June 6, 2008

My parents love who?

Vista Print. That’s who.

I’ve talked about them before but it’s always a topic worth returning to simply because of the huge plethora of products offered for free by these guys. They have a pretty amazing business model and one would do very well to take that model and replicate that into their own field.

And if their product isn’t free, it’s basically guaranteed to be very, very cheap. The value they offer on products such as cheap address labels is market leading.

So, the next and most obvious question. Are they any good?

This is a very understandable question as when you see something that’s cheap you think “there must be a catch!” But in this case, I don’t know what the catch is. At the very least, I didn’t notice any catch. My parents didn’t order address labels, they ordered business cards and I know that by and large they were very happy with the quality and also the delivery time.

I even saw my father passing his out once to someone so it proves that he wasn’t just saying it.

Address Labels help make an envelope look either more professional, if it’s a business, or puts a nice, unique personal touch, if it’s for a person. You know that someone takes pride in sending their letters when it arrives with an address label on it.

Well it’s been a little while since I gave an update on my progress on Spanish learning.

In short, it’s going well. Really well.

I’m currently reading a Spanish biography of Ricky Martin. The book is horrible but there’s not many Spanish books in Melbourne.

Also, I’ve started reading the news websites without the aid of a translation program. I still have to translate a reasonable amount of words while reading the article (depending entirely on the topic) but it’s not stressful anymore. The hardest topic to read about is sport because there is so much terminology that is game specific. Think football (soccer) - wingers, strikers, offside, shot on target, yellow card, goal, tackle, pass, defender, net, linesman… all these words are unfamiliar.

Probably the easiest topic to read about is Christianity, and also American politics. Because I understand the topics back to front it means I can nearly always understand the terminology just from the context.