Nowaday there are so many social network that one could be member of: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MSN Space, etc. Being in mainland China, Facebook and Twitter are not accessible, and I’m not going to make huge effort to cross the wall to access them, not worth the trouble. I’m now online mostly on the Chinese microblogging site weibo.com (新浪微博) under the alias of @CK桑. You’re very welcomed to follow me if you happen to be on there and can read Chinese as well. I will check my 4 email accounts on a daily basis, chekim.com, Hotmail, Gmail; and my work email too; long with cell phone and SMS, all that should keep be very well connected to the virtual world.

I do see some comments on some of my posts here, it’s all well appreciated. I wish you all a happy life and wonderful time with your family!

CK

Overreaching is a deadly sin for any empire in human history, starting with the Roman empire, the Byzantine empire, the Mongol empire, the Ottoman empire, the Spanish empire, the British empire, the Napolean empire, the Russian empire, and now the American empire with its 800 military bases around the world. In most cases the empire’s military and financial strength was not challenged by any external entity, but it ended up collapsing on its own weight.

A half-million army strong, all highly educated of various technical qualifications, healthy and energetic, disciplined and patriotic, creative and determined; sent to a far away desert to fight for the empire’s desire to dominate a region where it is admittedly unpopular and unwelcomed. Behind this half-million army there is a colossal crew of highly skilled (and well paid) support personels and private contractors of all sort, working at home and abroad, to handle the logistic of a remote war. It is estimated that for every soldier sent to the war zone there are two support personels behind him, so we’re talking of effectively one million additional head counts of highly skilled and well paid workers just for this war!

Just imagine for a moment, rather than being the most efficient killing machine of all time, if we could deploy this 1.5 million active people (roughly the size of a nordic country) to create value for America, such as building infrastructure, schools, hospitals and industries, how that would have been better? Imagine if deploying them to research on curing diseases instead of deadly explosive chemistry, research on green technology instead of blowing up the world, create high-tech gadget instead of high-tech weapon, give a hand to civilians instead of pointing guns at them? Not only America could greatly benefit from them to remain the world superpower for another century, the world could also benefit from a prosperous America!

Instead of spending over $3 trillions on the war on terror, if that could be spent on creating value to humanity, these people could stay in their country, with their families, and build a much stronger country. Wasn’t that the purpose of fighting terrorism anyway? Why is every empire so eager to “make” an enemy of its own and fighting that so relentlessly to a point of self-destruction?

Unfortunately, the empire is sticking on its own agenda………………………………………………………….

The first remarkable event happenned during the Tuesday diner at Shu Zhe Hui restaurant. We were 15 people sitting around a huge round table in a private room. The atmosphere was good, we all know each other pretty well, especially the respected DE who has been with us for a week now. At one point, she launched a challenge to all of us. Each person would say one thing (a word or short expression) that characterises leadership, then the next person had to repeat the previous words before providing his/her word, and so on.

At first I worried that we would not find enough words by the time we finish half the table, but then it just went on and on. Eventually everybody had found at least one thing to say about leadership, and there were still words that we hadn’t use. So, here’s what we said about what a leader should have or should be:

• Influence
• Do the right thing
• Change agent
• Visionary
• Special
• Passionate
• Inspire
• Take ownership
• Lead by example
• Optimistic
• Confidence
• Mentor/coach
• Trust
• Risk taking
• Empathy
• Forgiving
• Honesty
• Perseverance

To our surprise, it takes quite a lot to be a good leader, to be a leader that is respected and sought after. And I’m sure that are obvious things that we’ve not thought of.

At Thursday and Friday, I had a classroom training on Technical Leadership Today (TLTP), given by a mature (mentally) and passionate instructor. He skipped most of the official content to focus on the most important material, which I found truely impressive because he mastered the content very well, and tailored it based on the duration of the class and the level of the students. Beside the important lessons that we learned from his experience sharing and the interesting stories shared by classmates, I was really enlightened by two statements from the instructor:

• Excellence is not an act but a habit.
  This is a quote from Aristotle that I’ve not heard before.
• Draw a horizontal line for your IQ level and a vertical line for your passion, your life achievement is the triangle surface covered by joining the horizontal and vertical line!
  In other words, your achievement depends as much on your IQ as on how much passion you have. If you only have great IQ without passion for anything, you won’t go very far in life. If you have average IQ but lots of passion for what you do, you can probably achieve much more than the high IQ guy!

The first statement is logical to me, but hearing it in such a short straightforward sentence make it really strong. The second statement is new to me, I always felt that my IQ is just average so I can’t achieve anything great, but with this enlightening concept inspires and encourages me a great deal, now I know that passion can overcome some of my IQ limite. Yeah! 

Unsurprisingly, the majority of the CIO/CTO in the list are working for american companies (these are american magazines after all), the usual recipients are from Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Fedex, UPS, JPMorgan, Prudential, NASDAQ, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Shell, 3M, Xerox, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Nike, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc, etc, etc. Those are the world wide recognized innovative companies where their CIO excel in transforming business practices and processes by leveraging cutting edge information technologies. That is what I’m used to read for the past decade and a half, until now…

In the latest Global CIO 50 survey of InformationWeek, I was extremely surprised and delighted to see that there are 7 Chinese CIO in the list, I don’t remember seeing that many in any previous list. Seven mainland Chineses companies have made it into the list of Global CIO 50, that is something worth celebrating, let me explain…

The 7 CIO are:

First of all, the fact Chinese companies show up in the list of an american mainstream IT publication is quite significant to me. Many Chinese companies have been listed on NASDAQ for years without showing up on the radar of the average american investors. Now with globalisation a fact of life in every major industry, some well managed and innovative Chinese companies are having exposure on the international arena, not as a “3rd-world-country-companies picking up on modern technologies” headline, but as an equal peer with the very best of the world like Boeing and Rolls-Royce and IBM! This is one giant step toward the day where people don’t just think of the lead paint in toys and milk scandal when they think about Chinese companies.

Secondly, the fact that some Chinese companies can stand on this list will bring more attention to other companies that might have similar spectacular achievement to be recognized and learned from. Just imagine the gargantuan size of the Bank of China, ICBC, China Telecom, Chinese health care system, social security system, etc. Running those organizations’ IT department certainly have many challenges of their own that no other peer companies in the world could imagine and handle.

More over, these Chinese CIO not only use IT to support the business operation, but they manage to squeeze much competitive advantages out of it. I’m sure many other CIO are doing that too, this is just the beginning of a phase where Chinese companies are forced to become competitive globally to survive, forced to evolve and innovate continuously, just as their counterparts in the West.

I think that, by treating Chinese innovative companies as equal of organizations in the developed world, we can encourage them to try harder to bring their IT usage and infrastructure inline with the developed world, and that means that IBM will have a huge opportunity to capitalize on such movement, and so do I!

You can download the report in PDF here.

I do have dream of course, but it’s always the same one year over year. It’s the universal dream of improving my life situation, which includes career, finance, life style, knowledge and family, without any particular order. For 2009 I think career and finance are priority, not that the rest are not important but one must have a relatively narrow goal in order to focus effort on it.

My choice of relocating to Shanghai at 2007 remains a good one despite all the events of the past years, and as far as I can see, will remain a good choice for my personal and career growth. I just hope that my family at Canada have a peaceful time so that I won’t have to worry about them, which is — thanks God — so far so good. Without any doubt, I want to settle down at Shanghai as my permanent location from now on, if everything goes as expected.

As I grow older, I realize that every gain in life comes from persistence, perseverance and determination. To earn love and care from someone, you have to consistently, day after day, offer love and take care of that person. To earn trust and intimacy with friends, you have to consistently keep up the promises and spend quality time with them, day after day. To make career advancement, you have to consistently keep up the good work, go beyond your responsibilities,  continuously learn and share your knowledge, be patient, open and tolerant, day after day. To earn good health, you have to consistently keep a good regime of diet, balance work and life, day after day. There’s no easy gain in life, only some people do it painfully while others just do it naturally not feeling any pain at all.

The ox year is such a natural symbol of perseverance, giving without complaning. There couldn’t be a better zodiac sign for this recovering year. Be persistent in your daily life doing good things, persevere when facing challenges, and be firm and determine toward your long term goal. I’m talking to myself of course!

These photos were taking at my residence building and Jing’an Temple. Click to see the album Capturing 2009 Spring Festival at F/1.4.

