After flying back from Thailand, taking the red eye from Bangkok at 2am and arriving in Shanghai at 7:30am, rolling into work, I had a disastrous week.

Yes, Monday was followed by Tuesday night poker. (Hey, I haven’t chilled with the boys in a while, and poker’s a great way to chill.)

Tuesday was followed by Wednesday’s celebration of Jamian’s birthday at DaMarco’s and then party at Babyface. (Hey, it’s Jamian! One of my good buddies in Shanghai! I had to go right?)

Wednesday was followed by Thursday night’s little outing at Guandii. Some guy from Singapore was in town, and my friend had to show him a good time, and needed to rally the troops so that there was some critical mass. (Hey, it’s all good, I’m doing someone a favour! They wouldn’t ask me if they didn’t really need it right? err…)

Thursday was followed by Friday night’s Atlantis Rising party, a party that one of suppliers put together to celebrate their 900th day birthday. (Hey, I was doing QC. AND it was a Friday night, I didn’t expect to stay home on a Friday did I? After a long week at work… and in retrospect of going out… Ok so maybe I should not have went to Guandii afterwards and stayed til it closed.  But this involved me following a friend around because he was wasted and kept trying to pick up chicks, I was kinda worried some local would smash a bottle on his head.)

And that was topped off by last nights little adventure. Going to a houseparty full of laowais, and mostly guys, dirty ones wanting to prey on the locals. Then traveling to Gossip only to find out it was an after hours place. Then to Cashbox to join Alton’s birthday. Then to Guandii to enjoy the Hip Hop. Then back to Gossip…

I don’t remember the last time I went out every night of the week. What a Frackin disaster. I’m almost 30. This place is a den of sin I tell you.  Hopefully I have gotten it out of my system.  Time to concentrate.  Concentrate dammit.

Mary J. Blige is great, I think her voice is fantastic, and I’m glad she has another album out.

These are so hilarious:

http://www.leftlanenews.com/2006/02/22/vw-strikes-again-un-pimp-my-ride-videos/

I remember we pitched an agency one time for VW’s business. They were once a dominant car brand in China. Too bad they’re losing to all the newcomers. I have a feeling that Volvo will do wonders in China: Safe, Luxurious and Sleek.

I just returned from Thailand.  Phi Phi island is the most beautiful place that I’ve ever been in my life.  More pics to be posted soon.

Biggie Smallz may be dead, but he is still the bomb.

So I am in Bangkok right now. It’s my friend, Andy’s bachelor party. It will likely consist of chilling at the beach in Phuket and reading my books.

So good to be outta SH’s cold and drab weather.

Every day, there is at least one highlight that makes my day. It’s all I can do with such a routine in Shanghai. Today, that highlight was finding this:

That’s right. Lion King is coming to Shanghai. Of all the musicals I’ve seen, I truly believe this one to be extra exceptional. Most because of the beautiful costumes and how creative the actors have been able to portray the animals of the jungle. I know, it’s a little gay, but Simba is coming to Shanghai. So what I can sing Hakuna Matata? So what?

Heating in China, is really designed very poorly.

First of all, most apartments seldom have a heater built in, so what you end up doing is buying a couple heaters / air conditioning machines that attach to the wall or act as a standalone heating unit. Apartments usually will have some type of an outlet for the wiring of this, and usually, each room will be suitable for 1 of these units.

Now the stupid thing is, is that these outlets are located near the top of the room, in some far corner of the room. Not very efficient if you want to evenly distribute the heat in a large room relatively quickly. Secondly, heat rises, so wouldn’t it make more sense if the heat vents were on the ground? The developers here must not know that. Also, everything here seems to be built out of concrete, not the greatest insulator. I hate it when people ask me why I complain about the cold since I’m from Canada. These people are obviously retarded. In Canada, all our walls are insulated with fibreglass insulating material, designed to trap heat. I can practically run around naked at home in the dead of winter. Not in Shanghai though.

Must have those soft fur slippers so your feet don’t touch the cold ass ground. Must wear longjohns for that extra layer of warmth. Must have that electric blanket to keep your bed extra warm. Must have that cup of hot tea/water right beside you at all times. I guess it could be worse, and I could be living in Beijing where it is snowing.

Google Maps has a map of Shanghai:
Google Map Shanghai

It’s interesting to note that they won’t let you zoom TOO close. You KNOW they have the technology to do it, I guess the MAN thought that it might be a little bit too intrusive.

After a week of being in HK, it was good to be in SH. Especially after I lost my phone in HK, so disappointing. What it did do though, was give me an excuse to purchase a new phone. I was going to get a Motorola Q, but it wasn’t out yet, but tell me you don’t think this is so dope!

I ended up getting an O2 mini, and a Jabra 250 bluetooth headset.  I’m really happy with this phone.

Another comment I’d like to make is about HK Disneyland and the boneheads that run it. Chinese New Year is an amazing time for HK’s economy because of the increased spending as well as the 400,000 + visitors from mainland China that go to HK to spend money. Disneyland this year was a massive draw, and it was quite apparent that the people behind planning did not anticipate the popularity of Disneyland. They began to close off ticket sales after entrants reached a certain limit, and did not allowed some people to buy tickets / enter the park. The problem was that many mainland Chinese bought prepurchased tickets hoping to visit Disneyland in HK during Chinese New Year and upon the order to disallow additional guests into the park, many of these people with the prepurchased tickets were turned away.

