A.Connector

Musical connection

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:48:19 +0000

Sometimes being a parent has it’s unexpected rewards or serendipity factor. The other day my son Kevin mentioned to me in passing (he was in the rush out the door mode for school) that he likes the, “what’s that us and what song on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon?” I correctly filled in the missing blanks with, “Us and Them.” He said that he loved that song. I quickly mentioned what a truly symphonic experience “Dark Side” is and how it combined psychedelic, progressive and symphonic elements seemlessly. He nodded agreement and disappeared off to school.

I never “preached” my musical gospel to him. Clearly, some of it has gotten to him by osmosis. So it’s not interesting that he should know about this music, especially since we share the computer I’m typing this on. What is interesting is that he should choose to embrace it and like a lot of what I like. Maybe this is pater-narcissism but fulfilling nonertheless.

One other recent shared musical experience we had was at the Taichung Jazz Festival (picture above is from that). I highly recommend experiencing music together with your loved ones. It’s both a rich and substantive activity.

Typhoon thoughts

admin — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:16:48 +0000

This has been one of the most typhoon heavy seasons that I can recall in my almost 21 years of living here in Taiwan. It seems that whenever there is hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico/Atlantic there is something brewing here too. Typhoons can be some what nerve-wracking-high speed howling winds and sheets of horizontal driving rain are interesting for a few minutes but can be daunting when it stretches out over hours, or worse still-days.

It looks like we might be getting back to some sunny skies again. That’ll help my morning exercise routine back on track. There’s something very nice about getting some more oxygen in your blood stream, moving your body parts and connecting with a beautiful sunrise. I’m enticed.

Talking for talking’s sake?

admin — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:36:38 +0000

Lately, I’ve been a little burnt-out on the new media or specifically “social media” space. I think it’s great that so many are tweeting and friend feeding and commenting on blogs or leaving utterz,etc. However, I’ve been kind of maxed out on the abundance of white noise that seems to be accumulating. No I’m not saying my words are inherently better, more meaningful or deeper, but at least I have some control over them and have a better handle on the reality factor of my own contributions.

Maybe that is why I’m gravitating more to the use of images (my own and viewing other peoples) since it is much more of a pure WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) medium. Don’t get me wrong-I’m not advocating that everyone stop chatting because I’m in a dark mood, bored or didn’t get the joke, I don’t suffer party-poopers lightly. In fact, I’m elated that so many people are finding tools and channels to express themselves. I simply feel the need to modify my own participation.

It seems to me many seek out encounters on the web as a replacement for actual activity or social engagement; either because they lack the opportunity or find this method easier. I can certainly appreciate that point of view, particularly the latter. However, I realize that there is no substitute for meeting and reacting in the “meatspace.” I guess that is where I’ll be spending more time these days.

Where is the silver lining?

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:55:07 +0000

The big thing these days is the “cloud.” The online cluster of applications and services that enable users to use and store information on hosted servers accessible 24/7. Well in theory anyway. yes, at least 23.87/6.92 but not all the time. Case in point was logging on today and checking G-Mail only to be shown an error message. Not a comfortable feeling. This isn’t Twitter or FriendFeed fun and somewhat useful services-this in fact was my e-mail lifeline with the outside.

Fortunately my anxiety was limited to only about 15 minutes. It sure makes you think though. I’m going to give some thought to putting back-up system in place. Thanks for the wake-up call Google.

A.Connector Jr.

admin — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:48:43 +0000

It’s been a week and a day no since my son Kevin has gone to the States to visit with my family. I went through numerous moments over many days preceding his leaving, on pre-missing his presence. The main concern my wife and I had about his trip (the first time going to the US or abroad on his own) was getting off the plane in San Francisco, going through US Customs (dealing with declaration form and any resulting questions) and getting luggage and connected to domestic flight in neighboring terminal. Oh, I neglected to mention that Kevin has attended local Taiwanese schools here with curriculum all in Chinese except for English classes. His spoken English has come on strong this last year since he elected to speak only English with me instead of Mandarin Chinese. I’m happy to say he managed quite well making me very proud of him. When he arrived in Phoenix my mother said he looked like he has done this 100 times-very cool and casual.

This caused me to reflect on somethings. It made me realize that a person’s life is an accumulation of experience: some good, some neutral and some bad. This made me even more excited for Kevin knowing that some day when he is experiencing difficulty and maybe some self-doubt that he can reflect back on this trip to the US he made alone at age 13, and how he handled it in stride.Nothing like some practical character building. Happy for you son-and proud to be your dad! This is one of the special pages I made for you in your scrap book in my heart and mind.