• By 2010, India will surpass Japan in purchasing power parity
• By 2020, China will surpass the U.S. in purchasing power parity
• By 2041, India’s economy will be twice as big as Japan’s
• By 2041, China will become the world’s largest economy
• Asians comprise only 5% of the U.S population, but …
  • 15% of the PhDs in engineering
  • 13% of PhDs in computer science
  • 13.3% of BS degrees in engineering
• 2002: Asian-Americans owned 27% of all minority-owned business in U.S. (1.1 million businesses, 49% of the total gross receipts, 46% of MBE employees)
• 2006: Median Asian-American household income over $64,200 (14K higher than any other race group)
• 1990 – 2011: Asian-American purchasing power will grow 434%

Based on these predictions from UN, I really feel good to have moved to Shanghai at this period. By the time of my retirement, Asia will be like North America, and vice-versa!

(Updated 2009/1/23) Oh! I forgot to mention about Canada… With an aging population of roughly 1/10th of USA’s, but owning a reasonably stable huge territory, we can only imagine that every Canadian (including me) will get a bigger share of the natural resources as the population is shrinking, and therefore automatically become richer and richer (ye!). Unfortunately, all the extra wealth are being used to feed a flock of incompetent and greedy politicians, including our beautiful but useless Governor General Michaëlle Jean, a troop of losers debating about pointless ideologies and fighting for power all year long!

For all my proudness that Canada is still an important member of the G8 as well as NATO, I can only imagine that, by the middle of the century, Canada’s role in world will be as important as Spain’s role in Asia… virtually nothing!

While the world has learned the concept of United We Stand long before modern history, a quarter of Canadian population, namely most of the Quebekers, have been fighting to separate this tiny population into smaller chunks, singing Divided We Win for the past four hundred years. This will lead to the inevitable loop of even greater division if they ever win their cause one day. Once all the Quebekers are grouped into one single entity (or nation as they prefer to call themselves), they will find other characteristics to divide themselves even further, such as by birth region, family name, ancestor ethnic, language accent, etc, until they finally find themselves in an entity so narrow that only one person belongs to it. And even that, they might continue to divide a single individual into something like “my body belongs to this entity, my mind belongs to that entity, but my past belongs to another entity” and so on.

For all the wonderful intellectuals that have populated Quebec for the past centuries, they should have learned that only diversity can flourish, only multi-ethnic states can last. More than 80% of the single-ethnic countries in the world will disappear within this century. This includes several small Nordic countries, and most tribes in Africa. They will disappear along with their languages, cultures, religions, heros and history. It’s so sad to see how vigourously an entire people seek such a dead end termination while they could embrace a multi-cultural continent with openness and humbleness. Vive le Québec libre!

UK’s Northern Rock was the first major victim last year, then Countrywide Financial, then Bear Sterns and IndyMac, then last week Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae, now Lehman Brother and Merrill Lynch. AIG and Washington Mutual are rumored to be the next ones. After this domino effect of bailing out and bankruptcies, I wonder how many financial institutions remain alive as the pillar of american financial infrastructure after this crisis recovers? How many financial management text books will have to be rewritten? How many economic theories will be ridiculized? And most importantly how many years should Alan Greenspan be sent to the core of a volcano to redeem for his suicidal monetary policy during his two decades of tenure as chairman of the US Federal Reserves? Thanks to his money printing machine at the Fed, everyone at North America seemed richer during the past two decades but in reality felt poorer and poorer with money value depreciation and price inflation.

No one has the power to stop the Dollar printing machine at the Fed, but at this rate for another decade, the one dollar bill’s value be worth less than the cost of that piece of paper plus the ink on it, like a 1c coin’s buying power is less than the cost to make that coin. And because of this credit crisis, my gold stock is now worth less than half of its value at the beginning of the year! Thanks Alan! Wish you a good time in Hell.

The only positive outcome of this financial elephants going belly up is that oil price is finally getting down to a more reasonable price below 100$ a barrel.

China is in the midst of the same evolution as Japanese in their late 70s. The image of “Made in China” still haunt Chinese brands, especially the rare high-end brands such as fashion and cars. Nationalist feeling has never been so high as it is today, some brave designers and photographers are exploiting this trend to promote their creations in the local maket, using local models with 100% local taste, while adopting a western looks.

I’m hoping that no too far in the future, maybe the next generation kids would be surprise and ask their parents why did people laughed at “Made in China” before?

Why do you hate us so much, we asked???. ‘No’, you answered, ‘we don’t hate you’…… We don’t hate you either, but, do you understand us? ‘Of course we do’, you said……, Then why you have AFP, CNN and BBC’s.. .???……… What do you really want from us…???……….. Think hard first, then answer……… Because you think Olympic Games is ‘Ours Last Chance to free those Chinese!’…… Enough is Enough, Enough Hypocrisy for This One World……

We want One World, One Dream, and Peace on Earth……. This Big Blue Earth is Big Enough for all of us!!!………

By Duo-Liang Lin, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Physics University at Buffalo State University of New York

Update: I finally found out that this piece of art “Discussion with Dante” was jointly paint by Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi and Zhang Anjun. 油画《与但丁讨论神曲》是著名油画家戴都都、李铁子、张安君新近创作的巨作。

Make sure you view these 2 pictures in full size, by clicking on the arrow at bottom right of it. First picture is full size 2600×1127 pixels (601KB).

This one has a grid on it to help associate with table cells below, full size is 1400×664 pixels (498KB).

Here’s how to play:

1. Click here to see the table of names
2. For each cell on the grid photo, look at the corresponding table rows and see if there are unidentifed people that you might know
3. Leave a comment indicating the name of the person, a native name if applicable, a description and the cell number where that person is found.

I’ll update the table using your feedbacks. Please also help me identify the author of the photo, I’d love to see the high resolution version of it. Thank you very much for participating!

Thanks for all the comments… Last updated at 2008/04/18.

Among the tour members there are campers and amateur photographers. The campers are supposed to walk all day long across mountains to admire more raw landscape, while the photographers, including myself and two colleagues, would take small bus to cross the mountains, thus leaving more time and energy to take photos. At night, the campers would — naturally — camp somewhere in the village while we’ll sleep in some farmers’ houses. We had breakfast and diner at the farmers’ houses as well. Wuyuan is usually very humid, especially during this period of the year. I rarely see a photo rapeseed flowers in sunny day here. Everybody literary brings umbrella or rain suit.

Ancien villages

Wuyuan is not only a unique place with huge rapeseed flowers landscape, but its beauty is greatly enhanced by the presence of many small villages embedded inside the rapeseed fields. This adds a great deal of punch when viewed from far away or from a high vantage. Most of those ancien villages were built amost a thousand years ago, based on the Hui architecture [徽派建筑]. While the bigger houses are now built on modern architecture (or the lack of one), they still maintain the grayish wall and black tiles, so viewed from far, they blended in quite nicely.

Life in those villages is generally very backward, no air conditioning, no hot water, no flushable toilet. If the electricity lines and TV antennas are taken away, those villages would look like how they were 500 hundreds years ago! Many villagers still wash their clothes at the small river, and wash their foods at the same river. I have no doubt that drinking water also comes from there directly. Some farmers still keep the toilet remains for using as fertilizer……. This is not my first time travelling to rural and poorer regions, but seeing it still make me feel uncomfortable, or maybe I don’t see it often enough.

Chinese tourists

The tourism industry in China is in booming period these days. Most of the white colar workers can now afford bus, train and flight tickets to the remotest region of China. Since those remote and backward regions are still very poor, the cost of staying there is very low and therefore making them very affordable at the same time very refreshing to citizen (people living in big cities). On one hand this is good for the poor regions, to have tourist business and bring new construction into the area. On the other hand, as soon as these places become popular, rapid development quickly destroys the authentic rural atmosphere while villagers also adopt modern lifestyle comfort and fashion. Suddenly you see electricity poles and lines everywhere, TV dishes and sun panel heater on roofs, snack garbages everywhere, and worst of all, a flood of Chinese tourists that destroy everything on their way, for their love of taking photos of themselves on or in the main attractions. Many of them won’t think for a second when stepping in the flower field or standing on the stone, if that’s the main attraction that they’re coming for.

