Thang Nguyen 555

11-11

Just Singles. Anti-Valentine. Lots of “Lonely People” in China.

Alibaba knows that. It wants to help reduce some of that anxiety and loosen some of those heavy purses.

Boom! $2 Billion in sales in an hour.

Anything, from toaster to Twitter ( smart phones).

Welcome to the new consumer society (used to be Savers Society).

Now, just jump until you drop (from the Foxconn balcony) or shop until you drop.

Almost all chose the latter.

To us, it’s just an ordinary Tuesday. But to the Rolling Stones, it’s Ruby Tuesday.

To the Delta Team, their day was Bin Laden take-down one.

To Alibaba, 11-11 is the equivalent of Black Friday.

The genius of marketing.

Big grin on the face of its CEO.

Money makes handsome people.

I don’t want to look at today as just an ordinary day.

Like Rob Reiner’s mom in “Sleepless in Seattle”, “I want some of that”.

If confidence can be contagious from merely looking at the screen, I am now catching it.

Singleness used to be socially awkward in some sectors of society, and certainly in China.

Now, all this is upending. (Andrew Lam even explored on one of his pieces, on sexual body in China.)

BTW. Do read Tazaki Tsukuru, latest installment by Haruki Murukami to understand the nuances of Asian male singleness.

In short, learn to spot the opportunity in the ordinary. For me, this day is not over just yet. I still have tonight to discover the extra-ordinary in everyday life.

Virgin Galactic. Undeterred.

After all, without the likes of Branson, Kingsford Smith, Lindbergh and Earhart, where would we be today!

2014 marks two major setbacks: Malaysian Air flight and Virgin Galactic flight.

Technology wants sacrifice first, mass utility second.

Soon, we will surf the net while our unmanned cars do the driving (we are doing this now on metro line).

I haven’t produced a hand-written letter in quite a long time (using just a laptop keyboard).

Even this morning, when I had to pry open a massive grapefruit, it came so unnaturally (without the juicer).

For billion of years, we have learned and unlearned various skills to adapt to technology of the time.

No risk no reward (the Wright Brothers at the turn of last century sure had a broken rib or two).

We have re-adjusted our expectations of happiness and comfort.

Now is the time to learn how to live longer: pick up a hobby, choose a place to begin our dying process etc…

An alarming statistic shows young people (up to 60% in developed countries) with depression.

At the age of risk taking, of discovering the world, they instead, withdraw to themselves (only to blow the lid via school shooting).

You may say, we don’t know how to handle peace time, at least, in the United States.

Prosperity was somehow coupled with global conflicts. When there is no war, we feel  as if prosperity were not there.

So, as far as (false) logic goes, waging wars would “mobilize” resources, chiefly among which, CASH.

Correlation was taken for causation.

Back to technology and what it wants.

Kevin Kelly seems to think that technology (technium) evolves just as biology.

It wants to give us more choices (from space traveling to channel surfing).

We have seen unintended consequences in China with a 12-day traffic gridlock, or Foxconn dorm-jumping.

Mr Kelly cited Unabomber (individual) and Amish (community)  for being Luddite.

Samsung has recently realized it can no longer stay in the race along Apple.

So Amish or Apple, we have cast our votes.

Lighter, faster, cheaper, better looking and better feel.

What we made  has become us.

What technology wants, not what we want.

The work of our hands now takes precedence.

And one day, when we travel in space, looking back to not just the Mojave Desert, but Earth itself, we will then realize it’s a small price to pay for the view and viewpoint: living on Earth itself will have been a provincial act.

Seeing Palawan Island on top of CN Travelers list brings back fond memories of my brief humanitarian trip there years ago.

Young, idealistic and fearless, I was sent down on rotation to “boost up”  the morale of a remnant of Vietnamese refugees stuck permanently there (later, after decades of legal wrangling, the camp was finally vacated and bodies shipped back to where they belong).

Palawan then as it is now (I suppose) was yet invaded by hotel chains and casinos. You can find more detail and description about Palawan on CN Travelers.

What once thought of as “trash” can quickly become “treasure”, given enough luck and time.

Australia, after Gold was found, became a nation, not a concentration camp.

