Currently MIA

In Miami this week, Monday - Friday, which is the end of our project. I have no idea what my next role will be... but, can the destination really beat Miami?

No Turducken for me, thanks.

I have everything to be thankful for, and trust me, I know it and everyday I am thankful. Though we do not feast together, know that part of my face-stuffing is in your honor, and by eating mounds and mounds of food, I am actually thanking you. Really.

Happy Thanksgiving, my loves!

Miami Weekend

This past weekend was one of the best in my life. It was a weekend of pure debauchery, laughter, heart and soul, and it was fantastic. I am so thankful, so so thankful, for how blessed I am to have you two in my life, and to have these memories forever. You two are probably thankful that I do not get this mushy on a regular basis.

For a full recount, visit Anjum's blog - no need for me to invent the wheel twice. Here's a brief recap:

Nightlife: Reggae and bad dancers at Mango's, attitude and gorgeous pool at The Shore Club, a drink at Fat Tuesday's, todos latinos at Oxygen, needed a black light at Club Live (Life/Lampshade/Shoe?), and stayed till 5am at Opium Garden.

Dining: Quesadillas at Mango's, tapas at Tu Tu Tango's, pastries at Buenos Aires Cafe, seafood (and heavenlychocolate mousse cake) at A Fish Called Avalon, and plantanos at Versailles.

Destinations: I think we covered allll of the greater Miami area - partied in Coconut Grove, chilled in Aventura, played in the sand South Beach, stayed and napped Downtown, ate in Little Havana, and held an alligator in the Everglades.

This is the stuff, people. This is the stuff.

Updates

- Finally got over my cold/cough/congestion as of yesterday, which would have made it a week and a half-long disease. All of last week when I was meeting the client in Miami, I'd have to introduce myself as, "Hi I'm Jeanne, but I am not going to shake your hand because I am sick." Thank goodness that's over... I wonder if I need to go back around and shake everyone's hand? How corporate America of me.

- Monday morning flight to Miami was cancelled. Tuesday morning flight was cancelled. Tuesday afternoon flight was cancelled. All Wednesday flights were cancelled. I am not flying down this week, clearly.

- Halloween is coming up. One year, at my aunt's house in PA, it was cold and rainy, so I couldn't dress up as Cleopatra like I had hoped. So, they put a oversized winter coat on me, I found my cousin's hockey mask thinking I could be that scary Jason character from those horror movies. Then I put my hair in pigtails, and dubbed myself, "JASON'S SISTER FROM HELL." Funny that I now actually am, Jason's sister (from hell).

- Will be in Miami, starting Monday for three weeks straight. What will I do, with all that beach, sun, ocean, food, booze, boys, shopping, beach beach beach?

- Drink lots of water

"Willlllllllllllllllllllmaaaaaaaaaaaa!" - Fred Flinstone

Due to Hurricane Wilma, my travel to Miami tomorrow morning has been delayed until.... tomorrow afternoon!

On another note, I am still suffering from the cold/infection/disease that plagued me since LAST Friday. It has gotten a bit better, but not so much that I am a fully functional phlegmless human being. Hopefully, a bit of rain and humidity will do the trick.

Staying at: http://marriott.com/property/propertypage/MIAJW

Fun times.

Miami, yo estoy aqui!

Traveling to: Miami for the next 6 weeks
Will be feeling: Weather
Will be working: Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines
Will be staying: Intercontinental

Anjum

Happy Birthday, beautiful.

"It’s a Flat World, After All"

Another article I find be be interesting, and well-written, about globalization/outsourcing:

