Tag: VHS

Jog and blog

The only way to hold a job and still jog and blog is to sacrifice your sleep. You will always find time for things you hold near and dear e.g. texting to ones you care about, reading about Oakland shooting etc….

ROW rest of world could wait. There is only 24 hours in a day.

At this rate (of information explosion), we might need another life.

When fake news are more entertaining than real news, lies more attractive than truth and violence more justified than love, we have a problem. Can’t start all over again, because the world as is, is all that we ‘ve got.

A friend loaned me a copy of past lives and reincarnation.

It documented hypnotic healing sessions conducted in the US by Dr Weiss, himself an agnostic scientist. Catherine, the patient in tow, recalled in full detail her past lives. True or False?

We do seem to feel a special connection with someone, calls it Deja Vu.

Could it be that we had indebted each other in past lives?

How about paying it forward? Will we ever see our ROI?

I just know my experience with earlier and next generation (parents and kids) have been great and rewarding. Nothing has come close to it.

Yes, many ups and downs. Broken pieces and piercing pain. But they count. Making me the man I now am.

Without my parents’ sacrifice, I wouldn’t be here today. Without my kids, I wouldn’t be the one today.

Those who cannot give any more thought they had hit bottom (compassion fatigue). They haven’t understood what giving really is about.

We are nearing the next phase, that of an Empathetic Civilization.

Strangers to strangers, thanks to the internet .

The vices will be followed by the virtues.

I know people are loaning each other money (micro lending) and giving each other money (foundation). One day, it will be direct, without the middle-men.

I need to go jogging now. Enough blogging. Train the muscle and train the mind. Yet the heart of men is unfathomable. Bend it while learning to love and learning to learn.

Trust a little. Then trust a little more. Maybe it (the heart) will get stronger, with muscle memory. The world can use some of that loving.

All you need is love, sing the Beatles. Love heals and succeeds in places we cannot accomplish all by ourselves.

The future, never in past tense

Peter Jennings took a smoke break, his first in years, from 9/11 live coverage. It was the beginning of his end. The Canadian co-author of “The Century” must have studied the Wright brothers, whose invention could lift itself up into thin air albeit for just a few blocks. But he had never seen anything like the two planes that aimed low that morning.

In the decade since, from Steve Jobs (the I-series) to Steve Chen (Youtube),

from Facebook to Twitter founders, we have seen a new breed of inventors.

Instead of fixating on the hunt for an old man, wrapped in blanket with a remote control, watching makeshift propaganda videos of himself (BL), these digital natives followed the trail to the future.

They limit data transmission to short bursts (140 characters) or miniaturize play-back device (I-pod) while charging only 99 cents per song. Search has evolved from generic to semantic and shopping from global E-Bay to local (Zagat).

Rattled? Yes.

Deterred? Hardly.

Five stages of grief, processed in one fell swoop (in less than a decade).

What evil didn’t plan, was for the very invention in the West, be used against dictators in the MidEast.

(Arab Spring propagated and went tweet-viral in Egypt, birth place of caliphate).

You can take down a building, but not its blueprint.

Yes, there were people who ran down the stairs to safety, and stayed there in the past.

But there were also 343 heroes who ran up the stairs, 43 more than at Gates of Fire, to “fight (fire) in the shade” .

Just as the analog stairway (Encyclopedia Britannica, book stacks) shows the way down, the digital one (Wikipedia, Skype) points to “the sky is the limit”.

In the decade since, we have started “friending” each other, made possible by another Harvard drop-out, whether we were from NYC or not, just because we all share in a future, that will never be conjugated in past tense.

How I wish to have “followed” Peter Jennings on Twitter to read his post-9/11 reflections!

Transparent trail

I saved up my visual history in 3/4 inch, VHS, slides, prints, CDs, hard-drive, flashdrive and cloud.

Not so much for me, but for my daughters .

That collage documented my fits and starts.

Each person is a narrative whose ending remains a mystery ( ‘in my end, is my beginning”).

In the Year of Magical Thinking, the widow-writer kept wishing that her husband would return (hence, magical ),

and refused to give his stuffs away.

The hard part about closure is to get through denial.

We have come a long way, since Watergate (White House secret taping) to Wikileaks.

The best way to avoid having some thing bad traced back to you is not to leave one in the first place.

What is whispered shall be announced from the roof top.

I blogged about de-clutterization. But this time, it’s not about our hoarding habit (fax machine?).

It’s about using whatever format or latest update (Adobe) as tool and transparency as policy.

Companies spent enormous amount of time, energy and money to whip up great-looking “About us”.

Until prospective customers detected incongruity and inconsistency  (reputational lag).

We live our digital lives one day at a time in open-source mode, with myriads of combinations to collaborate and co-create (the sharing economy).  We will have to relearn TRUST as online currency before Web 3.0 can happen (co-create).

The twin brother-in-law of Congress woman Giffords said on CBS: “from space, I saw this beautiful planet and I wouldn’t guess there were so much – bad things such as random shooting – going on . We can do better “.

Out in open space, with no one watching, one presumes, like Nixon, that misspoken words are not coming back to haunt.

