure-point experience. After a while of grimacing in agony I simply went limp and waited for the sweet embrace of death. It never came. After the session and even to today I am really unaware of any of the benefits - my feet certainly don't feel noticeably better, for the amount of pain that I endured. Feel free to extol reflexology's benefits if you are an advocate, in the comments!

At Changi I had a quick wanton mee (made with the proper type of noodles)

Before heading home. I conked out on the plane and when I woke up I was back in Tokyo, the weather outside a balmy 5C.

But! It's not all doom and gloom, I'm looking forward to Danny Choo's CGM Night event this evening.

Thank you all the people in Singapore who made my trip so enjoyable and productive - I'll be seeing you again soon :)

Nibbledish in Wall Street Journal

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:39:43 +0900

Just a quick brog post (it's a blog post where you brag) to say that Open Source Food (now known as Nibbledish) found its way into the WSJ today!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123669745373684121.html?mod=rss_Food_and_Drink

Here's what they had to say...

Ideal for the home cook looking to be part of a community to share, get feedback or learn from others. But when it comes to recipes, depending on who posted them, they can be hit or miss.

Ahem! That's because Nibbledish is full of real people and real recipes - we can't be all hitting gastronomic homeruns each time :) Even I post up recipes involving things such as instant noodles from time to time...

In other news, I've been in Singapore for the last week - expect a FULL REPORT OMG up online soon...

Yongfook Talks Cock!

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:27:06 +0900

No, I haven't gone back to my old, profanity and sexual-innuendo-laden blogging ways. From Wiktionary:

talk cock: (Singapore) To talk nonsense or engage in idle chatter.

This is just a quick note to say that I'll be giving a couple of talks at Blogout '09 this year in Singapore. Big shoutout to The Digital Movement and Claudia Lim for inviting me - very happy to start getting involved in the Singapore web community. As you beloved visitors may already know, I'm half Singaporean, so Singapore is quite a special place for me and it is definitely under consideration as a place to set up shop after Tokyo.

The event is spread over two days, one for a more corporate audience (register your interest here) and another aimed at bloggers, entrepreneurs and anyone who wants to come along and hang out. I'll be giving talks on both days, on these topics:

Measuring the unmeasurable! Social media's effect on your organization in terms of smiles, karma and dollars
In this talk we will discuss the problems of measuring social media ROI and look at ideas and methods to implement and measure the success of both qualitative (such as conversation-starting) and quantitative (such as generation of new leads or sales) sides of an organization's social media strategy.
Fire your boss! Ways you can turn your blog into a business in 2009
Besides showing ads, there are a million different ways you can extract revenue from a blog - especially if you're already blogging enthusiastically and authoritatively. In this talk we look at the math and discuss ways you can monetize what you are already doing on the web - and not have to worry about losing your job this year because you won't need it anymore!

The corporate talk is a topic I'm increasingly (and directly) involved and interested in, that being business metrics and measurement. I'll basically be talking about effective goal-setting for social media campaigns / strategies, and simple ways you can measure the success and ROI (yes, I'm from the camp who believes you should expect and measure real ROI from social media) from the ambiguous stuff such as relationship-building and conversation-starting, to the more obvious quantitative stuff such as generating more leads or sales.

The blogger talk is going to be a bit more light-hearted, but both of the talks will focus on giving the audience action items that they can take away, implement and benefit from. For the bloggers we will talk about ways to monetize in 2009, which in a nutshell is going to be about everything except advertising. We're going to talk about how 2009 is the year of getting people to pay for stuff, the kind of value propositions people will pay for when they have been enjoying your blog content for free for so long, and do the math on what you would need to do to match your current salary via monetising your ability to engage a niche audience.

So, Singapore, looking forward to seeing you!

Finally, just a quick announcement in case you didn't see my Twitter post linking to the Yahoo! Finance press release or the notification that I sent all registered OSF users before the handover - my recipe website Open Source Food was acquired by California-based Tsavo Media in January 2009. If you never saw my mail on this, you can read it here, it sums the story :)

Thanks to all for your support with OSF (now Nibbledish) and like the mail says - it's not like I'm going to disappear. I'm still posting recipes to the site cos it's still blatantly the best recipe site on the web :D

Creating Qualified Leads with the help of Dubai and Final Fantasy 7

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:18:04 +0900

Dubai functions on another plane of existence to the rest of the world.

Dubai is a place where the neon wet-dreams of some Final Fantasy creative director working in pixels and polygons are actually, and unknown to him, being made into a reality by a bunch of obscenely rich real estate developers on the other side of the globe who have probably never heard of his quaint little game and are too busy smoking on caviar cigars and eating diamonds to ever care.

This is Business Bay, a planned development for a part of the city that will be Dubai's answer to Manhattan, or Ginza:

Large Version

Aaaaand this is Midgar, the capital of Gaia from Final Fantasy 7, a city kept dark and polluted from society's abuse of Mako reactors:

Large Version

Likewise, this is Dubailand, a theme park currently under construction in Dubai:

Aaaand this is Gold Saucer, where you can go to have fun betting on Chocobo races or take your date:

What's that? I got them mixed up? OH LOLS.

Anyway, of course we can rationally explain away some of the similarities. It is partly due to the genuine, fantastical nature of the developments going on in Dubai but is probably equally due to the genuine, fantastical nature of all architectural renders, which is a topic I recently had an, ooh, 3 minute heated debate on, with an architect friend.

Observe:

That's a typical architectural render of a property in Singapore. It appears to be set in acre upon acre of lush, tropical jungle. In reality though, this property is to be found in Holland Hill, which is a nice residential area just a few minutes from Orchard Road, and is surrounded by, well, a whole mess of other condominiums.

I felt like arguing, so I argued this point.

Isn't creating images like this a gigantic waste of time for the realtor? You end up acquiring this certain percentage of unqualified leads that you won't be able to convert (the people who say "hey, where's the fricking jungle?" and leave) so you end up just doing more legwork for nothing. Wouldn't it be better to paint a more realistic picture, attract a lower absolute number of potential buyers but a higher percentage of those would be better qualified as potential leads, because they know what to expect??

My friend spluttered, laughed, and said no.

Of course, I'm from a completely different world to this. The world I live in is governed by computers doing the selling, grinding out the conversion stats and reporting back to me. So for me, inefficiencies are there to be eliminated and if I can cut costs by focusing less on absolute numbers and at the same time convert a higher percentage, hey I'm all for that, or at least exploring it.

