It's all about the PR

No, not PageRank, I mean public relations!

Yesterday was Free Hamburger Day at Harvey's, where they were giving out one free hamburger per person at participating Harvey's locations across Ontario. At the Harvey's location I went to, the line stretched back to the door, with probably 50 people lining up for their free hamburger. After I lined up, the line immediately started getting much larger, reaching probably another 50 feet out the door, into the parking lot, too!

The point is Harvey's burgers taste great. I think it's safe to say that they have the best tasting burgers in the whole fast food market, trumping competitors like McDonald's, Wendy's and Burger King easily. And I also think that yesterday was a great marketing idea for those top officials at Harvey's HQ... I'm sure they've attracted a lot more new customers as many undoubtedly got hooked on that great Harvey's taste.
Aside from that, I must applaud this corporation greatly. When we deconstruct the financial aspect of this free hamburger promotion, we can see the massive amount of money they must have lost through this promotion. Think about this; how many burgers, cheeseburgers, chicken burgers, hot dogs and chicken nuggets does a typical Harvey's location sell in one day (most people would have decided to go with a free hamburger than pay an extra 4.59 for a slice of cheese)? This effect of losing sales is even further compounded by the fact that many people would forgo their preferred cheeseburger or double hamburger, instead choosing the free hamburger. The point here is that each Harvey's location lost a huge amount of money that day. Multiply this large (theoretical) sum in dollars by the amount of Harvey's locations in Ontario, and you see the fortune in sales that they lost yesterday.

That said, one day of free burgers is a HUGE hit for Harvey's, or any other fast food company that would decide to do this. True, they are probably making millions per day across Ontario, Canada and the rest of the world, but one day of lost sales on this scale can have a massive effect on the financial state of this company... it may seem that these companies can roll with the punches but you must also realize that their annual revenue does not include the salaries it must pay it's thousands of employees, or the cost of purchasing the raw materials for their famous burgers, or leasing the land their restaurants are on, and so on and so forth for all things that concern maintaining a huge fast-food chain; you can see that the overhead is truly enormous.

In this, like I said before, I truly applaud Harvey's for taking that big gamble and giving us all free burgers for a day... I'm sure this act of goodwill (and improving PR) will pay off for them in the future! It's simply karma (or more people buying Harvey's burgers!).

kamster

Here little Fishies, time for Din-din!

I went to a nursery (not the baby kind) today and did some fish shopping for the two ponds we have in front and behind our house. Years ago, we had lots of koi (a species of Japanese fish that are considered premium... they have whiskers too), some up to one foot long! Then, they slowly started disappearing. One by one, the numbers of koi and goldfish in our ponds would drop. Some days I would walk around the side of my house to see the remains of a goldfish... torn fins, a skull and scales scattered about. We realized it was probably a cat or some sort of badger-ish type thing that hunts for fishies in ponds. By that time, it was too late, and almost every single fish was gone.

Of course a few of the smaller ones (small enough to evade the cat's paw) survived in the front, and they have been doing ok. They were tiny before this past winter but now theyre about as big as my pinkie, and growing all the time. However the back pond, up until this point was completely empty :S, except for frogs, and mosquito larvae, of course.

So back to what I was saying... today we visited this nursery and chose some koi to replenish our non-existent stocks in the back. We ended purchasing 8 good sized koi for the back and 3 smaller ones for the front... It was quite an interesting trip.

Of course when we got back we put them back into the ponds, and for that there is some sort of delicate procedure; you have to float the bags for half an hour, add water bit by bit then slowly using your hand or a net slip them into their new homes. After doing this it seems the fish were quite traumatized, hehe! It was like they couldn't figure out what to do with themselves, sitting there on the bottom staring blankly with eyes wide open (I don't think fish have eyelids, actually).

I hope they're doing ok.. and that they won't get eaten by a hungry Garfield tonight.

kamster

PayPal Money!!!

You might know that I do some get-paid-to stuff.. mostly with PPP where I get paid for my certain blog posts. Problem with that is is that there are very few open posts available and when a few do happen to free up, they are snapped up within seconds.

A few weeks ago I discovered another site where it's possible to make $5 or $10 within 15 minutes... no joke, hehe. This site is CashLagoon.com, where you can complete simple surveys or "offers" (where you have to buy, test or sign up for something), get your account credited and cashout via PayPal within 24 hours! In fact I got my first $5 today, so I guess you could go ahead and see what they have to offer you.

kamster

Great Tactical Clothing

Do you have an inner policeman, the one that is constantly calling on you to don your bullet-proof vest, tazer and tactical gear, and answer the call of those in need of justice? I don't think you can become a policeman by simply going online but you sure can suit up just like one.

