I give my appologies for not writing in a couple of weeks, but the power adapter for my apartment's computer is broken and I haven't been able to do any writing at home. Since I'm writing at work, I'll keep this post short and let you know that more info on my life will be coming soon!
Things to look forward to . . .
1) New project; I'm going to Shanghai
2) Going away party for my friend Jess
3) A day trip to two sections of the Great Wall
Soon enough there will be text, pictures and possibly video!!!!
Monday, October 30, 2006
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Back to Work
Not too much to write about this week. Work started again on Sunday after the week-long break. I was a little sad to go back because I was enjoying all of the free time, but this past week wasn't very stressful at all.
I've had a lot of down-time since the end of the Urban Safari so I've basically been doing a lot of research. At this point, most of the Chinese workers in the company have little to no formal business education so my work is pretty basic. I read American business educational material and summarize the parts that are most important to understand when working for HighTeam. Then I present the info to the other members of my R & D Team. It's pretty easy work and I'm learning a lot, which is quite nice. Over the past week I read 3 books on marketing and got paid to do so. I love learning, at this point I'm basically being paid to do something that I would have liked to do anyways.
In addition to that reading, I'm reading a couple of books at home. The first is Wild Swans, an amazing history of 3 generations of Chinese women growing up through the 19th century. If anybody plans to come and visit me, I would recommend that he or she picks up that book from their local library and gives it a read before coming by. There are lots of references to Beijing because it is the political capital of China, so I've seen many of the places mentioned in the book; pretty cool. I'm also starting The Pride and The Prejudice just for kicks. I bought a membership at a place called The Bookworm, which is essentially an English language library that charges membership fees. I haven't really gotten into it yet because I want to finish Wild Swans first.
Back to work. They are seriously running out of structured things for me to do, since most of the proposal writing that is going on right now is in Chinese. Hence, I've started to define my own projects. The company in the past has been a loose association of very talented and driven people who each built their own mini-businesses in HighTeam, and when they left, they took their work with them. So the company doesn't have a lot of base knowledge which everybody can access. So my first self-created project is to profile the major industries that HighTeam services. Right now Erica and I are profiling the high-end auto industry. Basically we're preparing the company for any type of project that they would need to do by breaking the industry down into manageable sub-industries (eg. we look at all of the high-end luxury sedans, find the different cars that are competitors based on price and style, and then determine the relative international positions of the cars in the international market. i.e. Volvo is a "safety" positioned brand; they sell based on the fact that their cars are very sturdy and safe, whereas Jaguar is a youthful image-based company; they sell to a crowd that is younger in age and enjoys nightlife, and is very concerned with style). All-in-all the project is very ambitious, but the project managers that I have talked to up to this point have been very excited about the possibility of centralizing some of the knowledge in the company. One told me that it would be "great not to have to stay up to 3:00 a.m. writing proposals anymore because of repeat work."
So that's my life right now. I enjoy the researching more than the event management for two reasons. First, it's far less stressful. I get to work at 9:00 a.m. and I leave at 5:00 p.m. Then I don't have to worry about whether I have taken care of all of the details in the project, because I set the level of detail. Second, I'm much better at it. I have always enjoyed and been good at working with very abstract problems which require me to synthesize large amounts of information into something more simple that gives people insights into what they should do in the future. So I like it. Still don't think I could do it for the rest of my life, but I like it.
I've had a lot of down-time since the end of the Urban Safari so I've basically been doing a lot of research. At this point, most of the Chinese workers in the company have little to no formal business education so my work is pretty basic. I read American business educational material and summarize the parts that are most important to understand when working for HighTeam. Then I present the info to the other members of my R & D Team. It's pretty easy work and I'm learning a lot, which is quite nice. Over the past week I read 3 books on marketing and got paid to do so. I love learning, at this point I'm basically being paid to do something that I would have liked to do anyways.
In addition to that reading, I'm reading a couple of books at home. The first is Wild Swans, an amazing history of 3 generations of Chinese women growing up through the 19th century. If anybody plans to come and visit me, I would recommend that he or she picks up that book from their local library and gives it a read before coming by. There are lots of references to Beijing because it is the political capital of China, so I've seen many of the places mentioned in the book; pretty cool. I'm also starting The Pride and The Prejudice just for kicks. I bought a membership at a place called The Bookworm, which is essentially an English language library that charges membership fees. I haven't really gotten into it yet because I want to finish Wild Swans first.
