Archive for August, 2006

Freeport Bakery - Sacramento, CA, 95818-3855 - Citysearch

I thought the cakes were pretty decent. We had the Chapnage Cake, Coconut Cake and real lemonade.

Freeport Bakery - Sacramento, CA, 95818-3855 - Citysearch
What a lot of people don’t know is that Freeport also has savory items for breakfast and lunch, like potato knishes (heavenly) and several varieties of quiche. However, these savories are really only a prelude to the desserts–you eat them only to pad your stomach with something “healthy” before gorging on what you really want, like the princess cake, the lemon cooler cake, or the “triples” chocolate cookies. One thing you’ll really like about Freeport Bakery is that you can have a slice of just about any cake that you see in the case. Even if it’s whole, they’ll cut it for you. The pies are also excellent, as are the many house-baked breads and danishes.

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Four Arts of the Chinese Scholar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Interesting…

Four Arts of the Chinese Scholar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Four Arts of the Chinese Scholar, otherwise known as siyi, is a term used to describe four main requirements of the Chinese scholar gentleman. They are qin (guqin), qi (the game of go), shu (calligraphy) and hua (painting).

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Go (board game) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One of the games I like to play.

Go (board game) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Go, also known as Weiqi in Chinese (Traditional Chinese: 圍棋; Simplified Chinese: 围棋), Igo in Japanese (Kanji: 囲碁), and Baduk in Korean (Hangul:바둑), is a strategic, zero sum, deterministic board game of perfect information originating in ancient China, before 200 BC.

The objective of the game is to control a larger territory than one’s opponent by placing one’s stones so they cannot be surrounded and captured by the opponent, but can surround and capture any stones the opponent plays inside one’s own territory. The game is now popular throughout the world, especially in East Asia, and on the Internet.

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dealnews.com - 60% off of resturant.com gift certs

Good deal!

dealnews.com - Find the lowest prices and coupons on computer hardware, software, digital cameras, iPods, MP3 players, plasma TV
Restaurant.com slashes 60% off any gift certificate via coupon code “42698″. That cuts $25 dining certificates to $4 and $10 gift certificates to $1.20. Restaurant.com’s gift certificates are redeemable at local restaurants across the United States. Some gift certificates have restrictions, like dinner-only or a $15 minimum. (Each restaurant lists it individual restrictions.) Coupon ends August 27.

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My favorite places in Los Angeles and Orange County - Chowhound

When I need a website food recommendation, I go to Chowhound!

My favorite places in Los Angeles and Orange County - Chowhound
Wasabi Sushi in Tustin, CA for Omakase Sushi. Natalee Thai in Venice, CA for Thai. Ding Tai Fong in Arcadia, CA for Chinese. Some place in Venice, Italy in which I had to best Italtian in my life. Joe’s in Venice, CA for Cal Fusion/French. Brodard in Westminster, CA for Vietnamese. Little Malaysia in El Monte, CA for South East Asian. Inka Mama’s in Rancho San Margarita, CA for Peruvian.

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More Shanghai Touring

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WRS class in Shanghai

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Touring around in Shanghai

Zhouzhuang: meaning “Zhou’s village”,named after Zhou Digong in Song Dynasty (960-1127 AD) who donated more than 13-hectare of his land as the field for Quanfu Temple. Famed as “No.1 water village in China”, with 900-year-old history, Zhouzhuang is an ancient town featuring great cultural traditions and unique architecture surrounded by water with many tributaries, stone bridges and old residences left from Ming and Qing Dynasties, where you can have a glimpse of particular charisma of Jiangnan(meaning south of Yangtze River).
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Grand View Garden
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Yuyuan Garden
, a place of peace and comfort in the heart of bustling Shanghai, dates back to the fabled Ming Dynasty. Now a popular tourist destination, Yuyuan began as a private garden created by Pan Yunduan, who spent almost 20 years - and all of his savings - to build a garden in order to please his parents in their old age. That is why he called this garden ‘Yuyuan’ - because ‘yu’ in Chinese means ‘peace and health’.

