Scribbles

Gino’s getting married!  In 3 days I’ll be on a plane to Peru for the wedding, so now would be best for some closing thoughts for the year.

A quick mental review of the year leaves me amazed at the major events in the 2008: career transition, cross-country migration, relationship, the introduction to Salsa dancing. Not the typical year. I suspect the slowdown in business in the last few months have lulled me into a false sense of “lack of activity” which brings upon my surprise when I really think about what’s happened in 2008.

Between my last months in NY and about 4 months in LA, I made the effort to learn the neighborhoods and try things out.  In that, I feel pretty lucky to experience two major metropolitan cities.  While I traveled a lot during b-school and even attended class in some amazing places, there was never any time to slow down and learn about the locale.  And while doing consulting, I spent so much time on the road that every weekend was filled with social activities that left little time for getting to know NYC.  I took advantage of my good fortune to do the local things, such as the sushi lunch special in midtown, or read the Sunday LA Times over fresh orange juice and french press coffee at the Farmer’s Market.

Career-wise, I took the leap from working for large corporations all my professional life to becoming an entrepreneur.  The contrast between being a peg in a the corporate machinery of tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and being the one decision maker running business development, IT, and accounting could not be more striking.  And as if that wasn’t enough, I came on board for FitFiend in hopes of propelling it to become a meaningful social site in its niche.

Since my blog is not designed to attract as many readers as possible, I tend to avoid discussion of my dating and relationship status.  (So much advice out there about juicy sexy dating postings for attracting traffic) I’m not keeping any big secrets, I’m just not blogging about it.  What I will disclose is that my current situation is different than what I’ve experienced in the past.  I’ll leave it at that on this public forum.  If you want more, you’ll have to buy me a beer in person.

With all the changes, I won’t complain about the challenges.  My biggest take-away this year has been how conscious I have become of trade-offs in life, be it money versus freedom, location versus rent, and on and on.  I realize that being aware of them and making the clear decisions, more appropriately, having the option to make the decisions, has made life harder and more rewarding.  These trade-offs became salient in the process of my career transition.  In my old job, most of the goals were clear and the tasks to accomplish them are defined in the role.  Now, I can take the afternoon off to watch a movie, or I can tackle some completely random project that may or may not help the business.  But it’s not limited to business decisions.  I’ve taken that lesson and applied it to all aspects of my life, striving to identify the trade-offs.  I don’t make any judgment on which is better, more or less choice in relation to uncertainty.  For me, the increased degrees of freedom seems appropriate at this stage of my life.

In closing, allow me to predict that 2009 will be more career focused.  Not foreseeing any geographical moves, I should have more energy to develop my start-ups and explore LA.  While the former may be harder with the slowing economy, the latter seems promising as I make new friends and reunite with old ones.  So as I sign off for 2008, I wish you a fun and safe holidays.  Thank you for your support all year long, and please remember that you certainly have mine.

Some of you may have noticed the Twitter feed I added to the sidebar here, as part of my experimentation with micro-blogging.  In the two-three month period that I’ve used Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook status extensively, it’s clear that I won’t be abandoning them any time soon.  The down side of it, is the encroachment of those mini-posts into this blog.

Less blogging on my beloved Wordpress platform aside, I find the new set of tools truly interactive and rewarding.  It’s amusing that I had done this way back ago, completely quit, and now immerse myself in this new generation.  It all started back in college, when the IM du jour was ICQ.  Then after college, I paid for a full version of Trillian so I could post whatever came to mind on my status updates in every IM medium conceivable.  The only problem back then was that it was great one-on-one interaction, but for one-to-many, I was in a constant state of reaction: I hear the IM sound, see the pop-up, and feel obligated to respond instantly.

It got to be too much during  the intense year of b-school, so I quit altogether.  The time zones didn’t work for me to interact live and this blog was the perfect medium to broadcast my whereabouts and happenings to people who cared.  I could post at my leisure and never feel the pressure of replying to IM.  There’s no instant in blogging.

Oh, but the brave new world snuck up on me so sneakily.  Blogging is still rewarding and the comment system works fine in that interactivity.  But then came Facebook and their implementation of status updates.  And then they allow us to comment on others’ updates, publicly.  The next thing you knew, the Facebook feed became a reverse blog, streaming in all your friends’ tidbids into that interesting mosaic of news, jokes, jibes,  break-ups, and job search.  It even comes with pictures!  I think it’s great.  There are some people using it as their blog without ever realizing they were blogging.  It’s just so much easier than setting up a blog.

And it’s that ease that makes it more powerful than blogging.  I meet a new acquaintance, we connect on Facebook. Whenever he logs in, he can see the updates of all his friends, including mine.  That’s a lot easier than subscribing to my blog.  I can login to FB or my FriendFeed and see all the happenings of hundreds of people in one place, but it’s highly unlikely that I would check 300 different blogs, even with a great RSS reader.