This is wayyyy different to how humans sell things, though. There are infinite ways that a good "human" salesperson can make you buy that house / car / toaster, through constant adaptation, interaction and relentless yet subtle psychological warfare*. Salespeople also have a personal motivation to sell - a computer only does what you tell it to do.

*Him: Why not upgrade to leather seats? if you don't, it means you have a small cock
Me: What did you say?
Him: Why not upgrade to leather seats?

The swift ad-lib into an introduction of other shinier features of the property, a change in tone of voice, use of persuasive language, smiling and talking passionately about the product, discounts and freebie deals made on-the-fly and tailored to my personality, a little playful flirting. There's a million different things a salesperson can try, in order to turn a lead into a customer - even a lead who was expecting a jungle.

A different process entirely, to passing a lead into a system of IF statements and "Buy Now" buttons.

THE INTERNET IS DOWN!!!

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:29:55 +0900

Frankly I don't think this is an unrealistic portrayal of what might happen.

My favourite parts are the almost immediate decry of "THERE IS NO GOD!!" and the bit with the girl screaming and holding up a pineapple.

Apart from the obvious such as disabling my ability to check email or live vicariously through my friends' photos on facebook of their sunny, relaxing beach holidays (Tokyo so cold. so cold), disconnection from the internet would prevent me from getting my hourly cracked.com fix...

If the internet went down, what kind of important stuff would YOU be prevented from doing...?

The Fiscal Effects of The Digg Effect

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:51:38 +0900

A considerable focus of my work on the web these days is analysing the minority contingent of users on your website who actually matter to your bottom line. Pageviews as we know are a broken metric as they don't necessarily correlate to greater popularity, influence, revenue or user engagement - all the things that actually kind of, you know, matter to the long term sustainability of your product.

So I thought it might be interesting to analyse the recent economic effects on my blog after an article was "dugg". For those who don't know, digg.com is a website where users can "vote up" an article if they deem it to be interesting to them. My article on web development tricks has received - at this time - over 2200 votes, or diggs. Digg is notorious for sending vast amounts of traffic to popular news items. The kind of vast amounts that can bring down servers and cause mayhem, human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together - mass hysteria. My server groaned through over 60,000 visits on Monday 1st December, which is a massive increase of about 5900% above the daily norm for my blog.

You'll notice I have a small banner on my blog in the top right that sells books via the amazon affiliates programme. Say for example this little banner made me, on average, $10 a day. If we assume that earnings are simply a function of pageviews then yesterday I should have earned about $590, right?

Nope. It earned more or less the same amount as always.

The reason? The visitors from digg, although massive in their numbers, are not the kind of audience who purchase books from my banner ads. They are an information-hungry audience who came to my blog to read one article and then leave. It's a shame I don't run any CPC ads on my blog so I could have measured any differences in revenue.

Changes in Directly Earned Revenue

As I stated above, the only way I really monetise this blog (this blog isn't really a monetisation vessel for me) is by an amazon affiliates banner. The daily earnings did not change on the day I received a 5900% increase in traffic via digg.

Changes in Indirectly Earned Revenue

+200%, but kind of iffy

On my blog I have links to a couple of external projects where you are encouraged to join a mailing list. One of these mailing lists is for the beta launch of a pay-for-use web application. As long as I am confident that I can convert X% of the mailing list into paying customers at the time of launch, I can put a dollar amount on the value of each acquisition of a new subscriber. Subscriptions increased by 200% after the digg article, which means that yes, the 5900% increase for that one day will have a positive (but indirect) fiscal effect at some point in the future. The number would probably be higher if I was plugging the app more - but right now it just gets a teeny tiny little banner on my sidebar.

The headachey bit is when you start to question whether the kind of subscribers you get from digg.com traffic are the kind of subscribers that will actually turn into paying customers down the line. There is of course the very real possibility that a bunch of unengaged subscribers (tire-kickers) will ultimately lower the assumed X% mailing list conversion rate.

Changes in attributes that may result in positive fiscal effects in the future but are impossible to measure accurately

Considerable

Lets break this down into bullet points:

SEO. A link from a high-influence website like digg.com is great for SEO, as are the inevitable inbound links from the myriad blogs who choose to republish the link. If you google "web dev tricks" right now, my blog will probably show up on the first page. This can have a positive effect on lead generation or influence-building in the future. The value of this does of course depend on whether you actually want to be known as a "web dev trick" guru or want to get leads related to doing web development - in my case, at this point, I want neither. Overseas leads are not particularly valuable to me as I never pursue them.
Influence / Popularity. A name like "yongfook" is pretty hard to forget and if I could pump out 10 digg-worthy articles a month (...I can't) then the name yongfook might become synonymous with web dev trickery! Awesome! The problem is of course, how does that actually translate into a business context. You might argue that an increased popularity would shower you with job offers from prospective clients - and it probably will - but those of us who've been in the web dev game for a while know that it's all about picking your projects. Personally I've never pursued a project offer that came via my blog, from someone I didn't already know. And if you're not using your blog for lead generation, popularity and influence will have zero effect on your bottom line unless you have the marketing knowhow to monetise these attributes. Hypothetically you could be writing the most popular erotic blog on xanga getting tens of thousands of visits a day, but not earning a cent because all you know about is writing about willies and boobs, and not capitalising on lucrative affiliate deals, advertising or building a mailing list to blast the release of your forthcoming book(s) to.
Feel Good Factor. Prepare to get psychologicableised. Did it ever occur to you that the boost in positive mental attitude and general "I rule the freaking world"-ness of being dugg could have a positive effect on your work? It was certainly nice to see an old article of mine get appreciated by a whole different audience some 8 months after I originally posted it up. Is this going to help me focus and get motivated about my upcoming web projects? Or is it going to force me into writing digg-friendly articles (you know, like this one) to feed a now growing and insatiable getting-dugg addiction...

My name is Yongfook and I'm currently working on Gumtrail, a tool for measuring user engagement on your website. Find out how much of your total audience are real fans.

Japanese Ice Cream Flavours

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:32:20 +0900

Just thought I'd share these with you

I was lucky enough to not put the contents of these cartons anywhere near my face or mouth. They were simply on display, rather proudly, in a place called "Ice Cream City" in Ikebukuro, Tokyo.

Crab Flavour Ice Cream

I can aaaaalmoooosstttt see this one working. Crab has quite sweet flesh and is often paired with heavy cream to make salads, mousses and stuff. Not sure I'd want to chug down a whole tub of crab-infused frozen cream, but in minute doses this might not be entirely disgusting, which is more than I can say for...

