Month: July 2006

Categories
Business China Saint Louis

Small is beautiful

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Last Updated on July 28, 2006 by stlplace

I like ice cream. The one I liked most is not hagen daz, it’s a little known place called Ted Drewes. If you do a google search on “st. louis frozen custard”, it will show up on the top. It’s located at Chippewa, very close to my old apartment. This is a very popular place in St. Louis. In the summer evenings, you can see lots of people standing outside of this store, waiting in line or just eating the ice cream. This place opens even in Winter, here is its web site (warning, its’ web site is slow).

At one time I wondered that since this place is so successful, why not go ahead and expand, open more stores in St. Louis, if not nationally? Turns out the owners of Ted Drewes keep it small intentionlly, so that they can keep the quality and community feelings. For them as long as the business is doing well they feel they have enough to live on. In another words, they potentially give up the oppertunity to be very rich.

I think in China there are also similar stories, here is just one I saw yesterday. Remember the corner “noodle store”? Or “dumpling store”? We all have our favorite stores, right. I still remember one where I went for graduate school in Shanghai.

Unfortunately, last time when I visit Shanghai, I saw more and more franchized stores, I am not talking about, McDonald, KFC, Pizza Hut (those are well known ones); I am talking about “Chatea”, “Xiao Mie Yang”, etc. I am not against those, but I like the small specialty stores better.

Categories
Business Technology

Make money using Google AdSense

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Last Updated on July 23, 2006 by stlplace

I am not going to explain how to make money using Google AdSense. Here I just put a real world example: a successful web enterprenur got a check from Google. Guess how big is the check: almost 1 million Canadian dollars. And here is the link. The nice thing about his web site is that he runs it by himself. So after he paid the web-hosting, and other service fees, he can put the money into his own pocket (after paying tax). Certainlly this is a very rare case. Also don’t think he built the web site and the business overnight, as a matter of fact, I believe he has done this for more than 3 years.

Not everybody can be as good or as lucky as him, but I think Google AdSense does provide a new revenue stream for many start-ups.   

Categories
Saint Louis

Power outage

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Last Updated on September 11, 2023 by stlplace

The following was written on July 19, 11PM.

This evening we had a big storm here in St. Louis. When I walked out of the door at the TKD place at Woodson plaza, the sky was full of black clouds and the wind is blowing hard. I hesitated for a minute and decided to drive back home anyway. I saw some trees being split by the wind. And the power was out at our condo. Since everything in my condo is powered by electricity. I pretty much can not do anything. My roommate came back from work shortly. Since we are out of power, the only thing we can do is chat, which ispretty nice because we don’t have much time to talk. He does lots of trips recently for work.

I called my Chinese friends to see if they have power. They are in the same boat as mine. So we went out to search for food. MCD and Subway, IMO all are busy now. Luckily we get in Sunway although they closed at 9, they are nice enough to let us in.There are lots of fire trucks running around. But no luck in power as of now (11 PM). I will go to bed now.

The following was written on July 20, 8 PM.

I left some lights on when I went to bed. During the night the lights went on and off couple times and never sustained. In the morning I went to two Panera Bread stores and both are out of power. Many traffic lights are also down and it caused delays. From radio I heard it is the biggest power outage in St. Louis in many years: half a million people are out of power. I believe St. Louis region has about 2.3 million people. The bad thing is it is also the hottest days, the high temp reaches 100F.

Luckily my home got power back today. From the TV news I heard they restored about 1/4 of the power, I felt very lucky compared to people still live without power.In retrospect, I don’t have a good contingency plan for those things. A few weeks ago I laughed at a friend when we talked about the preparation for those kinds of emergency situtaions – thought it was unnecessary.

Categories
Saint Louis

Hot weather and gas price

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Last Updated on July 18, 2006 by stlplace

The gas price hang around at $3.00 for a few days now. The temporature is even hotter, it’s more than 100 F. Looks like it stay at 100 for a few days. Maybe we all drive too much and emit too much CO2 from our cars?

Categories
Site Info

Search the blog

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Last Updated on May 28, 2009 by stlplace

I have not figured out the best way to search my posts. The Word Press (blogging software I am using here) provides a default search button, which is at the top of the side bar, does a decent job and will show all the post with the “key word”. The reader need to use the browser’s “Find” functionality to narrow down the actual key word in the post.

I also noticed when people do “baidu” search “Small Talk程序”, my web page is shown in the result:

stlplace.com 2006 January
“Small Talk” computer language, I am referring to “conversation starters”, or “…Leader(PL),PL是一个技术领导的位置,通常他们自己也写程序,但最重要的是他们要分析用户需求,搭建软件框架,指导…
www.stlplace.com/blog/2006/01/page/2/ 36K 2006-7-6 – 百度快照

But as you noticed it will show the archive page of Jan which contains the key word “Small Talk”. Again the user needs to use “Find” in the browser.

