Shanghai Tan

With more and more westerners now coming to China for doing business, the term guanxi has earned new popularity as they all learn that the success of their endeavor very much depends on how good their guanxi is with their local business partner and local government. At a time it was difficult to explain guanxi [...]

When you become universally popular, you automatically reap the benefits of free publicity that normal people can’t buy, even with great amount of money, simply because you represent the icon of time. People would put your photo on mugs, on T-shirt, on books, on toys, etc. I won’t attempt to distinguish between popular and unpopular, [...]

I must write to George W. Bush and Al Gore and Bill Gates about this… While the world is panicking about the scarcity and ever-increasing price of energy, all the sudden this little useless social networking site called Facebook is taking over the online world like a storm. The problem is that, if you add [...]

After three short shopping days at Tokyo, we fly to Hokkaido [北海道], then rent a car from the Sapporo [札幌] airport. Hokkaido is a big island prefecture at the north of Japan. It kinda looks and feels like at Canada, wide open, green, blue sky, mountains, sea, lakes, hot spring and fresh fishes! I didn’t [...]

Welcome to sushistan, kawaistan and idolistan! Although Japan has a long and strong culture of its own for the past two milleniums, its modern mainstream culture could be described by three words: sushi, cartoon and idol. During my trip to Japan between September 26th to October 3th, as a first time visitor not speaking their [...]

Last week, I went back to Montreal after 6 months stunt at Shanghai, but only for a week, from 15/09 to 23/09. Mary and I didn’t feel any excitment before going, I had to work the day before, and we actually packed out baggage the morning before leaving. We had so many stuff to bring [...]

Depuis mon arrivée à Shanghai, étant donné que le canal TV de SRC n’est plus disponible ici, je jette un coup d’oeil sur le site web de Radio-Canada presqu’à chaque jour, pour ne pas être entièrement déconnecté de la vie à Montréal. Ça va assez bien pendant 3 mois… jusqu’au moment où l’événement des deux [...]

There was a story in a Shanghai newspaper about a British expat who left behind her photography studio job in London, coming to Shanghai to document the transformation that the city is going thru. She calls China the hub of change, and that is so close to how I see this as well, but with [...]

S’il faut croire aux histoires de l’institut canadien des produits pétroliers, la dernière vague d’augmentation de prix de l’essence serait due à l’incertitude géopolitique causée par la capture des 15 marines britaniques par la garde côtière iranienne. L’augmentation en janvier serait causée par l’incendie d’une raffinerie en Ontario. L’augmentation précédente était causée par la guerre [...]

While most of the people today must have heard of the term supercomputer, few of us can actually claim to have seen one in real. I have seen large computers and very large computer room, they are impressive, but not even close to a supercomputer! Now that I’m going to be a real IBMer soon, [...]