Squid Ice Cream

There must be something about seafood and ice cream that makes lightbulbs flash wildly in the brains of the Japanese.

Abalone Ice Cream

Presumably attempting to capitalise on the massive popularity of squid ice cream, this company goes one better and does Abalone flavour. Abalone has a much more robust, meaty taste than the above two seafood items. It's a small step away from hotdog ice cream or beef stroganoff sorbet, both of which I think I'd rather eat than Abalone ice cream.

Silk Ice Cream

Now you've really lost me. As those of you who regularly chow down on sheets of silk will undoubtedly know, silk doesn't actually have a flavour. I have no idea what this ice cream would taste like, besides of course cream. I like how the most appetising visual they can come up with for "silk" on the lid is the sails of a sailboat. That's right, you too can now enjoy the delicious taste of sail, whenever you want.

Nattou Ice Cream

Obviously made as a joke and only to be eaten as a bet. This may be the world's worst food item. Here's a very old blog entry where I describe what nattou is. Now imagine that, but mixed up with cream, frozen and stuck in a cone for it to drip nattou stink all over your fingers as you gingerly lick at it, grimacing and praying for death. Who would eat this. They must be killed with fire.

Garlic Ice Cream

It does have a cool design though. Since I'm obviously a materialistic, form over function apple-loving fanboy I would probably eat this.

Charcoal Ice Cream

Just think, no more 2nd degree burns from licking those hot embers after the barbecue! What the hell. Behold everyone, the ice cream manufacturer's equivalent of the long tail, in photo form.

But...

That last point was a serious one though, folks. For anyone who reads marketing / brand building books, serving the long tail is one way to be successful in these days of incumbent "superbrands" (e.g. Haagen Dazs) who you have no hope of usurping.

I'm sitting here laughing at the companies making these ice creams, and probably you are too, but their strategy of selling to niche markets is most likely paying off an order of magnitude more than if they tried to enter the market with a "newer, better tasting vanilla!" flavour. Something to think about, that.

Street Fighter II Fans?

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:49:10 +0900

Holy.

A while ago I was following this game with intense, groin-warming desire and now I see that it has a release date. December 31st 2008.

To those who are wondering what all the fuss is about, this is a High-Def, updated version of the classic 90s video game Street Fighter II. All graphics have been hand drawn by a top tier animation studio - to see what it looks like at full res go here:

http://xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/900198/super-street-fighter-ii-turbo-hd-remix/videos/ssf2_hdremix_kenlvl_031208.html

It's just unspeakably beautiful.

For many guys my age, Street Fighter II was the game that got them into arcade gaming. If you're my age, you are probably old enough to remember a time when there was a huge gap between what an arcade machine could do and what your home Amiga / NES could do (nowadays the gap isn't so large). Street Fighter II became the reason to go down the arcade, ignore the obligatory 1942 cabinet and line your 50ps up on the SF2 cabinet, with its punch and kick buttons all worn out.

I remember very clearly the first time I played Street Fighter II. It was in Farnborough Leisure Center, Surrey, UK. I was maybe 12 years old, and chose Blanka. Can you remember the first time you played Street Fighter II?

Hong Kong Food Report

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 22:58:13 +0900

Just spent a few days in HK to get something to eat. Here's what happened.

I love Hong Kong food, but once you get bored of amazing street food and dim sum, it's difficult to know where to take yourself next. Where to get something above and beyond the hearty, fun local fare that - whilst delicious - does somewhat bribe you into loving it with its oil, spicyness and strong flavours (and in some cases, liberal usage of MSG).

There is of course an impressive array of first class hotels serving well-executed food with amazing views (which I am partial to, and had a decent dinner at the Peninsula) but this is also the kind of food that is typical of any big hotel in any big metropolitan city. Indeed one of the new, fashionable places to eat and be seen at in HK is Nobu in the Intercontinental, a restaurant that has sister branches all over the world, including Tokyo.

I'm thankful then, that before I came to HK I watched Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" Hong Kong episode and saw a place called Bo Innovation - where chef Alvin Leung serves up creative interpretations of Chinese dishes using asian ingredients combined with french technique and aspects of molecular gastronomy.

Instantly I knew that I would have to eat there. His restaurant is not landlocked with a fancy hotel, and is even somewhat hidden away down a quiet street in Wanchai, and accessible only by a private elevator. I went with very high expectations and was not disappointed.

In a way I'm glad that I got to experience it like this before his talent inevitably propels the Bo Innovation experience to various locations around the globe and his magical xiao long bao and truffled cheung fun become as ubiquitous as Nobu's black cod.

I was also lucky enough to sit at the chef's table and could therefore watch the preparation as well as chat directly with Leung, who flits effortlessly between being the smiling, funny proprietor standing with a glass of wine talking with customers at the chef's table, to being the head of the kitchen ordering his staff around (who all have chinese chess piece characters embroidered on their whites...) and meticulously plating up dishes for the pass.

I had the chef's menu, meaning a lot of small dishes and no choosing - exactly the way I like things. I opted for a wine-pairing too (totaling some 6 varieties), since it was my last night in HK. I staggered home a very happy man.

Larger version here: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3120/2914996624_365617a82b_b.jpg

1000 year old Egg

No pic because I shoved it in my mouth too quickly.

I felt apprehensive about the Amuse because I'm not a huge fan of preserved eggs. Chef expected this and explained that the lemon "snow" (like a sorbet) on top is there to neutralise the strong ammonia taste and he was absolutely right. As an Amuse it worked brilliantly, the zesty, sour snow wakes you up and you also get a hit of rich, melting egg flavour which leaves your palate buzzing for the next course.

Oyster 2

RIGHT: Fresh oyster topped with a ginger and spring onion sorbet - classic Chinese flavours presented in a modern way.

LEFT: A "taste of the sea" - oyster tofu topped with seaweed. If the primary goal was to make the customer think of the sea it was definitely achieved, the smell of the seaweed was quite strong. Delicious, but I remember thinking it would have been nice to be able to taste the tofu sans seaweed.

Caviar

Again, no pic because as soon as this arrived I shoved it into my gaping maw in one swift movement.

This was a crispy taro ball topped with a warm slice of soft quails egg, with a spoon of caviar on top. Chef noted that it was the most expensive item on the chef's menu and thus "if you drop it, you don't get another one" :) The crispy taro with the buttery caviar was just incredible. I could eat these like popcorn at a movie. If I was a billionaire.