"It’s a Flat World, After All"
By Thomas Friedman, New York Times, April 3, 2005

In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he met ''Indians'' and came home and reported to his king and queen: ''The world is round.'' I set off for India 512 years later. I knew just which direction I was going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I came home and reported only to my wife and only in a whisper: ''The world is flat.''
And therein lies a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally reshaping our lives -- much, much more quickly than many people realize. It all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron -- which even prompted some to wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, which is why it's time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others already are, and there is no time to waste.
I wish I could say I saw it all coming. Alas, I encountered the flattening of the world quite by accident. It was in late February of last year, and I was visiting the Indian high-tech capital, Bangalore, working on a documentary for the Discovery Times channel about outsourcing. In short order, I interviewed Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to prepare my taxes from Bangalore, read my X-rays from Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from Bangalore and write my new software from Bangalore. The longer I was there, the more upset I became -- upset at the realization that while I had been off covering the 9/11 wars, globalization had entered a whole new phase, and I had missed it. I guess the eureka moment came on a visit to the campus of Infosys Technologies, one of the crown jewels of the Indian outsourcing and software industry. Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys C.E.O., was showing me his global video-conference room, pointing with pride to a wall-size flat-screen TV, which he said was the biggest in Asia. Infosys, he explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its entire global supply chain for any project at any time on that supersize screen. So its American designers could be on the screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian manufacturers all at once. That's what globalization is all about today, Nilekani said. Above the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys workday: 24/7/365. The clocks were labeled U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.
''Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world,'' Nilekani explained. ''What happened over the last years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things.'' At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together.''
At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that rang in my ear. He said to me, ''Tom, the playing field is being leveled.'' He meant that countries like India were now able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before -- and that America had better get ready for this. As I left the Infosys campus that evening and bounced along the potholed road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: ''The playing field is being leveled.''
''What Nandan is saying,'' I thought, ''is that the playing field is being flattened. Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!''
Here I was in Bangalore -- more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon, looking for a shorter route to India using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round -- and one of India's smartest engineers, trained at his country's top technical institute and backed by the most modern technologies of his day, was telling me that the world was flat, as flat as that screen on which he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain. Even more interesting, he was citing this development as a new milestone in human progress and a great opportunity for India and the world -- the fact that we had made our world flat!
This has been building for a long time. Globalization 1.0 (1492 to 1800) shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, and the dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for resources and imperial conquest. Globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000) shrank the world from a size medium to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets and labor. Globalization 3.0 (which started around 2000) is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 -- the thing that gives it its unique character -- is individuals and small groups globalizing. Individuals must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others globally? But Globalization 3.0 not only differs from the previous eras in how it is shrinking and flattening the world and in how it is empowering individuals. It is also different in that Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were driven primarily by European and American companies and countries. But going forward, this will be less and less true. Globalization 3.0 is not only going to be driven more by individuals but also by a much more diverse -- non-Western, nonwhite -- group of individuals. In Globalization 3.0, you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.
''Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,'' said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape and creator of the first commercial Internet browser. ''That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field. As bioscience becomes more computational and less about wet labs and as all the genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.''
Andreessen is touching on the most exciting part of Globalization 3.0 and the flattening of the world: the fact that we are now in the process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together. We've tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, not to mention the work of teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses that affect us all. But the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South. Only 30 years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student in Boston or a genius in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen Boston, because a genius in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her talent. They could not plug and play globally. Not anymore. Not when the world is flat, and anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray.
When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.
How did the world get flattened, and how did it happen so fast?
It was a result of 10 events and forces that all came together during the 1990's and converged right around the year 2000. Let me go through them briefly. The first event was 11/9. That's right -- not 9/11, but 11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the Berlin Wall came down, which was critically important because it allowed us to think of the world as a single space. ''The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future,'' the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And the wall went down just as the windows went up -- the breakthrough Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by creating a global computer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell.
The second key date was 8/9. Aug. 9, 1995, is the day Netscape went public, which did two important things. First, it brought the Internet alive by giving us the browser to display images and data stored on Web sites. Second, the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight. In sum, what the Netscape revolution did was bring people-to-people connectivity to a whole new level. Suddenly more people could connect with more other people from more different places in more different ways than ever before.
No country accidentally benefited more from the Netscape moment than India. ''India had no resources and no infrastructure,'' said Dinakar Singh, one of the most respected hedge-fund managers on Wall Street, whose parents earned doctoral degrees in biochemistry from the University of Delhi before emigrating to America. ''It produced people with quality and by quantity. But many of them rotted on the docks of India like vegetables. Only a relative few could get on ships and get out. Not anymore, because we built this ocean crosser, called fiber-optic cable. For decades you had to leave India to be a professional. Now you can plug into the world from India. You don't have to go to Yale and go to work for Goldman Sachs.'' India could never have afforded to pay for the bandwidth to connect brainy India with high-tech America, so American shareholders paid for it. Yes, crazy overinvestment can be good. The overinvestment in railroads turned out to be a great boon for the American economy. ''But the railroad overinvestment was confined to your own country and so, too, were the benefits,'' Singh said. In the case of the digital railroads, ''it was the foreigners who benefited.'' India got a free ride.
The first time this became apparent was when thousands of Indian engineers were enlisted to fix the Y2K -- the year 2000 -- computer bugs for companies from all over the world. (Y2K should be a national holiday in India. Call it ''Indian Interdependence Day,'' says Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign-policy analyst at Johns Hopkins.) The fact that the Y2K work could be outsourced to Indians was made possible by the first two flatteners, along with a third, which I call ''workflow.'' Workflow is shorthand for all the software applications, standards and electronic transmission pipes, like middleware, that connected all those computers and fiber-optic cable. To put it another way, if the Netscape moment connected people to people like never before, what the workflow revolution did was connect applications to applications so that people all over the world could work together in manipulating and shaping words, data and images on computers like never before.
Indeed, this breakthrough in people-to-people and application-to-application connectivity produced, in short order, six more flatteners -- six new ways in which individuals and companies could collaborate on work and share knowledge. One was ''outsourcing.'' When my software applications could connect seamlessly with all of your applications, it meant that all kinds of work -- from accounting to software-writing -- could be digitized, disaggregated and shifted to any place in the world where it could be done better and cheaper. The second was ''offshoring.'' I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China. The third was ''open-sourcing.'' I write the next operating system, Linux, using engineers collaborating together online and working for free. The fourth was ''insourcing.'' I let a company like UPS come inside my company and take over my whole logistics operation -- everything from filling my orders online to delivering my goods to repairing them for customers when they break. (People have no idea what UPS really does today. You'd be amazed!). The fifth was ''supply-chaining.'' This is Wal-Mart's specialty. I create a global supply chain down to the last atom of efficiency so that if I sell an item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China. (If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.) The last new form of collaboration I call ''informing'' -- this is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow anyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves.
So the first three flatteners created the new platform for collaboration, and the next six are the new forms of collaboration that flattened the world even more. The 10th flattener I call ''the steroids,'' and these are wireless access and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). What the steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration, so you can now do any one of them, from anywhere, with any device.
The world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the year 2000. This created a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language. ''It is the creation of this platform, with these unique attributes, that is the truly important sustainable breakthrough that made what you call the flattening of the world possible,'' said Craig Mundie, the chief technical officer of Microsoft.