Back to work. They are seriously running out of structured things for me to do, since most of the proposal writing that is going on right now is in Chinese. Hence, I've started to define my own projects. The company in the past has been a loose association of very talented and driven people who each built their own mini-businesses in HighTeam, and when they left, they took their work with them. So the company doesn't have a lot of base knowledge which everybody can access. So my first self-created project is to profile the major industries that HighTeam services. Right now Erica and I are profiling the high-end auto industry. Basically we're preparing the company for any type of project that they would need to do by breaking the industry down into manageable sub-industries (eg. we look at all of the high-end luxury sedans, find the different cars that are competitors based on price and style, and then determine the relative international positions of the cars in the international market. i.e. Volvo is a "safety" positioned brand; they sell based on the fact that their cars are very sturdy and safe, whereas Jaguar is a youthful image-based company; they sell to a crowd that is younger in age and enjoys nightlife, and is very concerned with style). All-in-all the project is very ambitious, but the project managers that I have talked to up to this point have been very excited about the possibility of centralizing some of the knowledge in the company. One told me that it would be "great not to have to stay up to 3:00 a.m. writing proposals anymore because of repeat work."
So that's my life right now. I enjoy the researching more than the event management for two reasons. First, it's far less stressful. I get to work at 9:00 a.m. and I leave at 5:00 p.m. Then I don't have to worry about whether I have taken care of all of the details in the project, because I set the level of detail. Second, I'm much better at it. I have always enjoyed and been good at working with very abstract problems which require me to synthesize large amounts of information into something more simple that gives people insights into what they should do in the future. So I like it. Still don't think I could do it for the rest of my life, but I like it.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
My Apartment Location
Hey all. If anybody was wondering where my apartment is located in Beijing, feel free to check out Google Earth online. Worker's Stadium is just northeast (more east than north) of the forbidden city (a big square in the middle of Beijing). Worker's Stadum is also a tough landmark to miss if you know where to look since it is a big, round stadium-looking thing. This picture is a blown up view of my area of Beijing with some major roads and Worker's Stadium labeled. I don't know how big the picture is online (I can't read my own posts), but you can click on it to see the full size.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Photos!
So I don't have too much to write about today. I was planning on taking a trip to the Great Wall this morning, but apparently I ate something that didn't agree with me and I was up all last night with major stomach pains, and I didn't feel like leaving for the Great Wall at 8:00 am in that condition. Luckily, the pain has since subsided substantially.
The main purpose of this post is to link you up to my new webshots account. Click here to get to the site that contains my albums. I should be updating with new photos every once in a while, so feel free to bookmark (Don't become a member, though, unless you have an email address that you don't check often; Webshots does send some spam. If you need an extra email address, just get a Hotmail one; it's free and completely useless compared to Gmail!)
That's about all I have for now. I head back to work on Sunday . . . the holiday calendar here is a little odd compared to the U.S., but whatever. I'm just going to make the most of the free time that I have.
The main purpose of this post is to link you up to my new webshots account. Click here to get to the site that contains my albums. I should be updating with new photos every once in a while, so feel free to bookmark (Don't become a member, though, unless you have an email address that you don't check often; Webshots does send some spam. If you need an extra email address, just get a Hotmail one; it's free and completely useless compared to Gmail!)
That's about all I have for now. I head back to work on Sunday . . . the holiday calendar here is a little odd compared to the U.S., but whatever. I'm just going to make the most of the free time that I have.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
(October 1, 2006)
Wow it has been a busy couple of weeks. I hope I can remember what has been going on . . . I’ll start from the big event . . .
Weekend of September 23rd
The weekend of the 23rd was the big weekend of the F-1 (Formula One Racecar) run in Beijing as well as my first project, the Urban Safari. Saturday I was up at 5:30 am to catch a bus to the site (about 1 hour north of Beijing) at 7:00 am. I spent that day supervising the construction of the tent, learning about the site, and coordinating the project via cell phone (there were 3 people who still had things to finish up in Beijing the day prior to the event). Besides a little confusion about where our 4:00 rehearsal would take place (one girl thought it would be at the office, but it was on-site) and one other thing, things went smoothly on Saturday.
