episteme_sundays's Xanga

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:56:45 GMT

Night on Wall Street.

The sentinel bull of Wall Street.

Spent the evening at a function sponsored by my alma mater's Carey School of Business. Even on my international travels, there is no doubt that even perhaps more than London, the term "Wall Street" summons up all that is possible in the economic aspirations of growing into what could be. That holds true whether you are a developing country who has just joined the WTO or a two person energy startup working out of a Starbucks and a PO Box.

Surreal to get to walk the old wooden floors of the trading floor while holding a champagne flute---a landscape which during the day is rife with all flavors of Greenspan's "creative destruction" personified in shouts and the digital christmas lights of a Thomas Reuters terminal display. This evening it was relatively calm, running into alumni, running into the Dean, to benefactors and other architects of the Carey school and the global financial world it aims to send out into the universe.

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Life after, after, after 4:00pm on the stock floor.

Front.

Wall Street entrance.

The kiosk that trades P&G (which closed at $57.49/ share tonight, by the way)

Trinity Church overseeing the non-tangible aspects of Wall Street.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 22:53:50 GMT

Double Dirty Rice.

It's not as immoral or scandalous as it sounds. And it's perfectly legal in all states.

All states that have a Bojangles Chicken and Biscuits in them, that is.

I do not condone irresponsible gorging of one-self on fast food, particularly fried foods, but I myself am an occassional diligent practitioner of eating such things (for some foods, more occasionally than others...).

I have an entire caategory of "good things that are bad" with regards to types of food that are delicious, but not exatly what your nutritionist would push on you for a weekly eating plan. Certain strains of fried chicken fall into this category.

As a Dixieland born and bred Southerner, fried chicken has been part of my culinary life from the time my mother and I would crave Kentucky Fried Chicken (at the time, still bearing its full, multi-syllabic moniker, before the finger lickin' mouthful was reduced to just three letters K.F.C.). I would go to a southern-style chain called Po'Folks (later renamed Folks Country Kitchen) whose decor conjured up a picnic in a barn in some Tennessee countryside.

But there was another phenomenon across town---numbering just one store relative to abundant Kentucky Fried Chicken locations.

It was called Bojangles.

There were only two in the town I grew up in and eventually, only one of them survived. Perhaps it was due to economic forces of supply, but I found myself preferring to drive across town as a high schooler, passing several Kentucky Fried Chickens along the way, not just for Bojangles chicken, not just for its crusty biscuit the size of a Waffle House hashbrown, but for a particular side dish it featured that made the cajun zest of its chicken that much zestier: its cajun style rice, known in the Bojangle's world as "dirty rice."

On a recent trip to Charlotte, I finally learned that Bojangles was founded right there in the Queen City in 1977. I saw a photo of the original store design that I grew up eating biscuits and chicken legs and, of course, dirty rice, in. Here I was, at the origins of one of my childhood cravings, feeling strangely at home. There may be cajun-styled spicy rice in all incarnations in the cajun eateries of the world, but in my heart of hearts, I will forever refer to all such rice as "dirty rice" even though I know there can be only one. And perhaps even more modern than the fact that Kentucky Fried Chicken is now KFC, Bojangles now has its own Facebook fan page (which of course, I signed up to support without a second thought). Thankfully, tastiness has not disappeared with progression of other changes.

The Bojangles franchise seems to be doing quite well in the Carolinas these days as I find myself having to drive less and less far whenever I pass through town on business and am on the prowl for one. Mind you, one visit per busienss trip is typically plenty for me and my cholesterol levels. But that one trip is just enough to get those stomach-warming childhood memories re-seeded. And to discover that I have unknowingly had a particular freedom all along, the freedom to order dirty rice as *both* of my side dishes: double dirty rice.

That's advanced.

History is tastier with options.

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Thursday, September 10, 2009

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 08:15:54 GMT

The Financial District of the Moon.