Toro

A piece of high-grade otoro tuna topped with some of Leung's signature dried foie gras (he oven-dries foie gras for 10 days leaving tiny grains of intense foie gras flavour) and freeze-dried raspberry. Presented with some very sharp tweezers with which to eat it with, I assume because it might slip out of the grip of chopsticks quite easily. The foie gras reconstitutes in your mouth and is just amazing with the fatty tuna.

Scallop

Nothing outrageously creative, but it's difficult to fault such a perfectly-seared scallop. The sauce was made with a kind of Chinese liquor.

Xiao Long Bao

Deconstruction of the classic soup-filled dumpling. An impossibly thin skin surrounds a ball of dumplingly soup. Bursts the moment it hits your tongue. One of the most creative presentations on the menu and I watched with a grin as other diners put this in their mouths and instantly smiled from ear to ear, taking care not to open their mouths and dribble soup all over their faces.

Halibut

A tender piece of halibut with a crispy piece of toffee on the side. Halibut is quite a sweet-tasting fish so this worked surprisingly well.

Crab 2

Crab roe souffle topped with aged Chinese black vinegar. I think Leung could take this one step further and make crab cupcakes - the texture is almost there and it might be more fun as a little cupcake you pop in your mouth. My only complaint about this was that it is slightly difficult to eat - you are given a spoon, but the sides of the oven-fresh ramekin are so hot that you can't hold it in place whilst you spoon out the good stuff and the dish is so small that it moves around easily with your spoon. It came partnered with a deliciously crisp starfruit and crab salad.

Pork

Layers of pork that had been slow-cooked for 24 hours, topped with a soft egg yolk that bursts when you poke it. Rich, smoky and sweet - a fine example of pork art.

Beef

Possibly my favourite dish of the meal. Two buttery pieces of wagyu hiding an absolute treasure underneath - truffled cheung fun. Inspired, delicious and I wanted a second plate.

Starch

Fried rice. Except I'm not sure it was fried at all, but the presence of tiny fish eggs that pop on your tongue give the impression of crispness, so in fact in terms of mouthfeel it's even more crispy and fried-feeling than actual fried rice. Again, I couldn't help but smile at the creativity, marvel at the flavour, and pay the chef yet another compliment...

Pre Dessert

You take a hit of red bean powder:

and gulp down a sparkling sesame smoothie (the size of a shot glass - the pic makes it seem huge)

...and end up creating a very familiar Chinese dessert flavour in your mouth. Magic.

Dessert

The sesame dumpling in the middle was filled with melted chocolate instead of the traditional red bean. Impossible to dislike. The meal was rounded off with a kind of deconstructed apple crumble:

Which was like a custardy, appley gooey center surrounded by crumble. Down in one. Delicious and warming, but I think I would have liked to end the meal with something more Hong Kong-ish, or at least in the knowledge that one of the ingredients is local. Perhaps Leung could try doing a crumble with an asian fruit like durian...

All in all though, I was massively impressed.

Alvin Leung is doing a great thing here - he's helping put HK on a more contemporary culinary map. I'm sure his imminent superstardom is going to inspire more local chefs too. He's on the Michelin shortlist and has had inspectors visit - the results come out in December and I wish him and his crew the best of luck with getting a star. However, star or no star, Bo Innovation is absolutely going to be the first place I book when I go back to Hong Kong next time.

More HK pics here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yongfook/sets/72157607760275167/

The 4 Male Prime Directives

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:48:20 +0900

Eat
Sleep
Nail
Play GTA IV

Sometimes I like to think deeply about existential questions such as, "what drives me and the rest of malekind, what are the metaphorical goalposts for life, what are the basic necessities for living in this generation of ours" whilst eating a whole box of cereal in one go with my fists.

If I had to make a list of 4 "prime directives" for the human male in a Robocop stylee, what would they be? I wondered. Excluding silly classified get-out clauses for fatcat execs in cahoots with organised crime syndicates headed up by the dad from That 70s Show.

The above list is what I came up with and I think it's pretty accurate. I think it's reasonable to say that any activity you can name that a man partakes in can be shown as merely a means to an end to achieving one of the prime directives, when looked at from a more macro perspective. "Macro" in this case being a clever word that simply means "from so broad a perspective that it becomes trivial to relate any given reaction to any given action". But I think you'll find that if you look upon my theory from a more macro perspective, you'll find it to be both scientifical and correct.

In contrast, I don't claim to be an expert on the female, seeing as much of my interactions with females could be illustrated in a comic book style with a crudely drawn yongfook feigning interest and charm whilst a thought bubble above my head shows a big pair of boobs inside it; but I think the female prime directive list might look something like this:

Blow the tiniest disagreements completely, maddeningly out of proportion
Steal all the duvet
Babies
Shoes

Am I right or am I right? I'm right.

If you dispute my rightness, for either the male or female list, kindly suggest your 4 prime directives in the comments below.

In other news, this yoochoob vid has been cracking me up all week (watch it until the end):

How much do I want a discreet canister of that stuff? Flipping out on someone Beelzebub style has got to be the ultimate way to end those pesky tiny disagreements that get blown completely and maddeningly out of proportion.

"LOOK IT IS TOO LATE TO GO BACK AND ASK THEM TO VALIDATE MY PARKING NOW, THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE IN THE QUEUE AND I DON'T WANT TO PUSH IN. I WILL JUST USE THE MACHINE UPSTAIRS. AHA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA" /satan laugh

The Blog is Dead!

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:13:46 +0900

Well kinda.

Long live Sweetcron!

Live video by Ustream

Gave this presentation last night on where personal blogs are going and how lifestreaming will…perhaps…take over :)

To the people who were in the ustream chatroom, you’re all very scary people, please for the not stabbing of the face. kthx!

Ironic that I declare the death of blogs with a blog post. No but seriously, the point is that blogging is not necessarily dying, but is becoming an inadequate paradigm to keep up with all the data that the average internet consumer now produces. Lifestreams are the way to keep up with it all. I might not have got it all perfectly right with Sweetcron, but I think it’s a good step in the right direction :)

OMG LOOK MOM! IT'S LIKE I'M DRIVING

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:02:38 +0900

Google unleashed their “Street View” feature for Tokyo google maps yesterday. For those who don’t know, Street View a feature whereby you can get a 360 degree view of any point on a map, as if you were standing right there in the street. Google have literally crawled the entire metropolitan area enabling anyone in the world to get an amazingly fluid, candid look at this city. The results have me simultaneously scraping my jaw from the floor and hurriedly bringing in my dayglo pink underwear from the drying rack outside.

