I am in the Palo Alto, on a transit back to Shanghai, with strange ecounters in the last 24 hours.

Like sitting at University Cafe talking to some friends (Nick, David and Andy) yesterday and turning my back to see Loic, who is meeting Benjamin, another new friend I just got to know just 2 hours ago. Small world!

And waking up in the middle of the night, jetlag, login to World of Warcraft, only to realized Joi Ito (who is also jetlag) is in SF holding a party tomorrow. (guild-only, no links). Very tempting, almost made me wanted to stay for another day.

Or just an hour ago, as I am about to go through security clearance, to see Ole Jacobson standing inline in front of me on his way to Osaka, and then Nakayama joined us in the lounge who is on his way back to Tokyo.

I guess March is an active month, with ICANN (Mexico), Demo (Palm Bench), ETech (San Jose), IETF (San Francisco), APAN (Taiwan) and WIDE (Japan). The geeks are certainly busy traveling.

This is so sad at so many level…

Cowboy Caleb message me a few days ago whether I have seen the new Association of Bloggers (Singapore). I have and was one of the things I followed with quite a bit of amusement after the fury.

But I hesitated to comment on it because,

1) I could be one of the “foreign blogger” who is “controlling the Singapore blogosphere” she is referring to altho I am quite certain she is referring to U-Zyn and not me or Cowboy. While I acknowledge the “foreign” part is true, I am not so sure of the latter.

Tomorrow.sg is foremost, an experiment, pushing the boundary of what is allowed in Singapore (and towards that goal, with the results of what AIMS have proposed, I think we done our part) and a social management experiment (for me personally) to see whether a bunch of people with wildly different ideals can come together to work on a project. I couldn’t even get the editors to come to an agreement for lunch, much less “control” the whole blogosphere.

2) Given the vindictiveness of how ECL goes after U-Zyn after the ping.sg award incident (I know U-Zyn and Veron so I kind of know the back story), she is one woman I don’t want to cross.

While I have an occasional (weakness) habit that I provoke people like ECL for fun, I don’t have the time nor the energy to engage in another blog flamewar right now.

3) Most importantly of all, while I may disagree with who is leading the association, I am not so sure I am against anyone trying to form an association. It is another step forward, yet another experiment, which may or may not work out, but something to watch.

There is an old saying in American politics “Decisions are made by those who show up (Aaron Sorkin)”.

There lies the answer to those who is against the association. Participate and make your vote counts (perhaps that’s the reason why they require council approval before allowing membership). Or form your own association. :-)

It was a relatively warm weekend (10degree…how fast your expectation of “warm” changes :-). So we spend the weekend with the kids; playing with their scooters and electric automobile in the garden and shopping/dinning in the nearby mall.

Out of the blue, my wife said to me that I am beginning to behave “more like a father”.

Reflecting on her comments, I feel quite guilty. I spend most part of Yauyau babyhood away from her (Malaysia and Indonesia) and then I spend most part of Shern Ley babyhood away from him (US and China). Even on the times I was in Singapore, I spend most of my days running from meetings to meetings and will be home quite late. The only times I really spend with them is the few weekends I am in Singapore, which is not much.

My wife never grumble of my traveling, and always supportive. I feel very blessed and thankful to know she is behind me on this. Many friends in similar situation as me are amazed by my wife tolerance (she is rather independent and all she really asked for is a broadband and a warcraft subscription. Very easy to satisfy :-).

But still it does not eliminate my guiltiness and looking back, insisting them to come over to China with me was a good decision. For my kids; Yauyau love her school so much that she said she don’t want to go back Singapore after first day; but also our family; that I spending more time with them that I am starting to plan family trip within China (something my wife never thought I would ever do cos my idea of a vacation is “sleeping in bed”).

I feel extremely guilty this morning. Three of them, lying in bed, weak from diarrohea and vomiting, and I am packing my bags for Wuhan and Beijing. More importantly, unlike in Singapore where I know the in-laws would be able to take care of them, there would be no one over here.

Our “aiyi” left this morning to spend Chinese New Year with her family but luckily our driver is still around so I asked him to keep an eye on them this morning. (He told me of his old village remedy for diarrohea, extracting from fat in the chicken stomach, grill them and down it with water…*gump*)

Still, I don’t feel quite good about it.

But my wife say “Don’t worry, I am strong enough today.”.

Obviously she wasn’t and made me feel even more guilty :-(

I spend most of my time this year in China – My family has made an important decision to move to China. Things has being crazy for the last couple of months with the logistics but we finally have our first Christmas over here.

The decision is a combination of my work, but more importantly how I see the world developed in the next decade or two. Out of the 4 fastest growing economy — Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRIC), I think I can fit into China.

One thing I have certainly improved is my Chinese since moving over here, or at least my wife (who is a Chinese teacher) say so. Nevertheless, I think the depth of Chinese I can command is still pretty far from norm conversation.

For example, I was having tea in Beijing several weeks ago when a friend asked me why I could not get along with another certain mutual person. I struggled to find the right words to expressed in Chinese. When she got it, she just said “君子合而不同小人同而不合*”.

Just 12 words explained what I tried to do in the last 5 mins. Chinese is an amazing language — it contain far more “information” per word than English if you know how to use it properly.

* “君子合而不同小人同而不合” is a saying by an ancient Chinese philosopher known as Confucius record in the “The Analect”.

Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach has being appointed to lead Obama Team Review of FCC!

I know both of them; Kevin is an advocate of all things open (open spectrum, open access, net neutrality) and Susan is an advocate of public space online (privacy, online rights :-)

Now, these appointments really mean CHANGE! Wohoo!

Congratulations and I look forward to good things to come :-)

When someone ask you how much it cost to license your technology, the last thing you want to say is “depend how much you value our technology”.

1. You don’t know how much your own technology is worth.

2. You going to charge different people different licensing fee.

Most important of all, you sound like a hawker in some third world country bargaining, not a professional negotiating licensing for a major research lab.

And if you say “If there is no value to you, then don’t license”, I will walk away.

ps: Yes, I walked from the deal. It is just too silly.

In Cairo, waking up at 2am to watch the election on CNN and online and watching the votes come in. I hope I am not disappointed as I did in 2004 tho.

Go Obama Go! I had enough for the last 8 years!

Update: Wohoo!!! I look forward to CHANGE!

Billionaire who wasn’t by Conor O’Clery

A book about Chunk Feeney, the co-founder of Duty Free Shopping, ranked 23rd richest man who gave away all his money, mostly anonymously until people discover he don’t even own a house or a car. (Incidentally, I realized I was an indirect benefactor of Chunk after reading his book :-)

Didn’t blog much lately due to the heavy traveling between China, Hong Kong, United States. Between my travels, I spend less than a total of 10 days in Singapore with my family the last two months.

Oh yea, I finally did my Segway Tour of San Francisco last weekend, thanks to Dewayne Hendrick who spend an afternoon going on the tour with me. Gosh, I got to get one of those Segway soon!

On an unrelated topic, I have accidentally deleted all the comments on the blog over the years as I was trying to get rid of 20,000 spam comments :-(

Instead of trying to recover from backup, I decided it is perhaps time for me to disable the comment totally. Afterall, i am getting more spams than legitimate comments – and for those who wish to, you can also contact me directly.