I'm at the end of a long stint of travel throughout Asia that started June 19 and, aside from a few days of meetings in Connecticut, I have been going through hotel branded soap and shampoo as I change from place to place. Now in my last week, I'm taking a few days off to enjoy my missed "July 4th" and "Labor Day" holidays as my Asia work wraps up.

According to dopplr.com, so far in 2009, I've traveled around 40% of the distance between the earth to the moon, but for now, although I've never personally been to the moon, this busy intersection during rush hour in a financial center in a large Asian metropolitan city seems like there'd be more to do (collecting cool geological samples notwithstanding).

Traveling throughout earth though isn't necessarily less foreign than going to the moon, I'd imagine (especially if Marriott opens up a Renaissance East Crater or something there, because then I'd at least get Reward points). If the moon were to become the next financial center of the universe (London and Wall Street surrendering their spot), I would picture these same businessmen in white shirts, black slacks, clutching dark suitcases or Louis Vuitton man-bags. There would be jsut as many coffee houses scattered throughout the side streets. Crossing the street would still be kinda dangerous unless you were in fact, faster than a speeding bus.

But the people I'd meet there, moon men or otherwise, would doubtlessly be just as interesting, career climbing, transaction pushing, delivering to themselves and their customer base the same aspirations of a quality life as much as any other creature. You'd meet people you could learn endlessly from, some that you befriend over seafood dinners, some that annoy you from Powerpoint Slide #1. But the good and bad would even out and when the lights in the offices got turned off at night, some averaged sense of accomplishment would still pervade us, satisfaction tempered only slightly by corporate stresses. Work more now, stress less later.

As such, thermodynamics is as much as philosophy or way of life as it is a science, I reckon.

Even enjoying a gorgeous afternoon at the breezy cusp between summer and autumn takes some energy.

And the world and its people will become wiser and more light hearted for it.

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Monday, August 10, 2009

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 07:59:00 GMT

The Sound of Progress.

I'm on the seventh floor of a hotel that over the past year, has
undergone renovations. Specifically to this floor. The bathroom was
re-tiled, the bed was replaced by a king sized waterbed (really),
there is even video on demand. Upstairs on the 8th floor, similar
renovations are currently being carried out as well. Every few
minutes a drill pounds against the ceiling above me. Wooden posts or
steel pipe clanks to the ground. A few hundred feet in the opposite
direction, although still clearly audible, a carpenter is hard at
work, the pangs of his hammer matching the beat of my own heart. The
sounds of construction, progress, renovation, continuous improvement.

It also happens to be 2:00am.

I can't believe this is happening and as the thumping of metal
continues above me I'm not sure what will crack first from the
pressure---the ceiling or my skull.

I'm not in the US, or I'd march right down to the front desk and fill
out a comment card and demand that the dusty bottle of $5 Evian in my
room be comp'd. I won't say what country I'm in, but let's face it,
this blog site is censored and blocked there anyway so who's counting?

So I take a deep breath, smile in my sleep, and dream I'm in a
construction site.

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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:56:13 GMT

9 People, 7 Countries, 5 languages. One dinner table.

Not quite the G8, but instead, a group of battery engineers, paper engineers, machinists, and electrical technologists gathered around a dinner table in a mountainous, southeast corner of China, in a city that gets few western foreigners to begin with.

Another indication of the highly Western presence was that on one singular lazy susan, there were three orders of the Chinese version of Americanized Chinese Food icon: kung pao chicken.

As much as I may gripe about humidity and getting stranded at the Fuzhou airport in the summers because of typhoons, the Fujian Province has really started to grow on me. I suppose most places have that way about them when on any given month, I may be sleeping in the hotel bed far more often than my own (recently purchased, rarely used Simmons Beautyrest Cushion-top).

That's my hotel and third (or fourth home), the Starlight Motel (really, that's what it's called: 星光). Less because of its tendencies to remind on of the Las Vegas strip or a seedy corner of downtown Baltimore, but because it's owned by the Xingguan Paper Company, another major industrial presence in this otherwise remote town.