During the past 400 years, Yuyuan, although restored and reopened several times, was most often in disarray. Due to the decline of Pan’s family after Pan Yuduan’s death, Yuyuan gradually fell into disuse. Although the garden was improved by the local signiors, several civil conflicts in the mid-19th century caused great damage. In 1956, after Shanghai’s liberation, the city government reconstructed the garden and refurbished its mien and beauty as in the old days. Yuyuan Garden was finally reopened to the public in 1961, and the State Department declared it a national monument in 1982. Now Yuyuan Garden attracts countless visitors at home and abroad every year.
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Old Shanghai Road
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Shanghai Tech Musume
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Huangpu River, the most important shipping artery of Shanghai, wriggles like an undulating muddy dragon from the mouth of the Yangtze River in Wusong to the East China Sea. The yellow and ice-free Huangpu River is 114 kilometers (71 miles) long, 400 meters wide and has an average depth of nine meters (30 feet).

Huangpu River joins 29 kilometers (18 miles) north of downtown Shanghai and divides Shanghai into two parts, east and west. Cruises are available everyday, including the shorter cruises (navigating the main waterfront area between the Yangpu Bridge and the Nanpu Bridge) and the complete cruises (meandering eastward along the golden waterway, over a distance of 60 kilometers or 37 miles). Whether it is in the daytime or at night, the views along the river are the same beautiful. The great modern skyscrapers and the characteristic buildings in different architectural styles are the best records of the development of the city and the Huangpu River, the birthplace of Shanghai, is the faithful eyewitness.

The Huangpu River and the Bund, ShanghaiThe Bund, also called the Zhongshan Road, is a famous waterfront and regarded as the symbol of Shanghai for hundreds of years. It starts from the Baidu Bridge, which is at the connecting point of the Huangpu River and the Suzhou Creek, to the East Jinling Road and winds a 1500 meters (less than one mile) length. Walking along the Bund, which is at the west shore of the Huangpu River, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower can be seen on the opposite side and also the Jin Mao Tower.Being one of the Top Ten Shanghai Attractions, the Bund is a really beautiful and special place which is worth visiting. The newly-built Flood Control Bank takes the function of preventing the oversize flood; the square with the statue of Marshal Chen Yi is an open air podium which gives new views of the Shanghai Plaza Culture; the Cenotaph which stands on the man-made island is a monument of people’s heroes; the riverside greenbelt, the Electronic Waterfall Bell, and the Great Mural Carving are all representatives of the Bund.
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CouchSurfing - Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch At A Time

CouchSurfing - Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch At A Time
What is Couch Surfing?
You’re probably here at CouchSurfing to find a free place to stay or people to hang out with while you are traveling. After your first experience of either surfing or hosting, you’ll find out that what you get out of it is so much more. We help to create a better world by opening our homes, our hearts and our lives. We open our minds and welcome the knowledge cultural exchange makes available. We create deep and meaningful connections that cross oceans, continents and cultures. CouchSurfing changes not only the way we travel, but how we relate to the world!

CouchSurfing.com helps you make connections worldwide. You can use the network to meet people and then go and surf other members’ couches! When you surf a couch, you are a guest at someone’s house. They will provide you with some sort of accommodation, a penthouse apartment or maybe a back yard to pitch your tent in. Stays can be as short as a cup of coffee, a night or two, or even a few months or more. When you offer your couch, you have complete control of who visits. The possibilities are endless and completely up to you.

The friendships made through CouchSurfing enhance members’ lives and contribute greatly to making the world a better, safer, more peaceful place. Signing up for a free couch and ending up with amazing adventures and a global family–that’s what CouchSurfing is all about!

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Fast Company Now - Everything I Thought I Knew about Leadership Is Wrong

Abstract: To get rich, do you have to be miserable? To be successful, do you have to punish your customers? Tough questions from a CEO who’s smart enough to admit he doesn’t have all the answers.

Link: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/02/meyerson.html?partner=rss

In 1992 Ross Perot asked me if I would join Perot Systems as CEO. It had been five years since he and I had left EDS. I told him I would do it — with the disclaimer that I didn’t know much about the current shape of the business. Ross told me, “Just follow your nose.”

That’s what I did. It took me six months. I visited with all the associates of Perot Systems and all of our customers. Then I went back to Ross and told him, “Everything I thought I knew about leadership is wrong.”