For example, the village of Xiaoqi [晓起] has convenient highway and bus station, so now it’s packed with farmer-style restaurants as well as big commercial restaurants and hotels. The old village is so packed of tourists that you wouldn’t believe you’re in a remote village, you can’t see anything but heads when visiting the ancien houses (kinda like in Zhou Zhuang). 30km away, a small village called Qingyuan [庆源] still has no convenient road to reach it, so it still maintains part of its calm atmosphere and charm, but that’s about to end next year when they’ll complete the road that allow tour buses to flood it with thousands of tourists everyday! By that time, farmers will give away farming and get on the tourist business and this place’s fame will be over forever!

Sometime I wonder if we shouldn’t make a beautiful place popular as that certainly will destroy it…

Click here to see the whole album.

Tokyo view from Cerulean Tower - We can see the Tokyo Tower at far left.

Tokyo view from Cerulean Tower - Quite messy actually

We went to an isakaya [居酒屋] that night with a dozen friends of Desmond, at Shibuya area naturally, and later to a pub at the corner. Around 1:30am I was so drunk that I could barely walk back to the hotel room by myself. The next morning (it was more like noon) I heard that the other guys came to our room for sleeping until early morning, but I had no idea about that… Anyway, it was nice to know all those guys and gals. I hope they’ll come to visit Shanghai very soon.

After checked out, we had a ramen at [博多天神] and went to visit the Meiji Shrine [明治神宫]. For those who don’t know it, a japanese shrine is a place for meditation and prayer, just like a church or a temple, but it doesn’t have any god figure or any human symbol, it’s just a quiet place to pray, zen style normally. At new year eve people would go to their favorite shrine to pray, and bring back an arrow distributed by the shrine, if one can be ahead of the pack to get it.

Meiji Shrine	Meiji Shrine	Meiji Shrine
Meiji Shrine	Meiji Shrine	Meiji Shrine
Meiji Shrine	Meiji Shrine	Meiji Shrine

At evening we drove to Moichi’s home at Sayama [狭山] and stayed one night there. We were greeted by a very warmhearted and welcoming family that is The Tanakas. We were served delicious japanese foods, great wines and excellent snacks such as fried grasshoppers which is perfect with cold beer or whiskey! For the first time in my life, I had a chance to taste a bottle of Opus One, probably the best California wine out there. In addition, I also had a rare chance to taste one of the best shojiu [烧酒] that money can’t buy, Hanatare, unless you know someone in the company. Around the table, we had great and lengthy conversation with Moichi, his father and his brother-in-law (the full-time drinker and part-time surgeon). It was all interesting to learn each other’s culture and perspective.

Diner at Moichi's home

Hey watch out! I'm holding a magnum bottle of Opus One, 2000.

I'm holding a bottle of Hanatare, one of the best shojiu out there.

New Year Eve

At the night of 31st December, Desmond was so exhausted (after 4 nights of alcohol) that he returned to sleep at 8pm after our diner at Daidaiya [橙家], at Shinjuku [新宿]. So I went for a walk at the Meiji Shrine on my own. I heard that this place would be packed by huge crowd around midnight, that it would take 4 hours to make a round and get out, therefore I wanted to be there early to avoid the trap. There were indeed a scary atmosphere as one can see large number of policemen standing at every corner. I can easily count a hundred of them, visibly standing outside. I don’t know how many more are sitting inside. So I made a quick round and came out, within 30 minutes.

Meiji Shrine at new year eve

Meiji Shrine at new year eve

Meiji Shrine at new year eve

From there I took the JR train to Shibuya to see some street action. Expectedly, at midnight people go crazy, they all come outside for the countdown, hug each others (between strangers), jump around like if they just win lottery, and holding a bottle of alcohol. I can smell alcohol everywhere on the street, whereas japanese street is usually very clean and smell-less. But then, 1/3 of the crazy people are tourists, so that might explain the liberal behavior! It was a rather lonely new year eve for me, my phone didn’t work at Tokyo so I couldn’t phone anyone to wish happy new year, neither could I receive any wish… But it was a special moment standing beside those crazy youngsters at Shibuya, seeing all the policemen and special armed force.

Shibuya streets at new year eve	Shibuya streets at new year eve	Shibuya streets at new year eve
Shibuya streets at new year eve	Shibuya streets at new year eve	Shibuya streets at new year eve
Shibuya streets at new year eve	Shibuya streets at new year eve	Shibuya streets at new year eve
Shibuya streets at new year eve	Shibuya streets at new year eve	Shibuya streets at new year eve

Golfing at 1st January

The next day we went to have a game of golf at Showanomori Golf Course, at the west suburb of Tokyo. On the highway I can see the Mount Fuji [富士山] with its signature white-top look. Everyone we talked to were surprised that a golf course was opened at the 1st of January. We fully expected that nobody would be there to play with us, but surprisingly, there are full of cars in the parking lot! Nevertheless, we had a funny twosome game, without caddy. It’s interesting that they build a monorail system to carry the golf bags all around the holes, with a remote control to advance or stop it. So we just walk around hand free, stop the train at anytime to pick a club. (see photo at page bottom) This is perfect for a small golf course where you don’t want 8 people to stand on the field.

After the game, it was a stressful drive back to Tokyo as we had to rush for returning the car before the rental company close for the day. Despite the very complex but stupid and user-unfriendly Panasonic navigation system that insisted on splitting the screen even though we only want the most basic functionality, despite we ran out of gaz and Desmond’s cell phone has only 4 minutes of talk time left and we need to call the hotel asking for information, we actually made it back to the car rental place 5 minutes before they close for the day! I keep reminding myself that I won’t ever drive in Tokyo myself, unless I can get an English-speaking navigation system. Tokyo streets are small and curving, highways split all the time, in such a way that is hard to tell which side is the main direction, and there’s toll booths at about every 15 minutes of driving!

That night we stay at Chisun Grand Hotel at Akasaka [赤坂], went to an isakaya around the corner with Desmond and Yume. We didn’t drink so much, 2 bottles of shojiu for 3 guys, but at the end I wasn’t feeling good… The next morning Desmond had to fly to Hong Kong very early. I woke up quite late, took a long shower, didn’t quite recover yet. Then around noon I checked out and went to Akihabara [秋叶原] to see show electronic shops. I got lost into a huge gadget mall of 8 stories. It’s really amazing to see the modern gadgets available in the Japanese market that you can’t buy anywhere else, smaller, bigger, slicker, more colorful than what is sold in China or USA. For example: the >100″ flat TV from JVC, Sharp and Toshiba; the 3mm thin 11″ OLED TV XEL-1 from Sony; the Sony mp3 Walkman that you can use to watch TV; the newest digital SLR cameras from Nikon, Canon, Sony; all the big gun Canon lens; about 500 choices of earphones; etc. I only had 2 hours to spend there, so only visited 2 floors. After that, I rushed back to the hotel to catch the next Narita airport limousine bus, and that concluded my new year trip!

Tokyo Metro

After running around the city few times by myself, I finally figure out how to go from the airport to Tokyo, inside Tokyo and back to the airport. Tokyo has very well developed subway and railway system. The subway system is operated by Tokyo Metro, and railway by JR. They are very similar in the perspective of a passenger, so I was confused many times thinking that I was in a metro station while I was in fact in a JR station. They don’t share the station, but are close to each other sometime. Together they make very good coverage of Tokyo, as you can see in the map below.

Tokyo Metro and JR map

Tokyo Metro and JR map

The biggest problem, I think, is the transition from kanji [汉字] to romanized name. Maps given by hotels to tourists have station names in roman characters, while the map at the station’s ticket machine is only in kanji, and there is no way to relate them. Normally we could look at the line color and figure it out, but there are so many lines, and in some maps there are also JR lines in the mix, so it’s like a puzzle to tourists… Strangely, inside the station, all the maps have both languages and very good letter+number indicators for every station. For example S01 is Shinjuku, G01 is Shibuya and H08 is Ginza station, so that’s no mistake. But at the ticket machine, they don’t put such updated map, just the simple map with kanji only! Anyway, now that I know it, I’m no longer scare to travel around Tokyo, very conveniently indeed.

Six hours later, I was back to Shanghai home, sweet home!