Palawan Island, once housed unwanted refugees, now the darling of global trotters. (Same with Con Dao Island in Vietnam, once a French “alcatraz”, now a getaway of choice for the likes of Angelina and Brat Pitt).

Personally, I spent one entire summer on Wake Island – pristine waters, coral reef and cleanest air around – yet was unable to appreciate a single second of it (I was in transit, with a burning desire to get to my final destination: America). I am sure the Japs and the Allied forces were fighting for every inch of that place (a refuel station for B29 which ultimately delivered those two fateful atomic bombs onto Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

So what is at the heart of the matter? Is it the place? or one’s expectations of the place?  Prison, as undesirable as they may first appear, has been character-builder for Nelson Mandela, Genghis Khan, Senator John McCain. In a latest Atlantic article, we find Viktor Frankl’s meaning of life as the ultimate surviving mechanism, not pursuit of happiness. And this Nobel-prize winner discovered his theory in,of all places, Nazi concentration camps.

Back then,  laying under a thatch-roof hut and on top of a straw bed, I repeated to myself “He who is no fool to lose that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose” to get through the long and ardous torrential night.

I did not know back then I was getting one of the best vacations given 2014 CN travelers rating.

Or else, I would have asked to extend my stay.

People I visited were eager for outside news, for a word of encouragement, for my takes on things (reminds me so much of The Unconsoled, a novel by Ishiguro, who was famous for The Remains of the Day).

It was neither pastoral nor papal a visit. But it served a purpose: to assure that they were not cut-off from the outside world, and that they should remain faithful (drunkenness and immorality are not uncommon).

BTW. Years later, at MCI Circle of Excellence, it’s Maui for me. But then the expectations and excitement were quite different – with helicopter trip and black-tie reception.

It must be in the awaiting that makes the heart grows stronger.

To wrap it up, I was also visiting Liberia long time ago. Knowing that the country had been formed by former American freed slaves, I set foot there with enormous respect and a sense of appreciation.

Now it’s well-known as birth place and hotbed of Ebola. Things do come in full circle if you think about it.

You may say I  have a penchant to look for trouble spots (The Last Days of Vietnam, the burning monk and Three-Mile-Island news internship).

Those were choices by which I will be remembered.

I might not look like J.K. Rowling now, in fact, more like her pre-Harry-Potter version, but I have lived a rich and rewarding life. A shared life.

All things will come to pass. He who is no fool to lose that which he cannot keep, to gain that which he cannot lose. If someone wins a free ticket to Palawan and asks me to join, I would politely decline. Once is enough.

Conversely, if someone were to offer me a Penn State Home Game pass, I would jump to the asking. You see, in Beaver Stadium, even when you lose a home game, a rare event, you still feel that camaraderie, a sense of WE ARE, PENN STATE. I wish for us to extend that esprit de corp a bit, sort of making waves, to embrace and include those who are now isolated, in the ward, Dallas and New York, because of Ebola. They are our new Unconsoled awaiting our visit.

One more reason to stay glued to E-commerce to avoid contracting E-bola.

Shop until you drop.

Our team transited via Zürich on our way to Liberia back in summer 1986.

Had it been 2014, our travel might have been banned.

Monrovia then already looked bleak. Then the civil war. And now Ebola.

More ambulances for 4-million people.

and more political appointees for a divided United States.

New crisis is calling for new czar.

Dr Kim (WB) is blaming Dr Chan (WHO) who is equally frustrated.

Where is Dr Chu (E-nergy)?

The CDC figure-head spends more time fielding phone calls from Republican congressmen than actually does the job.

Now that Ebola is here. Banning travel is no longer the first-line defense: it’s already been breached.

Doomsday Scenario, with Brad Pitt in WW Z.

It’s not just Dallas since geography in our post-Columbus world has become quite relative and compressed.

It’s us with the old map, which reinforces our prejudice and intellectual laziness ( Ebola and Ethiopia etc…).

Alibaba and Arabians…Amazon and the E-commerce site.

So our education is now complete: we finally understood that the world is at our doorstep.

And that Nina Pham is not a Mexican American. She is a Vietnamese-American nurse in Dallas.

Numero 2 person who contracts Ebola in America, her home sweet home.

I finally picked up the Happiness Project to see what’s all the fuss about. Was it a clever way for the author to make some money while going through her mid-life crisis?