But the hills here remind me much of the Tennessee of my childhood oddly enough. Unlike other Chinese factory towns that have to suffer a wide turnover of workers, most of the workers here are homegrown, well-rooted here, and rarely have a reason to need the comforts of what my Frankfurt colleague called an idyllic simple life. The people here become friends, the friends become family.

If the promise of this city is any indication of the continued growth of China as an ever evolving corporate and business powerhouse, then the best of our hopes can be realized, and the less popular side-effects of globalization can be better understood and completely revised by a country that has continued to walk prudently and diligently on its path of impressive economic growth.

That day will come. But for now, it's a table of representatives of Finland, Germany, the US, China, New Zealand, France, Belgium, trading stories of jet lag, international foods, how a Tsingtao and a heaping pile of hearty food can be a grand model of unilateral cooperation, even if in the seemingly smallest mountain regions of southeast China.

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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 02:08:00 GMT

Sunset in Manhattan, Sunrise in Seoul.

17 hours ago I was in a Manhattan-bound rental car with the rest of the weekend traffic heading into the City and now I'm watching the morning attempt to catch up with my jet lag from the glass-walled top floor of a Seoul hotel. Another sign of different place and different time is that along with my black coffee, I'm having kim-chee mandu for breakfast, in jeans and a sweatshirt smelling like the inside of an airplane.

Beside me on the plane was an electrical contractor turned missionary named Steve who was on his way to install an array of solar panels to power a newly constructed church in Tanzania. He has made it his life's work to bring solar power to developing countries (that and trying to convince his oldest son, a sophomore in college in Lansing, to reconsider a career in international business and pursue engineering instead.)

The day gets brighter as I type, at about the same rate as my coffee gets colder. How's that for a balanced breakfast?

As I have been afforded this traveling lifestyle, in the name of personal portable power (our marketing lingo for "batteries"), I know that such opportunities, like the take off and landing of a Boeing 767, don't last forever. So I'm packing as much into my suitcase of memories and experiences as much as I can(literally, as I hop onto a plane for Shenzhen in 4 hours). I collect observations (in addition to stealing hotel soap) on things that I have always rationalized to be true but had never gotten to witness firsthand.

Regardless of the currency exchange rates or the nationality of the bank that happens to be on the verge of failing today, people still get tired, people still get excited. People like hot meals (for the most part, unless we're talking Cold Stone or nyangmyun), people want a place to lay their head comfortably(whether they get Premier Deluxe Platinum Elite Hosh-Posh points for it or not), people want hot showers after 13 hour plane rides, people want to stay cool in the summer, warm and fuzzy in the winters. People still miss their family and loved ones. People still lose their tempers. People still laugh together running through the rain with broken umbrellas. People shriek together while sprinting through airport terminals after spilling entire bags of Skittles like a confectioner's version of Spy Hunter.

Yesterday's Financial Times had its own share of grey-clouded gloominess: unemployment is getting worse, companies are getting devalued, many of us are still at war (personally or nationally). Just scan the front page of any newspaper (for those newspapers that still exist, anyway). Not necessarily the picture of greatness or unchecked prosperity.

But for those of us who are holding on with white-knuckles to the opportunities that they still fortunately have in the face of crippled travel budgets, seeing the world from 30,000 feet (or 9 km), provides a bit of introspective cloud time. I accept the fact that things may get worse before they get better. I accept the fact that my 401(k) will continue to vaporize. I accept that fact that one day people will stop buying toothpaste and detergent and batteries and I'll be out of a job.

I expect that my luggage will get lost again at least three more times this year and that my computer will crash and I'll lose three month's worth of lab data. I know that if I don't get in more preparation for my state engineering licensure exam in the spring, that I will absolutely lose my Cheerios on test day.

But the economy is cyclical. Just like baggage claim belts are cyclical.

Hemingway was right that the sun also rises for all of us despite our unpredictable, adverse surroundings--eventually anyway. We just have to stay awake long enough.

Just keep your nose down and chin up.

Solar power is here for all of us, even if you have to fly to another time zone to get first dibs.