I’ve been using WordPress on my website for almost two years now, never looked back. Prior to this, I used blogger.com, which was nice and easy, but didn’t provide the total control as hosting my own site. Beside posting regularly, I’ve been improving my wordpress installation lately, to a point that I feel quite satisfied now. So for my own record and those interested, here’s my current WordPress configuration.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.3.x last month, from 2.0.x. It wasn’t exactly straightforward but I didn’t run into big trouble, after throughoutly reading the upgrade doc. The theme that I’ve been using all the time is ChinaRed, made by BigHead. I like the very Chinese color combination, with a clean banner, simple 2-column style and foremost the beautiful wallpaper.

I’m using the following plugins:

• Askimet: to automatically tag potential spam comments, so far it has 100% hit for me
• pb-embedFlash: to embed flash content in posts, including YouTube
• WP-Highslide: to embed popup images display in posts, this makes it easier for viewer to see large images without leaving the actual page
• Quality Quotes: to automatically fetch famous quotes from thequotes.com, and randomly display each one on the main page
• Google XML Sitemaps: to automatically generate sitemap.xml everytime content of this blog is modified, and also notify major search engines about the changes (Google, MSN, Yahoo, ask.com)
• StatPress: to dynamically generate viewers statistics

There is no shortage of open-source blog tools in the market, but I still feel that WordPress is the best choice out there, in terms of having a very active developers community, tons of plugins available, user-friendliness, simplicity and stability.

I still remember 8 years ago when I registered my domain chekim.com. At that time I was temporarily living at Fort Lee (NJ), working as a consultant at Roseland (NJ). I wanted to put my resume on the website but it wasn’t pretty… Then I started putting some photos on it, taken with my Sony DSC-F505 digital camera. Later on I had my company e.consulting‘s website on it, built with NetObjects Fusion. At 2004, I installed the open-source Gallery 1.3 that I keep using until a month ago where I migrated to Gallery 2.2. I am now very happy with WordPress and Gallery. I never say enough of thanks to those brave developers working on their own leisure time. OPEN-SOURCE ROCKS!

Two years after I started blogging seriously, I found my love of writing just grow stronger, almost as much as my passion for photography. Meanwhile, I also become more sensitive about society, economy and world politics, and I read a lot about those subjects. I think this is good signs of mental maturity.

Actually I don’t know who is reading my blog, if anyone, except myself. Hopefully my newly installed plugin StatPress could shed some light on it. [To readers] If you’re reading up to this point, please make a comment to this post as a feedback. Thanks!

Journey to the dark side – Tom Engelhardt

See more of these at TomDispatch and The American Empire Project sites.

And don’t forget to buy some imperial toys if you want to celebrate it.

Alors voilà mon premier noël en Chine, sans neige ni Père Noël, sans sapin ni dinde, sans chant ni messe, sans bonhomme de neige ni crèche, sans bottes ni mitaines, sans course aux cadeaux ni Boxing Day, sans don de charité ni opération Nez Rouge, sans famille ni amis (un peu mélancolique mais pas si pire en réalité). Heureusement que je travaille pour IBM, j’aurai quand même congé le 25 décembre alors que la plupart d’ici n’en auront pas. Il n’y a pas vraiment de célébration à part dans les centres d’achat ou les rues piétonières touristiques.

C’est devenu presqu’une tradition depuis les cinq dernières années, nous aurions organisé un party chez moi entre noël et le jour de l’an, avec une vingtaine ou trentaine d’amis proches pour une soirée de bouffe et de cocktail et d’échange de cadeaux, et d’abus d’alcool quoique cela sembre diminuer considérablement année après année, au fur et à mesure que chaque individu acquière davantage de sagesse en vieillissant ou plutôt après avoir juré sincèrement de ne plus vouloir avoir de gueule de bois pendant presqu’une semaine! Bref, c’est une mauvaise chose pour la SAQ, mais une bonne cause pour la SAAQ, et surtout, ça démontre que le temps de caler un pichet de quatre litres de bière en trente minutes au Peel Pub est longtemps passé pour toute notre gain… Bravo les amis, let’s move on!

Il faut noter qu’il y a eu de changements majeurs au cours de l’année, à commencer par mon absence, et celle de Thuy Ni aussi; pis le chef de notre clan Thuy Hao est devenue chef de famille de facto, ayant plus de responsabilité civile à sa charge; deux mariages au mois d’octobre (Kalun & Duc Le, Sui Men & Tam Tam) ont diminué de quatre célibataires dans le clan, avec trois autres mariages l’année prochaine (Heng & Mei Mei, Han & Rainbow, Emilie & Nghia), réduisant le nombre de célibataire dans notre clan à…. moi-même et Mary, quoique nous ne sommes plus considérés célibataires depuis bien des années déjà; pis cher Nyvoath est devenu papa la 2è fois maintenant, ainsi que My Ngo et Chi Quan aussi probablement; pis Feng et Thinh Thanh doivent être trop occupés à prendre soin de leur bébés respectives pour participer aux activités communautaires (oops, Hoa & Seng aussi); et Doré, je suppose il faut qu’il décide s’il va porter le bébé dans sa ventre, si oui il serait papa aussi bientôt, même chose à Kyle; et je suis sûr que d’autres bonnes nouvelles m’échappent depuis mon absence.

Donc, tout ça fait que notre party traditionnel risque de devenir un party de nouveaux couples et de nouveaux parents où les sujets de discussion tourneraient autour de l’achat de maison et de couche de bébé… Ça va être quelques années difficiles pour l’unité du clan, mais j’ai confiant que notre fidèle chef va nous mener à travers cette brève tempête de vie, fastidieuse mais nécessaire, à commencer par se trouver un nouveau local pour les partys annuels, idéalement avec une chambre à côté pour contenir une douzaine de pouponnières et ayant une infirmière expérimentée sur place… Quant à moi, je vous rejoindrai après la tempête, à Montréal.

Alors sur ce, chères amies et chers amis, chères camarades et chers camarades, chères collègues et chers collègues, je vous souhaite un joyeux noël rempli d’amour et de tendresse, une bonne année 2008 remplie de sourire et de santé, et de bonne fortune en tout temps, évidemment.

En terminant, afin de compenser pour notre absence prolongée, je vous offre cette petite danse très personnalisée à deux, et celle-ci où je danse seul. Amusez-vous bien et souriez en masse!

“Most strategies are built on specific beliefs about the future.” writes Mr. Raynor in his book. “Unfortunately, the future is deeply unpredictable. Worse, the requirements of breakthrough success demand implementing strategy in ways that make it impossible to adapt should the future not turn out as expected. The result is the Strategy Paradox: strategies with the geatest possibility of success also have the greatest possibility of failure. Resolving this paradox requires a new way of thinking about strategy and uncertainty.”

He rightly points out that “the best performing firms often have more in common with humiliated bankrupts than with companies that have managed merely to survive. In fact, the very traits we have come to identify as determinants of high achievement are also the ingredients of total collapse. And so it turns out that, behaviorally at least, the opposite of success is not failure, but mediocrity.”

This observation isn’t new, there’ve been great amount of publications that analyze successful and failing organizations. I frequently hear in Chinese movies that “there’s fine line between success and failure” [胜败只差一线]. The main content of this book provides some methodologies and tools to guide senior managers to sail thru the imperative of making a strategy commitment while keeping all the options open and reacting flexibly should the premise of the adopted strategy wasn’t inline with the actual market condition. That whole teaching doesn’t apply to my work obviously, but the observation is applicable to all things in life.

I almost felt like being pointed the finger at when reading this at the last page: “Realizing this, most managers (people) shy away from the bold commitments that success seems to demand, choosing instead timid, unremarkable strategies, sacrificing any chance at greatness for a better chance at mere survival.”

I feel like I’m in survival mode in China, personally and professionally. This prompts me to think of my new year resolution, what would I want to accomplish during 2008. I want to make bold steps, but I’m afraid to disturb my little confortable life…

It is understandable that the English language, by being the world’s most used language and also being mostly used by non native English speakers, could become insanely distort in general usage, due to its immense popularity. But more surprisingly, as the Plain English Compaign has shown years over years, the people who speak gobbledygook and make baffled comments include as much native English speakers as non natives. To bring awareness to the public on English quality and clarity, the Plain English Compaign came up with an excellent idea, they give awards to public figures, of mostly English speaking countries, including politiciens, journalists, artists, actors, CEO, etc. One of those award is the Foot in Mouth award, to honor those who make baffled and confusing comments in public.

So here we go with the award of 2007. The award goes to Steve McClaren, the lately-sacked coach of England soccer team failing to qualify his team for Euro 2008. He was quoted at Radio 5 Live with:
“He is inexperienced, but he’s experienced in terms of what he’s been through.”