But in cyberspace, the opposite is true. We do live our virtual lives with more-real-than-real-life ramifications. We leave behind our digital fingerprints and carbon footprints, together form a narrative, to be mined years from now by “bots”. Faint-of-hearts need not apply! (as of this edit, Apple just purchased a company whose software can pinpoint where we have been i.e. GPS plus past footprints to predict our next likely frequent stops).

See me, text me, group me, call me…

When I saw a near accident today (a beat-up car driver, on the cell phone, backing up and brushing my neighbor’s mail box – which pulled my neighbor out of the door, in the middle of a mobile call himself), I realized we were indeed in a different era (from one which people sat on the front porch, chatting face to face).

So ATT needs to go big infrastructure-wise (when bankers get in the mobile banking game, we know we are no longer content with just online banking from home). It essentially undoes the 1984 break-up back in the copper era. The strategy at the time was, whoever owned the “last mile” to the house wins. Mid-80’s happened to see the rise of Motorola brick phones which got more mobility and apps e.g. meet-up and mash-up.

Can you see me? Can you hear me?

If any group that needs to adopt latest tools for business development, it would be the porn and charity groups. The former has always been early adopters of technology (VHS, cable, and now .xxx domain), while the later, relies on donation to survive, hence, relying on the best tools out there.  I still am not getting used to seeing Red Cross signs which say, “Help Japan“. In my mental positioning, Japan was up there with best of the best. No offense, I wouldn’t think twice when the sign flashes “Help Haiti” or the like.

We indeed are ushered into the real 21st century, when our old mental maps don’t jibe with what’s out there (from Big Mac to Big Moon).

To top all this, Victoria Secret came up with a coupon which acts as a lottery.

The tag line stated that “even us, we don’t know what the amount is. It remains a Secret”. Oh well, chances are, it’s $10 coupon, enough to pay for shipping charges.

I am excited about apps like GroupMe etc… because we often are separated from the group, let’s say in Vegas, by chance or by choice.

GroupMe and the likes enhance our field trip experience.

Corporate outings can exploit this app or extended families, like mine, who are scattered across the country and world.

Blogs and posts are too passive. GroupMe satisfies the demand for immediacy and mobility.

Still, I like the Who’s line, when edited in slow motion (despite the constraint of audio connectivity, they did what they could to increase mobility, in this case, vertical jump to defy gravity itself)”..Feel Me, Heal me..through you, I can see the  Billions….” It’s Billions, with a B.

the Who

Our VHS future

Beta was more superior. Yet VHS won out.

The market (in this case, movies on tape) dictates the terms. At the present time, it wants all things mobile. In other words, our knowledge and skill set need an upgrade (But I thought technologically, Beta gave crisper resolution!?!! Sorry Sony.)

While on tour for his book “After Shock”, Robert Reich mentioned on Charlie Rose that despite Obama’s ability to synthesize every one’s opinion earlier in his campaign, he now fails to connect the dots i.e. to tell a narrative of America’s vanishing middle class.

Silicon Valley has reinvented itself once again, this time, into a Mecca of clean tech (just about time, because Chinese IT companies are forming clusters in TX to compete against India’s counterparts right in the heart of America) and mobile/cloud/social network (zynga-like). Between Detroit, Disney and Dell, America can still do it, with better choices and better counsels.

Again, the global market will decide winners in each group (VHS 2.0) and don’t be surprised if it might not be you, even when your mother thinks you are her most beautiful baby.

I have heard of re-engineering, reinvention, and recession. Then we came up with soft power, thought leadership and self branding.

Meanwhile, all attempts to dress up old concepts won’t mean a thing to the lady in Las Vegas outskirts who is the last on the block to stay in her house. Or the Lonely tenant in Miami condo high-rise.

I notice a significant drop in day laborers in Orange County. And I heard rumors that Vietnamese in CA now migrated en mass to Houston, where housing is more affordable, and unemployment rate lower (in the early 80’s, the movement was reverse due to Texas oil crisis). The story of Vietnamese immigrants in America is tied so much to the rise and fall of technology companies in the Bay areas (electronic and chip industries). As soon as those jobs got shipped overseas, America’s immigrants decide to go home (after Indian IT professionals who went home to India, or Vietnamese American applying for Intel recent facility in Vietnam). After all, the future belongs to automation or hybridized version therein.

It’s market demand which dictates supplies, including labor supplies. First shipping jobs overseas, then automating the marketing side of the equation. I have blogged about migration movement, automation and death of the salesman. In doing so,

I stumbled upon a narrative. It’s America’s. It’s the new America, whose future is staked upon its choice to go Beta or VHS, metaphorically speaking. And it has nothing to do with Beta’s superior resolution. As of this edit, it is facing a choice to arm to send boots to Syria. Soft or hard boiled? Since when it is easy to be King of the Hill? Good luck to those who “think out of the box”, instead of getting out of it altogether.

P.S. Fareed Zakaria‘s article on TIME featured “How to restore the American Dream”. At least, he listed a few pointers worth considering e.g. “benchmarks” which are take away from other countries’ policies. After all, other countries have tried to reverse engineer the American way of life for decades. Upon CNN 30th anniversary, I saw an ad for Singapore. When CNN started out in Atlanta, Ted Turner couldn’t even conceive its network celebration would be underwritten by Singapore, then an emerging country. One must wonder about its 40th, if there will still be a Cable News Network. What a struggle between television and telephony. The jury is still out for whoever can be on the go, with better softwares.

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