Similar thing for Google. Or worse, right now it only shows the main page. I guess my blog is not popular enough to be noticed by Google. But anyway as an experiment, I put the Google search button at the bottom the side bar so the user has an option. I was thinking, ideally when the user search, the result can be narrowed or even better highlighted.

Categories
Business Life

No exit strategy

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Last Updated on July 12, 2006 by stlplace

Watched the Charlie Rose Show with Warren Buffett  Part 2. One interesting comment from Warren Buffett is “when I decided to buy a stock, I intended to hold the stock for life. I don’t have an exit strategy”. This is really something. In the reality I think Warren does sell stocks from time to time, but I think in most of times he hold a stock for a long time. He has the patience. And he is confident about the organic growth of a business if he decided to buy after doing his research.

On the other hand, when we look at the dot com and current web 2.0 craziness, how many are really going to “hold the company for private” for a long time? I think many people are looking for VCs or IPOs before actually start it. We can apply this to our own career path and personal life too. Sometimes when there are no exit strategy, we have to work hard to make sure things work.

Categories
Site Info

UTF-8 and GB2312

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Last Updated on May 28, 2009 by stlplace

To me this is really a nusance: some Chinese web pages are in UTF-8 (unicode), some are in GB2312. Internet Explorer can not determine the Chinese code format from a web page header and makes a wrong guess. Basically the user has to go to View => Encoding and try those two formats to see if it will work. 

This is not an isolated problem for Chinese language, or for web browsers. Similar problems do occur to other non-western languages, and software. Before we have a better solution in the software, I wonder if we could all agree on UTF-8, which seems to me is a newer (and better) standard.  

Categories
Business

Charlie Rose show features Warren Buffett

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Last Updated on July 11, 2006 by stlplace

Charlie Rose, the famous TV talk show host at PBS, has this 3-part series show features Warren Buffett. The show is played in PBS station in late night. Here is the link of Google Video for Part 1 (it’s free as of now).

I watched it last night. Here is an interesting comment I heard from Buffett: how old a person starts your own business will largely determine if he/she will be successful in  his/her own business (when grow up). Buffett started at age of 6.

Since we can not roll back the time machine, why not we take his other advices, such as love what we do (passion), and focus.   

Categories
China Saint Louis

Gas prices

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Last Updated on July 8, 2006 by stlplace

The gas price is creeping up again. This weekend the regular unlead costs about $3.00 here in St. Louis. Last time it broke the $3 barrier is post Katrina. It seems siutation is not going to improve in the near future due to geopolitical reasons (Iran, North Korea), more importantly, the supply and demand trend. A few days ago I heard from NPR that number of cars in China increased 3 fold in past 3 years. I can tell it by visiting the apartment complex in Shanghai (so many cars, so little packing space). It’s good to see people are enjoying the “freedom of cars” in China, just like the American enjoyed in 1950 and 1960s. That was also the hey days of American car makers. There are certainlly problems comes with “car freedom” in China: traffic jam, air pullution, tensions between the “have” and “have not”, etc. The solution, however, won’t be simple. One top oil investor said “unless American got rid of the big SUVs, Chinese go back to bicycle, we are not going to see $1.50 gas”. Yes, I know, those 77 cents per gallon days is gone forever, that was 1998. The thing is at this price level, I don’t see most people reducing too much driving, not the middle class American and newly-emerged Chinese car lovers. I think for the people to take notice, the price must go higher. Maybe we will see $5 gas soon?

Categories
Fun Web

Delicious

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Last Updated on July 5, 2006 by stlplace

There are a lot of hype about Web 2.0 lately. As I learned more about it and I believe some are not just hypes, e.g., the RSS, XML, and the del.icio.us bookmarking site with social networking and tagging capabilities. I have 5 computers (3 at home, and 2 at work), and I used 3 of them frequently. I would like to have the same bookmarks (or favorites in Internet Explorer). del.icio.us solved this problem for me. And its registration, install and use are fairly staightforward.

Besides keeping all my bookmarks (or good article) in one place. I can add “tags” which helps me to identify the content. So far I don’t have anyone in my network. But from the bookmark I can find out people with similar interest, etc.   

del.icio.us is currently owned by Yahoo, as is the flickr photo sharing web site (also features the tags). Don’t overlook this “tag” thing, it’s like put your own key word for the content (the alternate way is let computer figure out), which I believe is more semantically correct in most cases.