business cards

if you ever need business cards printed, taiwan is a great place to get them printed. tuesday i went to the printer and asked a bunch of questions. the guy gave me samples, dimensions, printing time, etc. so i returned home and designed my business card. wednesday before i headed out to lunch i dropped off my design, saved as a pdf file. friday afternoon (about 1/2 hour ago) he called and said they were ready. i went to pick them up, and they were just as i had ordered.

in total i paid NT$200 (< US$6) for a box of 500. that means each card costs me less than US$0.012. crazy cheap. even the "free" cards from vistaprint will cost you about US$10 (after s&h) for 250 cards. the price jumps to about $30 for a box of 500. and fast. the paper stock i had chosen takes 3 days, but there are ones where they print them daily, so you can have your design the next day.

a talk on investing in cloud computing

a friend invited me to an investment forum yesterday, where the talk was on investing in cloud computing. the audience were mainly wealthy investors and bankers. it surprised me that they did not know that much about the topic, so the talk was a lot more introductory than i expected. and it was interesting to see how they reacted to the prospects of cloud computing.

afterwards, i approached the speaker, but he was busy being introduced to some of the bankers. but some of the people from his company approached me, and said that they were hoping to talk to me, because they had heard of my talk at nchc the previous week. so we discussed possibilities of me visiting their company next week. i eventually did get a few seconds with the speaker, whereby i got his business card and he acknowledged that his people will arrange for my talk next week. hopefully i'll be able to sit down with him then.

afterwards, my friend and i went back to the wine bar i had found a few weeks ago. i had to explain some of the concepts of the talk more deeply, but over a bottle of wine and good conversation, it was a good end to the day.

disasters strike

sunday night a mountain sheared, and the mountain top slid onto a main highway near taipei. right now construction crews are using earthmovers to move all that soil, in order to determine the number of casualties. they are all likely to be dead by now, from lack of air, if not from the impact of hundreds of tons dropping on them. on the news though, is that a lot of the construction contractors that the government has brought in (because they own the earthmovers) are about to stop work, because the government will not pay them to cover their operating costs. WTF?

and during my talk at itri, an earthquake (6.9) hit off the coast of eastern taiwan. no much damage, since eastern taiwan is largely unpopulated.

the talk at itri

monday morning i took the high speed rail to hsinchu for my talk at itri. the train cost me NT$240 (US$7.50). As there was no connecting bus, i took the taxi. it cost me NT$235. the last mile really is where the money is made.

the talk went really well, and i got to meet all the big shots at the cloud computing center at itri. they were much more sophisticated about cloud computing than the folks at nchc, and much more receptive about the possibilities of my software. had lunch with 2 of the directors, and we also talked about strategic alliances. they seemed really excited about such prospects. when i mentioned one possibility, one of them pulled out his iphone and almost dialed up the company on the spot.

so, i'm glad to have made this trip, and i'm hoping that something concrete will evolve.

a poorly run conference

i attended the open source developers conference this past weekend in taipei. it was perhaps one of the worst run conferences. they had no signs directing people to the building. one of the organizers and i were lost on the academica sinica campus for a 1/2 hour! once there, the people didn't know anything, even the basic, "where is the talk being held?". what i saw was a bunch of people who were supposed to be organizing, sitting around playing games and chatting with each other.

i tried signing up for a lightning (5 min) talk, but the first day, no one knew how to do so. the second day they had a signup sheet, so i signed up. unlike other conferences, they did not have two projectors available. so the first person took 5 minutes alone to get his computer setup. and then spoke for another 6 minutes. i was beginning to feel that at this rate, i'd never be able to give my talk.

but i was able to give my talk finally. the guy on the stage started cracking down on people and cutting them off. and afterwards, 3 engineers from trend micro approached me. i'm hoping that i'll be able to sit down with them and discuss possible collaborations.