attended two talks today at the Wilson Center. the first was the book launch of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat and another was a panel session on reform to the UN Security Council with Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State, and two other distinguished individuals.. haha whose names i've never heard of. but anyway, i enjoyed Friedman's short lecture/intro/summary of his book more.. it was a pretty entertaining and informative talk and i now feel compelled to buy his new book.. =P once again, open source software was given honorable mention... including Firefox and Wikipedia! well Linux too, and apparently the Brazilian government has or is going to switch to the Linux operation system.. and he foresees China doing so, since she wouldn't want to be made vulnerable to possible sanctions by Microsoft if the Taiwan issue heats up... also learnt that UPS doesnt just do shipping.. apparently it has this whole logistics business.. what he terms "INSOURCING"...the eg. given being that if ur Toshiba laptop screws up, you get UPS to pick it up and u think they send it to Toshiba ppl to fix it for you, but in reality they send it to some place in Kentucky (if i didn't remb wrongly) where UPS technicians fix it for you and then send it back to the customers... and many of these brand names have become nothing more than marketing shells.... hmm i was just pretty fascinated by the number ongoing innovations... that change the way everything is run...that we (or maybe it's just me) don't even know about!
also got an email today from a paranoid dad telling me that i should postpone my plans to visit China and Japan till things cool down... which actually reminded me about some silly things i've come across in the midst of this newly-triggered China-Japan animosity... i feel it's so easy for us to associate things or think they are the same just because of one obvious thing in common... perhaps i'm guilty of such a tendency at times jsut that i might not be aware of it... i think i came across an article headline in Zaobao few days ago on how Cecilia Cheung has boycotted eating ramen or something (i guess because of this incident?) and how many Chinese are boycotting Jap goods... i cannot help but feel unlucky for these Jap shops/companies cos why on earth should they be blamed for the Japanese govt's decision to publish misleading history texbooks... yet for many Chinese right now there seems to be this blanket hatred of all things Japanese...