The other thing that didn’t go smoothly was the hanging of the pictures in the gallery. It wasn’t supposed to be hard . . . but it was for some reason. We had 5 hired assistants with nothing to do, so we gave them this job. We had printed off photos of how we wanted the pictures arranged on the wall. The instructions were simple: make sure that the tops are flat and that the pictures that are at the same level in the example picture are at the same level on the wall. Well, it turns out that hanging pictures level is very, very hard to do. Now there were 5 guys there, so they could have had 2 hanging and 3 checking to see if the pictures were level, but for some reason that didn’t happen, even after I saw the “first draft” of the wall, screamed, and suggested it. The second time I came back after leaving them to do it, the pictures looked like they were floating along a wave in an ocean. They started (on the right half of the room) reasonably flat, but then they started tilting to the right and rising until they reached the crest at the far left end of the room where the top of the left-most picture was a full 3+ inches higher than the top of the right-most picture. The change was gradual, so one wouldn’t have noticed it if they were walking 4 inches from the wall, but if you were on the other half of the room, it literally hurt your eyes. Yikes. So I just did it myself.
After that fiasco was straightened out, we had the walk-through by a couple of VIPs, and they were very excited. Hurray! After that, we did a little run-through, packed up, and went home to get a little sleep before the big day.
Sunday morning, I awoke at 4:30 am to catch a 6:00 am bus to finish setting up. The main day went extremely smoothly with the exception of a little scare when our wine connoisseur showed up 15 minutes late. Luckily, only one VIP had arrived to tour the tent at that point, and he was still around when the wine-man arrived.
Later in the day, the tent was a huge hit! We invited about 50 people, 30 or so came, and several came 2 or 3 times to take advantage of the air-conditioning, the massages, and the wine. Meanwhile, I got to discuss Urban Safari as a concept, hand out my business card so that people could schedule their own Safaris, and so forth. It was excellent. It felt very good to finally reach the end of the whole project and to see all of the ideas come together as a reality.
Despite the fun time that I was having in the tent, the high-point of the day came when I got to see the F-1 car run. Because our company planned the event, the people on our team got “very special access” badges which allowed us to go right up next to the F-1 racer as it took off and whipped around and skidded to stops, etc. It was crazy! It’s actually pretty scary when a car that can go 0 to 60 in 3 seconds is whipping around about 8 feet in front of you and burning so much rubber that you can’t see it after a second when it starts driving away. And all of this occurred when we were in what I liked to call the “death zone” (as in, if the driver screws up, he plows through the barricades and you are dead, zone). He did actually go through the barricade at one point, but not near me. It was a pretty minor accident too, with only $500,000 damage done to the car (eek).
So that was that. I got lots of “congrats” from the other members of HighTeam for completing my first event, and many (including Alex) said that the tent was better than expected. So I’m happy for a first success.
This past week was quite eventful to, but not as unique as the F-1 Event. Monday I thought I was done with work, but since I’m a numbers guy I had to run the analysis from all of the survey data that we took. It wasn’t too bad, though. Tuesday I took a trip to IKEA and continued the slow process of making my little bitty apartment into a home. Wednesday was a thank you dinner for the better than expected F-1 Event from the mystery company whose name I can’t divulge. Thursday, I was invited to a wine tasting by the wine connoisseur who helps us with Urban Safari; I’m finally starting to get a feel for the wine lingo that he throws around. After the wine tasting, it was on to karaoke, which was a blast. It was so much fun, in fact, that I went back for more karaoke on Friday. Saturday I caught up on sleep and today is Sunday, the first day of our week-long Mid-Autumn Festival (which means that I have no work next week!).
So today Erica and I went shopping around Beijing and I got the man-bag that I’ve been wanting for such a long time (my backpack is too big). In case you’re not familiar with the term man-bag, it’s something like a purse, but for a guy. However, you can sling it over your shoulder, so it’s masculine. Then we did some grocery shopping, I watched some T.V. and I treated myself to a nice little Bose stereo system that hooks up to my iPod. Soon my apartment will be a home ☺.
That’s about it for now. I’ll keep updating as I have time (which I hopefully will this week)!
Wow it has been a busy couple of weeks. I hope I can remember what has been going on . . . I’ll start from the big event . . .
Weekend of September 23rd
The weekend of the 23rd was the big weekend of the F-1 (Formula One Racecar) run in Beijing as well as my first project, the Urban Safari. Saturday I was up at 5:30 am to catch a bus to the site (about 1 hour north of Beijing) at 7:00 am. I spent that day supervising the construction of the tent, learning about the site, and coordinating the project via cell phone (there were 3 people who still had things to finish up in Beijing the day prior to the event). Besides a little confusion about where our 4:00 rehearsal would take place (one girl thought it would be at the office, but it was on-site) and one other thing, things went smoothly on Saturday.