I may never need to go outside again. Everything that is outside is now on my computer. This is of course all part of Google’s “Roadmap to Human Race Assimilation”, a whitepaper on which I briefly read through last year. It all begins with us spending time innocuously walking through the streets on google maps, gradually spending more and more time there, until real life and Street View become indistinct and one day you double-click on a pedestrian and he cranes his neck around, arms shoot out of your screen and pull you in, digitising your flesh into the internet in one quick, painless motion. I’m pretty sure there’s already a jquery plugin that does this.

Walk a mile in my shoes!

In celebration of Tokyo Street View, have a look at some of my regular / favourite spots in Tokyo, so you know where to wait for me, axe in hand, all crazy-eyed, like.

This is my supermarket. There are many like it but this one is mine.

It may not look like much, but it’s open 24 hours, which is handy when you run out of bogroll. PROTIP: don’t buy bogroll from convenience stores because they sell thicker rolls that run out quicker. It’s a scientific fact that convenience stores earn most of their revenue through clever scarcity manipulation like this. Fiends! Also, the convenience stores near me don’t sell Guinness, and this supermarket does. It’s a no-brainer. Scroll north-west to see the dozen-or-so train tracks that make up Tokyo station.

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Marunouchi

Even though I still find this place nigh-on impossible to pronounce without sounding slurry and inebriated, it’s definitely one of my favourite spots in Tokyo. Wide, pedestrian-friendly roads, not many people and hardly any cars. Paradoxical when you consider that this is the very center of Japan’s financial industry. PROTIP: Train routes make it seem further than it actually is, but you can walk to Ginza from Marunouchi in about 10 minutes. A rather pleasant walk it is, too.

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Ginza / Yurakucho

I love to go and walk around Ginza at the weekend for a few reasons. One, I can walk home from there. Two, they close the roads to traffic meaning everyone can go wherever they like. Three, it has some amazing examples of architecture. PROTIP: Famous Ginza department stores Matsuya, Matsuzakaya and Mitsukoshi are largely indiscernible from each other. Skip em. Go buy a mac at the Apple store instead.

The curvy DeBeers building:

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Hermes store, made up of glass lego bricks:

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Cheapo thai food place where everything on the menu is 630-yen and the trains rattle your plate every 2 minutes as they pass overhead.

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The bit of grass infront of the Imperial Palace

You’ll find better-kept grass only on the world’s finest golf courses. I’m often baffled as to why there are so few people at this park. It’s not illegal or some kind of imperial faux pas to plonk yourself down here with a book, but no one does. Even with a main road nearby it’s still quieter than Yoyogi park I think, because there are naff-all people. PROTIP: Don’t set up a tent and live here. There’s actually a sign saying that is prohibited.

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Roppongi

Tokyo Midtown - Tokyo’s latest salute to materialism. A couple of decent restaurants (Union Square is still a favourite of mine) and a very competent Choclatier, Jean Paul Hevin, call this home. PROTIP: If you ever get approached by a pushy club / bar tout in Roppongi, the best tactic is to immediately drop to the floor and soil yourself.

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An inexplicably cheap Chinese restaurant (greasy, hearty northern-style food), right smack opposite one of the fanciest hotels in Tokyo, the Grand Hyatt. Good place for a post-karaoke food stop.

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Well that’s yer lot

Got a favourite spot in Tokyo? Show me on Street View! First person to link to my apartment building gets 10 shiny stalker points

iPhone 3G: Let me put my opinion inside you

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:52:06 +0900

After a morning in the baking summer heat of Tokyo queueing along Omotesando with a rabble of other mac nerds, I finally unleashed my sweaty mitts all over the beautiful screen of my very own iPhone 3G. Here’s what I think.

Apps I immediately downloaded:

1) Teh Facebooks 2) Flickr 3) Super Monkey Ballss

What did you download first? Monkey Ball is impressively well done, albeit bloody difficult. Not particularly train-friendly either, as even slight wrist movements send the poor monkey fellow careering off platforms into the abyss. Someone has to make DOOM for this thing. With network play.

TIME, Stormtroopers, iPhone BLAM

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:19:16 +0900

It’s been a busy month. Here’s the rundown

In the video I mention Tokyo Dance Trooper, from internet anime rock god, Dannychoo - the dashing, popular Vincent Chase to my rotund and moochtastic Turtle, of the Tokyo English-language blogger community. Tokyo Dance Trooper is below:

If I don’t get an iPhone this friday I will potentially cry until I puke.

Everlasting Edamame!

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:45:26 +0900

Bandai, in all their idiot-savant genius when it comes to creating odd little Japanese toys that make me squeal with an embarrassing, schoolgirl-like joy whenever I visit the novelty section of any toy store, have created a new trinket in a continuation of their “mugen” series, which they began with the “Everlasting Bubblewrap” toy I showed you a while back.

I bought a few too many of these, so I’m going to give some away. Want one? Find out how to get one in the video below. They are pretty awesome little things…

So that’s that. Just answer the question in the video by writing a comment below, and leave me some method of contacting you (as I said in the video, this needn’t be an email, it can be a link to your site / facebook profile / adultfriendfinder.com member page etc. BRING JOY TO MY LIFE IN THE FORM OF LAUGHTER AND WIN BIG BIG PRIZES.

kthx.

p.s. you can post multiple answers if you decide that the one you came up with previously was crap.

Taiwan Food Report!

Thu, 29 May 2008 16:52:49 +0900

I’m writing this in a Taiwanese taxi on the way to the airport, clenching my buttocks together in anticipation of a head-on crash as my not-atypically batshit crazy Taiwanese taxi driver glides idly and randomly from lane to lane on the highway without so much as moving his head to look let alone putting his indicators on, kissing the tail-light of every vehicle he passes with his headlight in a bizarre, glazed-eyed ritual that would be almost impressive if I weren’t so utterly constipated with fear.

Anyhoo. I book hotels through Expedia.com and although this enables you to make reservations without interacting with a real human being, you’re still subjected to a pretty convincing upselling process involving simple checkboxes and savings highlighted in red, for the dumb and impressionable.

“For an extra $XYZ per night, you can upgrade from plebian class!” the website snorted at me. I clicked, and booked the VIP floor at some Taipei hotel I had never heard of, choosing it over the Grand Hyatt because apparently - I had heard 3rd hand from a friend - it is haunted. I think the Chinese often fleetingly dismiss a large building’s unfamiliarity - or indeed unfamiliar objects in general - by declaring them haunted or bad luck. I’d make fun of them some more if I wasn’t so cripplingly superstitious about everything and anything Chinese folklore-related.