No, not everyone has access yet to this platform, but it is open now to more people in more places on more days in more ways than anything like it in history. Wherever you look today -- whether it is the world of journalism, with bloggers bringing down Dan Rather; the world of software, with the Linux code writers working in online forums for free to challenge Microsoft; or the world of business, where Indian and Chinese innovators are competing against and working with some of the most advanced Western multinationals -- hierarchies are being flattened and value is being created less and less within vertical silos and more and more through horizontal collaboration within companies, between companies and among individuals.
Do you recall ''the IT revolution'' that the business press has been pushing for the last 20 years? Sorry to tell you this, but that was just the prologue. The last 20 years were about forging, sharpening and distributing all the new tools to collaborate and connect. Now the real information revolution is about to begin as all the complementarities among these collaborative tools start to converge. One of those who first called this moment by its real name was Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O., who in 2004 began to declare in her public speeches that the dot-com boom and bust were just ''the end of the beginning.'' The last 25 years in technology, Fiorina said, have just been ''the warm-up act.'' Now we are going into the main event, she said, ''and by the main event, I mean an era in which technology will truly transform every aspect of business, of government, of society, of life.''
As if this flattening wasn't enough, another convergence coincidentally occurred during the 1990's that was equally important. Some three billion people who were out of the game walked, and often ran, onto the playing field. I am talking about the people of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Central Asia. Their economies and political systems all opened up during the course of the 1990's so that their people were increasingly free to join the free market. And when did these three billion people converge with the new playing field and the new business processes? Right when it was being flattened, right when millions of them could compete and collaborate more equally, more horizontally and with cheaper and more readily available tools. Indeed, thanks to the flattening of the world, many of these new entrants didn't even have to leave home to participate. Thanks to the 10 flatteners, the playing field came to them!
It is this convergence -- of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes for horizontal collaboration -- that I believe is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early 21st century. Sure, not all three billion can collaborate and compete. In fact, for most people the world is not yet flat at all. But even if we're talking about only 10 percent, that's 300 million people -- about twice the size of the American work force. And be advised: the Indians and Chinese are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. What China's leaders really want is that the next generation of underwear and airplane wings not just be ''made in China'' but also be ''designed in China.'' And that is where things are heading. So in 30 years we will have gone from ''sold in China'' to ''made in China'' to ''designed in China'' to ''dreamed up in China'' -- or from China as collaborator with the worldwide manufacturers on nothing to China as a low-cost, high-quality, hyperefficient collaborator with worldwide manufacturers on everything. Ditto India. Said Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, ''You don't bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without huge consequences, especially from three societies'' -- like India, China and Russia -- ''with rich educational heritages.''
That is why there is nothing that guarantees that Americans or Western Europeans will continue leading the way. These new players are stepping onto the playing field legacy free, meaning that many of them were so far behind that they can leap right into the new technologies without having to worry about all the sunken costs of old systems. It means that they can move very fast to adopt new, state-of-the-art technologies, which is why there are already more cellphones in use in China today than there are people in America.
If you want to appreciate the sort of challenge we are facing, let me share with you two conversations. One was with some of the Microsoft officials who were involved in setting up Microsoft's research center in Beijing, Microsoft Research Asia, which opened in 1998 -- after Microsoft sent teams to Chinese universities to administer I.Q. tests in order to recruit the best brains from China's 1.3 billion people. Out of the 2,000 top Chinese engineering and science students tested, Microsoft hired 20. They have a saying at Microsoft about their Asia center, which captures the intensity of competition it takes to win a job there and explains why it is already the most productive research team at Microsoft: ''Remember, in China, when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.''
The other is a conversation I had with Rajesh Rao, a young Indian entrepreneur who started an electronic-game company from Bangalore, which today owns the rights to Charlie Chaplin's image for mobile computer games. ''We can't relax,'' Rao said. ''I think in the case of the United States that is what happened a bit. Please look at me: I am from India. We have been at a very different level before in terms of technology and business. But once we saw we had an infrastructure that made the world a small place, we promptly tried to make the best use of it. We saw there were so many things we could do. We went ahead, and today what we are seeing is a result of that. There is no time to rest. That is gone. There are dozens of people who are doing the same thing you are doing, and they are trying to do it better. It is like water in a tray: you shake it, and it will find the path of least resistance. That is what is going to happen to so many jobs -- they will go to that corner of the world where there is the least resistance and the most opportunity. If there is a skilled person in Timbuktu, he will get work if he knows how to access the rest of the world, which is quite easy today. You can make a Web site and have an e-mail address and you are up and running. And if you are able to demonstrate your work, using the same infrastructure, and if people are comfortable giving work to you and if you are diligent and clean in your transactions, then you are in business.''
Instead of complaining about outsourcing, Rao said, Americans and Western Europeans would ''be better off thinking about how you can raise your bar and raise yourselves into doing something better. Americans have consistently led in innovation over the last century. Americans whining -- we have never seen that before.''
Rao is right. And it is time we got focused. As a person who grew up during the cold war, I'll always remember driving down the highway and listening to the radio, when suddenly the music would stop and a grim-voiced announcer would come on the air and say: ''This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.'' And then there would be a 20-second high-pitched siren sound. Fortunately, we never had to live through a moment in the cold war when the announcer came on and said, ''This is a not a test.''
That, however, is exactly what I want to say here: ''This is not a test.''
The long-term opportunities and challenges that the flattening of the world puts before the United States are profound. Therefore, our ability to get by doing things the way we've been doing them -- which is to say not always enriching our secret sauce -- will not suffice any more. ''For a country as wealthy we are, it is amazing how little we are doing to enhance our natural competitiveness,'' says Dinakar Singh, the Indian-American hedge-fund manager. ''We are in a world that has a system that now allows convergence among many billions of people, and we had better step back and figure out what it means. It would be a nice coincidence if all the things that were true before were still true now, but there are quite a few things you actually need to do differently. You need to have a much more thoughtful national discussion.''
If this moment has any parallel in recent American history, it is the height of the cold war, around 1957, when the Soviet Union leapt ahead of America in the space race by putting up the Sputnik satellite. The main challenge then came from those who wanted to put up walls; the main challenge to America today comes from the fact that all the walls are being taken down and many other people can now compete and collaborate with us much more directly. The main challenge in that world was from those practicing extreme Communism, namely Russia, China and North Korea. The main challenge to America today is from those practicing extreme capitalism, namely China, India and South Korea. The main objective in that era was building a strong state, and the main objective in this era is building strong individuals.
Meeting the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic and focused a response as did meeting the challenge of Communism. It requires a president who can summon the nation to work harder, get smarter, attract more young women and men to science and engineering and build the broadband infrastructure, portable pensions and health care that will help every American become more employable in an age in which no one can guarantee you lifetime employment.
We have been slow to rise to the challenge of flatism, in contrast to Communism, maybe because flatism doesn't involve ICBM missiles aimed at our cities. Indeed, the hot line, which used to connect the Kremlin with the White House, has been replaced by the help line, which connects everyone in America to call centers in Bangalore. While the other end of the hot line might have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new piece of software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the United Nations, and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in ''From Russia With Love.'' No, that voice on the help line just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It simply says: ''Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?''
No, Rajiv, actually you can't. When it comes to responding to the challenges of the flat world, there is no help line we can call. We have to dig into ourselves. We in America have all the basic economic and educational tools to do that. But we have not been improving those tools as much as we should. That is why we are in what Shirley Ann Jackson, the 2004 president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, calls a ''quiet crisis'' -- one that is slowly eating away at America's scientific and engineering base.
''If left unchecked,'' said Jackson, the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in physics from M.I.T., ''this could challenge our pre-eminence and capacity to innovate.'' And it is our ability to constantly innovate new products, services and companies that has been the source of America's horn of plenty and steadily widening middle class for the last two centuries. This quiet crisis is a product of three gaps now plaguing American society. The first is an ''ambition gap.'' Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many Americans have gotten too lazy. As David Rothkopf, a former official in the Clinton Commerce Department, puts it, ''The real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.'' Second, we have a serious numbers gap building. We are not producing enough engineers and scientists. We used to make up for that by importing them from India and China, but in a flat world, where people can now stay home and compete with us, and in a post-9/11 world, where we are insanely keeping out many of the first-round intellectual draft choices in the world for exaggerated security reasons, we can no longer cover the gap. That's a key reason companies are looking abroad. The numbers are not here. And finally we are developing an education gap. Here is the dirty little secret that no C.E.O. wants to tell you: they are not just outsourcing to save on salary. They are doing it because they can often get better-skilled and more productive people than their American workers.
These are some of the reasons that Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, warned the governors' conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American high-school education is ''obsolete.'' As Gates put it: ''When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.''
We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner -- people in China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.''
I repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning of a crisis that won't remain quiet for long. And as the Stanford economist Paul Romer so rightly says, ''A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.''

Thomas L. Friedman is the author of ''The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,'' to be published this week by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and from which this article is adapted. His column appears on the Op-Ed page of The Times, and his television documentary ''Does Europe Hate Us?'' will be shown on the Discovery Channel on April 7 at 8 p.m.

Photolog 1

Deliverables due EOW, no time to write. Be happy with pictures:

Jeanne @ work

My desktop wallpaper

Playground in New York City

The picturesque mountains of New Joisey

Tearin' it up on my Avenue

At the request of my many adoring fans (one), I am taking a few seconds out of my day to post. Oh adoring fans (fan), fawn over my ingenuity.

