Last night I was “Toastmaster” of our Toastmasters meeting - meaning, I lead the meeting. And one of the responsibilities of the Toastmaster of the meeting is to give an intro speech and set the “theme” for the meeting - although it’s rare everyone else follows the theme. I feel the theme I selected is important for everyone, and decided to post the speech as a blog entry. Enjoy. Some of you may know that last week I moved into another apartment.

Sorry to my 3 loyal readers - I haven’t posted here since December 22nd! Many apologies! So, what’s going on these days? Well, I’ve been back in Beijing since the 4th of January. Back at work since the 7th. Melanie have been here for the last almost-2 weeks, so that’s been nice. Oh, and we moved to a new apartment! interested to know where it is? Have a look at this Google Map I made: https://maps.

Ok, I only took 3 photos… Here they are:

I landed in Portland, Oregon in the early morning of Friday, 6:30AM to be exact. Immigration and Customs was a breeze. My next flight, to Las Vegas, isn’t until 7:15PM this evening. So, I took the light rail downtown - will be meeting with an old college buddy who lives here (although not for long) for lunch. Right now, I’m killing time at a Border’s bookstore cafe on a 24-hour US$10 internet connection.

I got an email today in my company email box from the conference organizer that I dealt with couple of months ago (for the BCP conference). The email was a Christmas Greetings. It’s classic! Go ahead, click on it to see the full size! Imagine all the little people graphics are animated. They’re jumping up and down (including Santa), doing whatever it is they’re doing… My favorite is the “If you are a girl, wish you more beautiful (pic) more considerately (pic), where the first pic is of the girl nitting, presumably a sweater, and the second is of her making eggs.

Not sure if you’ve been following my flickr photo stream, but I posted a photo I took the other day of a notice in my elevator. I knew it had something to do with turning off electricity as it had the “dian”, or 电 character, a date (Dec. 20), and a time range (00:00 - 02:00). So I pretty much guessed what this was about. Thanks to one of my few loyal readers, Ray, who can read Chinese, he translated it for me in the flickr photo comments: