Back from Asia...

What can be more of a perfect way to fight jet lag than to keep my blog up-to-date? ;) So I just came back from a combination of Taipei, Beijing, and Hong Kong. This trip was half business and half pleasure. The business purpose is to explore my future opportunities in Asia while catching up on some oversees work for Metacentrix. As for pleasure, well, I just haven't had a vacation in ages. So I did the usual Taipei night market, Great Wall visit, LKF parties and such.

Although I didn't have my camera with me for the most part of this trip, I managed to still take a few pictures here and there:



Out of all three places, the most outstanding experience must have been Beijing. While I was there, I ran into my friend, Francis randomly and finally got to catch up with him a little bit. It turns out that he's now working as a program manager at IceBreaker, Inc. What a perfect job I must say. He works half the time in Seattle and the other half in Beijing. It's almost my perfect scenario. The only difference would be that in an ideal world, I would replace Beijing with Hong Kong. Of course, that's only a fantasy especially when Beijing is developing at such rapid speeds. Any entrepreneur with the right mind would hit Beijing over Hong Kong any day.

To give you an idea how fast Beijing is developing, on my first night there, right downstairs from my friend's apartment, there was a barebone empty leased space with construction tools all over which was apparent that they hadn't even started renovating the place yet. However, the next night as I walked by the same place, this same exact space became a restaurant already and was in business with lots of customers inside. That's something that you won't see in the US or even Hong Kong for that matter of fact. Now I only wonder if this speed of development will sustain after the 2008 Olympics. After all, the Olympics is what really prompted the recent rapid development efforts. After seeing Beijing, I am even more excited to see what Shanghai is like. I can't wait. I am just not sure when the next time I have enough vacation will be given my upcoming family reunions.

Lastly, the other worth while event I attended was the Info Expo in Taipei. You have to see it to know what I am talking about. They effectively bring street market tactics into a high tech environment. ;) See pictures in link provided above.

Happy New Year everyone!

Apple scores again on my scale... or maybe not?

I was browsing around the Apple store in Bellevue square yesterday with a friend that wanted to buy a Mac Mini and ran into this:



It was love at first sight. It's too bad that I already very recently bought a Plantronics discovery 655 or I would have picked one up on the spot.

Though I am thinking it's probably a good thing I didn't pick one up considering the reviews I have been reading about them. It appears that the functionality of this slick bluetooth headset is not as impressive as its design.

The almost perfect car dealership...

As some of you know already, my car was slightly scratched up by one of the valet guys in a garage located in downtown Seattle recently. Fortunately, they were perfectly honest with me and told me right away. The manager also offered to take my car to Lexus of Bellevue where he worked in the evenings to get my car buffed out and fully detailed at no charge. So after a few back and forths, I decided that I was going to take him up on his offer but I would take the car in myself.



When I got there, I was thoroughly impressed. They had moved to a brand new location down the street since July. Basically, think of a multi-level elegant building with views of downtown Bellevue all around. They also have all the amenities you can ever think of. There's a showroom, surround sound theater, gift shop, cafe, TV area with fire place, a beautiful fish tank, LCD screens in multiple locations, children's play room w/ video games, work area, and most notably, a mini golf course!



Problem? yes... while I almost had a perfect experience waiting for my car to be finished, I hopped on their guest wireless to get some work done. My first impression was, "hum, decent speeds..." then I found a significant problem. I was unable to connect to any of my e-mail accounts via IMAPs or remote into the office with VPN or SSH. After some investigating, it seems that their IT dept. decided to block all outgoing ports except for 80 and 443 which make their guests only able to browse the web. You would think that a dealership for cars of such prestige would be more sensitive towards business usage when it comes to their IT amenities. Unfortunately, that's not the case. It's one thing to be security conscious but it's another thing to be unaware of customer needs.

Well, maybe I am just too critical.

The IPhone is out...

Quick summary of this hot new item -

Pros:

* Stylish
* Compelling UI
* Fully capable of E-Mail, Browsing, and Searching Google Maps
* Apple Compatible (Sync with Macbook, etc)

Cons:

* No keyboard (Just Soft Keybaord)
* No stylus (Hard to type on soft keyboard with fingers)
* Lacking corporate integration & support
* Still too expensive for someone like me to want to buy one

WiFi Funded To Hotspot Your Digital Camera

This is a pretty interesting idea. We all have friends that always take pictures of the group and swear up and down that they will send it to you later but it never happens. Now if only I can make them all use this technology. ;)

The WebOS Paradigm???

There's a new web-based desktop product out there called DesktopTwo in beta stage that seems like a pretty cool idea. I took about 10 minutes to sign up and play with it a little myself and it seems like that it would be pretty useful for people on the go and always using different computers. However, I suspect that "people" will most likely equal to "students" because the applications available are pretty opensource heavy and you know non-techy corporate users swear by their Outlook and MS Office. As for other non-corporate users, mobility for personal use is just not important enough "to learn yet another thing." That aside, it does provide quite a bit of features and services such as your own e-mail address @desktoptwo.com as well as your own blog off of their server.

Micrsoft Surface

A Microsoft secret project that's no longer a secret.

New computing paradigm? This is just like the movie, Minority Report except for it's not a projected user interface but rather it is in the form of a tangible surface.