Tag: BMW

Simplicity and humility

I saw on the  news that the new Pope inspires a group of high school students to reenact “feet washing“. Now, that’s refreshing (no punt intended!) to find news (besides kids shooting other kids, bullying them, DUI, Springfield groper etc…) with some positive twists.

I have read about the Jesuits, Alexandre de Rhodes in particular, who worked from a Portuguese-Vietnamese dictionary to invent modern-day Vietnamese written language (or else I still am blogging in Chinese characters). The unintended consequence of evangelization has been the speeding up of literacy adoption among the Vietnamese, away from the more complicated Chinese characters (besides the will to be independent from this imposing neighbor).

Now we learn about the Pope of the people, who lives simply and humbly.

You can’t have the cake and eat it too. Not when you want to be a role model, the embodiment of that simple Cross. On this important Sunday, though not Catholic, I feel like we are witnessing change. I hope the heavenly light would spill over and push away those dark clouds. Already we saw some positive signs in the economy, in spite of the adjusted price tag for the two wars (they have fumbled on the numbers since McNamara).

Earth in the balance. People on the move (mobile phones). And elections are held quite often (Africa, S America).

Well, not in North Korea, where our young man is not joining Christian Association to sing “YMCA.”

The Jesuits. I know my life has been indirectly influenced by them. They live selfless, simple and humble lives. For others. It’s like the three musketeers without the swords, only plowshares.

Being multi-lingual they inspire many on the path of life-long learning. When you deal with suffering (there are plenty around this side of the Recession) you are humble by it.  And in humility, you can then be an instrument and channel of common grace. No time for DUI or BMW. You take the bus, and cook your own meal. You move into Motel 6 and not the Four Seasons. There, you don’t just rest, but you continue to serve (feet washing). They will leave the lights on for you, always.

Hope that light continue to shine and illuminate pockets of illiteracy, ignorance and illegitimacy.

Jobs’ off switch

Steve Jobs hated the on-off  switch. Perhaps more so because it was a relic of electricity (Edison) and automobile manufacturers (Ford). He did not like old wine in the same wineskin, given our always-on Cloud Service in  A/C data centers.

Apple chose North Carolina as a site to store music, video and the rest of its customers’ files. The FCC recently allowed the roll-out of White Space, wi-fi on steroid, also in NC.

Who needs the on/off switch! It had some utilitarian legacy (activate and deactivate) when hardware used to rule.

Now, software eats your lunch.

Of BMW’s  thousand components, a large portion are software-controlled. From Buggy to Beamer, the engineers have made a giant leap.

Jobs was quoted as saying (this was counter-intuitive and anti-academic):

“if Ford had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said,

faster buggies”.  In short, it’s categorically different with revolutionaries.

Think different!

No on/off switch.

Just the dial.

Circular motion.

The experience economy.

Control the product from end-to-end to make every touchpoint with the customer an iSee! (Disneyland).

Progress , like time, waits for no man.

If you keep standing on the track, you will likely get run over.

Not a single word in Jobs biography states directly that he was a  futurist. Yet he could intuitively sense what was coming – his biography itself was well orchestrated (momenti mori) and ironically open-sourced (counter-culture life style, but proprietary business model).

In fact, religious zealots did take a shot at him for his views.

I wonder if those people secretly borrow an I-pad from friends to touch and feel (where is the on/off switch?).

I wonder what their legacies are as opposed to Jobs’?

And their destination : paradise or purgatory?

Jobs took his son to a business meeting (antennaeGate) mostly for I-phone IV damage control . “It would be a two-year worth of Business School  education” said he.

His biography, which offers more than a two-year worth of B-school, is a must-read for technologists, marketers and culture critics who want to understand the Valley ethos.

When arts (music in this case) found new venue (I-pod) and revenue (I-Tunes), it is unchained melody for the mass (unbundled as singles not whole album).

Be spoiled with IT 3.0 (cloud and social media) but also be thankful sitting on giants’ shoulders

An image evokes in my mind was that of Cinema Paradiso, where the kid got a ride home on the bike’s frame, wearing his mentor’s hat and chatting up as a fee for the ride. However long, enjoy the ride. That’s our reward . As Southwest Airlines would say, please collect your items to ensure faster turn-around at the gate.

Beyond Hero

On Easter, the networks dutifully searched their archives for larger-than-life movies like Ben-Hur to fill their air time. From the Beat Generation to the Beatles, anti-hero started to emerge, like in “Rebel without a cause” (the knife-fight at the Observatory between leader of the black leather gang and James Dean in white T-shirt). Since then, anti-heroes, like at My Lai Village, Vietnam, or Nixon, after Watergate, got choppered out of the White House (premonition of the last chopper out of Saigon two years later).

Fast forward to recent James Bond character. He had to be reigned in by his female boss ( the trend with female CEO now prevails at HP, IBM, Xerox, Yahoo).