I think I lucked out though. Free booze in the evening at the lounge and a very cool bathroom made the extra dollars per night well worth it.

After only a day there, I think I had Taiwan worked out. It’s a weird sort of purgatory between Japan and China. Shop signs are often in Japanese - shop clerks will even speak to you in Japanese, if they assume you aren’t Taiwanese. The food was a familiar mix of Chinese noodley, dumplingy things with some dishes having a tartness and use of vinegar that I’m more used to tasting in Japan (not to mention Japanese food itself being available at every street corner and under ever department store). The skyline is earthquake-friendly and low-rise, just like Japan - apart from the gigantic Taipei 101 looming in the distance like the Ministry of Truth. I had a good time, but I think I’ll get more out of a holiday in Taiwan by visiting the beautiful countryside regions rather than Taipei. Taipei felt like I had simply taken a trip to a smaller city in Japan. With blind taxi drivers.

On to the food. I did the whole spectrum - from greasy street food to eating at the top of Taipei 101. Here’s what I nommed.

Lurou Fan

This is the Taiwanese equivalent of an onigiri, or chips. It’s that staple that you have on the side of other dishes, never a dish unto itself. It’s kind of like a confit - pork stewed until the fat has pretty much rendered into liquid and the meat melts in your mouth, resulting in a sweet-savoury topping for rice, invariably served with a bright yellow Japanese-style pickle (see what I mean?). I love it.

Din Tai Fung

Din Tai Fung is a Taiwanese institution, famous for their Xiao Long Bao - steamed dumplings with meat and soup inside. Delicious, but I’ve eaten at the same restaurant in Singapore (it’s now a global thing, see) and the food was indistinguishable to my inexperienced, round-eyed devil palate. I went at 11:30am and had to wait 5 minutes for a table. By the time I left at around 12:30, there was already a crowd of about 30 people outside, waiting in line to be seated. Notably, the waitresses here flitted effortlessly between speaking Japanese and Chinese to the patrons.

Papaya Milk

Let this be a lesson to the makers of Carrot Au Lait - vegetables and milk, bad; fruit and milk, good. I like papaya milk approximately 5000% more than I like carrot au lait.

Asparagus Juice

Sadly, Taiwan had to go and bugger it all up with this, a convenience store staple. There’s really no way to describe it other than asparagus, sweetened, and if you’re anything like a normal human being with a sensible grasp of what tastes good and what tastes wrong, so wrong, then you probably won’t like this either. I took two sips of this and the uncontrollable urge to eat bacon forced me drop the carton and raid the hotel lounge.

Pea Crackers

Tastes like sauteed pea shoots with garlic. Crispy and moreish. Thumbs up, Taiwan.

Beef Noodles

A traditional Taiwanese staple. The broth was more beefy than I thought it was going to be, tasting almost like a European bullion than something Chinese (although you get to Chinese-it-up with condiments such as pickled cabbage). I’ve been brought up on the Singapore-style beef noodles which has quite a herbal, peppery taste especially when doused with fresh coriander as they tend to serve it. Taiwanese beef noodles gets a thumbs up, but if I had to choose between the two, the Singaporean version is for teh win.

Crumply Pancake Thing

I’m not sure what these were called, but they are different to the flatter scallion pancake that I know they do in Taiwan. Like Singapore’s roti prata these were a simple fried dough pancake, fluffed up at the end by a liberal double-spatula’d crumpling. I don’t know whether the stall was famous or if they are always like this from any stall, but it was - if I am to compare it to roti prata - one of the most perfect examples of the pancake I’ve ever had. Light, crispy on the outside and not too oily. I would have sold my first born for curry sauce to dip it in but that is for south east asian philistines and this is Taiwan.

Pepper Pork Bun

A peppery (oh, really?) pork mixture surrounded by an oddly european-style crusty bun. 2 of these will send you into a bloated, happy food coma.

TKK

TKK is Taiwan’s KFC equivalent, serving up fried chicken, Chinese-style. This item was one of their popular menu items; glutinous rice wrapped in some kind of skin and then deep fried. So much food packed tightly into such a small container - it was like eating a collapsed star. I managed a few measly bites before lapsing into a food coma once again.

Slipper Lobster

You know you ate something special when you have to google your dinner later based on its attributes (“lobster no claws eat”) to find out what the hell it was. This was served in a garlicky, buttery sauce with a layer of silky tofu underneath. Absolutely yummy.

Fried Dumplings

Ahhh yeah. This shop, with two old ladies furiously beavering away making the dumplings in the back, Nike-style, served delicious fried dumplings for about 6p (12 yen) each. If this place was in Tokyo, it would be the most amazing post-booze food joint, ever. The place seemed filled with people like students and construction workers, each with a plate in front of them piled high with a tower of dumplings that cost about 2 quid for the lot. A range of condiments were free to experiment with, ranging from spicy to OH SHIT.

Cumberland Spring Onion Pie

I have no idea what this is actually called, but it looks like a cumberland sausage and is a pie-like item filled with chopped spring onions. I was very enthusiastic about trying one of these until I saw a moth commit suicide by face-planting into the hot fat then fluttering around liberally basting the pies with tiny particles of fried moth before ultimately dying, whereupon the stall owner nonchalantly scraped the moth into the part of the worktop I assume is called the “moth gutter”.

Dinner at Taipei 101

The 85th floor of the world’s tallest (occupied) building is home to a Chinese restaurant that I’m not sure really deserves to be there. You’d think that eating in such a fantastic location would be an adventure in Chinese gastronomy, an Asian fine-dining experience to rival that of eating in a michelin-starred restaurant in the Eiffel Tower. Sadly, the location has been snapped up by a “high end” chain restaurant and the food - whilst competent - was nothing to hoo and haa about. My dreams of a fine dining experience were further shattered by the woeful incompetence of the staff who might as well have been plucked from any random Chinese restaurant 85 floors below us, who answered the question “so do you have any recommended dishes?” with “well they are all quite nice!” and who spilled our tea everywhere when fixing a wonky table (which for crying out loud, should have been fixed without me asking when I was seated and the table visibly wobbled everywhere).

However, the meal was inexpensive and the portions overly generous. We spent a surprisingly reasonable 60 quid on a dinner that would have easily fed 4 people (so. much. leftovers) - so if you’re looking for a fine-dining view without the fine dining or the fine dining cost, Shin Yeh 101 is a pretty good place to go.

Some LOLS

It’s funny because it’s my name.

And again. If anyone has teh skillz with photoshop, feel free to photoshop my face onto a “yongfook egg tart” using the original full size pic.

Spelling mistakes can be funny AND ego-crushing.

I ate Hello Kitty’s FACE.

On the flight back my tv went spastic. If I weren’t the computer geek I am, an ominous message saying “THE SYSTEM IS GOING DOWN NOW!!” would probably alarm me, the passenger of a commercial flight some 30,000 feet in the air.

More Photos

Full set of photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yongfook/sets/72157605242785119/

My Top 5 Movie Soundtracks

Fri, 02 May 2008 05:33:39 +0900

Here’s a totally random blog post.

For those who know me intimately (very few people, and most of them went dead from madness) you’ll know that I have a thing for movie soundtracks. Not those compilations of pop songs and whatnot that are slung together and called soundtracks - I’m talking about original music, written specifically for a movie.

Number of reasons why - partly because I just love the idea of the “theme” in music - the often short, intensely recognisable main melodies that are then played upon in variations ranging from slow to fast, sad to triumphant. Also, I love music that tells a story and whilst most artists will say their music does in some way, music that has already been fused with a visual story with a beginning, middle and end is that much easier to relate to.

Here are 5 of my most favourite film soundtracks, some based on the thrill of the music, some more a result of how well it complimented the film.

Batman Begins, Hans Zimmer

I love what Hans Zimmer did with the soundtrack to one of my favourite comic heroes. He took some influence from Elfman’s memorable, comicbook gothic themes of the first 2 movies replacing whooping choruses with blasting brass and giving everything a much grittier and visceral sound.

The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Gregson Williams

I’m a big fan of HGW anyway. I think his work on the Metal Gear Solid franchise have helped immensely in turning it into the incredibly popular and valuable movie-like IP that it is today. The Narnia soundtrack is full of extremes - striding, poised battle songs like the above and delicate lullabies complete with medieval-sounding instruments.

The Fountain, Clint Mansell

One of the most beautiful contemporary films I’ve ever seen, with an amazing, contemplative and minimalist soundtrack often featuring just a solo piano or a string quartet. Hugh Jackman was absolutely incredible in this film. If you think Hugh Jackman is just that guy who plays Wolverine - you must watch this.

Fight Club, The Dust Brothers

Huge fan of the film and I hope Brad Pitt and Edward Norton collaborate on something else in the future. The Dust Brothers put together a quirky mix of chilled out beats, samples, grungey guitars and a dash of humour (the elevator muzak-stylee tracks) that really helped the movie to define itself as the fresh, satirical and misunderstood movie that it was.

Shaolin Soccer, Raymond Wong

People laugh at me for loving this film. I fail to understand why - it has EVERYTHING. Action, laughs, love, brotherhood and that whole triumph-over-adversity theme that many a great movie hath been made from (e.g. Karate Kid!1). The excellent, fitting soundtrack is a heady mix of traditional Chinese themes combined with swooping, brass-filled World Cup-esque fanfares and neat over-the-top touches such as crashing gongs and grunting male choruses. The film also features a spontaneous line-dance. What’s not to like?

So, anyone got any recommendations for me?

Birthday Post! Yongfook Now At Version 28!

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 09:46:00 +0900

Another year has passed, that one absolutely FLEW by…

Someone said to me the other day how quickly people’s outlook changes as they go through their 20s. It’s a decade of extremes, that’s for sure - in your early 20s people are quick to tell you that those years are supposed to be the best ones of your life, and then all of a sudden just a few years later you’re nearing 30 and friends now look at you sympathetically, give a sheepish coo and say things like “not long now, eh!” as you cringe and in your mind reach for a blunt instrument to strike them with but in reality just shrug pathetically and snort “heh yah lol”.

Me, I’m quite happy, really. I like being old(er). I’m even looking forward to my 30s. I think I make a much better middle-aged person than I do a young person :/

Thanks to all of you for your birthday wishes!

Also, today I want to announce a new project. Well, sort of new. A while ago I open-sourced the code to my lifestream app (you’re looking at the result - the software runs my blog) but I promised to make it more user-friendly for the mainstream. Well, I’m in the middle of doing that, and I’m also giving it a proper name and home on the web: Sweetcron.

Sweetcron is quite different to the alpha version of the software I released, which I called “Stampychan”. Stampychan was quite tricky to install and relied solely on the Tumblr API. Sweetcron on the other hand, is easier to install and you can use it with various services - think of it like Plaxo or Friendfeed, but something that you host on your own server and can style the look of to fit your own design.

Sweetcron will be this stuff and more:

100% free and open source
Automagical aggregation of your activity across various websites - photos, diggs, tweets, youtube uploads etc etc; with the option to directly input regular blog posts too.
5-second install (like with Wordpress)
Zero server config, no setting up of crontabs
Comes with a theme out of the box that looks like my blog (I’m calling this the “Boxy But Good” theme)
Service agnostic - no longer relies on the Tumblr API (but you can still use it if you want)
Supports popular services (twitter, digg, youtube, flickr etc) out of the box, with an extensible architecture to let people write (and share) their own extensions to support other services.
Ability to edit the data you import
Valid, Semantic markup etc

If you like the sound of that, just sign up for notification on the Sweetcron site and I’ll send you an email when the software is available for download.

This isn’t some major new project for me, this is just something that I’m building anyway for my own use, and I figured other people might want to use it - I get quite a lot of “how you do dat?! fuxake tell me!!” mails from people via this website; Sweetcron will be my answer to them :)

It’s going to be a busy year for me. I’m going to be running a couple of projects like this (another one is also in development, and I think a lot of you have figured out what it is already judging by how many people have signed up for the beta test…but I won’t mention it in this blog post heh) as well as maintaining OSF (we’re putting out a book soon…more on that another time) and adding a sister site to OSF. Basically this year I’m going to be building up a few separate IPs, some based on user-generated content like OSF and some straight-up software services or downloads, like Sweetcron (all with tenuously food-related names of course). I’m also doing a fair bit of client and consultative work, all of the above keeping me very busy which is why I look like such a deflated sack of broken hammers most of the time.

Cheers and thanks again to those who wished me Happy Birthday. You will be spared when Kraagon comes to destroy us all.

Oh and finally, my little present to myself. I’m a sucker for watches. Gotta spoil yourself once in a while, innit.

Email Marketing - What Do You Use?

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:46:31 +0900

To those who are registered with OSF and have opted-in to the RecipeMail feature, you’ll have started getting weekly emails in your inbox every Monday of the week’s most popular recipes on the site, complete with little pics. How nice!