The runner-up for this year is our dear leader the CEO of the American Empire, President George W. Bush, who is well known for making confusing or totally meaningless comments in public. So here’s his quote:
“All I can tell you is that when the governor calls, I answer his phone.”

For your entertainment, I’m going to quote the winners of other years as well, so to illustrate that even English native speakers speak broken English…

2006 -  Top model Naomi Campbell:
“I love England, especially the food. There’s nothing I like more than a lovely bowl of pasta.”

2005 – Rt Hon Rhodri Morgan AM, the First Minister for Wales:
“The only thing which isn’t up for grabs is no change and I think it’s fair to say, it’s all to play for, except for no change.”

2004 – Boris Johnson MP for his remark on the BBC news quiz programme, ‘Have I Got News For You’:
“I could not fail to disagree with you less.” (so, yes or no?)

2003 – Former Secretary of Defense² Donald Rumsfeld:
“… because as we know, there are known knowns; … We also know there are known unknowns; … But there are also unknown unknowns…”
(I just love it, maybe this is going to be Rumsfeld’s only legacy?)

2002 – Actor Richard Gere who said:
“I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake, I’d think ‘No, actually I am a giraffe.’ ”

2001 – Artist Tracey Emin, who explained:
“When it comes to words I have a uniqueness that I find almost impossible in terms of art – and it’s my words that actually make my art quite unique.”

2000 – Hollywood start Alicia Silverstone:
“I think that [the film] ‘Clueless’ was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it’s true lightness.”

Footnotes:

1. Since the province of Québec is not qualified as a country, the word nation fit in perfectly, and we have the Canadian constitution to prove that!
2. If you feel the need to ask me “which country’s secretary of defense”, I would say, he is undoubtly the “secretary of defense of the world”!

I usually consider myself part of the generation that embraces technology and Internet, I do everything with a computer whenever it is appropriate and provides higher productivity. I no longer listen to CD, only MP3. I have no audio tape or video tape player at home, only DVD player. But laptop and IM are things that make me feel different from the 80′s generation, or I would call them the WiFi generation.

Everytime I attend a meeting at work, at least 1/3 of the people carry their laptops with them, and for the whole duration of the meeting they seem to stare only at the laptop screen, rarely looking at the speaker or the projection screen. It really irritates me when I am the presenter, sometime I tell people not to bring their laptop or don’t bother coming. When I’m not presenting, I observe their behavior, and it’s quite funny, I might have to interview them one day…

So here goes my observation. Many of them don’t seem to be involved at all in the subject that people are discussing in the meeting room, they simply read their news on the web, read their emails, half of them IM with friends intensively, some continue to do their normal work. I feel like their thought is “I’m joining this meeting because you invited me, not because I’m interested in the discussion”, or “your subject is so un-relevant to me that I’d rather continue my work or chat with friends or read gossip on the web”. Many time I wonder if they ever understand and appreciate the concept of face-to-face meeting, or they’d rather avoid it.

I also observe that those who don’t carry a laptop to meetings are either a) the contractors that were not assigned a laptop at work, and b) the older employees who have started working before laptop and WiFi were ubiquitous. I have no doubt that the first group would do the same if they were assigned a laptop with WiFi connectivity.

Not so long ago, most employees use a desktop computer at work, only sales people and senior managers use laptop. In conference room there is only a network line connection for the presenter, some rooms have none, and projector was very rare. Every attendant would go there with a pen and notepad, and the presenter usually handed out prints of the content. I think during that time people pay more attention to the discussion than today, everyone participated or listened. Now it’s hard to get everyone to listen at the presenter, let alone looking at him or her.

The decision makers of baby-boomer generation would flight for hours to meet their business partners at the other side of the world, just to have a handshake and to see them in person. The X generation people would write emails and make phone calls to their customers, and video-conference with colleagues, now the WiFi generation won’t even listen or look at their colleagues! I wonder if these youngsters will grow up appreciating direct human contact, or if the world will evolve into a more virtual contact model. Maybe our next office building won’t have meeting room at all. Hell, I must rush to buy some virtual land in Second Life, and some Linden Lab stocks too!

At a time it was difficult to explain guanxi to westerns, with all the social implications that it encompasses. But no longer now, a simple Google search of guanxi returns 667,000 hits! There are countless of websites and books and PR companies who make very exhaustive explanation of this critical concept. From their view, if you’re starting a business in China and you have to decide whether you’re going to take a MBA course or a course on establishing guanxi, the later option will certainly yield much higher return on your investment, as simple as that!

Wikipedia explains guanxi as “describes a personal connection between two people in which one is able to prevail upon another to perform a favor or service, or be prevailed upon. The two people need not be of equal social status. Guanxi can also be used to describe be a network of contacts, which an individual can call upon when something needs to be done, and through which he or she can exert influence on behalf of another [...]“.

A well known Chinese sociologist put this as “关系，在社会学意义上，是中国社会中特有的一种人际互动形式，是费孝通差序格局理论中的重要概念。按照费的解释，在传统中国社会中，“社会关系是逐渐从一个一个人推出去的，是私人联系的增加，社会范围是一根根私人联系所构成的网络”.

Those are accurate but boring definitions. I prefer this one from Catherine Jiang of Asia Times: “Guanxi is a term for mutual back-scratching or reciprocal personal or business connections”. The expression mutual back-scratching [互相擦背 = 擦鞋 = 擦屁股 = 拍马屁] might be very cantonese, but I think it truely reflects my feeling about this concept. It also reminds me of monkeys in the zoos, they do mutual back-scratching all the time, or sometime they help each others seeking for louse. Maybe we’ve inherit that from them…

Here again, a photo is worth thousand words!

For example Paris Hilton gets free publicity everywhere she shows up, or plans to show up, just like recently she plans to stay at the Hyatt hotel for her first visit to Shanghai instead of her own family’s Hilton chain, then all the local newspaper talk about it at page one. Tiger Woods gets the same attention from media as well, but he doesn’t bother tell people about his plan. Journalists, especially those without a functional brain, love those icons, they would happily write about their most insignifant events at anyday anytime.

So naturally, when you’re the emperor of the America Empire, you deserve at least the same attentions without doing anything. However, the current emperor is aiming squarely at world domination, nothing less will satisfy him, therefore he deserves way much more attention than anyone else on Earth, alive or death! Beside having his face hung in every federal office building, in uncountable styles of mugs and T-shirts, he also shows up in some comparison between him and a specie of mamal that resemble tremendously to human, for free and without his awareness. Sometime he is also compared to the worst leaders of our time, those monsters who reminded us that humans are still barbarous and evil, deep in our soul.

Artists and creators also devote huge amount of time to worship him. For example I’ve collected some snapshots here.

You can also buy electronic keychain to worship him.

And in case you don’t have enough money to buy the keychain to see the countdown everyday, I’m attaching a flash version of it here, so you simply have to revisit this blog once a day, I guarantee you’ll feel almost as good as having a real keychain.

Heck! All the time that was spent over the past 5 years by American students to hug, kiss, spank, give beer, send gifts, test likeness, each others; if they were sleeping instead, it would have saved America tremendous amoung of energy and Internet bandwidth, lower pollution, and most likely increase America’s future competitiveness because those students would have more sleep and therefore in better shape to study the next day! Moreover, if they were reading books or doing research instead of hugging each other online, the world might already have a cure for cancer or AIDS or a better supercomputer to cope with the crazy weather shift.

I enjoy doing stuff online, such as email, blog, IM, share photos, read news, because that is the new way of getting in touch with the world. But when people spend most of their time hugging and kissing and spanking their friends’ friends and write meaningless things on somebody’s wall, I don’t think that contribute so much to the friendship or social relationship in any significant way.

In fact, I think we’re going backward with this thing. To me, Facebook is almost like students throwing scrap paper in the locker-room area, on which short and meaningless messages were written and randomly thrown to their friends’ locker or written on their locker doors… And the worst thing is that they’ve just started to open this to the public, any kids in primary school or high school can waste their precious time on this, and all the employees in work, all the teachers, all the nurses, all the engineers, Oh My God! So much for all the hype about yet-another-priceless-invention of the late Internet era, after YouTube and MySpace.