Riding that trend, in Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise is also portrayed with more psychological depth. In short, more human, as opposed  to  super hero in Ben-Hur (whose showing was at outdoor theater, with viewers “parked” in Chevy convertibles).

Today’s gen Y have their own version of villains and heroes: their Lab-created Avatars, in 3-D, descendants of  comic heroes like Batman, Spider man and Iron man.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan, drones are the new heroes (while pilots who remote-control them can go home in Nevada unharmed; all in a day’s work).

Welcome to the digital age, where commerce, coupon and combat are all conducted online.

We use Search before Select. Parent used to be consulted on almost everything large and small. Now, it’s the screen.

Most of us grew up observing and imitating our dads: shiny shoes and the must-have watch. I used to shine my Dad’s shoes while he groomed.

From that vantage point, he was a towering figure in L-size clothing. He was never afraid to defend our home against robbers (or in my case, bully). He had only low tech (no surveillance camera or motion-detector flood lamps) to rely on. One night when I was about three-year-old, I woke up with a start, just to see a thief sticking his long pole, with hook  on end, trying to fish my mom’s purse.

Before I realized what had happened, I heard footsteps running, pole dropping and my Dad charging out after having thrown his kitchen knife with all he had. Quite low tech defense!

His world was simple, and his concept of security unambiguous.

Unlike the world I now live in.

Unlike the movies I now see .

Unlike the Bond characters which have come and gone. Remember Q?  Bond’s in-house gadget expert ? His expertise is needed to gear 007 up for mission.

It might be a self-driven BMW, or a self-destruct briefcase.

No heroes today can hold up just a staff and look to the sky, waiting for water to part. Yesterday’s low-tech movies,  even with larger-than-life  heroes, couldn’t hold the water in today’s split screen and split attention.

I need a hero, like Bonnie Tyler sings, but more than that. In today’s machine-driven world, we need to go beyond Hero.

Heroes who use high-tech and are hyper alert. Heroes among us. TIME magazine featured YOU as Man of the Year a few years back.

It’s only fitting that YOU who invented Social Network, surveillance and surgical instruments are to be cheered.

My Dad, who died roughly at the same age as Andy Rooney (92), who couldn’t stand those two-prong plugs in a three-prong society,  remains forever my low-tech hero in today’s high-tech society.

P.S. I wrote this a week before the Sexual Abuse Scandal broke at Penn State, my beloved alma mater. In this vein, I now have to move beyond “JoePa” image of a hero.

It’s not enough for good men to stand still and do nothing. We have laughed at the YouTube viral video showing two vehicles ran over a child in China with no bystanders’ intervention. Now we found out it could happen anywhere, and ironically, in Happy Valley. Still memories are always soothing, whether when we were 3 years old or 30 years old. Towering figures that have served as guideposts for us are now gone by attrition, while automation, esp. in Japan, is filling in the gap. Where man failed (inconsistency) becomes an opportunity for machine to rise. The net result: children don’t know what they are missing, for instance, the tears and agony many of my classmates were experiencing while the scandal unfolded in State College. We, Penn State alums all of a sudden, share that sense of solidarity and determination to make a better tomorrow , and the school a better place to learn . I admire the tenacity of some emerging writers there at the Collegian. David Brooks calls them “the Emperical Kids” i.e. validated before venturing.

Go Penn State, Go. Beyond Hero, beyond ourselves. Let not complacency win again this time.

early imprints

I ordered my breakfast instinctively. And it’s 8 in the morning in Vietnam.

Already I feel the heat and humidity. Through the Australian school yard, I saw teachers in ao-dai. Could have been the ghost of my mom’s past.

Children are obviously better fed these days. And they have gone on to game 3.0 (playing less at internet cafe, but at home as broadband penetration has been on the rise).

There is less space between motorcycles, because the city was originally built as a French colonial city for a 10th of today’s size.

No one walks anymore, and certainly not in the heat of mid-day.

The game players keep the game designers employed.

The office workers keep the shopkeepers’

children fed. A family-operated coffee shop opens all day all night.

Three shifts in one. Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the earth.

But not earth. They chose cities, and not any city. It has to be Ho Chi Minh City. A few office towers got fully booked the day they let the tenants move in. Broadband was connected.  Zoom zoom.

If it weren’t for the absence of the double-decker, I would mis-take it for Hong Kong. Prepare to lose some weight here. And most importantly, stay alert when crossing the streets. My survival instinct kicks in, and not just because of the tropical storms.  I used to live here, schooled here and had my first love here. Except, we used to have more elbow room in traffic. It’s good that we wear helmet, glasses and mask.

It saves us from the embarrassment of  being stared at up close.

It’s awkward as well in Florida with the Lexus and BMW’s revving at the intersection.

But then it’s good that we found ourselves side by side as fellow travellers on our journey to work or home. Home is where someone is waiting for you.

It’s not a place geographically speaking. It’s your comfort zone. 1st place.

No more facade. Or acting up. Costume off. Hair down. And you are addressed by your rank in the extended family. Uncle Thang, good to see u.