Up late, FedEx Kinko's sucks, & Porsche

It's 4am on Saturday & I'm up trying to figure out what to do after I'm done writing this post. Probably study Managerial Accounting a little. The plan was to sleep for few hours, get up, run 4/5 miles, then study. But I guess change of plan. Well, enough on that.

Last Thursday I needed to scan about 43 pages of document into pdf format so, I can email someone all the documents. First trip to FedEx Kinko's. My options?!

Option 1. Pay .40 cents a minute to use one of their computer and scan each (remind you again 43 pages of documents) page and then save it.

Option 2. Pay the clerk $6.00 dollar per page to have all the pages scanned & he will save it as a pdf. WOW

I asked him about the Scan option in one of their copier, but he said that can't be done. Since the copies isn't hooked up to any computer to store the files. And all this time I'm thinking this is FedEx. With this kinds of inefficiency how on earth are they still in business?! Of course, I opted for the 3rd option.

And that is, visit Copy Co, the local shop in town. Since I needed so many pages scanned, the clerk was nice enough to charge me only $20.00 dollars. Again I paid $20.00 dollars to get 43 pages scanned that he saved himself on my jump drive twice as a pdf and once more as a jpeg file. Just in case.So, what was the $20.00 dollars for?!

It would have cost about the same to get all those documents copied. So he was nice enough to just scan it for me but charge me less.

And that's why FedEx Kinko's sucks for being inefficient, wasting my time in their store.

Porsche: Between Ferrari & Porsche, I am not a very big fan of Porsche. But one of their recent commercial deserves some applaud. I love the commercial. For two reasons: First, the song in that commercial, and I think you can guess the second one =)



If you loved the song as I did, it's by "2raumwohnung" & the song title is "weil es liebe ist." I've looked all over the Internet trying to find the whole song, so far no luck. I love the song a lot, I might just get the whole album from Amazon.

State of Trance & restaurant Menus

Most of my friends know very well, I'm a trance addict. Mostly that's really all I listen to everyday, of course every now & then I will listen to some classical music. But mostly trance.

For me trance is more than music, it takes me to another state of mind. When I am listening to trance, I can just wander off into a different world, interpret the music in my way, associate it with something pleasant. Rather than someone screaming about how love, life and just about everything else sucks in life.

I am more relaxed when I am listening to Trance. Of Course, I am crazy about DJ Tiesto, but there's also Kyau vs. Albert, Armin Van Burren and the list just goes on and on...When I go out for run, I listen to trance. I let the music dictate my pace. I know most of you are like what's so special about this one? Trust me, there's something different listening to trance while running. The music gives a different meaning to the whole run, sometimes I am running slow, sometimes I feel the air around me as I run fast. It's almost as if I can see myself running. If you are a runner, you want that kind of relaxation. You want to be in sync with your run. Anyway, so the question I've been asking myself, Why do I love trance so much? What does trance means to me?

Before I answering the questions, I would like to mention
Dyske Suematsu did a really great job on his site DYSKE.COM talking about something along the same line. Dyske talks about why Americans don't like Jazz, I thought the article did a great job laying out his ideas on it. I don't want to spoil the fun so if you are interested here's the article link: "Why Americans Don't Like Jazz."

As I said before, to me trance is more than music, It's an innovation. Innovation?!!! How?!!! Well, trance is where a DJ comes in, takes a great piece of music and makes it even better. Evanescene's "Hello" is a great song, but The Trafictor vs. Gabriel and Dresden mix is even better, the mix took the whole song to a completely different level. And that's what trance is about, it's about taking something that already exist and make it better, more appealing to the mass. That's why within the trance community you find the same beat or piece of music played by many different DJs, but incorporating it with other musics or songs. The difference is, very good DJs also produces their own music along the line. I am surprise more people don't look at it that way or doesn't realize it. Well, maybe some day they will, again Dyske did a great job elaborating on this issue.

Now on the restaurant menus section. Last weekend, we were in Overland Park, Ks. It was past midnight and we were really hungry. Option 1: drive another 13 miles & go to Westport for some late night fun & food. Option 2: go to the Denny's restaurant few blocks from my Friend's apartment. Since I was the driver, I didn't wanted to drive another 13 miles, we went to Denny's. The food on the menu (i.e. the pictures of the foods) looked so good, we ordered some food. Since everyone was really hungry, I also ordered the mini burger & fries appetizer for everyone. The fries were OK, the burger's were rather dry. After finishing our appetizer we kinda lost our appetite to eat. The disgusts of the whole place & the food started to kind of sink in. One of my friend ended up boxing his food, it just wasn't that good.

Few days later, I am thinking about it & that's when it hit me. My hypothesis is, usually restaurants that has good, flashy menus will have lower quality foods served, whereas restaurants with a simple menu will have something more delicious to enjoy. The question is why? Well, I would say because since

1) Restaurant A has good, flashy menus, that cost x amount. The restaurant must allocate cost for that x amount. While allocation cost for menus, the food quality is low. Here restaurant A must constantly allocate money on making their menu look good since they have to keep up that image

2) Restaurant B has a simple menu and serves great quality, tasty dishes. Well since restaurant B doesn't have to allocate much on menu printing & so forth, thus giving them the flexibility to prepare something more appealing to the consumers in terms of taste.

Now, the quest for answer begins. From now, for the next six months, I will begin to document every restaurant I visit, and let's see where this hypothesis ends.

Any ideas or thoughts?!

credits:

1st Photo: ayu trance

2nd Photo: Overland Park, Ks