They look something like this:

This is a great way for those members who aren’t necessarily contributors to keep in touch with the awesome content that goes on the site. Right now this feature is for registered members only as for cost reasons I wanted to just focus on the core audience. Now, with my move to a different mass mail service provider, my costs have been cut enough to potentially allow even non-registered users to opt-in to the RecipeMail feature.

To handle the bulk mailout server load and management of subscribers, I use a 3rd party solution which I pay for. It would probably be possible to build something myself, but building a really bullet-proof solution for mass mailing requires a lot of legwork (the scalability factor, all that boring functionality such as list importing, subscribing and unsubscribing on a per-list basis, writing all the reporting functionality so I can see who is bouncing, who is opening, who is clicking etc) a lot of legal knowhow and a lot of anti-spam / anti-abuse expertise that frankly, I’d rather leave to pioneers in the field who make it their core competency to deal with these things every day, rather than for me to waste time trying to do it all myself.

Previously, I used CampaignMonitor. I think they have an excellent, polished product. But their pricing system makes scaling your email marketing efforts quite cost-prohibitive. With a list of say, 5000 members and a weekly mailout, I’d be looking at a monthly cost of $220. It’s not a whole lot of money in the grand scheme of things because I believe it is money well-spent on communication; the RecipeMail is a great way for the site to give something to those users who don’t visit much and don’t contribute, without them even having to do anything - every week they just get a list of the top recipes for that week. It’s going to be interesting if we start seeing seasonal trends in the recipes too as the weeks go on. Anyway I digress; whilst $220 a month is a price I was prepared to pay for now, with CampaignMonitor’s per-recipient, per-mailout cost model, it would quickly become prohibitively expensive to mail out to larger numbers with any kind of frequency - and OSF is not the only product I manage where I use mailouts as a way of interacting with members.

Then recently I stumbled upon a competing service, MailChimp. At its core, MailChimp provides almost the exact same basic functionality as CampaignMonitor. The key difference is their pricing model, which is based on the amount of subscribers you manage (as a sum of all your various lists). For me, I sit in their $50 a month plan at the moment, and for that I am allowed to send out as many mails as I want (within reason of course - spammers will be quickly smited. I plan to send with no more frequency than weekly). In other words, a single mailout at CampaignMonitor costs me the same as a whole month’s worth of service at MailChimp.

I was initially skeptical about this vast difference in cost - there has to be a catch, right? But it seems not, as MailChimp has quite an impressive client list of people and companies using the service, most of them very satisfied as can be seen in their testimonials section. I used the service to send a test campaign to myself today and was pleased with the results.

Both have the core features I need to send my campaigns. They allow me to import lists, import an HTML formatted campaign (mine is created on-the-fly by OSF) and send them to the list either immediately or by scheduling. Both provide reporting on open rates, bounces etc. Both also feature a simple API, which I use to sync up my lists whenever someone subscribes or unsubscribes from OSF (recipients can also unsubscribe directly in the mail). The service’s differences, based on my admittedly limited usage of MailChimp are as follows, based on my needs (I haven’t mentioned advantages or disadvantages that don’t affect me):

Campaign Monitor

FOR: Elegant, uncluttered interface.
FOR: Import campaign via url
FOR: Visual reporting with pie charts and graphs
FOR: Images in your url-imported campaign are automatically saved to CampaignMonitor’s server and served from there in the final campaign email, which I like (seems more reliable that way, plus less load on my server)
FOR: Very cool cross-browser / cross-client tools that show you what your campaign will look like in an array of different mail clients.
AGAINST: the per-recipient, per-mailout pricing plan
AGAINST: tiny thing, but I think they might be storing passwords in cleartext because when you forget your password it actually sends you your current password by mail, rather than resetting it.

MailChimp

FOR: Very cool A/B testing tools so you can measure the relative effectiveness of different Subject lines etc on the same campaign.
FOR: At first glance, a stricter policy regarding abuse, which is better for everyone.
FOR: Their flat-rate monthly pricing plan, based on your total amount of subscribers.
AGAINST: Slightly clunkier interface (but I recognise that the actual process of creating, managing and sending a campaign is a pretty difficult one to guide a user through)
AGAINST: Assumes that you want to use their online tools to design and create your campaign. Importing of a pre-made campaign (which is what I do) is a non-default option. Being picky, it’s just one more click that I’d rather skip.

I wouldn’t even have known about MailChimp if it weren’t for a cursory mention on Techcrunch recently (I can’t even find where it was linked now) - perhaps there is even another service out there that is even better?

My Questions to you…

What are you using for your mailouts, if anything?
Have I missed something huge in comparing these two services? From my experiences as a basic user, there really isn’t much to differentiate them other than price - and certainly the features that do differentiate the services are non-critical ones that I consider just nice extras to the core functionality of reliably handling my mailouts and subscribers. How then is a service such as Campaign Monitor supposed to compete against one like MailChimp, which offers the same core functionality at a vastly lower cost? We’re not even talking incrementally lower - their entire pricing model is different. I really like Campaign Monitor (and actually have a lot of respect for Freshview, the company who makes it) but I wonder if long term there are going to be more users like me switching to MailChimp if either the pricing model doesn’t change or they don’t do more to highlight the functional benefits of using them over the cheaper service.

Your thoughts.

The Yongfook Music Album - FREE Download

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 07:52:44 +0900

Just in case anyone is interested (I’ve had numerous emails about this) I’ve set all the tracks on my Last.fm page to free download now, so anyone is welcome to grab them.

Yongfook’s Last.fm Page

I’ve been meaning to do that for freaking ages.

To any new readers who aren’t aware that I used to dabble in music composition, I’ve embedded some of my tracks below. Yes, I was one of those dudes who would sit infront of his computer with a pathetic little MIDI keyboard, oversize headphones and pretend I was a rock god. I’d love to get back into this actually. I have a whole load of half-finished tracks :/ I was aiming to create a kind of classical / electronic fusion, with chilled drum beats, string quartets and occasionally live strings (I play the violin, yeah, get me).

Here’s a seasonal one:

Yongfook – Sakura

One of my favourites:

Yongfook – Adagio For The Fallen

Classical-ish:

Yongfook – Underwater Romance

You can grab all the tracks from my Last.fm page. Enjoy!

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Email Marketing - What Do You Use?

Campaign Monitor

MailChimp

My Questions to you…

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TIME, Stormtroopers, iPhone BLAM