Over the past few weeks, the city of New York has completely repaved my sidewalk (complete demolition and reconstruction using cement). Over the next few weeks, the city will repave the road. So, they are doing some nice construction on my street to patch it all up. I am willing to endure the loud *BANG BANG BANG* of concrete breaking at the crack of dawn, because:

1. Rollerblading home use to be a pain in my ass. Literally. I could tell how close or far I was from my apartment based on the different textures of the ground on which I rolled over.
2. I no longer have to tell the taxi cab drivers to "WATCH OUT OVER THERE FOR THE GIANT BLACK HOLE.” Before I kindly ask them to stop at my apartment a few feet ahead.
3. I no longer have to endure the seething stares through the rearview window from the taxi cab drivers because he did not avoid the GIGANTIC AFOREMENTIONED ABYSS in the middle of the street, which split his bright yellow Crown Victoria in half, him in the front and myself in the back.

While the cement on the sidewalk dried, I had to walk down the asphalt road spattered with pieces of broken cement, rocks, pebbles and dirt in order to get home. There were a few nights, looking down this fenced-off, dirt-encompassed street with my orange plastic bag of fruit in hand, thinking that I was in another country. I bet this is what 'insert developing country of choice here' looks like. I wanted to take a picture, but refrained for fear of being run over by terrible Asian woman drivers. While taking pictures was not an outcome, I have decided to contact a few people of the administration to thank them for their generosity in spending millions (I have heard it will cost $8M for this construction work) on our little Avenue. Surprisingly, sheepish mayor Bloomberg will receive a courteous letter from me, as well as that lady whose name I forget, who is in charge of Transportation/Construction services. And, of course, Councilman John Liu, fellow Bronx Science alumni, for cleaning up our streets and making rollerblading youth safer, one humongous fissure at a time.

Favorite: Pet Peeve (Part Deux)

Of the voluntary, behavioral pet peeves, my favorite might just be the Korean Shuffle. OH how it irks me.

What is the Korean Shuffle*?

It is the action of dragging feet when one walks, so that the soles of ones shoes scud the surface of the ground to create a slight scraping or thud-type sound with each step. I wish those people would refrain from wearing shoes and do their little Korean Shuffle on ground that is not so friendly because they have no soles (pun intended).

Try Korean Shuffling through a horse barn, idiot! Try Korean Shuffling in a bar at 4 a.m. after the crazy drunkards have spilled half their purchases on the floor, before they indubitably ask, "Hey, where's the glass I was holding?" If you can Korean Shuffle your way through hot coals coated with sharp objects without lacerating your terribly dragging gimpy feet, then I will consider your Korean Shuffle as something less than a pet peeve.

*Note: Thanks to the creator of this phrase, for providing such a way for me to describe my pet peeve. Based on anecdotal evidence, Koreans seemed to have feet dragging tendencies and thus, the phrase "Korean" Shuffle was adopted.

'RHAPSODY IN BLUE'

An article about a condition that fascinates me:

WHY GEORGE GERSHWIN MAY HAVE CALLED IT 'RHAPSODY IN BLUE'
Wall Street Journal, Science Journal, June, 2002 by Sharon Begley

Like many artists, Carol Steen paints what she sees. But judging by the canvases that fill her loft in Manhattan's NoHo neighborhood, her vision is, well, unusual.

This series of canvases, she explains one afternoon, depicts the shapes and colors that appeared to her -- usually in her mind's eye but sometimes suspended before her -- when she underwent acupuncture treatments. In one, a luminous blue orb weeps emerald crescents. Nearby hang paintings whose images she saw while listening to music: flowing shapes in green, teal, gold and violent.

Ms. Steen is a synesthete, someone whose brain is "cross-activated" so that one sensory experience (feeling or hearing, for instance) triggers a wholly different one (seeing). The result is "a world in multimedia," she says. "Synesthesia is a gift.

"Brain researchers couldn't agree more. Because the condition promises to shed light on puzzles ranging from the roots of creativity to the origins of language, says V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego, "synesthesia is a gold mine for neuroscience.

"He estimates that as many as one person in 200 has synesthesia, which can take as many forms as there are sensory pairings. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote that the sound of a long A in English "has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French A evokes polished ebony." George Gershwin saw notes in color (ever wonder about "Rhapsody in Blue"?), as did Franz Liszt, requesting of musicians, "Gentleman, a little bluer if you please." For Ms. Steen, the radio creates a kaleidoscope so riveting she prefers to turn off the music when she parks her car. In a rare form, tastes have shapes. One synesthete says a roast chicken in citrus sauce is done to a turn when it is "pointed."

In its most common form, synesthesia makes you always see a particular letter or digit in a particular color. To author Patricia Lynne Duffy, P is invariably pale yellow, R is orange, 5 is purple. "When I think of the alphabet, it's like a sloping scale of brightly colored letters," says Ms. Duffy, whose book "Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens" describes her world. One medical professor tells psychologist Thomas Palmeri of Vanderbilt University that although color letters slow down his reading, they help his memory: He breezed through anatomy because the distinct colors of the terms acted as mnemonics.

For decades neurologists figured people like the professor were crazy or lying. Finally, though, brain imaging is establishing the reality of synesthesia. In April, scientists at Goldsmiths College in London reported on MRI scans of synesthetes who hear spoken words in color. The brain area that processes color when you or I stare at a cerulean sky or an emerald fairway is, in these synesthetes, also activated by the spoken word.

Synesthesia probably strikes when the brain takes E.M. Forster's maxim "only connect" to extremes. Everyone is born with extra connections, or synapses. Most get pruned away in childhood. In synesthetes, the extra synapses seem to remain, producing a rich web of circuitry that connects the cortex's color processor to the numeral area next door, or links touch regions to vision regions. Since synesthesia runs in families, defective pruning might reflect a genetic mutation.

While researchers have fun studying people who see Middle C, they're after bigger game. "We hope that synesthesia can give us a window into processes that occur in everyone's brain," says Edward Hubbard of the University of California, San Diego.

Chief among them: creativity (which, after all, is seeing connections that no one before you has) and metaphor (linking seemingly unrelated concepts, as in "Juliet is the sun"). Scientists suspect that crossed wires in the brain's angular gyrus, where information from different senses converges, underlies synesthesia. Not coincidentally, perhaps, when this structure is damaged, your brain can't understand metaphor.

Synesthesia may even explain one of the great mysteries of science -- how language originated. Try this: Draw one spiky shape and one rounded, amoeba-like one. Pretend that, in a lost language, one is a "kiki" and one a "shoosha." Which is which?

Almost everyone says the spiky shape is the kiki. "The spikes mimic the sharp sound of "kiki," says Dr. Ramachandran. If appearances and sounds are really linked in a non-arbitrary way in regular folks just as they are in synesthetes, then early humans could have used sound to represent objects and actions in a way the guy in the next cave would understand. In that case synesthesia, far from being a mere curiosity, offers a window onto the most human of human traits.

Interested in more? A more scientific explanation is offered by Scientific America.

Weekend Festivities

Friday night was an entire weekend condensed into a single night.

Since college, we have been in love with Dane Cook (hilarious comedian: www.danecook.com). Thankfully, one of us has a head on our shoulders (thanks again, Arjun) and got four tickets to his sold out show at the MSG theatre for Friday night. I hereby declare that if Dane asks me to marry him, I would say yes, then keep him locked in our house so he performs for me and my friends on demand (who needs TIVO?). The annoying audience members who kept yelling, "Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaane!" would never be invited. In fact, I'd lock them in their houses.