Or every so often, someone somewhere is bound to ask those loaded epistemological questions: where I am going? Is happiness awaiting for me at home while I go searching for it from East to West and back.

One thing for sure: we need faster and lighter airplanes while at it.

Meanwhile, a 17-year-old Pakistanis has just shared Nobel prize for Peace.

“One book, one teacher, one child… can change the world”.

To her, happiness is to be left alone to ask those questions, and to allow others the same privilege, Gretchen, author of the Happiness Project included.

While catalogue-ing the 12 commandments of Happiness, Gretchen is doing what Malala was trying to do in her own constricted way: searching and arriving at the truth.

One is from NYC, the other, Pakistan. One starts on January 1 and stays with it for one full year. The other, got shot, recovered and continued learning in Great Britain (with an occasional stop at the UN to give a speech).

People do look for happiness in unlikely places: kitchen, golf clubs, strip clubs, casinos, cruise ships, chapels, temples, thrift shops, pet shops and porn shops ( as in Bill Bryson’s discovery of Australia, a combined pet-porn shop under one roof).

One cartoon came to mind (the Simpsons). When the government experiments with a sun-blocking dome over the town, people inside the church run out into the pub next door, and the people in the pub, out and into the church.

Happiness always alludes us. It’s somewhere else, with someone else to be discovered but not continued. By definition, if you already possessed full happiness, you would soon be unhappy (the bell-shape curve).

It’s in searching that you are fulfilled, West or East.

Appreciate it while it lasts.

Happiness however can only be appreciated in looking backward.

Keep searching and launching your own Happiness Project, your own pilgrimage.

And don’t wait until mid-life. Just look at Malala. She started hers at 11, with a blog, then got shot, survived, and went on searching, speaking and is now recognized for having tapped into that universal longing for truth and the pursuit of happiness.

HP is about to be split into enterprise and mass market.

Reminds me of the old Ma Bell break-up ( which took down Bell Labs with it).

Long ago, we bought into the economy of scale, to vertical integration (ITT).

Now, the pendulum swings in the opposite e.g. IBM spinning off its hardware computer to Lenovo.

Agile, flexible and adaptive.

Key words for survival in the new age.

Meet the need.

They got in line to buy I phones.

Doesn’t take brain to see that and infer from it.

When was the last time anyone get in line to buy anything? (Mostly to return a purchase).

Car buying used to be painful.

Now it’s easy with the likes of Auto Nation and Carmax.

In Warren Buffett.

GEICO anyone?

Marketers were supposed to complete that feedback loop to the back room (technology) who tweaks and tunes the product to consumer’s liking.

Now, it’s technology which leads the way.

Slimmer, smaller and smarter.

Black Berry is not good enough.

Netflix has to bend over backward for the money.

And Amazon, now looks more like “the remains of the day” as Wall Street new darling, Alibaba, made its debut.

Paypal also split.

HP split.

The atom split.

Market fragmentation and segmentation.

It’s a plea, for marketers to do their jobs – having taken the backseat since Ad sense and Ad words took over.

We need observing eyes and “boots on the ground”.

Marketers were supposed to get in line with Apple fans, to feel the thrill of I-phone 6 anticipation and passion.

The were supposed to ride in the van up and down the coast (the way Bell Labs team used to test cellular signals, and Lexus team used to test the Toyota soccer-mom van).

The problem is, big corporations like HP have gotten their priorities wrong. They put low emphasis on marketing efforts, almost like an afterthought.

Hence, suffer the decline. At the tune of 50,000 lay-offs, than sliding in another 5,000 while at it. It’s the HP way to hide its mistakes: a technology company in the age of hyper-marketing.

The trend was there (smaller, more nimble, software and service driven). IBM got it. HP did not. Until now. Until it’s too late, at least for 55,000 dedicated workers soon with the pink slips.

Between Last Days of Vietnam and Too Big To Fail, documentary films all of a sudden get serious attention.

I was reading up on the latter story, while being a part of the former.

In fact, a few days that led up to “the last days” of the US Embassy, I had invited a friend to join me in line for a visa application.

We never got to ask our questions or get a blank form.

I still have one of the forms, filled out by my sister, but unprocessed.

Despite the 24-hour curfew, everything that moves, moved: feet, bikes, cars, buses, barges and helicopters – as shown in the documentary.

Then the pushing of people at the gate and the shoving of choppers off the deck.

Guns were tossed to the side before owners were allowed aboard the Kirk, or Midway, or  others of the full-alert 7th fleet.

Glistening bars of gold inside a half-opened Samsonite brief case was the sole belonging of the passenger ahead of me.

Or duffel bags filled with by-then-illegitimate currencies were tossed to the deep blue, stacks of them at a time, hovering over the Pacific like spirit money commemorating the death of South Vietnam.

My neighbor asked if I had a spare set of clothes. He just got off his shift and helped push to sea the very chopper he had worked on just days earlier.

He did not have to wait long: in another three days, upon arrival at Subic Bay, he would then receive his blue jeans and white T-shirt along with a coke and a sandwich.

I read in Goodbye Saigon, that the Embassy gardener roped up his twenty-strong family for fear of getting separated.

When forced to choose only a few, the marine guard simply said, ‘I could not’. They unfortunately suffered the same fate with those already in the compound (the Korean consulate folks even got drunk on what’s left at the Embassy bar, hence did not get on the last chopper – reserved strictly for Ambassador Martin and the folded American flag) .

I spent four fitful-sleep days, subsisting on a few oranges, inside the belly of the fish. Unlike my air-force neighbor, I only got a coke and a sandwich – without the jeans and T-shirt.

Talking about class service.

As to TOO BIG TO FAIL. By now, the SOBs of Wall Street have gotten back their entitlement attitude no matter how many Occupy movements have arisen since.

We all took it sitting down, our strength sapped before the fight: Too big to fight.

I did not realize then (75) and even later (09) , that the US would walk away from whatever it could, and wouldn’t when it couldn’t.

It by default did rope in a few hundred thousands of us, just to later see a hundred times more American out of work , permanently (automation, offshoring, increased productivity, aging America, the rise and reign of software).

Then I realize what a price to pay for those blue jeans, T-shirts, cokes and sandwiches.

Some non-fiction stories are worth retelling since they are way better than fiction. Just make sure you don’t find yourself on the wrong side of history – twice.

In The Idea Factory, we find a chronicle of great men, among them Claude Shannon, who dedicated themselves to solving big problems.

The transistors, capacitors, semi-conductors and the silicon chip (later became the magical wafer of Intel and the Valley industry).

Even an unheard-of technology of the time – cellular transmission – was shelved, since it was deemed unfeasible (ATT was still sore from its failed Picture Phone attempt).

We need brave and sustained efforts to get our voice heard in the wilderness.  Right now, it’s climate change, Ebola and the threat of sectarian conflicts.

We got F22.

But we actually need Ebola vaccines.

We need Claude Shannon, who among other things, juggled the balls just to think.

Pulse code modulation.

On and off.

Beautiful!

Just like its predecessor Morse code.

Tit tit tit, tat tat tat.

I got your message. I hear you loud and clear.

We are in this together i.e. suffer our common human fate in the face of change.

We see not the future.

But it’s coming whether we like it or not.

Fast approaching, with chip speed doubled every year and a half or so.

Hence, Moore’s Law.

The Great Men projects, funded by phone users’ revenue, tackled communications problems e.g. fidelity (Can you hear me now).

From Marconi to Moore, they gave us wireless and wire line, fast chips and Facebook.

All of a sudden, the message is delivered in the bottle. Small bottles, called bits – strings of 1’s and 0’s.

Bam! the Gigabit economy is here, offering and enticing us with more bandwidth,  more in the Cloud.

No time for contemplation or reflection. The more “friends”, the more feeds, the more frivolity. We once were blind, but now we see, once information-starved, but now stuffed.

“I am mad like Hell, I won’t take this anymore”, says the rogue anchor on NETWORK (the movie). If he has to update his protest, it would be “Feed me no more of those lies. I want the truth, even if I can’t handle it.”

What we need is the Ebola vaccine. Instead, we’ve got sci-fi and wi-fi.

Instead of connecting the dots, they gave us dots, by the trillions.

Google not only “organizes the world information”, it also seeks to replace our memory, de facto. Our only job as consumers of ready-served apps is to “amuse ourselves to death” in this information deluge.

Where are those Great Men of the Bell Labs Age? Aren’t we faced with a dangerous and uncertain future as men of the last century? Or is this our last?

We might inadvertently have done it to ourselves as we go about ignoring big problems. A classic case of bystander apathy, of kicking the can further down the road.

Dead men walking, walk on by. Ignore the can at your own peril.

For my Aimy, who is a recent college grad, September won’t ever be the same: she is not back to school as in years previous.

She is entering the world of work. That world is very different from the time I entered it.

She is expected to try her hands at multiple jobs, by sheer default.

Aimy got a media degree, has finished her stint of hip-hop (her team got the US championship title).

She should be able to handle whatever life throws at her.

She grew up watching LA speed chase, LA riot, LA earthquake.

At the time, she couldn’t comprehend the enormity and magnitude of 9/11.

I hope she does now.

She grows smarter by the day, just by watching me try my hand at various things and failed.

Your mistakes, my lessons – she said.

After all, I wouldn’t like to have a Dad who sits around and tries nothing.

That which doesn’t kill you makes you strong.

Sounds good.

We all know the elephant is in the room.

Some of us tries to feel it. Others make comments, or “Like” it.

But it’s there and won’t go away.

By “elephant”, I mean changes.

Take Bob Dylan for instance (or Jane Fonda for that matter).

the times, they are a’changin, he espoused.

Time waits for no one, including the one who announces it.

It just moves on, by nature.

My mistakes, Aimy’s lessons.

My world, Aimy’s heritage.

What do I have to leave behind for her?

That the job picture still hasn’t improved?

That those books I wished she would read will soon find themselves in Good Will stores?

Besides the obvious DNA’s, I wish to leave Aimy with a sense of stewardship. Aimy likes the beach.

I wish for her cleaner beaches. Aimy likes hip-hop. I hope for the US to continue its lead in creativity and innovation.

Free your mind from all constraints. The only way to come up with something new, unburdened by the past.

Time waits for no one. Worry not what others thought of you or your invention. All pioneers got ridiculed. Until it works.

“Mr Watson, come here”. then the trans-Atlantic cable. Then the I-watch. Yes, I have tried and failed, but never failed to try.

My legacy for Aimy. My modus operandi. Born to try. After all, the times they are a changin.

Even for those who sing about it. Even for Bob Dylan. My contemporaries, who stopped trying, don’t look like me. They look much older.

Their choices. I’ll never forget my first time at eye-brow waxing. It was fun. Daddy-daughter bonding.

You should try something silly with your kids sometimes. They have  a thing or two to teach you. At the very least, it gets you out of your shells.

We, creatures of comfort, tend to follow the path of least resistance. With an Alibaba-led world of work, change is our only constant.

Good luck Aimy as you find yourself in uncharted waters, with a different schedule, and a new identity. That of a wage-earning worker.

Eyes glued to the set. All eyes!

How can this be!

Smoke gets in your eyes.

Falling men.

Rushing in and about.

End of the world (why does the sun go on shinning…..amidst all the smoke).

Did we bring it on ourselves? Why was there so much hatred?

What were the causes? US “occupation” as perceived by Bin Laden?

Why punished the innocent for strategic calculation? (not successful there on the fields of Pennsylvania).

3 out of 4 planes, still drilled a big hole (knocking down New York’s two front teeth – to quote Tom Wolfe).

I wanted to withdraw. To sleep and sing “wake me up when September ends”.

On Ground Zero, a new building has been erected. Dust swept clean. Scrap steel refined to build ships.

Defiant, undefeated. Simon (without Garfunkel) performed there at the dedication of Ground Zero. Sound of silence. Sound of suffering and suffocation. No time to weep, no time to cry, no time for comment (facebook wasn’t around back then).

13 years of disbelief. Of living down that fateful day. Heads rolled. Drones deployed. Throats slit in reply.

Tit for tat. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. We have reconstructed both our inner (financial) and outer infrastructure (building). Now, we need to reexamine what, on our parts, have brought it on and contributed to the never-ending cycle of violence.

Wake me up when September ends. From 9/11 to 9/30, I count 19 days, of sleeping and pain-avoidance. Those 19 days have turned to be 13 years, and counting.