Jean-Francois Amadei

When a Mongkok's Street video shop starts to cast Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", everyone stop, watch and listen.

Tuesday night we start a new course called "eFinance". Unlike people here in Hong Kong, who are totally fascinated by this topic (the classroom is full...) and even though I passed through BBA, Ma, MBA and Msc courses, I always tried to "mentally" skip this kind of class (i.e. I physically attended, managed to pass, but my mind was somewhere else).

This time it's quite different, the teacher has quite a novative way to teach (experience+humor based) and it's still an eCommerce focused class, no meaningless suite of figures and theorems. During the 1st class he asked us all to answer some questions that would help him to customize the course's content, according to our expectation and to know us better (personally). Questions were "What does "eFinance" means to you" or "What are you expecting to learn in this course ?", but also "what are your current hobbies?".

At the last question I answered :

• Hang on Internet (Geek4Life heh)
• Hang around and discover some unknown Hong Kong places
• Being a start-up team member (I'll talk about that in a few weeks by the way, Interesting project is in progress)
• 學習中文 (Learn Chinese, I'm a Mandarin (please don't use "Putonghua" it's an ugly word) addict)

I saw that you are eager to learn even more Chinese every day? I thus offer you my latest book (18股市板塊) in which you will learn some Chinese financial terms and during the class I'll use both Chinese and English, I'll write Chinese term on the whiteboard.

To be a geek not necesseraly means that you only use and enjoy the latest technologies but all of them! I enjoy watching BRD as well as Betamax, LD or VCD. I love playing with a XBOX 360 but don't get me wrong, the Super Famicom still and will forever rules.
 
Another "simple" thing I like when I go to some Taiwanese night market, beside the amazingly good and cheap food, is too play to these old but so funny little pinball or fish games :)
 
The "Taiwan" touch on this pictures is that just beside the pinball stands (thus with a lot of kids around) you can see (you can't, but I tell you) a guy selling...porn DVD & VCD...don't ask me why, I have no idea.
 
PS: I actually wrote this post to try the new "multiple images sending" fonction introduced by the iPhoneOS 3.0

Envoyé de mon iPhone

跟你們說, the day before yesterday I had the immense "unpleasure" to find out (in middle of a new course) that my MacBook Pro's GPU (Nvidia 8600GT) has once again grilled (happened once last January). Can you believe that this #@&% machine costs me 2000€ in January 2008 and already failed twice ? You can't imagine how angry I was, especially that :

• it happened only two hours before I had to submit an important report (thanks him, the teacher delayed for few days the deadline)
• I (and my family) really have no more money to spend on this Apple Macintosh (that would amount at almost 800€ in repair in only six months...)
• It's my main working tool at Ogilvy.

Hopefully, thanks to the TMD method I could easily retrieve important files! After some research, I found out that my problem's quite common and that Nvidia/Apple replace the logicboard for free! I just brought the computer to a repair center, until then I have very few access to the internet...I shall focus on books I haven't finished yet and the shortcoming exams (what a pious lie...)

I know I'm quite late on this but during the W-E I was on a private+business trip in Taiwan, with no access to Internet. I won't write here what you can read anywhere on the Internet but Michael Jackson's death has been a great sorrow to me. A lot of souvenir suddenly came back to me (when I was listening MJ in the late 80's, 90's and 00's, when my mom used to buy me CD's when I had good grades at school, the wait until 4am to watch concerts on tv...etc) and I had a Taiwan trip with a knot in the stomack and "Billie Jean" out loud in my Popod.

Even if I know perfectly how a plane fly, I keep wondering...

No no no don't worry, I'm not talking about Taiwanese politics, but about the most incredible optical illusion I've ever seen. It's so well done that even if when you know the tricks, you keep on being cheated! Look at the image, you are seeing one spiral in green and another one in blue, right? Actually both spirals are totally the same color! You don't believe me? How that thing could be possible? Read the explanation on Buzzhunt.

It was 09:30 when Thomas Crampton first call me. Not to yell at me (because I was 30 mins late -_- ) but to announce me that Tim and I were invited to the Dopplr.com Private Lunch at the (AMAZING) Shangri-La Island Hotel.

We were really excited because quite important (from CNN, Turner, Shangri-La...) people attended and the lunch was conducted by quite a famous and important entrepreneur called Marko Ahtisaari (Dopplr.com's CEO, son of the former UN diplomat, president of Finland, and recipient of the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize Martti Ahtisaari).

This event is a unique occasion for us (mere students and entrepreneur wannabe) to simply listen...and learn ! For two hour we witnessed very interesting discussions about the future of Dopplr.com (expansion, new strategy) and social media used as travel purpose as well.

Once the lunch finished, I ranhome to change my formal dress (by the way, what do you think? :p) into some more casual one because today is the "David Ogilvy Day". We were all transported by bus to the Gold Coast Hotel where the employees, from the top managers to the simple (and highly appreciated, she even knows my name !) receptionist, had fun by playing (social) games, followed by a huge buffet and the first episode of "Ogilvy's Got Talent" (Some employees (including Shiren) performed some nice songs!)

It was a great day, I really look forward to seeing the "official" pictures and videos.

Feewwww, what a heat ! I feel like I'm back on some Corsica's beaches !
 
Now it's time to chill all day long under the sun with books, magazines, iPhone and iPod !

Envoyé de mon iPhone

I mentioned in my earlier post that I sometime use ChineseTeachers.com (I have so few spare time these days...) and I thought I would explain why (beside the fact that it's operated by friends of mine).