But that same ease of use also induces neglecting this blog.  Status updates and tweets are a lot shorter.  And unlike 5 years ago, I can post them directly from my phone instead of when I get back to the cube.  So instead of taking the effort to blog, the seductive nature of taking short-cuts has led to silly notions of my friends piecing together the last 10 postings and figuring out what I’ve been up to.  The ego!  So for my new year resolution, I promise, once again, to humble myself and to share more fleshed out thoughts and stories.  “Eating in lil Tokyo, again” on Twitter won’t cut it.  Sure, the short feeds will still be around, but as a compliment to what happens here.

Maybe it’s the onslaught of rain in sunny California that’s drained all contrast out of the city and transformed it into a uniform concrete gray, maybe it’s the recession that’s dulled the consumerist exuberance out of holiday shopping; whatever it is, it has afflicted me with a steady, dull ache of boredom, nay, dearth of spirit or whatever one describes the essence of life (beyond its physiological functions).

However that feeling may be internal, I’m convinced that the current set of external events differ much from previous years.  The Facebook chatter has noticeably slowed down.  News of friends, more than one of them, being laid off is a new experience for me.  Business has been slow.  The crap economy and holiday slow-down has bastarded this lackadaisical fog of dread.

If I only knew what to dread.

The trip was the perfect imbalance of visiting friends, partying, sightseeing, and eating eating eating. After all, what better way to honor the holiday than excess eating, to the point of recovering half the weight I lost the week before. Compared to my last trip, this longer one allowed me to soak up more of the good things in HK and checklist the remaining tourist attractions – venturing out to Lantau Island to see the giant buddha and gambling in Macau. Obviously we managed our jetlag by partying the nights in Lan Kwai Fong.

Stoopid drunk on food

Blessed with brilliant weather, the Lantau day trip thoroughly impressed me. The long cable car ride up to the buddha provided generous views of the scenery and surrounding water. And our reward for the brief trek up the stairs were delicious desserts at the monastery. They made a killer smooth version of my favorite hot tofu dessert that dissolved in my mouth, just heavenly. Who knew monks ate so well?

Calm before the food storm

While Macau’s claim to fame may be gambling – I even played craps in Cantonese at the Wynn, albeit to a losing cause – what stood out was the eating, again. After the hour-long ferry ride to Asia’s gaming capital, we took a cab to the town square and promptly began our eating ordeal in a crowded milkery (I struggle with the translation) that served milk-pudding (more like jello’d) and piping hot pork sandwiches. Our party of 7 was split up and 3 of us shared a table with two other people, who decided to gain back some of their casino losses by sneaking off without paying. The restaurant tried to stick us with the bill and in typical Cantonese style we politely declined in yelling fashion. And that was just the start. We left the joint and hiked up the street for the main tourist attraction, some unremarkable landmark consisting of the front wall of a church after the rest of it was bombed. In the short length of this half-mile walk, we ate pork jerky, cookies, peppery pork buns from Taiwan, Portuguese style egg custard pastry, and countless other samples heaped upon us by the locals. The pork jerky woman literally dragged my arm into the store and forced me to try more flavors.

Macau, where you’re always full

Season pork strips freshly roasted and served

The one sobering aspect of the trip was the economy and its affect on our friends in the financial industry. Like NYC, HK’s large financial industry makes it a hub for many of our MBA classmates from INSEAD and Haas. We partook in a few bankers’ luncheons in the famous IFC (also the Asian locale for Dark Knight) and listened to the worries of our friends. The level of uncertainty and lack of daily work shocked me. Some people literally go into the office for 8 hours to browse the web and wait for management to announce layoffs. As bad as things were, all of them have kept their chins up. I suppose they’ve all gotten pass the shellshock stage. I was relieved to see them not in panic or depression. I can only hope that the global economy recovers quickly, for all of us, and also to restore the city’s vibrancy.

View from Victoria Peak

The other similarity HK shares with NYC is its metropolitan nature – big city, big crowds – which I really love about cities. Hong Kong’s unique aspects are numerous: a modern, model transit system, the geography of islands, a much appreciated cleanliness especially compared to NYC and most Chinese cities, and a true nightlife culture. Despite my personal biases for big cities, I can’t help but rank HK highly on the list of desirable places to reside in.

(Photo credits to Dave and Euge)

We made it to the final round on Mashable, thanks to your support. The outpour of votes from all around the world has been impressive and humbling. I’m going to ask for your support from now until December 15th to help us secure the award, the voting widget is just on the left hand column here. In the meanwhile, I can give you a glimpse of what’s happening behind the scenes: the development team is furiously working the next release with more features and better ease of use.