Seiko Champion

I say this poking gentle fun at RJ at FratelloWatches for his post, as I really enjoy his thoughts and writing, but it is a perspective of many WIS magazines and blogs that Swiss & German watches are the only “real” mechanical watches in their opinion.

First, let me give a “thumbs up” to RJ for selecting the Nomos Club as one of his selections, a great watch that’s still on my wish list. I think he’s done a really good job picking watches, other than the exclusion of non-European brands.


Image from FratelloWatches.com

I would challenge those who exclude Asian (and other) high-end well known brands of watch makers from their lists. The perception of European dominance in luxury watches is actually just an example of successful marketing … it’s not true, and it’s a relatively recent perspective. Other countries including the US used to be considered the premier manufacturers of luxury watches, but that changed last century. Some of this changed for real, other parts of it just changed in belief.

I’m not talking about new Chinese firms with little heritage. I’m talking about something like a Grand Seiko, which has the heritage, quality, accuracy, and aesthetics to more than hold it’s head up high in this company. I guess this post earns me my “Seiko Champion” moniker.


GS 9S54A, 2001, image from luxurious.whatsoever.hk

It’s been discussed over and over in the watch forums and blogs these past few weeks, but still deserves a mention. TAG Heuer announced this month their new “100% developed in-house” caliber, the 1887.

It seems nice – 39 jewels, column chrono, 50 hours reserve, +/- 4 sec/day. And in fact the movement itself is nice. The problem is with TAG Heuer’s marketing statements – the movement is actually a modified Seiko 6S37 that TAG Heue licensed for their internal modification and use.



Legally and technically it’s a modified movement that they have rights to. Truthfully and in social media terms, the marketing is a lie. If you don’t have Truthful Branding you will be found out. In the case of TAG Heue, it tarnishes their image and makes them of less interest to me as a watch purchase, which is sad I’ve always liked a lot of their watches.

If you are reading this blog on an iPhone it should look a little different now.



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I don’t have a captcha currently in use on this blog (other security measures are installed instead), but I’m sure you’ve seen them, the “please type in these characters as you see them” box that tries to prevent robots and other phishing/spam engines from pretending to be people online. Captchas can really help prevent improper online contest entries, document downloads, database access, blog comments … well, you get the idea.



Well, one of the larger players in that industry sub-segment, reCAPTCHA, has just been purchased by Google (aka the “non-evil empire”).

One of the problems with Captcha systems is that hackers have learnt how to handle the simpler ones. That’s the reason you now see more complex ones in a lot of places (animation, gray scale, and other techniques being used). I never thought of the flip side of that though, and found it very interesting to read in the Google Blog that they are using these “learned lessons” of captcha validation as a way to improve OCR (Optical Character Recognition). And why would they be doing this?


Image from Wikipedia

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Last year I posted about the bankruptcy of Yema, a company that despite all the “French company, French manufacture, French brand” chest-thumping of the firm, was actually a Seiko sub-brand between 1988 and 2005. I first became aware of them through their Seiko 4S15 based SeaSpider diver models.



After finding out a bit more I then became interested in some of their earlier watches (from when they truly were a French brand, and indeed a partially French manufacture), especially their earlier divers and various xxx-GRAF model lines. I see these come up on eBay every so often, usually selling for a fair dollar. For example this Valjoux 7736 based Yachtingraf just sold for US$710.



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Over the past few years I’ve created literally hundreds of websites, ranging from larger corporate sites where I’ve contracted programming development, to smaller campaign-specific microsites.

After all that, there are still surprises. We recently brought a new site live (www.stairpans.ca) for a local client – Ball Service Group, a metal fabrication ship in Kitchener that specializes in more difficult/custom jobs. The site is specifically for easy ordering of metal stair pans, the forms that are used as the support and pouring foundation for concrete stairs, the sort you see in the stairwell of just about every corporate building.



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As I was researching the background of my Felca, I came across these interesting ads from World War 2, when they supplied watches to the US military, on the Titoni web site.



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I just saw Coraline, the amazing 3D stop-motion puppetry movie, and really enjoyed it. Seeing this reminded me how much I enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s work.



So, I decided to follow him on Twitter.

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