It is safe to say that the four of us laughed so hard that our face hurt. OUR FACE HURT. Dane is so funny that his CD, Retaliation, is 4th on the pop charts or whatever billboards top 40 charts crap artists' CDs are ranked. It went platinum- I know because he was presented his platinum disc at the show by a few folks from Comedy Central. Who from Comedy Central? Who the heck cares; Dane was there.

Afterwards, I met up with friends from - get this - elementary school. Long story short, three of us bumped into each other, used my certified stalking method to track down a few others, and threw a little "reunion" for our elementary school classmates. We were only able to contact 12 people, of which 7 showed up. But It was a blast! We even spent a few minutes singing the P.S. 165 school song, in the middle of fashionable bar louge Pop, sipping on our martinis and beers. They brainwashed us well, no? Some of the most ridiculous conversations were had:
-"I loved the organ-drawing project we did in 4th grade. Now I know that our pancreas looks like corn on the cob."
-"Wait a second... you guys used to pick on me!"
-"I wonder what happened to all the white people in our class?"
-"I bet Becky & Diana got pregnant and popped out kids already."

Then they came along with me Shanty's Birthday Bash, where everyone and their mom showed up. Not their mom, but all of Shanty's family under the age of 35 did for sure. I'm not sure, but I think Shanty had some fun. We all did. Some don't remember the fun, but fun was had by all.

Happy Birthday, Shanty!

Pizza Monster

See this pizza? I ate half of it.

Craving real Italian pizza for the past three years, I was finally satisfied a week ago after having this yummy sight from Serafina. Italian pizza is different from New York pizza; not that one is better than the other, just different. Pizza in Italy has very thin crust, tomato sauce from real tomatoes (not concentrate), fresh melted layer of cheese (not the stuff that comes in a plastic baggy), fresh tomatoes and basil. Other toppings include four cheeses, anchovies, or prociutto like the one I had. Before you eat it, you must sprinkle extra virgin olive oil to bring out the taste and freshness of all these ingredients. Though the pizza I had last week was not that true to form, it was close as I have come in a long time. Next? Some good gelato.

Movie Review: Broken Flowers

Broken Flowers is one of the best films I have seen in a long time. It was a movie about subtleness (I would have used 'subtility,' but somethings tells me that's not right). Jim Jarmusch, the director, never explicitly tells the viewers how to feel, or how the character feels (read: like most movies we watch). Instead, you FEEL it, in interpreting the actions of each character and listening to the conversations, while making assumptions as you go along. You start to feel the paranoia and intrigue that the characters feel. Besides, a little bit of full frontal never hurt anyone..

Don Johnston, played by Bill Murray, is a self-proclaimed bachelor (he has white hair!) who receives an anonymous letter from a past girlfriend, claiming that he has a son that has set out on a roadtrip to find him. Don sets out on a trip of his own to visit his past girlfriends to uncover the truth, and these encounters are what make up the bulk of the movie. [Note: I just watched the trailer, and it reminds me of the awesomeness of the movie.] The ending was at first unfulfilling, but now, I think it was perfect. We are just so used to happy, conclusive endings that we forget a movie doesn't have to have that type of ending to be good. In fact, in this case, the opposite is true (not that the ending isn't happpy.. well, just watch it).

Also very poignant is the camerawork. Just as you FEEL the story unfold, you also WATCH it unfold through Don's eyes. Some scenes seem insignificant, such as multiple 3-second shots of the rearview mirror reflecting the road, but these are the types of scenes that allow you to watch the movie through Don, creating a connection between the movie watcher and the character.

Again, Bill Murray is fantastic! He is so convincing, which is amazing considering how quiet his character is. The character development is very deep, and all of this is conveyed in action (and inaction). The story development is very similar. I think it's typical of Jarmusch- a depiction of everyday life, but in a strange scenario (Jarmusch's Mystery Train is hilarious and just as smart).

In remembrance.

My Favorite: Pet Peeve

Pet Peeves come in two forms, those that are:
1. Behavioral or controllable, and anyone who does it should be abolished from societal contact
2. Natural or uncontrollable, and anyone who does it should be abolished* from societal contact
*Exceptions can be made if the action is truly involuntary

Of the natural/uncontrollable/involuntary type that drives me up the wall, my 'favorite pet peeve' is Dry-Mouth Syndrome... Oh, you know what I'm talking about.

Caused by the slight sticking of the gums in the back of one's mouth, or the overly-wide tongue that hits one's teeth, it is an unbearable audible smacking noise that accompanies almost every word spoken. I'm not referring to the full out lithp that so adoringly supplements a stereotypical gay male's coming out of the closet ("I hate life. Oh my God, I'm gay. I'm gaaay!! Ith's thoo thuper!"). I am referring to the grating, disgusting, pervasive often faint but incredibly maddening sound, with every word and smack, that builds in my ears a fortress of agony. It grows from a faint byproduct of a sound to a deafening echo, the longer I am in the presence of someone with dry-mouth syndrome. There is a female correspondent on NPR, I don't know which, who exhibits The Syndrome. Every time I hear her, I question if there is an NPR-God punishing me for my wrong doings (listening to Hot 97 every now and then might of put him/her over the edge). What sane-minded person would let that woman speak on the air? What person would let her speak at all?? I often continue listening though, just to see how much I can bear.

Don't worry- none of you have it. But if I have offended anyone through this post, please refer to text above in bold.

Labor Day since 1882

It seems that I am quite popular these days. Refer to the fourth and fifth comments on my previous entry... I am so lucky to have such adoring fans; they even look out for my health.

Labor day weekend has come and gone! Some of you packed, some of you partied, some of you sat around and watched a lot of porn (Howard), but did we really celebrate what Labor Day means? Do we comprehend the significance of this occasion? A brief history on Labor Day indicates... YES! People worked, people got tired of working, people decided to proclaim the first Monday of every September a day to not work. I am trying very hard to do what this country wants me to: sit on my arse and not do a thing all day.

Unfortunately, there are many people unable to celebrate this day. Department stores, gas stations, grocery stores, are all open. If Labor Day was meant to celebrate the "working man," I think these people should not have to work; afterall, today is their day. Wait... on our way back from our weekend in the mountains, we had to fill up the gas (by the way, $3.05 per gallon? It's like we stole it!). We also stopped by ShopRite where I was able to procure some Total Honey Clusters cereal, that I so urgently desired (one word: fiber). So, if they were not open.... well, there's always Thanksgiving!

Happy One-Year Anniversary to Me

It has been one year since I started working at my company. In celebration of this momentus occasion, I was at the office until 9 P.M. last night, working.

