And to start a renovation. This blog is now past its sixth birthday, so time to ditch the old design, (based on Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick,) and bring in the new.

I’ve used Srini’s beautifully-coded Plainscape as the basis of the new design with aesthetic modifications. The sidebar uses the excellent Delicious Plus, Wickett Twitter Widget, and Picasa Photos widgets. I am running Wordpress version 2.9.

I went to their website. It is a true study in absolute shitness. You can do better than this with a five-year old chimpanzee and Microsoft Word. I don’t know how they managed to block out half their heading but they have. Of course, it’s perfect branding for them – it says cheap, it says Asian (this is a definite positive) it says cheap and cheap some more. I don’t know why anyone would go into computer hardware, it’s such a race to the bottom – margins are wafer thin and the stock’s superseded almost as soon as you’ve bought it. Great for the consumer though…

What I’m trying to work out is, did these guys:
a) slap up the shittiest website they possibly could because this is genuinely the extent of their style
b) maintain a shitty-looking website because at some point they realised that having a shitty website was the perfect way of saying “we are Asian and we are cheeeeaap”
c) pay some branding consultants a quarter of a million bucks to do market research and then engineer them the shittiest looking website since the early 1990s.

I’m guessing it might have started out as a) but progressed to b) or c) because these guys are obviously not amateurs – ten years in the game, 17 stores (they even give you how many square metres the store is – so useful) and big expansion plans too.

In any case, I love their branding and they’re totally getting my patronage!

–UPDATE–
I have just discovered that MSY’s website and PDFs are so unreadable as to have spawned their own fanpage, which takes MSY’s data and puts it into a more legible, aesthetically pleasing format… hilarious… check out MSY but Readable

1. Where’s the scrollbars? This isn’t intentional is it?
2. I don’t want programs to decide for me which language I want to type in. That’s what the language toggle in OSX is for. I particularly don’t want Firefox to change my language back to Japanese / English almost every time I enter a new text box. I have another program (JEDict) that also thinks it knows what language I want to type in. Shits me up the wall.
3. RSS link to NetNewsWire doesn’t work.
4. Not so keen on that magic address bar thingo. (You can probably switch this off, but I didn’t get that far.)

Now, off to Hendrix.

My installation of OpenOffice is proving inordinately complicated. OpenOffice won’t install without JRE and JRE can’t be installed without fiddling in the Terminal as a root user. Following Java’s instructions is no help however, because Xubuntu doesn’t apparently have a root user and I can’t readily find instructions on how to get around this. Note to Linux boffins – so long as this sort of fiddling is necessary large numbers of people will not adopt Linux.

Reason for this blab is, I waaant a UMPC (probably the EeePC 900, out soon) but I don’t want XP (expensive, clunky, superseded) and I don’t want the kiddified Xandros OS that Eee ships with either. So what about a normal distro of Linux? It’s been probably five years since I last tried Linux. Last time was most uninspiring. The kernel kept panicking and everything looked very foreign.

But times change. I’m trialling Xubuntu using Parallels at the minute. It’s a version of Ubuntu, a popular Linux distro, the X standing for Xfce, I think, which is a desktop module that apparently is very lightweight, making it easy for low-powered devices to crunch. Xubuntu took 5 rather disheartening tries to install (something to do with how Parallels treats Xubuntu, worked it out in the end using this Feisty Fawn on Parallels instruction) but now it’s there, it seems to work quite well.

Some frustrations – it won’t shut down properly (again, Parallels?) and it doesn’t recognise the full screen size of my Mac. It has an eccentric top-bar AND bottom-bar – cluttering the already mean screen real-estate. I’m going to try and work through all these things.

Good things – much of the software I already use (Firefox, OpenOffice, Picasa) plays very happily in Linux, meaning I don’t have to learn new programs, or use substandard programs! Be interesting to see what the FTP and Japanese dictionary/flashcard programs will look like. In fact, not even sure I have Japanese support yet!

Will update in a couple of weeks once I’ve had a good poke around at its capabilities.