Connecting

admin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:00:16 +0000

The other day I had a Skype chat with a friend I know from Twitter. Nice guy, good connection. I finally found out that he worked in the financial sector. Then a light bulb went off in my head. I have a good friend that is really skilled in financial market analysis. So instantly the A.Connector DNA kicks in and I asked my friend on Skype if he would be willing to talk to my friend. He said, “Sure. I’m alway looking for qualified analysts.”

So why am I excited? What benefit is there to me? Well I happen to be big fan of the new bleeding edge economics and not doing evil. There is still one better than that-doing good. Don’t know why, but it always makes me feel good when I can help others connect in a frictionless good fit kind of way. File this under-because that’s how I roll…

Let’s get Acrobatic

admin — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:45:25 +0000

Disclosure-I’m a long time Adobe product lover from my days as a Mac only guy(yes Virginia, I’m on the infernal Winblows machines now too). I’ve had so many discussions with web/geek friends about Adobe and how it’s so incredulous with their engineering/design abilities and strong advantage with Flash platform, that they don’t do more in light of Google’s Documents, Zoho,etc.

Well happy to say that recently they’ve launched Photoshop Express for touching up digital pictures and more recently Acrobat.com as a launching point for Buzzwords, their Word alternative (on flash of course) and Connect Now a collaborative communications suite that allow you and other collaborators to have video and voice chat and see each others desktops,share whiteboard and have option to control others’ desktop/browser as well.

I’ve been testing these and they all seem to offer a lot of promise. The interface for the Buzzwords word processor is pretty sexy, only complaint I have right now is that it didn’t offer ability to change formatting from left to center or right. I might have missed that or it may be on their to do list. In any case. much more robust than Google or Zoho’s similar offering IMHO.

For those that didn’t ask-no I’m trying Plurk because I just don’t care. Sick of the alphabet-soup shiny object of the moment thingie, even with a some what sick Twitter. I’ve been using FriendFeed more

China Quake relief/News

admin — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:50:18 +0000

China Vortex put together a few links for those interested in news about and/or are interested in donating to help the victims of the Sichuan Wenchang earthquake of May 12 tragedy.

* Danwei earthquake updates
* Shanghaiist earthquake coverage
* MSNBC earthquake coverage
* BBC earthquake coverage
* Guardian earthquake coverage
* Youtube video earthquake coverage
* Tianya public forum
* Tudou video earthquake coverage
* QQ news center
* Sohu news center
* Sina news center
* CNReviews 24+ ways to give
* China Esquire earthquake update news and donation information

Technorati Tags: bbc, China, cnreviews, danwei, donations, earthquake, guardian, hyperlinks, links, msnbc, news, qq, redcross, shanghaiist, sina, sohu, tianya, tudou, video, youtube

Yang, Yahoo & Chinese business custom

admin — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:50:35 +0000

Jerry Yang and Yahoo have been in the tech news a lot lately due having his “Texas Hold ‘Em” style bluff called by Miscrosoft’s Steve Ballmer. Sure it’s easy to second guess Jerry, and understand why shareholders would be really pissed at him in this world of , “Hey you made me lots of money 7 minutes ago but what have you done for me lately?” thinking and ethics. Yang’s biggest sin is being faithful to his cultural DNA. He is of Chinese descent. The Chinese are almost exclusively family businesses and are run like a family not like a company. Hence, there is a ton of emotion and passion tied-up in them. It’s very hard to distance one’s self from one’s company under the Chinese model way since they are so intertwined.

I am a small business owner myself and can empathize with Yang completely on this point. Sadly, I don’t have the comfort factor of hundreds of millions of dollars at my disposal to walk away gracefully and do something else. That’s the point though-Jerry is probably more focused on the intertwined identity of Yahoo/yang more than the financials. He has a lot to be proud of and his bruised ego will heal. Yahoo once a disruptor and trend setter has become a poorly managed behemoth. Time once again for Wall Street to devour what it has created.

Sometimes a great notion

admin — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:51:12 +0000

There are times in business where you can still be pleasantly surprised even after you’ve mentally prepared yourself to bang your head against the wall in resignation to the unpleasant reality that nobody is listening to you or cares about what you have to say. in this case it’s a fairly large Taiwan-owned tire company that does a small tire for our customers sporting goods products. We have been doing business with them for the better part of 12 years. They recently decided to shift small tire production to one of their China factories. The only problem is that China has gotten smarter and smarter over the last few years and doesn’t let foreign-owned companies just bring anything they want into China-in this case the existing tooling for our tires! So I wasn’t entirely surprised when my suppliers beautiful dream to shift production over there hit a snag. What did trouble me was when I got a sample from their China factory that was lighter in weight(less material/thinner) which my customer of course reacted to as being unacceptable.

Lo and behold I just got an e-mail showing a very responsible attitude in the form of a notice that they will be running this batch at the Taiwan factory until they get their China line problems sorted out. This makes me a happy camper and enables me to share some reassuring news to an excellent long term customer. Rock on!