Not griping though - there is no time to gripe. We're behind schedule! The Redcoats are coming! Our deliverable is due! (The second phrase was meant to provide context for the urgency of the situation. I hope that was properly understood.) I am such a dork.

My favorite: Season

Do you know that autumn is my favorite season? My wedding is definitely going to be a fall wedding... not that I think about that stuff.

I love everything about it, especially the temperature and the sunlight. It's not rainy (spring), it's not hot & humid (summer), and not cold (Ithaca). It is the perfect temperature - if you go running outside, you sweat a little, but you can walk for miles without even feeling hot. You can walk outside, take a deep breath, and feel crisp air in your lungs - I love that. Take a deep breath now- you feel that crispness? NO! Because it’s not quite autumn yet. I also love that the sun is golden - not yellow or white, but gold, like it is right before sunset. It's just right for my favorite articles of clothing: long pants or jeans, a cottony shirt and light jacket, or a sweater (think wool and fleece). Accessorize accordingly.

I think that psychologically, it represents new beginnings too (opposite of what most people think). For the past 17 years, it has represented the beginning of the school year. New friends, new classes, new knowledge, new pencils/folders/binders, new hobbies. And it represents the beginning of lots of vacation weekends and therefore family gatherings. And fun holidays like Halloween, which reminds me of big and small orange pumpkins everywhere. It also represents many opportunities to make crunching sounds as I walk because of all the crispy fallen leaves. So autumn not only bears warm food and warm fabrics, but also warm feelings. It makes me miss school, and it reminds of so many good things, in addition to the gorgeous auburns, reds and golds, and the swirl of very crisp air through my nose and in my lungs. This morning would have been a good one to wear a light coat for the first time all year. I’m so excited that it’s Autumn soon.

At the risk of sounding like a 6th grader, what's your favorite season?

Porn in Public - Not OK.

While sitting in seat 4-A on my flight to Minneapolis this afternoon (that's FIRST CLASS, biotch. Refer to previous post about GOLD STATUS), a very plump and dressed-to-go-a-huntin' young man sat down next to me. He had a slight speech impediment, which I first took to be a mental handicap.

The young man, Mark I think is his name, 'Blessed-me' when I sneezed, said "Excuse me, Miss?" to call for the flight attendant, and offered me some Bite-Size Butterfinger Balls (did I mention he was plump?) before he had any. I thought, "Golly, what a nice, young man." Yes, so what if I think the word "Golly" to myself when it's appropriate? As I proceeded to dabble in my work and read a few magazines (Shape and The Economist, because I know you were dying to know), he decided to do the same. So, Mark, sitting in seat 4-B, unwraps from a clear plastic bag a brand new shiny magazine. STOP.

That line is a dead giveaway. Hello- what kind of magazine comes in a plastic bag? Not The Economist! Not Road & Track! Not Vogue! Oh, but Sweet Tits does! Or was it, Cheeks & ASS? I couldn't really read the title because I was so distracted by the GIGANTIC NIPPLES on the cover. DID YOU GET THE MEMO THAT IT'S OK TO READ A PORN MAGAZINE IN PUBLIC!? I might have, but must of deleted it along with the slew of memos I got. Like the one about it being ok to fart in someone else's personal space. Or to sneeze without saying excuse me. Or to vomit on your neighbor's lasagna.

It's as ludicrous as whipping out your laptop (LAPTOP) and watching something from the Spice Channel, and without headphones! He continued to finger (ew) through the pages, like it was the Sunday Times, until a nice piping hot plate of lasagna was set in front of him for dinner.

--
On a completely different and unrelated topic and so sorry to include it in this same post:
ANJUM, CONGRATULATIONS. I AM VERY EXCITED FOR YOU ON (am I allowed to say what?)! AREN'T WE ALL, PEOPLE?

On exercising...

I started going to the gym 3 weeks ago, and it kicked my butt last night. I did a "Butt and Gutt" class, which will be my goal to conquer from today forth.

The instructor was a very tall and extremely thin brunette. So thin that I assumed she wasn’t actually fit, but just incredibly skinny naturally. I couldn't see any muscles, just saw a skinny body. Well, 2 minutes into the workout, I had an epiphany: “My muscles, they are so weak!” I thought my muscles were actually strong, but her class kicked my butt/gutt. I was in AWE at her endurance - I couldn't figure out how someone so thin had enough muscle strength to keep lifting the same 3lb weight over and over when I was STRAINING to even hold it up at that point. Please don’t laugh at my 3lb weight; lift that weight with muscles you never use 60 times and see if you’re crying for dopamine. The 3lb weight became my enemy at that point.

A specific exercise ripped me apart. They were hip muscle exercises; but I did two reps and almost spontaneously combusted. Instructions were to lay on your side, rest one end of a body bar on the foot of the outer leg, and the other end on the floor in front of you. Lift your leg up and down, up and down. I thought, “piece of cake I’ve been doing lunges for the past 3 weeks”. It wasn’t until I was burning a hole through the side of my shorts did I realize I’ve never used that muscle before and it was just untouched meat sitting on the side of my pelvis. I had to stop a few times, remove the body bar, and full out take a nap, before she was done with her thousandth rep.

I don't feel sore though, so I will keep taking that class. I can’t wait for the day when I write to you, “Damn amateurs in the class can’t even lift this 50lb weight 60 times? Why do they let these idiots into the class?” Just kidding…I’d still be using a 3lb weight.

"New York Changing"

I would like to see this exhibit before it ends on Nov. 20:
http://www.nychanging.com/

From the web site:

New York Changing: Douglas Levere Revisits Berenice Abbott’s New York presents 50 pairs of photographs by contemporary photographer Douglas Levere and world-renown photographer Berenice Abbott. Abbott’s iconic photographs, drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, were taken in the 1930s and first published in her landmark book, Changing New York (1939). More than six decades later, Levere used the same camera Abbott had used and returned to the same locations at the same time of day and the same time of year. Indeed, he took on the role of detective as he successfully sought to understand and replicate every aspect of Abbott’s process. When seen side by side, these two remarkable bodies of work reveal much about the city and the nature of urban transformation. Perhaps more than anything else, these carefully crafted images powerfully suggest that in New York, the only constant is change.

I NY

Hello, Chopped Liver!

That is all.

A quick update

I am in NYC for this week and next, with occasional trips to Jersey for the client. I just wanted to say hello and not leave this blog unattended to for more than a few days.

My high school reunion is coming up - will see some familiar faces and that's what I am looking forward to most.

P.S. Hi Jimmy - you are on my mind and i just wanted to tell you that. I am looking forward to that bowl of beef noodle soup with you and can't wait for the lunch when we get to do that.

Random Crap

I go on and on about how much I want to travel around the world and see everything all the time. But, it isn't easy being a woman and traveling alone, especially at night or through less... civil areas. Well, check out this website: Tango Diva. I knew I was onto something when I said that you can find anything online.

