"I am just mystified at the idea of having preferred pronouns. It's like having a favorite algae."
— Scott P., from the comments on Language LogDear Adobe,
In your lengthy Creative Cloud survey (in which you mistakenly addressed me as a former customer), I was struck by what was missing in the list of possible answers to the question “how did you learn to use Adobe creative tools?”: books.
Apparently the kids you’ve got running the game now are so hooked on the web that they’ve forgotten that Adobe software used to ship with manuals, and that third parties used to write entire books on how to use the stuff. Or perhaps they’re too young to have ever known.
Also, I was amused when the surveydroids referred to the process of installing the CC tools as “onboarding”, and then immediately had to explain their jargon, but what the fuck does this statement mean, which I’m supposed to rank my agreement with: “I have been able to meet the objectives I set for using Adobe Creative Cloud”? The correct answer would be “you stopped selling products, so I had to start renting them, which I’m not a big fan of”.
And I love this question toward the end:
“What methods would have been helpful to you in getting started to use Adobe applications or use the applications more?”
- A call from customer support to provide more information
- More emails explaining the benefits of applications
- A learning game
- Live chat online to provide more information
- A five minute how-to video
- A prominent 800 number to call Adobe customer support
- Included access to a 3rd party training provider such as Lynda.com
- A social network connection e.g. via Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, etc.
- Step-by-step tutorials (just text and graphics, rather than "how to" videos)
- Online or in-product tutorials
- Access to an Adobe learning resource center
- Links to CC user forums
- A 30 minute webinar/online seminar
- Other (specify):
- None/no other resources needed/none would be helpful
Odd how none of these options are related to the quality of the documentation, which defaults to online help pages these days. In fact, you have to manually download the actual PDF reference manuals separately from the CC applications; it isn’t even a clickable link in the help options.
Dear Amazon US,
Please don’t tell me why the results of a search for the Bluray edition of The Seven Samurai included the Japanese edition of Kick-ass 2.
Even more baffling is the import of the Samurai Champloo box set that showed up in the results, for more than ten times the price of the US release. The product description suggests that this isn’t a case where the Japanese set had significant extras:
Draw a rare journey of Foo daughter of cafe Liquidambar genius swordsman Jin era drama action animation! Wild boy infinite Shinichiro Watanabe "Cowboy Bebop" and "Animatrix" time as director! 3-Disc Blu which recorded all 26 episodes -ray BOX.
Pirate merchandise
Given the mid-August release, I’m guessing we’ll be seeing a Blu-ray of the movie around then.
Also, in November, Marika bikini figure.
Remo Williams Blu-ray?
It looks like there will be a UK release in July, at least.
Skype auto-translation: this will not end well
Microsoft just demoed real-time translation in a Skype call. They wisely chose the relatively-compatible English and German languages for the demo, but there are so many ways it can go wrong even between such close cousins.
And when you think about expanding beyond the simplest cases, well, consider the following tray of meatballs:
Is naked Satan cute?
Dear Hello!Project fans,
Apparently the folks who scanned Koharu Kusumi’s recent exposure in Cancam forgot to include the front and back pages of the insert. It’s obviously her, even before spotting the little beauty marks on her chin, so I wonder why they weren’t scanned. Then again, perhaps I don’t want to know…
I happened to be making a big order with Amazon Japan (~$500 in books and Bluray discs), so since that issue was still in stock, I threw it in. Lots of pretty girls pitching beauty products, as expected, so I’m not planning a subscription. By the way, the shipping for this order was a whole lot cheaper than expected, only $65; Amazon has apparently made some new international deals.