5.11TacticalOutdoors.com is a site where you can shop for all kinds of tactical police gear; pants, eyewear (NVGs?), knives, polo tops, shirts, tactical gloves and much more. They've even got some sick shades... so people won't know who you're staking out! Just visit 5.11 to see the full catalogue (you can get your stuff shipped to your door via UPS).

kamster

The Truth Is...

If you've ever read this blog before, you'll know that I often start off my posts with a "So I've been really busy lately..." (indeed, I'm doing it right now!), as an excuse to explain why I've been to lazy to blog. In actuality, I'm usually not as busy as I say I am, and instead am doing something like reading EncyclopediaDramatica articles or checking my email in lieu of blogging.

This time however, I really have been soooooooooooooooooo busy the past while. If you are or ever were enrolled in any educational institution in north america (or any other place in the world) you'll know that now and the weeks before and after the end of May are the busiest of the entire year. High school students have "exam week", entailing endless hours of preparatory cramming and college and university students are also wrapping up their exams, although they may still have some to finish at this point.

I am no exception. These past few days I have been absolutely cramming, staying up to finish those last couple bars (composing... wtf) or sentances, or getting those long biology terms firmly engrained in my mind. And it really sucks. I'm just looking forward to the annual visit to Centre Island and finally some respite from all this work.

I also saw Iron Man and Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay this past weekend, two fantastic movies. The first, of course is based on the famous Marvel comic written by Stan Lee ages ago... the movie directed by Jon Favreau and starring Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, the multi-billionaire weapons tycoon who becomes Iron Man through the course of this film. As an action film it's a success... I don't have too much to criticize it for. Actually I really loved the music... not the track by Black Sabbath but theme... it's so catchy!!!oneone11!1!!

Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay was a pretty hilarious movie too. It concerns two stoners who get mistakenly labeled as terrorists on their way to the pot-legal city of Amsterdam. They of course are sent to Guantanamo Bay but promptly escape. Oddly enough, the section of the movie in which they are actually in or around guantanamo bay is very short, I'd say less than 10 minutes. The large part of the movie follows their exploits as they search out some uncle in Texas (I think?) who can get them passports or whatever so they don't need to continue leaving lives of fear. Hehe. This movie is full of laughs but is also pretty crude (although, it's not that much worse than Superbad, considering what has become acceptable in today's media)... expect lots of profanity, racism and general hilarity. OH AND Neil Patrick Harris is in it too! OMG NEIL PATRICK HARRIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111111

kamster

Quick, find the carotid artery!

Dissecting pigs is a dirty, dirty job. Sort of like that discovery channel show, Dirty Jobs, except for real this time. A few days ago some of us were given fetal pigs (taken out of a mommy pig's womb!!?!?!?) to dissect. "Just take the scissors and slice it open from chin to tail! Have fun!", was what they told us. After getting over our initial disgust, we did just that. I was kind of looking forward to saying "Pass me the scalpel, quick!", but it turns out scalpels aren't used in this brand of dissection.

When we looked down at the dissection tray, we saw a small, shriveled innocent looking thing, pink with translucent hairs dotting its 9-inch long body. We felt a little bit cruel and sad at the beginning for cutting open this seemingly innocent creature, but then the stench of pig and formaldehyde made us forget our previous sympathies... and so, we butchered the thing.

Actually, we were just looking for most of the major organs in the pig like the lungs, heart, kidneys, stomach etc. After getting the academic part of the assignment done, we decided to have some fun with the pig. Yup, I totally went to town on that sucker. I sort of... sliced off the muscle on its left arm (to get better access to the neck), butchered its heart and circulatory system (to see the arteries better) and broke most of its ribs (to drain its abdominal cavity of fluids, of course!)... which is probably why we're screwed for our evaluation tomorrow... kidding. After this, we cut out all its organs (stomach, liver, lungs, heart, intestines... although we were actually sort of supposed to do this)... examined them... and cut them up some more. We even got to look inside the pig's heart, which looks somewhat like a sponge with like 10 compartments.
Anyways, we came back to the lab 2 more times, each day the stench getting worse (we didn't have enough room in the refrigerator to store 20 fetal pigs, although I supposed to smell of formaldehyde is preferable to that of rotting tissue) to further slice 'n dice the little piggy that went to the market.

