Personal Dork Assistant

Flight Chow

Flew on Cathay this time with Mr. Tsai, our Japanese dept. head. He has Lounge privileges with Cathay, which kicks ass when you're flying through HK. Another bonus for flying with the home team is that Cathay also runs the in-flight catering service for the airport. My flights were around noontime and they had hot ham-and-cheese sandwiches on good bread (cheddar on french roll one way, swiss on a mini-cibata on the way back). Sure, the bread were still a bit fluffy for my tastes, but still way ahead of squishy-soft or rock-hard rolls usually found in the air.

A Little Gettogether

There was the formal Chinese New Year dinner with the boss and everybody, but you can't really cut loose with the main man sitting right there, and people didn't really like the Macallan anyway (funny hangovers). Plus the food sucked because the restaurant was running like three year-end banquets and a wedding at the same time. So the VP was nice enough to take us out to dinner again later in the week. Total damage for 25 people:

• 2 bottles of Martell XO
• 26 liter-bottles of Tsingdao beer
• 2 little bottles of 20-year old rice wine that one of the guys brought back from his mother-in-law's

Did my fair share, but was hardly a major contributor. With all that alcohol mixing (grape, barley, and rice) I'm surprised nobody missed work the next day. Well, I did get in 10 minutes late, but at least I was my usual inefficient self. Yay for tolerance, although the buzz is kinda overrated.

Wait, Are You Telling Me That This Sucker's Nuclear?

No no no, this sucker's electrical, but it requires a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need.

So we're having a hard enough time getting these folks to make one (give or take 300 million) LED without screwing it up, and now they want to build dozens of nuclear power plants?

In its anxiety to satisfy its seemingly bottomless demand for electricity, China plans to build reactors on a scale and pace comparable to the most ambitious nuclear energy programs the world has ever seen.

Yeah, the hazy air sucks, and we're here near the coast. The inland cities are supposedly unbearable with the coal pollution. Still, it's not as if China has a great track record for dealing with environmentally dangerous waste. Maybe the pebble-bed reactors that got the Slashdot geeks all hot and bothered will actually work. On the other hand, if they were any good at predictions the iPod would've been a massive flop. Besides, they probably think it would be cool to be a radioactive mutant.

One sure sign of the Chinese industry's self-assuredness is the promotion of the Daya Bay plants as a tourist attraction. For now - in a country where surging power demand has led major cities like Shanghai to force companies to stagger working hours, shut down during the week and operate on weekends - the public is likely to support anything that promises more electricity.

It's not as if we don't need the juice. Running our own generator once a week doesn't help the profit margin any. Hey, Daya Bay is only 50 miles from HK. Maybe I'll finally have something to do on the weekend.

Meanwhile, Bush continues to promise a strong dollar, even as reality interferes. What happened to the faith in the free market? Everyone hopes that a yuan revaluation would be the magic bullet, but the New York Times article outlines the reasons why it may not even matter. Even with a 25% rise in value (well beyond the most optimistic estimates), it would still be cheaper to do business in China, not just because the labor costs are that low, but also because the entire supply chain is in China now, and it's not that easy to move everything back. It wouldn't be coming back to the States, that's for sure. Maybe Mexico. The Chinese probably won't be buying American goods with their spiffed up yuans anyway, they'd be buying more raw materials, which are usually dollar-denominated anyway, and probably real estate. I can see how hordes of Chinese people buying up American land would go over real well at home. Those folks waiting for Bay Area home prices to drop may have to wait another decade or three if that comes to pass.

Back In The PRoC

The trip to the factory is getting to be old hat at this point. Catch the cab to the airport at 8am, flight is at 10, get to HK by noon and run to catch the 12:30 bus across the border to Shenzhen. The driver from the factory picks us up from the drop-off hotel at 2:30 and I'm unzipping the suitcase by 2:45. This trip had a little extra challenge though, as orders came down from the factory that all incoming personnel must bring in duty-free Macallan 12-year single-malt for the upcoming Chinese New Year festivities. Apparently Macallan is the fad du jour for the hard-drinking Asian businessman this year, because they were all sold out of the 12-year at the TPE duty-free shops, and the party budget didn't allow for 18s. We had to wait until we got to Hong Kong, and even there the shops only had one-liter bottles remaining. So each person could only take one one-liter bottle instead of two 750ml bottles, due to China importation limits. Booze costs more in HK, too. We definitely didn't maximize our alcohol-purchasing dollar. They had other single-malts at the duty-free, but the boss wanted Macallan, so Macallan it is. Hopefully they won't be mixing the whiskey with bottled green tea again. God damn that is vile. They can save the Johnny Walker for that shit.

They've spruced up the place a little bit since last time. Put in venetian blinds on the windows, and they finally fixed the cold-water feed in the sink, so I don't boil my teeth when I'm brushing. I really should work out exactly how much clothes I'd left here and what to bring each time. I've got way too many socks and I can really use a sweater. At least the cold mornings mean that the breakfast congee cools off fast enough so I can finish the bowl just in time for work. Makes it tough to get out of bed, though.

Kung Fu Hustle

The GF's cousin works at the NTU Executive MBA program, which means they get all sorts of nice perks from the home office. She was able to get tickets to the sneak preview of Kung Fu Hustle at the Warner Village the night before it officially opened. Stephen Chow must've really impressed some people in Hollywood with Shaolin Soccer, since Kung Fu Hustle is bankrolled by Sony-Columbia, and is due for a US release.

Stephen Chow is a big fan of Bruce Lee and the WuXia genre in general, so the film was very much a pastiche of clichés in homage to the genre, with zany humor to hold it together and make it fun. More importantly, the movie works on multiple levels. There's the physical comedy and the chop-socky for the ignorant (Americans), and then there are the inside jokes and obscure references for the hard-core fans of the genre. I guess I fall somewhere in the middle of spectrum. I know the language so I realize the English translation sucks all the life out of the dialogue, and I've read enough of the genre to recognize the stylization, even if I don't know the exact references to the original material. Anyway, it's all in good fun, and I had a good time, even if it meant I was up well past midnight on a work night.