So, let’s get together and save our little world. Let’s write an open letter to Bush asking him to order Facebook shutdown, let’s ask Al Gore to make a movie about how much this is wasteful, and asking Bill Gates to give up buying Facebook’s stocks! For the sake of our children and America!

I didn’t dare to drive the first day because the driver seat is at the right side in Japan. Why in the world do we need to have both standards? We don’t even have a map of Sapporo, lucky the navigation system in the Toyota Esteem mini-van seems quite sophisticate. And more fortunately, there are quite a large amount of Chinese words [汉字] in Japanese language. In some case we are able to understand a phrase if we know the context, just by reading the scarse Chinese words that we could understand. Many road signs, street names, city names, public signs and instructions have Chinese words that we understand. They might use those words in a slightly different way but it remains in the same context. For example they use the Chinese words 化妆室 (make-up room) to indicate a bathroom, which is understandable. They use 大丈夫 (big guy), meaning no problem, like in you’re big boy, no problem. They use 无料 (no stock) to mean free of charge, see, it’s not so difficult to understand when you’re in the right context.

Again our friend Desmond is quite familiar with Sapporo and Hokkaido as he has come here 5 times already. He can use the navigation system (in Japanese) without reading the words. I would have trouble using it myself, until the last day.

Sapporo

Sapporo

Sapporo

Sapporo

Sapporo

Sapporo is small and quiet city. Its downtown area comprises of ten streets down and across, that’s it! To my surprise, they have a subway system for this nearly 2 millions population city. I guess it’s really convenient for them during Winter, which I heard could be as bad as Winter at Toronto, or worse in mountainous areas. We spent the first day walking around the downtown, again ate like pigs and drunk like cows, several meals a day, sometime 3 meals at night, no kidding!

It must strike every first time tourist as to how polite the average Japaneses are, much more that the gentlemen at UK I bet! In North America people are friendly, in Europe people are snobs (or sophisticate sometime), in China many people are plain inpolite, especially the low end of the population, but in Japan everybody seems to be really polite and nice! I haven’t been bow to so many times in my whole life compare to one week here. I haven’t been said aligato gazaimaseta (thank you – politely) so many time in every single meal or shopping. I guess they must have said many other polite things that I couldn’t understand. At the end of our trip, I was already used to aligato everyone that I meet, and bow my head too…. If I stay a year there, maybe I would be stuck with that habit forever!

I think if there’s something nobody can beat the Japaneses, it would be politeness and hygiene! Every toilet that I’ve seen and used in Japan, in hotel, in restaurant (big or tiny), in public toilet, shopping mall, are all really clean and smell-less. It’s hard to complain about anything in their toilets, every little details are well thought of. You have to be there to really feel this. I wonder how Japaneses can stand it when they travel abroad to other countries, like those south Asia countries that even myself can hardly accept despite my pass experience there. Politeness, on the other hand, is something much easier to get use to. We normally respond in the same way we were treated at first place, that’s universal.

We spent a large part of our second day at Otaru [小樽], a little city 35km north of Sapporo. It looks almost like a tourist city, but actually it is a major port city of Hokkaido. I was surprise to see, on their main street, several excellent bakery and chocolaterie, litterary written in French. Beside this and the traditional glass-ware industry, there isn’t much thing to mention about this city. It was just nice to walk around and have seen it.

Otaru

Otaru

Otaru

Otaru	Otaru
Otaru	Otaru
Otaru	Otaru

The third day was really a special day for me! I started to get used to driving at the right side, and going to the other side of the street when turning right. So I drove, for the first time, at the right. It wasn’t so bad as I thought, I didn’t make any stupid mistake, but I was slower than usual, naturally.

Equally fun is our golf game at the Sapporo International Golf Club, a 27-holes public golf club that is absolutely impeccable and easy to enjoy. The only problem is that no one seemed to speak English there. We had to deal with the lady at the counter by writing numbers and Chinese words. We rent the golf clubs and the shoes. We had a lovely old lady as our caddy, she ride a small motorized cart with our equipments on it, kinda like a sophisticate lawn mower where she can stand on it, so it wasn’t exhausting as being a caddy during a PGA tournment. We enjoy the walk without anything to carry on the shoulder. The weather was perfect, it can’t get any better when you can walk under the sun of noon time without a cap and not feeling any discomfort! It was majestic!

Deeply in my mind, I was really worried that I can’t play a normal game because I have only practiced once since Summer last year… Then we didn’t have enough time after lunch to drive a bit before our tee time. We barely had enough time for 25 balls, and that was enough to bring back a little confidence in myself. So, off we go, following our caddy. She must be an experienced caddy, she can understand the basic golf keywords in English. She takes her job very seriously, following the golf rules rigourously, but without taking away our joy of the game. On a few occasions she suggested me to use a different club that I would have used, and she was right on the spot! Still, the strongest memory of her is how she call nice shot in almost a military order way… And also when a ball looks like going bad, oh… bunka!

And my score? I didn’t write it down… But I was happy with my performance, I did pretty good in the short game, using the rather cheap rental clubs, and I didn’t lose a single ball in the whole game! That’s almost the first time ever happenned to me. And obviously I wasn’t playing hockey, believe me…

Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...

Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...

Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...

The next day we drove (I did) to Jozankei [定山溪], a village of hot spring resorts where we would stay overnight. On our way there, we tour around the sea shore of north west Hokkaido. It was a pleasant experience to see the blue sea and blue sky, although going thru the many narrow tunnels across the mountains could become scary sometime, the 2-way lanes were really narrow and the trucks are big!

Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...	Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...
Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...	Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...
Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...	Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...

Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...

Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...

Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...

Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...	Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...
Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...	Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...
Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...	Somewhere north west of Hokkaido...

Hot spring is one of the healthy way of life of Japaneses, along with healthy foods and excellent hygiene, no wonder they’re ranked second in longevity in the world. This is how it works in a hot spring resort: they only let their hotel customers use the hot spring bath, no outsider. You check in the room, change for the traditional Japanese cloth (yukata). Relax in the hotel, go to the hot spring bath several times a day, about 40 minutes everytime. You would have all the meals in the hotel’s restaurant (included in the package). So, just go there and forget everything, relax. It is nice to do that once in a while, but if we have to stay more than one day, we would probably get bored quickly. This was my first hot spring experience, it was nice. We’ll try another resort next time, definitely!

Jozankei

Jozankei

Jozankei

Jozankei

Jozankei

During our 3 days at Sapporo, we had eaten so many fishes, mostly raw. The best that I can remember was the samma [秋刀鱼], served raw with a bit of gingered rice, it was the most delicious piece of sushi I ever had in my life! Simply melting in the mouth and fabulous taste! We also had toro, saba, bla bla bla. How can I remember all those fish names in such short time?

We also drunk uncountable types of sake [日本酒], sochu [焼酎] and umeshu [梅酒]. The one I can remember most is Otokoyama [男山]. That one is easy to remember, but we also had several other good sochu. Again, how to remember so many names in such short time? Need to drink more often, unfortunately Japanese wines are only good to serve with sushi or sashimi, it won’t fit with Chinese or western foods at all. Nevertheless, we have tried so many good dishes in Japan that we won’t miss sushi at Shanghai for a while.

Our plan is to return to Japan once again, with a tour guide, so that we could visit the attractions and understand something about them (reading book is too long). At least I want to go to the Mount Fuji [富士山], Kyoto [京都] and Osaka [大阪], and revisit Tokyo properly. I think there are many photo subjects there… You know what I mean………………….

Click here to see the whole album.

We spent the first 3 days in Tokyo (東京), and the last 4 days at Hokkaido (北海道) which is the northen island of Japan. In Tokyo we mostly shopped around, ate like a pigs and drunk like a cows, we didn’t really visit the typical tourist attractions like the Meiji Shrine (明治神宫), the Imperial Palace (皇居), the Tokyo Tower or the Mount Fuji (富士山). Instead we visited the shopping area of Harajuku (原宿), Omotesando Hills (表参道), Shibuya (渋谷), Ginza (銀座), Shinjuku (新宿), Asakusa (浅草) and the Sensoji temple (浅草寺). That was fine by me, actually visiting these places allow me to see the real Japanese live rather than seeing only tourists.

