Author: Y C

….in Hong Kong at least it’s not so sudden like say Beijing.  The change in weather is nice and also making things somewhat more mellow for me.  On the other hand, things have been very busy with the year end and should be full-on until December.  Looking forward then to some R&R and spending time with family.  

But, the fast approachng year end isn’t giving me a lot of chance to catch up.  I have some training courses to take in Tokyo after X-mas from Insights Learning & Development.  It’s continuing my journey toward HR and people focus in my professional life.  At the end of the day, it’s about the people.  It’ll be fun for this and looking forward to it.  I’m also going to try winging the CGEIT exam in December. 

Hope you folks are doing good there.  One of these days I’m going to be able to make it back for a visit.  Meanwhile, life goes on here in Asia and the future seems good.

With the new Star Trek movie the amount of hits daily to my blog went up 4-5 times.  Apparently people were clicking on one of my pictures where I was comparing Star Trek with successful IT people. Funny really, I’d never have thought that before.

Anyways, it’s nice to be back blogging there although I know that my blog stats are artificially inflated.  On the other hand, an out-of-work CIO from NYC put me on his blogroll after finding me (not sure where).  I feel bad for him somehow.  It’s about “branding” now I guess.  Don’t know but will try it out too.

New cool toy I found on The Pogue’s column: MIFI — Wi-Fi to Go, No Cafe Needed.  Looks great to try out in my field force.  Luckily they’ve got in HK, TW, CN markets.  I’ll have to get someone to look into it and what we can do to increase connectivity and information sharing with our back-end systems.

Back to the grind …

Then off to Taipei and KL again.

It’s been a very long while since I last visited/posted here.  I’m sorry to have missed out on the musings here.  Life certainly has been extremely hectic and too many little things compete for my spare time.  Anyways, it’s the Labor Day holiday here in HK and much of Asia.  So it’s been good downtime and the weather is good too.

3 days of my team in HK and we had a lot of productive discussions/meetings on what the rest of 2009 is going to look like.  Also started getting back into my personal blog again and enjoying it.  I do need to resist falling off the wagon and try at least once a week to post something.  Once a day is probably too much.  I recently mentioned how interesting my blog stats were and even more so that a lot of people searching star trek find my blog.  Not exactly what I had intended but cool.  And the readership is really spread all over the place.

Anyways, enjoy all and Monday is an anniversary for me and B-, our first date which was @ Yankee stadium.  Time does fly.  Take care of it and enjoy it while it lasts!

2008 is winding down and man, it’s been a heckuva year. Am still working through and busy and not a lot of down time.

Still, got a chance to go out and hook up with some fellow walkers/hikers in HK through a Meetup Group. I really like it. So looking forward to more hikes and a bit of photography on the side too. Treated myself a nifty new Nikon D40 and I’m very happy with it. I also really liked Ken Rockwell’s site and donated as well.

Today I had my first alumni interview with a prospective student. This young precocious man was amazing. I felt stupid compared to him but was so energized by his youthful enthusiasm and outlook toward life. A very enjoyable 2 hour chat with him and his parents. I do hope he gets accepted.

Going into 2009, the operative word is to survive, build on for the future, try to improve on my health hopefully through regular hikes/walks, hobbies and forget about the work more. Continue going back to my blog and get a couple of IT certs here and there. And let’s see what happens!

Warmest wishes – be safe and joyful!
=YC

I came across this nice story on being a happy and successful lawyer from David Maister’s blog: Passion, People, and Principles.

Stephen C. Ellis is the managing partner at the law firm of Tucker, Ellis & West.

What follows is the commencement address he gave at Case Western reserve School of Law in Cleveland, Ohio on May 19, 2008.

The title of his remarks is “On Being a Happy(and Successful) Lawyer”

Do enjoy it.

On a side note, I’ve been having a blast since setting up my WordPress blog last month. I was fortunate also that I decided to have wordpress.com host it as opposed to setting it up on other hosting sites (e.g. bravenet, doteasy, godaddy) because of the tag surfer feature. This allows us on the wordpress.com blogosphere to know who else is blogging. And using tag searches, you can find other like-minded bloggers posting about the same things you’re thinking about. Awesome. There are a whole lot of extremely knowledgeable people sharing wonderful experiences. The downside with using wordpress.com is that it doesn’t allow much customization – quite vanilla. Hosting on wordpress.com is all about the sharing and blogging, not about the other (commercial) stuff.

Blogging has been “therapeutic” but a great way for me to learn as well. I’ve been a bit on a tear with what originally was meant to be a part time deal but has turned out to be a daily item for me. Let’s see how it works out. My blogroll has grown exponentially and I can’t help but expand my RSS feeds because there’s just too many good stuff out there.

Finally, B- and I went to a food conference today at the HK Convention Center and it was amazing. The crush of bodies was like rush hour traffic. Food lover’s heaven. We’ll probably go back again. In any event, she needs to go for research.

And before signing off – last weekend, B- and I went to the Macau Venetian for the 2 days 1 night package. Great stuff. As a said in my FB – it’s a lot of fun and a lot of dangerous. We’ll be back there I’m sure.

How could I resist?  Well, combination of (l)user error and less than optimal tools, I didn’t have my own blog.  Now, thanks to F C and a HK blogger/consultant named Dan, I got off my fat butt and got one going.

The credit of my blog’s name completely goes to F C.  His genius came up with it in less than 60 seconds no less.  Definitely fast and the furious :).  I’m indebted.

So I’m soft launching my blog now through some of my online professional networks, but of course, need to share here as well :).

The Pai Mei (白眉) Guy’s Blog has “gone live”!