I guess all in all it was a pretty fun experience, getting to poke and probe at the viscera of an animal eerily similar to ourselves (not the pig, but how the makeup of it's insides is almost the exact same as a human's). More importantly though, it made me realize that taking biology and more specifically, agreeing to get my hands dirty was not a bad decision; I had this idea from the beginning that I would not want to participate in the dissection at all! Turns out, I ended up doing most of the cutting and not feeling squeamish in the least! I guess that just proves that you shouldn't be closed minded... especially with food. I can't even express how much I missed out on by not eating

• crab,
• lobster,
• mushrooms,
• shrimp

and other generally expensive seafood in my younger years... what a waste (*blargh*).

kamster

Silly Putty

Lumines is officially the best game ever invented. Lumines: Puzzle Fusion was created by Japanese game maker Tetsuya Mizuguchi, released in North America in March of 2005. It's a little bit like tetris, but way better and with way cooler graphics. You might think releasing something similar to tetris for the PSP would be a rip-off, but this game's simplicity just adds to its entertainment value.

Like tetris, multi-colored blocks fall from the top of the screen where they come to rest at the bottom. Unlike tetris, the blocks aren't rigid; if you put half a block on another raised block, half will break off and continue to fall downwards. Additionally, you can't get rid of accumulated blocks by filling up one row; in Lumines, you must "delete" blocks by creating 2 x 2 squares of blocks of the same color. This might seem to be just as boring as tetris, but the game also incorporates lot's of cool special effects, sounds and lights when you get rid of blocks or beat a level. As well, they have some intuitive features such as shuffle mode, challenge mode and even boss mode (where you have to survive longer than a CPU).

However the best part of Lumines is the music, OMGSH the music! Lumines has a huge host of "skins" (different backgrounds either animated or static), each one with it's own playlist of great music! They often feature hot artists like The Black Eyed Peas, Gwen Stefani and The Chemical Brothers, just to name a few... it's sort of like DDR; the louder the music the harder you want to play, hehe.

Anyways, I recently got the phone version and although it is slightly "dumbed down", it's still just as addicting as the PSP version, and there's even cool music too by some dude named... Mondo Grosso, although he is apparently quite famous.

kamster

Secretly, Furtively

Heyyyyyy peeps!

I went to see The Forbidden Kingdom the other day. I had heard from some of my friends that it was pretty lame, but I decided that I would ignore their advice and go see it anyways. It turns out... it was a decent movie. The movie has gotten so much media attention as of late because it marks the first time that Jackie Chan and Jet Li have appeared onscreen together... ever! As you well know, these two characters are huge azn kung-fu movie stars, and I'm betting that many people went to see this movie just to see which of them would win in a fight. Turns out that they're not actually fighting each other, and that both of them play a secondary role to Michael Angarano who plays a geeky white boy named Jason Tripitikas.

I won't totally spoil the movie for you (if you're intending to see it) but I will divulge the fact that the movie is based loosely on the Chinese legend of the Monkey King; a fabled warrior who wielded a staff and could summon monkey minions by plucking out hairs from his head. Yeah. Anyways, Jason is magically teleported to ancient China where he finds himself burdened with the task of returning the Monkey King's staff to... the Monkey King (who has been imprisoned in stone by the Jade Emperor). And so begins his journey. Sounds kind of like LOTR right?

Anyways, the acting isn't the greatest but it's not nearly as bad as Kenny said it was. I'm guessing that Kenny was biased because, being azn himself, a film about a white boy by a white director would not interest him in the least. So go see this movie... it's worth it. Sort of. But you know, you could just watch it online for free because as we all know... only suckers pay for movies =P.

-----

As you may have noticed, I have added some music to Up the Ante. The song playing is You Don't Miss Your Water (Until the Well Runs Dry) by Craig David. I have no idea why I chose this song... probably because I heard it on someone else's blog one day and decided to put it on mine. Anyways, I am well aware of the fact that having music playing incessantly on a blog can be incredibly annoying (especially if you hate Craig David... RAWR), so you can go ahead and turn that off right at the bottom of my blog.

kamster

p.s. it is interesting to note that the actor who plays Golden Sparrow in The Forbidden Kingdom, Yifei Liu, is the same actor who plays... the main character in The Return of the Condor Heroes, a truly good azn movie.