Friday, November 14, 2008

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 03:47:05 GMT

Let Me Out or Let Me In.

There's a thing about rental car's that's unsettling.

In an industry plagued by fuel efficiency, consumer preference, and J.D. Powers trophies and crash safety tests, one thing that has unnerved me is this: where the trunk release buttons are located in rental cars.

I am a rental car customer.

On several, several occasions.

As part of my life sends me romping on one-way trips to and from airports, long term rentals upon arriving at airports in cities old and new, the one consistent challenge I face on those long, tired evenings, further handicapped by general travel weariness, way-too-heavy shoulder bags, and suitcases with lopsided wheels, is how the hell to open the trunk so I can relieve my spine and/or shoulder blade(s) of my luggage.

Even when I had no luggage, this was unsettling (mostly because I was in the middle o' the mountain ranges in China and my luggage was in Las Vegas--I would have preferred the opposite, but duty called...). The non-obviousness of the trunk release just made it that much more unsettling.

It is unsettling especially when it's night and when the keys to the rental car are already in the ignition (because that's customer service).

You see, one is harrowed after hours on a plane eating pretzel packs (with just enough pretzels in it to make you hungry, and just not enough to mock your hunger) and those tiny plastic cups filled with soda (unless you're flying US Airways, in which case, you won't get any of that unless you fork over a couple of bucks and only then, after the air-stewards themselves pitch you credit card deals, mortgage refinancing, weight loss solutions, and pamphlets on how to start your own multi-million dollar online business).

By the time you've deplaned--which means you've actually left the plane even though it landed 45 minutes ago--you are rubbing elbows with other similarly tired and easily agitated colleagues of the sky.   Airline crews have had to put up with the complaining, screaming versions of you as much as your elbows have had to put up with getting dislocated by the hurtling beverage carts (some nicer crew folks will warn you, but if your iPod is on, or, heaven forbid, if you're asleep... fuggedaboutit). The airlines are trying their hardest and the whole lot of us: crew, captains, passengers, ground crew..we all just want to go home. It's just that for some of us, "home" means a hotel and getting to that hotel means: a rental car.

And then, since every airport is laid out differently, the location of the rental car area is different. Some have people movers that whisk you away on EPCOT center-esque monorails to the rental concourse. Others have rental car shuttles lined up alphabetically. Others have shuttles located by the taxi stands, but no, not over there by the inter-concourse shuttle.   Vice versa.   There's the long term parking stops, the public bus stops, the one-way-to-suburbia super vans...

Nonetheless, staying conscious and in a focused state becomes quite taxing after you've been subjected to these mental olympics.

That's why the timing is so perfect, yet so simultaneously humiliating, when, just as you think you're about to head to your hotel, you get to your car in the rental lot and you can't open the ever-loving trunk.

At this point in your delirium, *everything* is blown out of proportion.

Typically, the button or trunk release may be located:

[] in the driver side door handle somewhere
[] just below the ignition switch
[] just to the left of the steering wheel (usually where the dimmer switch and/or headlight switch is)
[] on the panel by the gear shift

These seem the most obvious but I have been frustrated when neither of these most obvious locations become actual locations or, I have to run through my Cycle of Trunk Activation of candidate locations each time.

Is this an issue of design? Or simply an incompetent, bumbling user?

Sometimes you will be successful.

Sometimes you will fail. But hey, the backseat also works just fine as a storage location. Think of it as a cushioned trunk.

Just don't get me started on finding where the universal door lock buttons are.

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Friday, August 08, 2008

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:16:03 GMT

epi(cure).

gangnam | korea

Friday, August 08, 2008

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:13:26 GMT

epi(cure).

fuzhou | china

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:12:22 GMT

Brooklynwaterfalls.

Alice leans in to get a closer look, despite being overly unimpressed.

In addition to discovering the Brooklyn waterfront area as a nice summer spot for fish tacos and Sam Adams in plastic cups while supporting public art projects, more fantastically, it was nice to just sit on the grass, eat junk food, and watch large boats go by.

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