Unitus & microfinance

AFS' birth announcement arrived in the mail today and I noted with amusement that we share the same Chinese name (at least in sound)! There is only a slight addition in one of the characters in her name changing the meaning from her "forever peacful" to my "singing peace". Can't wait to meet her in Bangalore!

Even more interesting, though, was the brief note that her father would be working with Unitus, which "is a global microfinance accelerator that acts as a social venture capital investor for the microfinance industry". Their 14-minute video is a great intro to their work that has impacted more than half a million individuals and counting:

Tokyo Midtown and iPhone update

Was supposed to be in Tokyo this weekend with the yoga gang visiting FS, who is in Tokyo taking Japanese classes for a couple weeks, but work and other obligations have got me grounded in Hong Kong for the next few weeks. Am sure I'll hear all about their bacchanalian weekend though. In the meantime, FS sent picks of her swanky Oakwook serviced apartment in Tokyo Midtown.



On another note, been using the iPhone for a week now and still loving it (sounds like a McDonald's commercial!). I had a scare Saturday evening when I thought iPhone had gone into a coma. Turns out, when you run the battery down to nothing, it takes about 10 minutes for it to become responsive even after putting it into the charging dock. The biggest lesson in preserving the battery time is not to keep wifi on when not in use. With wifi constantly on, I only managed to get 24 hours standby out of the battery with about 4 hours of audio playback time (using the built-in speaker most of the time) and a couple hours of email checking and web browsing. My main complaints so far are its 8GB of memory (you have to be really selective about what music, TV shows and photos you load) and the fact that the Shure headphone jack doesn't fit into the iPhone (Apple's headphones are lousy at blocking outside noise, but the click control on the tiny microphone for pausing songs and forwarding tracks is quite convenient). Other than that, the iPhone works beautifully. Watching videos on it is so much better than iPod video and the great thing is the built-in speaker that lets more than one person watch (or listen to music, which is great when going running with BL so that he can entertain me with his karaoke running) at a time.

OMG! It's Genius!! iPhone AT&T authorization bypassed.

OK, I used the unlock mentioned in the previous post...et voila!...it's worked like a charm! I just finished synching iCal, songs and videos via iTunes and just got connected to office wifi. The interface, web browsing, etc. all work like a charm! Now, if only I could get Skype to work on this...

For techies: iPhone Dev Wiki. Check here for updates on the SIM unlock as well as other cool things for the iPhone.

I am in love with my new 8GB iPhone!!!

Even though it is just sitting on my desktop being charged while I surf the web for hacker solutions to bypass AT&T activation so that I can use all the non-Phone functions including wifi. Thank you soooooo much to DY for bringing it back from Honolulu! Apparently, he showed up at the Apple shop just as they got a new shipment in.

If anyone figures out how to do the SIM card unlock, please let me know!!!!

Lies 1 @ Six Keyz Gallery

Was having drinks at Zuma on Thursday (or as SF likes to call it, "boring bourgeoise drinks") when I got a call from ZL to drag me off all the way to the other side of Hong Kong island in Chai Wan to check out a party/exhibition opening. We ended up on the 6th floor of an industrial warehouse at Six Keyz Gallery, which houses a mini-half pipe for skateboarders. The exhibition was a series of mixed media paintings and a site-specific work by Lies 1, a French graffiti artist. The show is called C1V1L1SAT1ON and the paintings are beautiful, in particular the first in the series. There's a certain explosive, optimistic energy to them. It was definitely worth the trek to see them. In the next room, DJs Doze, Sam1r and Swamy were spinning a funky vibe. The crowd was much funkier than I've seen in Hong Kong in a long, long while and a bit eclectic. Ran into BK, whom I haven't seen in years as well as CMY, one of the trainers from Pure.

Moleskine Travel Notebook Competition Judging

Moleskine Asia held a competition (Invitation Au Voyage!) to create a travel notebook using any one of their notebooks. The deadline for submissions was 30 June 2007. AC invited me to be on the panel of judges to select the grand-prize winner of a round-trip ticket to Paris as well as other prize-winners. The competition sounded like it would yield a lot of creative work (when we first started WANLILU Play, we awarded travel grants to students based on their own travel proposals), and going through them sounded like fun.

The three judges, which were AC, MJ (a teacher at St Martin's in London) and myself, met up at agnès b (PN couldn't join us, but he judged the entries separately). cafe yesterday afternoon to go through nearly 100 entries. It took us nearly 3 hours to select the winning entry. At first, the task of going through all the entries seemed daunting, but we very quickly figured out that the three of us had very similar views and managed to come up with a very good system for identifying the good from the mundane. We all leaned towards notebooks that were aesthetically daring and visually interesting. In terms of content, we were not impressed with what AC called "stick, stick" jobs, where photos or receipts or ticket stubs would be randomly stuck on pages. Nor did we find straightforward travel diaries particularly inspiring. Not that these entries did not have their merits. We could tell that all the entrants put in a lot of time and effort into their travel notebooks and it seemed a bit harsh that we would have to whittle so many of them out. But our task was to pick just one winner, two runner-ups and 40-50 for the exhibition, so we had to be efficient. In the end, we came to a unanimous decision to award the grand prize to PW, who submitted a beautifully-executed travel notebook with wonderfully-rendered, intricate drawings and collages with witty writing about his trip to Taipei.

There will be several exhibitions of the submissions next month at Festival Walk, Times Square and other locations. See photographs of the winning entries here.

One of the runner-up entries.

Hilarious diversion

Slow day in the office today, or at least it seems nobody feels like working, so AW's been playing and re-playing this Sneezing Baby Panda video from youtube. I've always loved pandas and want to make a trip to Sichuan to visit them. In the meantime, though, am amusing myself with:



If you really want to kill some time, check out all the spoofs on this video as well...