When we read about successful people, we often read about how capable he is in certain field of specialty.

Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha, world’s greatest stock market investor.
Bill Gates, Billionaire Computer Genius, world’s richest man.

We tend to overemphasis on the man and overlooked the fact that successful men are successful because they are surrounded by a team of talented people.

Warren have Charlie Munger. Bill have Steve Ballmer.
Liu Bei have Zhang Fei, Guan Yu and Zhao Yun.
Sun Quan have Zhou Yu, Zhang Zhao, Zhang Hong, Cheng Pu.

Empires are not build by one man. 江山不是一个人打出来的。

As a leader, people skill, of recruiting and retaining talents, is far more important capability than his own capability.

So there was this news that Google is still hiring after layoffs, which I normally won’t consider a “news”. I don’t find it unusual; any company would have fat is some portion but always desperately looking for talents in others, layoff or otherwise.

But speaking to one of the staff recently, I just realized how bad it could be for the moral of the company, esp the company is small in a close-nit group. He reminded me that it is sending a very wrong signal when his friends are being let off and a new one is joining at the same time. Worst, a good talented new staff may end up being ostrichized by the rest of the company, even though no fault of his.

One of the few things that makes managing a Chinese company quite different; “Relationship” is stronger than anywhere other company I used to work in.

Try to explain why PVG-PEK-SFO ticket is CHEAPER than PEK-SFO ticket. Same airline and even same flight code.

No, I am so silly to fly back to PVG (Shanghai) only to take a PVG-PEK-SFO cheaper ticket.

Anyway, back in SFO yet again. 3rd time this month. The guy at the immigration was puzzled. Me too.

RMB 10 each from Wofo Temple…hand-made from leaves.

Dragon

Phoenix

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Stuck with day-to-day fire fighting, I finally got around to read the excellent article by Michael Lewis.

It is a wonderful article of how the whole financial sector breakdown, to the world we have today, in simple terms of how CDO and CDS adds to the mess we are in. (I understand CDO, but I never fully grasp the implication of CDS until I read this article)

Actually, I was made aware of something called “sub-prime problem” in US in late 2006 by a very smart investor I worked with. He told it is going to be the biggest problem the world going to face and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how a lending problem in US could lead to a worldwide breakdown. I also remember sitting down with some analysts over lunch in mid 2007 trying to make sense of this subprime thing, and we never got it except to get out of the market.

I remember asking “If something going to crash, then someone somewhere going to made money”. I don’t know how back then and wasn’t smart enough to figure it out. I didn’t bother to dig further either (not my field anyway).

But it all make sense now and I wish I did ask a lot more questions then.

—
[I wrote the following and then deleted it, and then wth, I am not giving out anything that is important anyway]

While I lost money in the crisis, I am a little proud I wrote the following in 15th Aug 2007 for an investment report I made for my investor.

“The other risk is timing of the IPO. Many market analysts believe that the US market has being growing for too long and the housing loans problem will bring a major correction to the US market within this year. We must be prepared that the (COMPANY) may not be able to go IPO in 2008 as planned.”

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 James Seng.

First, I would like to thank the staff who have work very hard for the revised gTLD RFP. The quality of the RFP clearly show the effort the staff have put into the document, despite facing very challenging and sometimes conflicting comments from the community.

It is important for me to pay tribute to the staff because what I am going to say may sound ungrateful, and I am certainly not.

When I started using the Internet in the early 90s, it was an Angelo-centric Internet.  We dream about an Internet that is truly international where English is not a prerequisite.  There is a slogan then from ISOC – “Internet for everyone, everywhere”, remember?

In 1999, I demonstrated IDN at APRICOT/ICANN. I went on to chair the IETF IDN WG in 2000 defining the standard for IDN as we know now. I have conducted numerous workshops here at ICANN, also at ITU and other international forum on IDN.

I have dedicated nearly a decade of my life on IDN. I have no regrets and gladly doing it all over again.

So I am really proud that I finally get to see my dream, a 10 dream, of a fully-internationalized domain name coming true.

Yet, as we embark on the next great step forward, of IDN TLD, I am also disappointed that despite all these years, ICANN remains as Angelo-centric as ever.

Why do I say that? Two examples.

In the latest revision of the RFP, there is a legacy 3 character limitation on GTLD. The arcane rule has extended from 3 ASCII character to 3 Unicode character, assuming an Angelo-centric view of “character” apply to the rest of the world. A “Unicode character” in CJK is not a “character” but a “word”.

Imaging having a rule that say “Your English TLD has to be at least 3 words long”. That what ICANN is telling the CJK community.

Second example, despite our work on JET Guidelines, the RFP is silent on IDN variants. I shall not go into the technicality of variants but imaging ICANN saying “.shop” in small letter goes to A but “.shop” in upper case to goes to B. The confusion it will cause to the CJK community is unimaginable.

I spent a lot of time with the ICANN staff this week on these issues. I am happy to say that the staff, Tina, Kurt and Patrick, are extremely understanding to our problem.

I thank them very much for their time and effort.

I am not here to whine but to bring proposals. I won’t go into detail right now but I hope it will be accepted.

Let me end with a story: At the Joint SO/AC meeting this week, the moderator posted a question to the audience, “In the RFP, do you agree that IDN TLD has the most well-defined need?”. It is the only question that has 100% green flags. So if there is such thing as a “priority” in this RFP, then the priority MUST be IDN TLDs.

In 2008, the largest growth of domain names, excluding .com comes from Asia.

If ICANN is sincere about making GTLD successful, I beg you, please do not fumble in Asia.

Thank you.

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 :-(