The Chippy Breakfast

For years I have on occasion enjoyed a Sunday breakfast/brunch at the Magnificent Fish and Chips - aka. Chippy. I would usually go for their Big Breakfast, advertised like this:



28 Ringgit, in Malaysia, is not exactly what you would call a cheap breakfast, but then again, it wasn't advertised as being cheap, it was advertised as being big.

In fact I never really had a problem with the price, because quite frankly, the portions used to be huge.

Today however it looked like this:



Excuse me guys, but that is half a sausage - HALF!

They can call their breakfast what they want, but they can not call it big and then serve HALF a sausage. I suggest they come up with a new name. Suggestions could be:

The Chippy Stingy Fucking Breakfast
The Chippy Really Rather Small Breakfast
The Chippy Whatever We Got Lying Around Breakfast
The Chippy Finish Someone Else's Breakfast
The Chippy Left-over Breakfast
The Chippy Low Fat Breakfast
The Chippy Get Slim Now Breakfast
The Chippy Somewhat Average Sized Breakfast
The Chippy We're Really out of Sausages Breakfast

You guys owe me half a sausage!

I Think Not

Some moron just distributed these stickers on every car in the area:



I am not quite sure what to make out of that, but I seriously feel like distributing some tomorrow offering beer at RM 1. It would be more believable if they bothered to put an address on it.

Starbucks Pigsty

In the center of Kuala Lumpur is a small shopping mall called Plaza Low Yat.  On each side of the main entrance is a cafe, to the left it's a Starbucks and to the right a Coffee Bean.

It is quite amazing to look at the difference. Starbucks basically always look like a pigsty:



The tables are never cleaned, there's rubbish on the floor and I have yet to see an ash tray on any of the tables.



Quite disgusting really and as you can see this wasn't exactly at a busy hour - in fact there wasn't a single customer on the outside and only one or two inside.

Moving to the right of the main entrance is a completely different story.  Outside Coffee Bean it is absolutely spotless:



All the tables are clean, no rubbish lying around (except from the occasional napkin blown over from the Starbucks side) and a clean ash tray on about half the tables or so.



I have no idea what the staff at Starbucks is paid - but in general I would expect they are paid about RM 5/hour or so.  A cup of coffee is about RM 10++.  In other words - they charge the equivalent of 2 hours salary for one cup of coffee.  I think it's only reasonable they get enough staff to keep their premises clean and I personally wouldn't dream of spending a single cent on the Starbucks side.

Update 12-06-2010:

Starbucks makes an effort linking to Facebook pages from their web-site.  I posted a link to this blog on the main Starbucks page and on the Malaysian one.  I also wrote an email to customers@starbucks.com.my (which is mentioned on the web-site).  Both the postings were removed without comments and I have received no reply on the email.

That is just incredible!  It clearly shows that it's a management decision not to waste time and resources on cleaning.  IF the management had wanted to keep their places clean, I think they should have thanked me for pointing out this problem instead of just trying to hide it.  Ah well - perhaps I'll receive thanks from Coffee Bean instead.

Product Testing

Microsoft have just published a "test" that is supposed to prove that IE 9 (Internet Explorer) is compatible with the upcoming HTML 5 standard.  This test is a response to a site launched a few weeks ago where everybody can test their own browser.  The result as published here is quite a surprise to anyone who has ever written a single line of HTML:

In other words, according to Microsoft, IE9 is in full compliance with HTML 5.

The problem is that Microsoft have deliberately picked the extremely few bits and pieces of the HTML standard that IE9 could understand.  As a respond freeciv.net performed their own test, deliberately picking stuff from the HTML 5 standard which IE9 could not understand, and the results were as follows:

Just as Microsoft's, this result is obviously doctored in that only tests that IE9 could not succeed were selected and it proves just how idiotic Microsoft's own test results are.

Fact is that the original test is the interesting one and that one shows:

• Firefox 3.6: 101 out of 160
• Google Chrome 4.1: 118 out of 160
• Safari 4.0.5: 115 out of 160
• Opera 10.53: 102 out of 160
• Internet Explorer 8: 19 out of 160
• Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview: 19 out of 160 

Microsoft's approach to testing is a bit like if a car manufacturer claimed their cars were safe "because they were able to stay below the speed limit". It is obvious to everybody that IE9 has got almost no support for HTML 5.  The scary part is that Microsoft spend resources - and lots of them - on cheating their customers, instead of actually spending a bit of it on standard compliance.