The other thing that didn’t go smoothly was the hanging of the pictures in the gallery. It wasn’t supposed to be hard . . . but it was for some reason. We had 5 hired assistants with nothing to do, so we gave them this job. We had printed off photos of how we wanted the pictures arranged on the wall. The instructions were simple: make sure that the tops are flat and that the pictures that are at the same level in the example picture are at the same level on the wall. Well, it turns out that hanging pictures level is very, very hard to do. Now there were 5 guys there, so they could have had 2 hanging and 3 checking to see if the pictures were level, but for some reason that didn’t happen, even after I saw the “first draft” of the wall, screamed, and suggested it. The second time I came back after leaving them to do it, the pictures looked like they were floating along a wave in an ocean. They started (on the right half of the room) reasonably flat, but then they started tilting to the right and rising until they reached the crest at the far left end of the room where the top of the left-most picture was a full 3+ inches higher than the top of the right-most picture. The change was gradual, so one wouldn’t have noticed it if they were walking 4 inches from the wall, but if you were on the other half of the room, it literally hurt your eyes. Yikes. So I just did it myself.
After that fiasco was straightened out, we had the walk-through by a couple of VIPs, and they were very excited. Hurray! After that, we did a little run-through, packed up, and went home to get a little sleep before the big day.
Sunday morning, I awoke at 4:30 am to catch a 6:00 am bus to finish setting up. The main day went extremely smoothly with the exception of a little scare when our wine connoisseur showed up 15 minutes late. Luckily, only one VIP had arrived to tour the tent at that point, and he was still around when the wine-man arrived.
Later in the day, the tent was a huge hit! We invited about 50 people, 30 or so came, and several came 2 or 3 times to take advantage of the air-conditioning, the massages, and the wine. Meanwhile, I got to discuss Urban Safari as a concept, hand out my business card so that people could schedule their own Safaris, and so forth. It was excellent. It felt very good to finally reach the end of the whole project and to see all of the ideas come together as a reality.
Despite the fun time that I was having in the tent, the high-point of the day came when I got to see the F-1 car run. Because our company planned the event, the people on our team got “very special access” badges which allowed us to go right up next to the F-1 racer as it took off and whipped around and skidded to stops, etc. It was crazy! It’s actually pretty scary when a car that can go 0 to 60 in 3 seconds is whipping around about 8 feet in front of you and burning so much rubber that you can’t see it after a second when it starts driving away. And all of this occurred when we were in what I liked to call the “death zone” (as in, if the driver screws up, he plows through the barricades and you are dead, zone). He did actually go through the barricade at one point, but not near me. It was a pretty minor accident too, with only $500,000 damage done to the car (eek).
So that was that. I got lots of “congrats” from the other members of HighTeam for completing my first event, and many (including Alex) said that the tent was better than expected. So I’m happy for a first success.
This past week was quite eventful to, but not as unique as the F-1 Event. Monday I thought I was done with work, but since I’m a numbers guy I had to run the analysis from all of the survey data that we took. It wasn’t too bad, though. Tuesday I took a trip to IKEA and continued the slow process of making my little bitty apartment into a home. Wednesday was a thank you dinner for the better than expected F-1 Event from the mystery company whose name I can’t divulge. Thursday, I was invited to a wine tasting by the wine connoisseur who helps us with Urban Safari; I’m finally starting to get a feel for the wine lingo that he throws around. After the wine tasting, it was on to karaoke, which was a blast. It was so much fun, in fact, that I went back for more karaoke on Friday. Saturday I caught up on sleep and today is Sunday, the first day of our week-long Mid-Autumn Festival (which means that I have no work next week!).
So today Erica and I went shopping around Beijing and I got the man-bag that I’ve been wanting for such a long time (my backpack is too big). In case you’re not familiar with the term man-bag, it’s something like a purse, but for a guy. However, you can sling it over your shoulder, so it’s masculine. Then we did some grocery shopping, I watched some T.V. and I treated myself to a nice little Bose stereo system that hooks up to my iPod. Soon my apartment will be a home ☺.
That’s about it for now. I’ll keep updating as I have time (which I hopefully will this week)!
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