I met a blond stripper the other night and she claims to own a condo in Miami, a house on a lake in Atlanta, and a closet of Vera Wang dresses. Not that I'm contemplating a new occupation, but unless Accenture's stock skyrockets to $1,000/share... Anyway - a blond joke for your entertainment:

A blonde walks into a bank in New York City and asks for the loan officer. She says she's going to The Bahamas on vacation for one week and needs to borrow $5,000. The bank officer says the bank will need some kind of security for the loan, so the blonde hands over the keys to a new Rolls Royce. The car is parked on the street in front of the bank, she has the title and everything checks out. The bank agrees to accept the car as collateral for the loan. The bank's president and its officers all enjoy a good laugh at the blonde for using a $250,000 Rolls as collateral against a $5,000 loan. An employee of the bank then proceeds to drive the Rolls into the bank's underground garage and parks it there. One week later, the blonde returns, repays the $5,000 and the interest, which comes to $15.41. The loan officer says, "Miss, we are very happy to have had your business, and this transaction has worked out very nicely, but we are a little puzzled. While you were away, we checked you out and found that you are a multimillionaire. What puzzles us is, why would you bother to borrow $5,000?" The blond replies "Where else in New York City can I park my car for a week for only $15.41 and expect it to be there when I return?" A smart blonde.

Good As Gold

My friends, you are too funny. Please keep writing and leaving comments; it gives me something to giggle about quietly as I learn about calculating Return on Invested Capital. Which may not be a good thing, if people in my training class think that I am giggling at ROIC = NOPLAT/Invested Capital. Although, they probably giggled their way through getting their MBA... and the vastly higher salary they make as a result.

On another note, I have just acquired GOLD ELITE status with Northwest Airlines. This means:
1. Automatic upgrades to First Class if a seat is available
2. Access to the express security checkpoints at the airport
3. Automatic doubling of mileage every time I fly
4. Elite recognition when flying on the SkyTeam network

What this really means:
1. Automatic upgrades to First Class if a seat is available - When flying through LaGuardia, I've yet to receive an upgrade because First Class seats are always taken by Platinum status members. In order to become a member of this class, one must accumulate enough miles to what equates to weekly flights from New York to the Himalayas to the middle of the Kalahari to the bottom of the Atlantic. I anticipate becoming Platinum in a few weeks.
2. Access to the express security checkpoints at the airport - This is the best perk. Every Monday morning, I anticipate a 5 minute wait at security, while groggy morning travelers stand online (‘inline’ for you non-New Yorkers), bobbing up and down, slowing schlepping along, for 20 minutes. This is especially useful during Jewish holidays, when all the schmucks and schlemiels from Brooklyn and Bayside clog the lines and increase the wait time to a whopping 40 minutes.
3. Automatic doubling of mileage every time I fly - Currently in my mileage repository, I have banked 101,106 miles (53, 134 accumulated in 2005). Earth's circumference around the equator is 24,902 miles. Need I say more?
4. Elite recognition when flying on the SkyTeam network - At the airport, when I arrive, throngs of Chippendales dancers carry me on a golden throne, margarita in hand, into my private quarters on my personal jet, while the flight attendants fluff the Gucci bathrobe they have tailor made for me in preparation for my flight.

Traveling; it's not so bad.

In Hotlanta

Hotlanta is not so much how as Very Rainy. It was misty and musty all day, and is now rainy. But, rainy is acceptable if one is staying at the ultra-luxurious Intercontinental Hotel in Buckhead.

Marble bathrooms with separate tub and shower, cherry wood furniture, tv panels embedded in the treadmills, tastefully appointed decor. The restaurant downstairs, Au Pied du Cochan, is a very nice French restaurant with traditional brassiere fair. The last time I was staying at this hotel, there was an ice-storm (in Hotlanta), and I had a fever the entire time. Thank goodness this time, I'm able to enjoy it, and don't you worry - I will enjoy it to its fullest.

Vote for Jeanne!

Jimmy, in a continuous display of love that baffles me sometimes (Hi Gege), asked me if I knew my blood type. I had to call my pediatrician, Dr. Liu (who I would still see as my general practitioner if only I weren't old enough to be one of her nurses), to get this vital information (type O or O positive... I already forgot).

So guys, do you know your blood type? Do you absolutely know what medicines or foods cause an allergic reaction? Do you know what to do if you severed a body part or spilled acid on your skin (because this happens often at our desks in the office)? The point is, we are not taught the most essential information about safety, nor do we know some of the most vital and basic information about our own health.

My fear is that we will not need to know these things until it is too late. In high school, we learn about sexually transmitted diseases, but not what do in order to save someone's life. So you'd know "HEY, I have crabs!" but not how to perform the Heimlich when I'm choking on one of those excessively large neon orange Centrum multi-vitamin pills (true story-- the vitamin part).

When I am President of the United States of America, I will indoctrinate in all schools a requirement to teach basic life-saving skills to all students. Stranded on an island with no electricity? No problem! Almost drowned and in need of CPR? Piece of cake! Stuck in a sand trap in the Amazon? Crap I ran out of analogous phrases. And if Congress doesn't approve, you ask? I'll wait until they adjourn for the summer.

So, do I have your vote?!

Test

I just realized that there is a little icon that looks like a photo because it is meant to be clicked in order to add an image! I will test it now:

I am elated.

Peggy, the Tingling Feeling

Have you ever been overwhelmed by warmth that starts at your mouth, because your smile is so glad and true that it just spreads to the top of your head, from looking at a picture of someone? This someone is so special, yet I don’t know the first thing about her. Yes, Jennifer Aniston and I are in love.

No, no. Her name is not Jennifer, it is Peggy. She and I were friends from when I was three years old. I am not sure how much we were actually friends because she is five years older than me, so when I was still managing bowel movements, she was already learning about really big kid things, like the word carbohydrates (I had that one on a third grade vocabulary pop quiz - it horrified me). Regardless, we were buddies, and in fact, I thought of her as my sister. After a few years of my incessant nagging and playing of the house, she and her family moved to Taiwan, and I did not see or hear from her for the rest of my childhood. Those were lonely years.

Well I mention all this now because over the past few years, Peggy and I have chatted once or twice, and it is always a flood of utter delight to talk to her - to remember how happy I always was to see her when we were little knee-highs. It was a very genuine and innocent feeling, and the best part is, when I talk to her now, I feel that again. We chatted this past week because her family has forgiven the United States of America and is visiting for a week, with a trip to New York on the agenda. Very unfortunately, I will not be here that weekend, but I promised to visit her at her current residence. She lives in the very progressive state of Texas, as an associate professor of psychology at a very large university. Hence, we exchanged pictures via email, which lead me to the tingling feeling that I described above, and felt compelled to create a posting about it here so I never forget.

Sugar = good

You're welcome, Arjun. For some unknown reason, I am knowledgeable about very important things, such as the size of the smallest primate in the world (size of your thumb, found in Madagascar, studied carefully by an ex-Dallas Cowboys cheerleader). But when it comes to very trivial things (my blood type?), I'm clueless.

