Calgary Singles Auction for Diabetes this Saturday (May 10)

My friend Tyler Mitton and his girl friend Natalie are hosting a “Singles Auction” to raise money for diabetes this Saturday May 10th, 2008 at 6pm.

Quoting Tyler,

“It will be a very light hearted and fun event open to both singles and non-singles….it’s taking place this Saturday. If you’re free you should come check it out… I think it’s going to be hilarious!”

Click here for more information and profiles of the Bachelors and Bachelorettes.

Here are samples of what the Bachelors and Bachelorettes list as accomplishments. Have fun finding who are the Bachelors and Bachelorettes that list these accomplishments.

• “… 2007 Sing Star Champion of the dental hygienists of Saskatoon (no joke!) …”
• “… I am a pro with a jackhammer …”
• “… mastered medium on Guitar Hero …”
• “… World Champion Hula Hooper …”
• “… Minute Rice dinner cooked in 45 seconds, Level 10 on Duck Hunt from Nintendo …”

Tyler and Natalie, good luck in raising money for diabetes and wishing everyone have lots of fun.

Tales of a Chinese Purchaser, Episode 12 (買手的故事, 第12集)

In episode 12 and the next few episodes, we will discuss how to handle things when order size changes (產品訂單有變時，如何處理).

• When products are selling well ==> Increase order size or move up shipment (當產品暢銷 == >增加訂單或提早出貨)
• When products are selling poorly ==> Decrease order size or delay shipment (當產品不暢銷 == >減少訂單或延遲出貨)
• How purchasers can use computer to generate “rescheduling reports” to help process these changes (買手如何可使用電腦 “新調度報告” 來幫助處理這些變化)
• When suppliers can’t meet the revised scheduling requests (當供應商不能滿足 “新調度” 的要求)

You can click here to listen to episode 12 of the program in mp3 (or you can download or stream the program here).

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Program Info: My friend Simon has worked as a Hong Kong-based purchaser for over 30 years before his retirement. Simon has agreed to record a series of Chinese audio shows/podcasts call “Tales of a Chinese Purchaser 買手的故事“ to share his years of experiences and insights in purchasing and working with Chinese factories. (Note: This program has been recorded in the Cantonese dialect.)

Capitalism’s Woodstock - Live

• LIVE BLOG ARCHIVE: Warren Buffett’s Q&A With Shareholders (Morning Session)
• LIVE BLOG: Warren Buffett’s Q&A With Shareholders (Afternoon Session)

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May 4, 2008 Update: Warren Buffett Talks to CNBC’s Becky Quick at Shareholders Meeting (Video with transcript)

Sniffing for the right privacy balance

Interesting article by Ian Kerr,

Last Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada released two important privacy-related decisions, both addressing an increasing trend in which Canadian law enforcement agencies use police dogs to conduct random searches of public spaces.

[via Michael Gesit]

Hell in Honey’s Kitchen

The video of Chef Ramsay (Hell’s Kitchen fame) with Toronto Star’s Food editor Kim Honey at the Star’s test kitchen is real fun to watch. (big smile) Thanks Kim for sharing it with us. It is just priceless!

See Kim’s article here.

The Copyright Myths

The Copyright Myths presentation by Michael Geist (12 minutes video) this Monday. [via Michael]

Errol Morris in GQ

A very interesting profile of Errol Morris in GQ.

Ask film buffs for a list of the greatest living American directors and you may hear the name Errol Morris, the documentarian who created an entirely new way of conducting interviews, made classics like The Thin Blue Line (which helped get a man out of prison), and this month gives us the fullest, most honest look yet [in the film Standard Operating Procedure] at the people who took part in Abu Ghraib

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4 May, 2008 Update: Roger Ebert review of the movie.

Tales of a Chinese Purchaser, Episode 11 (買手的故事, 第11集)

In episode 11, we continue and finished the case discussed in episodes 9 and 10.

• Use emails to document the reasons/mistakes for the lower-end supplier under priced the quote and high-end supplier over priced the quote (用電子郵件記錄 — 低檔廉價供應商報價太低 及 高檔供應商報價太高 的原因)
• Helping the suppliers (high-end and also the lower-end) to provide more accurate quote (幫助高檔及低檔供應商提供更準確的報價)
• Visiting the high-end supplier’s factory and providing technical assistance to help reduce yield lost thus provide better quote (參觀了高檔供應商的工廠,並提供技術援助,以幫助減少產量損失,從而提供更好的報價)
• Working with the high-end supplier to create a handbook to help reduce yield lost (幫助高檔供應商及寫一本加工手冊,以幫助減少產量損失)
• Passing on lessons learned to the lower-end supplier (教其他供應商)
• Updating US headquarter of the new cost & rationale, plus provide engineering samples (通知美國總部新的成本及原因,並提供工程樣品)
• An important lesson of do not simply pass along quotes from suppliers without some investigations (一個重要的教訓,不應簡單地交上報價,應做一些調查)
• Work together with the vendor (和供應商合作)
• How will Simon handle the “mis-priced” quotes if they are much closer in prices? (如報價近,Simon會如何處理這一”錯誤”?)
• Please send us your feedback, questions and cases (請電郵上您的意見,問題和案件)

You can click here to listen to episode 11 of the program in mp3 (or you can download or stream the program here).