Sensoji temple	Sensoji temple	Sensoji temple
Kaminarimon gate	Shibuya 109 mall	Shibuya at night
Shibuya at night	Shibuya at night	Shibuya at night

In Tokyo we mostly travelled by subway. I estimate that their subway must be built around the same time as Paris’, it’s kinda old style, line transfer is sometime messy, but it’s very clean, no bad smell, and it goes to every corner of the city, so very convenient. The Tokyo public transport system is quite well developped and affordable, lots of people don’t need cars, so they have less road congestion than the other major cities around the world, like Paris or Los Angeles.

When walking on the streets or malls, it is striking to see how much Japanese women and men, especially young women, take care of their appearance. Every young lady is fashionably dressed, impeccable hair style, make-up, mascarat and nails, branded hand bag, and their shoes are incredible to say the least! In other words, nothing on their body is left to random, everything must be perfectly tailored to the latest popular style. I use to think that Shanghai ladies are stylish, and even care too much about their look. But that’s not remotely close to the Japanese ladies. Tokyo’s Shibuya is really the fashion place where every lady dresses and appears like the models on Japanese pop magazines! Actually I can’t tell the difference, maybe they’re actually the models. Nothing is too weird to wear, some girls dress like a princess in the fairy tale, other dress like the hero in some games, but that doesn’t seem to attract any special attention from passer-by on the streets. Maybe their cartoon culture has invaded their real life, manifested as cosplay in the real society.

Many of the following pictures were captured over a very short period of time, and I’ve miss many better opportunities because there were too many people on the streets. But nevertheless, it gives you an idea of this year’s trend in Asia, because everyone will be following the Japanese style eventually.

Trendy youth at Shibuya	Trendy youth at Shibuya	These young people may have money to buy LV bags and pretty shoes, but they still eat instant noodle on the street.
Trendy youth at Shibuya	Trendy youth at Shibuya	Trendy youth at Shibuya
Trendy youth at Shibuya	Trendy youth at Shibuya	Trendy youth at Shibuya
Trendy youth at Shibuya	Trendy youth at Shibuya	Trendy youth at Shibuya
Trendy youth at Shibuya	Trendy youth at Shibuya	Trendy youth at Shibuya

Trendy youth at Shibuya	Trendy youth at Shibuya
Shibuy station	Shibuya station

As for men, their hair style is remarkable, they all look like the characters in Japanese games or manga (漫画). They either wear teared-down jeans for going out, or black suit for work. I wonder if Men in Black isn’t a Japanese comics inspired by Hollywood. In the subway during rush hour, you can see a long row of men all wearing black suit, some grey suit, but never a colored suit. The same goes for cars, black, white and grey cars are predominant on the streets, I can hardly see a red or blue or green car out there. That’s the men world…

In constrast, in every lady shop, I was blinded by all the colored displays and labels, with pink being the predominant color. Everything destinated to ladies has to be cute, cartoon is commonly used for everything from avertisement to user instruction to packaging.

Where cartoon is not appropriate, such as beauty products or high-end consumer brands, you can expect an idol instead. Japanese idols are everywhere in public view. These quasi-perfect young ladies (and boys too, but relatively less frequent) have everything a young Japanese girl wants: they look good, they’re cute and they wear chic stuff. They’re used to promote everything that cartoon won’t fit. And among the 127 millions Japanese population, the marketing machines can easily produce thousands of new young idols every year, keeping the average age of idol below 20. So, they’re cute, good skin, naive, open minded, adorable and fresh. It’s like breeding a thousand of new Paris Hilton every year!

Actually the following annecdote would explain it all… While my tour mates were shopping in the 0101 mall at Shinjuku, I was exploring a small the street on the side. I saw several mini-casinos, actually there’re only slot machines, but lots of them! What striked me was in those slot machines, instead of the boring melon, cherry, apple, the bell and the 7 signs, what they put in there instead are the latest cartoon characters, the latest game characters, the latest TV show characters, and the hottest idols. Every mini-casino advertise their latest slot machines idols to attract players. I think that’s very creative, they must make lots of money out of those slot machines to justify changing the signs regularly, while even the fanciest casinos at Las Vegas still stuck with the century-old slot machine signs. I was really impressed, deeply impressed by how much their pop culture are found in every aspect of their life.

Slot machines using idol signs

Now, when we talk about Japanese cuisine (日本料理), that’s where the millenium long Japanese tradition remains very strong. In Tokyo, we had sushi (寿司), sashimi (刺身), ramen (拉面), curry rice, charcoal BBQ, tempura and donburi (丼). Our friend Desmond, who is actually our guide at Japan, probably knows more fishes than an average Japanese, and probably has tasted more sake (日本酒), sochu (焼酎) and umeshu (梅酒) than an average Japanese has. Under his guide, we tried many good Japanese foods and wines. We particularly enjoyed our meal at an izakaya (居酒屋, Japanese-style pub) at Shibuya, the atmosphere was good, the BBQ foods were tasty, the wine selection was rich, and it was memorable because Desmond celebrated his 4th wedding anniversary.

Revolving sushi

Stand up noodle restaurant

The last thing to mention is a rather unusual activity, Desmond and I went to the newly opened National Art Center of Tokyo to see Vermeer‘s exposition. It is a very stylish space-for-rent type of museum. We were there early the morning, sunny and blue sky, the interior view is really impressive. We also had lunch there at the very stylish suspended restaurant, Le Rond, founded by Paul Bocuse.

National Art Center of Tokyo	National Art Center of Tokyo
National Art Center of Tokyo	National Art Center of Tokyo
National Art Center of Tokyo	National Art Center of Tokyo
National Art Center of Tokyo	Restaurant Le Rond

Click here to view the complete album.

So, at 11am we left home, taking the subway to switch to the high speed train (Maglev [磁悬浮] @ 430 km/h) to the Pudong airport, that would avoid any traffic problem. In the subway, suddenly Mary asked me “you said the flight is for 12:40 right?”, my reply was “I thought you told me that, I didn’t check… oops…” And for a moment we hoped at least one of us was right……. we were so unexcited that no one has confirmed the flight schedule before leaving! Luckly our assumption was right, we were on time for the flight. And I have to insist here again, Air Canada sucks big time, we were served instant noodle at one point, and honestly, that was the best thing we had during the flight, the other meals were horrible! There was practically no movies to watch since the screen is so badly positioned for us, and it was playing cartoon anyway. With Japan Airline each person has a screen in front of the seat, with several movies playing simultaneously, and some basic games also, that really does make the 13 hrs flight a little shorter. The only good thing about Air Canada is that the flight itinery is the shortest: Shanghai – Toronto – Montreal. Actually, flying between Shanghai and Montreal is really painful no matter what airline we took, unless maybe First Class would be better since we can sleep with a straight body.

When we got out of the Trudeau airport at 8:30pm, the first thing we noticed was the frest smell of the air. We took it for granted when living at Montreal, but now we really miss that, and the clear blue sky was so wonderful! It was good feeling to take a deep breath. We rent a Toyota Yaris from Enterprise Rent-A-Car, it is a cheap car, but no complain, it does very well for what it is worth. I would recommend this to anyone who only drive to work and back home, very economic in fuel and surprisingly good handling. Bravo Toyota!

We stay at Mary’s parents’ home, right in front of Parc Lafontaine. Early the morning I stand at the balcony enjoying the view and the fresh air. I can see the whole downtown and Mont Royal, and the park of course, clear blue sky, unlimited visibility. I took a few snapshot with a point & shoot camera, didn’t bring my own Canon 20D because I had too much to bring already…

Montreal downtown morning

Mont Royal and Parc Lafontaine

During the whole week we had to run like crazy, every day. It was good to see our family and friends once again, but we weren’t exactly in good shape. Wednesday we went to the long awaited French diner with Kim at Le Pégase, good wines and delicious dishes, but Mary were in such bad shape (because the alcohol of the night before) that she couldn’t really enjoyed the diner at all, I was ok but not perfectly fine neither. We had a lot of Pho (Vietnamese noodle), almost every lunch…

So, it was good to see people, but one week is way too short for a 12-hour jet lag. We were hoping to have time to enjoy several French meals, red wines and golf games, maybe next year….. We really miss our golf season, but we won’t miss Winter!

Je suppose que ces deux individus ne s’attendaient pas à un résultat quelconque de quiconque impliqué, mais désiraient plutôt se faire une réputation dans leur pays respectif pour leur act “courageux” et “humanitaire”. Et pour faire une bétise pareille en Chine, je suppose qu’ils se sont préparés de passer la durée de leur vacance dans la prison, du moins qu’ils puissent sortir de là en un morceaux vivant. Bref, à ma surprise, ils étaient seulement gardés sous surveillance pendant 48h et explusés du pays par après.

