This morning the sun arose just a little bit earlier. It was brighter outside than usual. The kids were just a little happier, and walk with a little more skip in their step. They are more eager to go to school and play with their friends. In fact we are all a little brighter than usual. It snowed last night.
___It’s magical that a sprinkling of 5 cm of new snow can transform our landscape, and with it the spirits of our neighborhood. New snow is pristine, covering everything with a whitewash of, well, white. It’s as if some gigantic bottle of baby powder was evenly sprinkled on everything. A landscape of white greets your senses, with only a hint of green showing from our evergreens, who have the ability to partially shed their coat of snow.
I was once at a lunch with colleagues when a remarkable revelation hit me. No, the meal at our downtown Toronto Ethiopian restaurant Queen of Sheba was not that enlightening. It was that everyone at the table was Chinese.
___Here in Toronto, that alone will not a single eyebrow raise. With five distinct “Chinatowns” here, one may view wide swaths of Toronto with nary a white or non-Chinese face. A packed Chinese mall with the rare Laowai is common, and he might be the janitor. Or lost.
There is much written on the internet about Overseas Chinese (huachao, or huayi), and not so much about Chinese Overseas, as in Mainland Chinese people that visit overseas. I live in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, a part of North Eastern Toronto. My neighborhood has many Chinese people that visit from mainland China.
___Our Chinese visitors come to stay from 3 months to a couple of years. Most are retired, called here by their married kids to help raise their grandchildren. For the most part, these visitors from China are devoted to their families and add a lot of flavour to Toronto culture. They bring with them traditional Chinese values and thinking from an era of China that may be long gone, or at least buried deep in the past.
I‘ve now spent some time playing with Yahoo Pipes. Now I have a couple of great Pipes that aggregate and filter worldwide sources for news on China and Japan. As well I have also found a huge number of blogs about China. They are all aggregated on my website DonTai.com. To put all these worldwide sources, filtered by keyword, into one simple web page, for each a linked title and a small description, is great. It saves so much time. You read the title and the small description and you decide to delve in deeper or to pass. It is brilliant.
TThere is no question that contributing on the web in China is fraught with a level of personal risk not seen in the West. Here, no one really cares what you write, provided it is not racist and does not defame anyone.
___In China, blogs and blog service providers get shut down on a regular basis. No explanations or warnings are given. This is what happened with a large Chinese blog provider Bulldog.cn last month. A blog that has run for one year is considered to be long lived. Search for the most popular blogs in China and you’ll find many that are posted on local blogrolls no longer exist. Here today, gone tomorrow. You’ll find previously vibrant URLS shuttered, all content gone, no comments allowed, no explanation given. It’s all very subtle.
Overwhelming is an understatement when I describe available news on the Internet. Just get on Google’s news section and search for something. If it is anything remotely general, mountains of pages of links will topple out of your monitor and cascade onto your head like a pile of bricks. You then grit your teeth and dig your way out.
I continue to search for work, and Monster.ca is one of many sites I visit. Lately I have noticed that almost all of the jobs posted on Monster are from headhunters. It’s not that headhunters are bad per se, but that some of their advertised job descriptions are close to: “Wanted: Live animal. Able to stand up and breath without keeling over. Please send your resume to ima @ headhunter.com”. Would it kill the recruiter to provide a little more position-related information? Often times there are three headhunters from the same agency posting essentially the same cut and paste effort to the same job board. Do you think that possible candidates do not notice this?
Some of life’s simple pleasures need not cost much money, but can put the heart at ease. One may always reach and strive for more worldly possessions, but is this a true measure of success?
Simple pleasures:
- Hearing laughter that follows tears
- Baking cookies in the afternoon
- Riding bikes in the winter
- Dodging water drops as it starts to rain
- Warm wind on your face
- Climbing to the top
- Hearing snow crunch beneath your feet
- The trickle of water flowing through the downspout
- Working the system to get better food for your family
- Talking to friends
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In a move after surplusing 4,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada, IBM has created a program called “Project Match”, offering them jobs in various Third world countries. This program was discussed in Informationweek this Monday.
___On the positive side these workers are already surplused, so for IBM to offer them any position anywhere is positive. IBM will help in some relocation and immigration support. While the salaries will be a fraction of their North American wage, these workers can have a great international experience and live a life of luxury, with drivers, maids and gardeners at their beck and call.
