A Window to the Back of the Bottle

November 12th, 2007, No Comments »

I thought this was a clever variation on fancy sparkling (or ‘fizzy’, as they seem to prefer here) water bottles:

Clever Label

As you hopefully can see, there’s a little window through the front label showing a pastoral scene on the inside of the back label. It’s not earth-shattering, but a little change that Julie and I noticed and remarked on.

For extra points, they could go the Jones Soda route and feature, uh, drinker-generated pastoral photos there instead of that cheesy water colour.

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Five Star Hotel, Two Star Wifi Page

November 5th, 2007, 3 Comments »

As we occasionally do, Julie and I spent a couple of hours today working in the lovely bar at the Kempinski Hotel San Lawrenz. I think it’s the only five star hotel on Gozo, and despite its peculiar location (there are no views of the sea), it’s quite posh.

I wasn’t using the web, but I happened to visit the hotel’s portal page for its wifi service. Here it is:

Two-Star Web Page

That looks pretty weak, doesn’t it? Why does a five-star hotel, with its spa smelling of sandalwood and lavendar, it’s beautifully-tiled pools and gorgeously-appointed rooms, have such a crappy-looking login page? The Kempinski isn’t unique in this peculiar disconnect–I’ve seen worse in plenty of four and five-star hotels.

It’s a tiny thing, but swish hotels aspire to get the tiny things right. The five-star devil, after all, is in the details. On the other hand, at least I wasn’t presented with an image of some kind of fruitophile.

Incidentally, I took that screenshot with a great little OS X program that Monique tipped me off on. It’s called Paparazzi, and all it does is make a full-length screenshot of any URL you enter. It saves you the trouble of stitching screenshots together.

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