J’imagine que si la canadienne aurait affiché une grande banderole pareille quelque part sur le parlement à Ottawa pour réclamer l’indépendence des Premières Nations, ou même du Québec, elle ne serait pas aussi bien traitée… Et si le britannique aurait affiché une banderole pareille sur le Big Ben pour réclamer l’indépendence de l’Irlande du Nord, il ne s’en sortirait pas mieux, je crois…

Hélas, un(e) journaliste à Radio-Canada a décidé de participer à cette propagande en mettant un tel événement insolite à la une de leur site web (je n’en sais rien du côté de télé SRC), avec la permission de l’éditeur-en-chef bien sûr, en décrivant l’événement d’une manière comme si ces deux individus sont des héros qui se battent pour la justice et la liberté, blâmant que le gouvernement chinois n’a pas pris les mesures appropriées, supposément il faut que le gouvernement se plie à leur demande immédiatement et s’excuse auprès d’eux… Sont-ils tous souls les journalistes et éditeurs de Radio-Canada?

Alors, depuis cet événement, le site web de SRC a été banné en Chine, je ne peux plus y accéder! Alain me disais que je n’ai rien manqué de toute façon, c’est probablement vrai. S’il faudrait mettre à la une du journal à chaque fois que quelqu’un pisse sur une copie de la déclaration de l’Indépendence ou sur une photo de Bin Laden, on n’aurait pas besoin d’un éditeur-en-chef, les singes suffisent amplement!

Normalement j’aurais attaché une copie de l’image sur cette page, mais évidemment j’évite de tomber dans leur piège de propagande. L’Internet est devenu un engin massif de propagande, malheureusement ça devient très difficile de distinguer des vraies nouvelles et les propagandes, surtout dans Wikipedia…..

Although I’m not planning to make a living out of photography any time soon, in China or anywhere else, I do have the same feeling about lack of stimulation for having worked at home over the past two years. That was a great opportunity for me, but it’s time to move on to a new life. Now again, I got a great opportunity to work at China, I’m feeling pretty lucky about my life, so far…

I’m not the type who constantly looks for new opportunities like a businessman, thing just sort of happens in my life and I choose to accept or let it pass. As much as I enjoy photography today, I don’t wish to become a professional prographer yet (professional means making more than 50% of revenu from that activity). But if that opportunity ever shows up in my face in the future, I wish I could do half studio works and half photojournalism. I always feel great and heroic to be able to capture life and pass that over to other people, maybe to other generations and participate in making history. But before one can do that, one needs to acquire a great deal of wisdom. And that, my friend, is one of my reasons for leaving behind my confortable life at Montreal!

On voit bien que les producteurs et marchants de pétrole souscrivent totalement à l’effet papillon ainsi qu’à la théorie du chaos. C’est-à-dire que le moindre incident local ou global avec lequel on puisse établir un lien quelconque à la stabilité de provision pétrolière sera utilisé pour justifier une hausse du prix de l’essence au détail. N’est-ce pas la loi de l’offre et demande en action à son plus haut niveau d’efficacité?

S’il faut établir un parallèle entre la consommation quotidienne de l’essence avec d’autres produits quotidiens, on pourrait la comparer avec le lait et le café, notre société en consomme et en dépend autant quotidiennement.

Alors c’est comme si l’on dit: aussitôt qu’un moustique pique une vache quelque part en Alberta, le prix du lait risque d’augmenter car la vache pourrait tomber malade ou mourir, affectant ainsi la provision et la rareté va faire augmenter le prix au détail.

Ou dans le cas du café, c’est comme si l’on dit: il y a gamin qui pisse dans un champ de café, ça risque de tuer quelques plantes de café ou déranger la productivité des fermiers, causant une baisse de production et par conséquence il faut augmenter le prix du café chez Tim Horton!

Voilà comment je pense qu’ils ont exagéré les événements mineurs pour atteindre leur objectif et profit record année après année. Je comprends que le pétrole est une ressource beaucoup plus critique que le café ou la cigarette, mais pas plus que le lait et la farine, et pourtant, on ne voit pas le prix du lait ou du café fluctuer quotidiennement au détail, à +10% par jour! Évidemment nous avons la régie agricole pour régulariser le prix du lait dans les épiceries, et nous avons une forte concurrence pour stabiliser le prix du café dans les bistros, mais pourquoi pas une régie de l’essence pour régulariser le prix de l’essence qui est pourtant si critique pour l’économie? Nous avons une régie de l’énergie qui est là pour approuver (et régulièrement) les augmentations de prix de l’électricité, et rien d’autre… incompétence et indifférence!

Finalement, pour votre divertissement, notez que le concept de l’effet papillon est apparu bien avant la théorie de chaos. Déjà au XVIII siècle, Benjamin Franklin a dit ceci:

À cause du clou, le fer fut perdu.
À cause du fer, le cheval fut perdu.
À cause du cheval, le cavalier fut perdu.
À cause du cavalier, la bataille fut perdu.
À cause de la bataille, la guerre fut perdue.
À cause de la guerre, la liberté fut perdue.

Tout cela pour un simple clou.

Vous voyez comme un clou peut causer bien de dommage à l’humanité!

IBM enters the field of supercomputing during the mid-90s, with the first successfully project called Deep Blue, which was able to beat world champion chess player Garry Kasparov at the 2nd year of competition, attracting huge media attention. That was 1997. Fast forward 10 years, IBM’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer series dominate, and by large, the list of Top500 fastest computers in the world, with 4 of the top 5 being held by IBM!

You may now ask, what does a supercomputer have to do with a game console? Actually, there is a similar technology and a common problem behind IBM’s BlueGene/L supercomputer and Sony’s PlayStation 3 console. In fact the PS3 could have been listed quite high in the Top500 list if we were at 1997, it is a supercomputer by pre-Y2k’s standard, now shrinked into a tiny microprocessor chip with 9 processing cores within it. The microprocessor inside PS3 is called Cell Broadband Engine Processor, it was jointly developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony over 3 years of hard work by a team of 500 people. It is based on a scale down version of IBM POWER microarchitecture used in many IBM commercial machines as well as their supercomputers. The difference is that in the PS3 there are 9 processing cores, while in BlueGene/L there are 131,072 processors, and still growing! But PS3 is essentially based on a mini-supercomputer architecture.

IBM MareNostrum supercomputer - Spanish

IBM BlueGene/L - Thomas J. Watson Research Center

ASC Purple - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

So, what problem do they have in common? Actually, writing efficient multi-tasking programs for these machines are quite difficult. Traditional computer science education provided by mainstream universities do not provide opportunities for students to practice multitasking programing on large computer, they only learned the theory about parallel programing, and that’s not even the norm…

The problem is if we take a typical software program today and run it on the PS3 or the BlueGene, it will only consume one processor, or two at most, all the other processors will not have work assigned to them and will simply sit idle. To explain this problem in layman’s terms, let’s compare these programing methods to the ways a chef might prepare a meal**:

• In the John von Neumann approach, the chef (program) runs to the store (memory) each time he needs an ingredient (loads data). This doesn’t present a big problem because the market (cache/memory) is right next door.
• In the multi-core Cell paradigm, the chef is a trailblazer. He lives in a villa and the closest market is in the next town. However, seven highly-skilled assistants (special processing cores) live with him, and they are ready to pitch in. The chef divides the tasks among the assistants (special processing cores). They each return a shopping list to him. Before the tasks begin, he travels to the next town (memory) and collects the ingredients. When he returns with the goods (data moves from a global address space to the special processing cores), everyone works together on their individual tasks (parallel processing), and sometimes two or more assistants divide up a task (overlapping instruction execution) to work more efficiently.

** I actually copy this metaphor from somebody else, hope he doesn’t mind…

Sony PlayStation 3 console

Sony PlayStation 3

Sony PlayStation 3

That was for the Cell processor, imagine how much more complex it is to write programs for the BlueGene/L with over 130,000 processors! So now we have a highly capable machine that can do all kinds of things, but doesn’t know how to do it on its own, we humans, smarter but far less capable, have to teach it how to do things the most efficiently possible. It would be really fun if one day these supercomputers can write programs on their own, or write some games for us to play…