In other news, my coworkers and I participated in the company BBQ at our client site for lunch. It was one of the few days this summer under 70 degrees, with wind gusts of 16 mph. I think half of the food I ate was actually my hair. We were offered uncooked (not just undercooked) chicken, tasteless lemonade, and no mustard with my bratwurst. The meal cost $6.95 (why not $7?), and no one left happy. I did snatch a few cookies and pieces of carrot cake before leaving, which brings me to my point. Soft, fluffy, sweet things are always delicious and can save every meal. When another coworker saw me walking in with a plate of of cookies, carrotcake, high fructose corn syrup, he remarked, "Oh, a typical Jeanne meal." So what if I had 2 cookies and 3 chocolate dipped strawberries right before dinner last night? Plenty of vitamins and proteins in sugar! How do I know? Because, I am knowledgeable about very important things.

Me English Speak Good

Public Notice: Friends. If you notice that I have mistyped, misSpelled, misdefined or, missed, a word... please let me know. Do not let me continue to embarass myself continually in front of the World. Thanks.

Oh, a TITLE!

Stalking is no longer and art, as it is made easy with all the online-friendship-school-interest networks budding up. Finding someone's personal information (phone number, college, location, bra size) can be as simple as typing their name at thefacebook.com, friendster.com, orkut.com, please-stalkme.com and of course, Google. I will be first to admit that when I get bored, I have typed in the names of anyone and everyone who comes to mind, just to revel at how ingenius (injeanneous!) I am to have found them on the Internet. And then I'll send an email to Shanty about it. And if it's really juicy, Anjum gets one too.

I just spent a good 30 minutes doing the above described actions, shamelessly. I have come across some very interesting individuals. Again, I am not ashamed.

Movie Review:
If you're idea of a good movie is excellent cinematography, phenomenal acting, and questionable subject matter, 'Secretary' is the perfect movie. I LOVED IT. It stars James Spader and Megan Jlylhshahhallll (Jake Jylenenelahahahallll's sister). If you are not so much into stories about sadomasochistic tendencies and bothersome relationships, please skip this one. If you're still curious, l'll tell you more.

Morning from Minneapolis! I thought about putting the link to my photos here... but realized that then my brother's very cute and round 9-year-old face would be prematurely exposed to the Internet and we don't want that now do we?

So, I will send out a link to the Orlando photos in 5 mins. Therefore, if when you read this and have not received the link, you must inform me in writing that you would like a link to the photos. If I do not receive such a notice from you, I will expect that you do not wish to see these photos.

Sincerely,
The Management

On another note, D.C. will be my playground this weekend. I anticipate tourist sight seeing, serious bargain shopping, and a little bit of partying. Just a lil. More to update soon.

I want to post photos of Orlando trip- but am confused as to how to proceed. Anjum, helllllp!

So, Orlando was tons-o-fun. I am dark yellow now; sort of like a ripening banana. A beautiful, dark yellow, ripening banana.. little brown spots and all (damn mosquitos). What did I do in Orlando?

Epcot, Magic Kingdom, SeaWorld, Universal Studios, Nick Faldo Golf Institute lesson, buffets for lunch and dinner, and took hundreds of pictures like the Asian tourist that I was. I hope to put them up soon (ANJUM!!!).

I watched 'Closer' while waiting for my delayed flight to depart (late by 3 hours. After traveling on a plane 2x per week for the past 6 months, that 3 hour delay hardly peeved me at all. I knew all this travel lead to some good). The movie gets my nod of approvavl and a quiet introspective smirk. I can't wait to watch it again so I get all the little nuances. That's what the entire movie is about - nuances. [Edit] And Natalie Portman's bum.

I've rented two more movies for this weekend: The Secretary and Decalogue X. I don't know what either is about, but of course, I will be reporting on them here. Asian reporter, Trisha Takanawa, back to you in the studio.

(If you don't watch Family Guy, you 1-won't get the last quote 2-need to get over yourself and watch an episode)

Orlando is fun, despite:

1. The sweltering heat - my family likes to go as close to the equator as possible during the hottest times of the year, as exemplified by our vacation choices for the past few years: Taiwan, Hawaii, the Bahamas.

2. Exhorbitant ticket prices - we have spent over $2,000 on entry fees so far to visit three Disney Parks + Sea World + Universal Studios. That could have been another vacation... to a less sweltering destination.

3. Masses of vacationers - who not only seem large in quantity but also in their size.

A few more days to go and back to normalcy in New York. What strikes me most here is not the shows, music or attractions - it is the sheer number of shops within the theme parks. The last time I saw these many things on sale, I think I was standing on Wall Street. OOHHHH! The commercialism drives me a little nuts, but for the sake of those traveling with me, I refrain from complaining about it...too much.

In the past five months that I have been traveling the MSP-LGA weekly commute, I have met 3 people so far that have given me their cards/contact.

The first fellow traveler I met, I tried to ignore (there was PowerPoint to be tweaked), but he was persistent in talking to me. Turns out, he admires the work of consultants, claiming that we are able to turn ideas and disparity into tangible networks and solutions. It made me wonder what line of work he is in. After a few minutes of conversation, I started to enjoy it; talking about the latest research on consumer behavior, popcorn sales, traveling around the world for a year, and advertising. Turns out, he is the president of kirshenbaum bond + partners, a small but very reputable ad shop. I will contact him if I want to change fields.

The second gentleman I met, the neurosurgeon, I already mentioned in my first blog entry.

The third I met this weekend on my flight to Orlando. A French-blooded, Southern-accented, talkative and fairly attractive beverage-bottling-machine technician. He has lived in Orlando for 19 years, but travels so often that he has over 500,000 miles banked with Continental Airlines. The unpredictability of his job requires constant flights to irregular destinations for indeterminate stays. For this reason, among many others, he and his fiancé split. We chatted about many things, mostly places we've been and what/where we ate there; but really, he wasn't listening. We were conversing because he likes to listen to stories about how he felt after a seven-month stint in Fargo installing a new bottling machine (bored), and hobbies outside of work (architecture). What did interest me about this guy were his hands - they were so worn. His face was that of a sun kissed, blonde hair blue-eyed, 30 year-old bachelor. His hands looked like they had been through both World Wars. His fingers were crooked, like trees bent leftwards from constant ocean winds, slightly larger at the knuckles. I kept wondering if working on bottling machines caused such an alteration, or if it was a genetic disease, or if he actually spends all day cracking and bending his knuckles for a living.

I won't be calling him for, "If you want to try out a new Arabian restaurant I've heard a lot about," but the next time I drink a Coke from a plastic bottle, I might think about the strenuous effort which was required to bottle it that could have molded Nils' hands.

P.S.- What, pray tell, is an 'Arabian restaurant'? Is it located in the dictionary next to 'Oriental person'? Or is correctly used and I am just overly sensitive on behalf of Anjum? Lastly, Happy Independence Day... really.