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Program Info: My friend Simon has worked as a Hong Kong-based purchaser for over 30 years before his retirement. Simon has agreed to record a series of Chinese audio shows/podcasts call “Tales of a Chinese Purchaser 買手的故事“ to share his years of experiences and insights in purchasing and working with Chinese factories. (Note: This program has been recorded in the Cantonese dialect.)

Re: The most important statement made by Steven Cheung

Interesting to read what Wallace considers as “the most important statement made by Steven Cheung“. For the curious readers who want to read the complete article where this quote comes from and the statement’s context, you can check out “假若人是不自私的（附后记）” (1984.02.17).

I don’t know enough to pick which is Steven Cheung’s most important statement. But I can say Steven Cheung’s way of thinking and analyzing problems play an important role in shaping my own. And Cheung has written this series of articles to share his insight in 1984,

思考的方法（上）, （中）, （下）

As an aside, some of my friends have commented that I read very broadly. Over the years, I’ve tried to learn from a diverse group of people. If you have time, I encourage you read and learn from people like Warren Buffett, Richard Feynman, and Bill Buxton (with videos and book recommendations). These three people are very different from each other but I believe we can learn from them just the same. For fun, I’ve created a series of posts call “Great minds of our time“ to share my personal picks of some of the great public minds of our time.

Helen Hunt directs

Helen Hunt discusses her directing debut — Then She Found Me

Zimbabwe arms return to China

Very good news.

• Arms destined for Zimbabwe returning to China, official says - CBC News
• Zimbabwe arms shipment returns to China - Guardian UK
• Zimbabwe-Bound Ship Heads Back to China - NYT
• China says Zimbabwe arms shipment to return to China - AP
• Chinese arms shipment to Zimbabwe turning back: Beijing - AFP
• China’s Zimbabwe arms ship turned away by African nations - Telegraph UK

An excerpt from CBC (emphasis added),

A shipment of weapons destined to Zimbabwe from China will be returned after neighbouring countries refused to allow them to be shipped through their territories, a Chinese spokesman said.

Countries neighbouring Zimbabwe refused to allow the Chinese freighter carrying the weapons, which included mortar grenades and bullets, to dock at their ports.

“This cargo was not unloaded because the Zimbabwe side was unable to take delivery as scheduled,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu.

[...]

Jiang said the shipment was a purely commercial transaction that broke no laws and had nothing to do with the ongoing political crisis. [K: If China wants to be a true world power, commerce can no longer be the only consideration. Of course, the Chinese gov may have wanted Mugabe to stay in power and that will be a different issue all together.]

There is no international arms embargo against Zimbabwe, and China is one of the southern African nation’s main trade partners and allies.

ShoeTube

ShoeTube ? Yes, ShoeTube. If “Live Life. Love Shoes.” describes you, check out “The Daily Shoe” @ ShoeTube. [via AdAge]

P.S. If they are going to be successful, they will have to get shoe lovers to create and post their videos/stories, otherwise there isn’t really a community.

World’s best chef

From Guardian UK - “Meet the world’s best chef - His restaurant, El Bulli, in Spain, has been named best in the world - for the fourth time. So how does Ferran Adrià do it?“

Pressuring Olympic sponsors

From Guardian UK - “Follow the money: Olympic protest movement turns its sights on to sponsors“

YCombinator founder at Startup School 08

Here is a video of Paul Graham, founder of YCombinator, speaking at Startup School 08 about how to create a successful startup. [Hat Tip: Austin Hill]

Streaming Victims

Here is an excerpt from my friend Trevor Doerksen’s insightful blog entry “The Streaming Victims - Canadians” (emphasis added),

Turn Audiences to Customers
Broadcaster and producers refer to their fans as audiences. Unfortunately, these audiences don’t want to be told how, when, what, and where to passively view content. I consider these fans as customers. We know their names, their email addresses, and their likes and dislikes. In fact, when speaking to broadcasters and producers in Canada I often ask what they know about their fans. They know very little. This must change. The Internet is a communications medium, it is not just a passive viewing system. Together we must develop relationships that allow everybody: the customer and the producer to benefit from knowing each other better.

Provide content not formats
In music the transformation is almost complete. Customers no longer have to pay for format. Purchasing Queen on vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, and digitally rights managed (DRM) digital download is over. Customers don’t have to pay for the format, they just buy the content and move it around as they please. TV and movies will need to give customers what they want. They can’t keep pretending. I know the customers I deal with are much smarter than that, giving them what they want is a viable business model. Providing seamless, unified, and flexible access to their favourite content is viable.