All the reasons he’d asked me to rejoin him for were wrong. The people who had signed on, thinking we’d recreate a new and improved EDS at Perot Systems had expectations that were wrong. They would have to either change or leave.

It was a traumatic meeting. Not that he got mad. It was just a mouthful to tell somebody.

I was telling him that everything had changed. Technology, customers, the environment around customers, the market — all had changed. The people in the organization and what they wanted from their work had changed.

Organizations must change radically: we are at the beginning of a revolutionary time in business. Not just an evolutionary time. Not a year-to-year change. A fundamental revolution. Many companies that have enjoyed decades of fabulous success will find themselves out of business in the next five years if they don’t make revolutionary changes.

Of course, many of these changes are about technology. They’re also about the fundamentals of business and people, and they raise elemental questions: How does this business revolution affect the organization? What does it mean to the people in the organization? What changes do we have to make in the way we communicate?

And most important: What is the new definition of leadership?

I can’t offer absolute answers to these questions. But I do know from my own experience that the leadership techniques that applied 20 years ago don’t apply anymore.

My intense self-examination left me wrestling with two questions:

To get rich, do you have to be miserable?

To be successful, do you have to punish your customers?

To answer these questions, I would have to look deeply into myself, reinvent my concept of leadership. And in the process, we’d all have to reinvent Perot Systems.

———–

Sidebar: My Intro to Leadership Course

In 1967 Ross Perot gave me my intro to leadership course at EDS. I had just joined the company in January 1966 and already I was going to Ross about once a week with a new way I thought we should change things. He rejected every idea. He even wondered aloud if I belonged at EDS. Finally he offered me a chance to be the leader of a five-person project, working with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas on a system that processed Medicare insurance claims. This was Ross’s original customer, the client he had had when he was with IBM before he founded EDS. That told me it was highly important; I assumed that this was the test. At the time I didn’t know the reason there was an opening for a project team leader. Much later I learned that the five people on the project had told Ross that if he didn’t remove the project leader they were all going to quit. Nobody told me that. But it was clear when I walked in the door and announced I was the new team leader, I had entered a tense situation. One of the team members told me that he was 10 years my senior, had already been on the project a year, and that he should be the team leader. Why was I even there?

Somehow it worked. This project was the first of its kind. We developed a brand new system in a brand new language working with a brand new computer in just 90 days: over one year’s work crammed into 3 months. In the process we took project revenues from $16,000 a month to $400,000 a month. We took it from a breakeven project to 80% pretax profitable.

That began my training as a leader at EDS. Then in the summer of 1967, Ross gave me the two-week crash course in sales and leadership. We had a major opportunity for a contract with Blue Shield to process their Medicaid claims. It was my project to lead. But I didn’t know the first thing about putting together a proposal.

I went to Ross and asked him: How do you price a contract? He said, “Why don’t you go back and make a proposal, figure it out, and then sit down and give me the options?” The next week it was time to present it to the customer. I’d never done that either, so I asked Ross: How do you present this? He said, “Why don’t you go make an outline and then come back and show me your proposal?”

So I did. Then the day came to meet the customer. At 8 a.m. I went to meet Ross so we could make our 9 a.m. meeting with the customer. When I got there, Ross’s secretary told me he had left town. I had never met the customer. I had never made a sales pitch in my life. But I didn’t have any choice. When I sat down in front of the customer’s executive vice president, I was so scared I literally couldn’t talk.

Fortunately, the manager of the customer’s unit I’d been working with sat next to me. I had a written offer in my hand, and he took it away from me and started reading the proposal aloud. In an act of charity, the executive vice president listened to the offer and then asked me a question about the technology. I was very comfortable with the technology, so I could answer that. Finally I loosened up and at the end of an hour the executive vice president signed the contract.

Within three years we took the 5-person group I was leading and grew it to 1,500 people. That became the health care business of EDS — at that time the financial engine of the company.

In 1979 I became president of EDS. It was roughly a $200 million company. Five years later we reached $1 billion in revenues. That same year General Motors suggested that they buy us for $2.5 billion; the deal was closed in October 1984. I was the lead manager for the next two years when EDS went from $1 billion in revenues to $4.4 billion. So I went from managing 5 people in 1967 to managing 45,000 people in 1986. When I left EDS, it was the largest computer services company in the world.

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