It not only ruined the vacation of some wealthy Chinese, many young childrens’ first real contact with Disney was soured and the amount of people that it pissed off caused a lot of negative PR. Chinese are extremely gossipy, and word of mouth here is more powerful than ever. With the additional string of negative PR, Disney’s got to hire some smarter people to make their decisions.

The one major weekend in 2006, and they mess it up. Dumbasses.

I am in Hong Kong for CNY, it’s always good to get out of Shanghai every once in a while.  I’ve been taking the bus more in HK, it’s so convenient, and everything here makes more sense than they do in SH.  It is extremely obvious that things in SH are not properly planned out, and is no wonder that I get pissed at someone somewhere in SH at least once a day.

And the people in HK seem much nicer, they line up, say thank you and also will let people such as elders or people with the right of way go ahead of them.  I almost forgot about being nice, until on the bus, a few of the passengers gave the bus driver some red pocket money (lai see / hong bao).  I cannot imagine people in China, especially the Shanghainese, doing that to complete strangers.

Having said that, I need to get me some lai see!

Gong xi fa cai / Gong hay fat choy … Happy Chinese New Year and I wish you a Happy and Prosperous Year of the Dog!

The recent news of Google adjusting their search engine for China is an intelligent and very necessary move for Google if they are to survive in China’s changing Internet landscape. In a country where Internet usage growth is soaring, everyone in China that uses the Internet knows Google right now. I would argue that to “Google” something, is also as familliar to the Chinese as it is in the West. And if you don’t believe the hype about Baidu.com, then you should believe the hype, because Baidu.com is also widely used. I took an informal survey among my local friends and everyone also uses Baidu. But Google’s latest move, should keep Baidu’s stock tame and maintain Google’s foothold in China.

“Searches for the Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama and Taiwanese independence all seem to have results omitted…”

Google.com still works for me right now, but when it kicks in, I suppose there are some tricks to try instead of using Google.cn.  This includes the two following links:

http://www.google.com/options/index.html
http://www.google.ca/

If foreign companies expect to make a tonne of money in China, then they must follow the rules. And if they do make a tonne of money, they’ll still be harassed, but only because the Man expects you to share.

If you still don’t get it, it can be simply put that in China’s eyes: “This is my house, and if you don’t like it then you can get the F*&K out!”

With that, I’d like to wish you all a Happy Chinese New Year and prosperous year of the Dog!

I just found out recently that our Diesel Launch event last November, got an award for Party of the Year in Shanghai. It was voted by a Shanghai local media agency and is being given an award tonight. In addition to that, Diesel’s HQ, also voted China as best party internally. I must admit myself, it was one of the best ones that we did last year. Completely off the hook. To celebrate, some of the Diesel management from HK are flying up to Shanghai to receive their award. Party at Shanghai’s Bon Bon tonight. Bon Bon is a new club that opened recently in Shanghai and is affiliated with God’s Kitchen. Even though it’s become a popular club in SH, I still prefer my dose of Hip Hop and R&B.

More pictures of the Diesel party can be found here.

If you ever get a chance, the book 1421 is a great read. I’ve written about this book before, but there’s been more talk recently about China discovering North America before the Europeans.

http://www.1421.tv/

Awesome book.

I started reading the website techcrunch recently.

“TechCrunch is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new web 2.0 products and companies. TechCrunch is written by Michael Arrington”

I have had more time to browse the net lately and have had interesting times stumbling onto different websites. Techcrunch brought up this one website, that I thought was particularly interesting: 1000tags.com After reading about the milliondollar homepage (basically some kid who made a million bucks selling a million pixels of adspace on his site for $1 each pixel) 1000tags.com is kinda similar with a web 2.0 twist.

I’m not a techie, although I would say my computer ability is above average. I have tried to learn more about this tagging phenomenon that some companies (like my Flickr site) have used to organize information. It remains to be seen how this will benefit the web though, a seemingly mass disarray of information. It’s tough to imagine it’s ultimate benefit however, if information is to be uniformly categorized since people routinely use different words in the English language to describe different things. I think it works best with words confined to specific meanings or feelings, for example branded items like Gucci, or Prada, or in the context of a certain discipline, where grapejuice is really grapejuice. It’s also great in communities, where someone using the term “friends” as a tag, for example can share the word with their friends, who know that they themselves may exist in the “friends” tag when browsing through pictures. But in the grander scheme of things, the word friends, could also mean the show “Friends” or could be a book about making friends, or could be a study on the social phenomenon of friends, the information provided could be seemingly endless.

But perhaps that’s an angle to capitalize on, where you know that certain esoteric terms are related to certain elements of a particular group that you are targeting. I read this question earlier from the 1000tags.com website:

“… write about what your thoughts are regarding “paid tag clouds”, whether you see Google offering paid tag clouds instead of paid text ads in the future”

I seriously don’t think so. If Google’s mantra is to organize the world’s information, tags will only do well to mess it up. Different people from different places will have different interpretations of tags. Blue is sad, the colour blue, and the brand Blue Navy.

It will be interesting to see how the Chinese may adapt tags in the future. Some Chinese characters have many meanings all somewhat unrelated to each other. The Simplified Chinese character for BREAD (面) for example can also be understood as FACE, FLOUR, SURFACE, RESPECT and used in combination with another Chinese character could mean a couple different more.

And the conclusion of this post, you’ll see that if you visit the site 1000tags.com, there is an offer for a free tag if you write about tags… I’m giving it a shot.