What Warren thinks …

Great article from Fortune. Here is an excerpt with emphasis,

Before we start in on questions, I would like to tell you about one thing going on recently. It may have some meaning to you if you’re still being taught efficient-market theory, which was standard procedure 25 years ago. But we’ve had a recent illustration of why the theory is misguided. In the past seven or eight or nine weeks, Berkshire has built up a position in auction-rate securities [bonds whose interest rates are periodically reset at auction; for more, see box on page 74] of about $4 billion. And what we have seen there is really quite phenomenal. Every day we get bid lists. The fascinating thing is that on these bid lists, frequently the same credit will appear more than once.

Here’s one from yesterday. We bid on this particular issue - this happens to be Citizens Insurance, which is a creature of the state of Florida. It was set up to take care of hurricane insurance, and it’s backed by premium taxes, and if they have a big hurricane and the fund becomes inadequate, they raise the premium taxes. There’s nothing wrong with the credit. So we bid on three different Citizens securities that day. We got one bid at an 11.33% interest rate. One that we didn’t buy went for 9.87%, and one went for 6.0%. It’s the same bond, the same time, the same dealer. And a big issue. This is not some little anomaly, as they like to say in academic circles every time they find something that disagrees with their theory.

So wild things happen in the markets. And the markets have not gotten more rational over the years. They’ve become more followed. But when people panic, when fear takes over, or when greed takes over, people react just as irrationally as they have in the past.  [...]

[Fortune] Your OFHEO example implies you’re not too optimistic about regulation.

[Buffett] Finance has gotten so complex, with so much interdependency. I argued with Alan Greenspan some about this at [Washington Post chairman] Don Graham’s dinner. He would say that you’ve spread risk throughout the world by all these instruments, and now you didn’t have it all concentrated in your banks. But what you’ve done is you’ve interconnected the solvency of institutions to a degree that probably nobody anticipated. And it’s very hard to evaluate. If Bear Stearns had not had a derivatives book, my guess is the Fed wouldn’t have had to do what it did.

[Fortune] Do you find it striking that banks keep looking into their investments and not knowing what they have?

[Buffett] I read a few prospectuses for residential-mortgage-backed securities - mortgages, thousands of mortgages backing them, and then those all tranched into maybe 30 slices. You create a CDO by taking one of the lower tranches of that one and 50 others like it. Now if you’re going to understand that CDO, you’ve got 50-times-300 pages to read, it’s 15,000. If you take one of the lower tranches of the CDO and take 50 of those and create a CDO squared, you’re now up to 750,000 pages to read to understand one security. I mean, it can’t be done. When you start buying tranches of other instruments, nobody knows what the hell they’re doing. It’s ridiculous. And of course, you took a lower tranche of a mortgage-backed security and did 100 of those and thought you were diversifying risk. Hell, they’re all subject to the same thing. I mean, it may be a little different whether they’re in California or Nebraska, but the idea that this is uncorrelated risk and therefore you can take the CDO and call the top 50% of it super-senior - it isn’t super-senior or anything. It’s a bunch of juniors all put together. And the juniors all correlate.

Links: 2008-04-21

1. Tension Over Sports Blogging - NYT - a note on bloggers from credentialed news organizations
2. Edward Lorenz, father of Chaos Theory, dies
3. Brokeback Mountain director warns Bill C-10 means censorship
4. Filmmaker Ang Lee has no love for ‘Canadian values’ bill, but plenty for Vancouver
5. New Wii Games Find a Big (but Stingy) Audience - an insightful look at the Wii gaming business
6. Our Top Ten list of Privacy Act fixes - by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner

Ad Links: 2008-04-21

1. Chelsea Guitars
2. Neu.de - ad for dating service in Germany
3. Ice-made animals fight globe warming
4. Discovery Channel re-branding
5. ATMA Lights - very neat Ad
6. Don’t smoke when kids are around - extremely effective. love the idea

Susur Lee - celebrated Canadian chef

Here is an excerpt G&M Report on Business video interview with Susur Lee (emphasis added),

Celebrated Canadian chef, Susur Lee, moves his East-West fusion cuisine to New York this fall with plans to open with a restaurant inside the new Thompson hotel on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Mr. Lee says that he just couldn’t turn down the opportunity. He will close his Toronto restaurant, Susur, which opened to rave reviews in 2000, at the end of May but will continue the more relaxed eatery Lee, located right next door.

The 50-year-old chef told the Globe, “If I don’t change, I’ll get old. I always love the challenge. I always love to do new things. I’m not sad at all.”

The Hong Kong born chef, who moved to Canada almost three decades ago, is generally credited with developing a new form of cuisine that blends Chinese with French cooking.

Enjoy.