卦Trigram 2.0

Ever since I started blogging, in my pre-MBA days back in 2003, it’s been clear that Asia was becoming more important and would become central – and that we would know this when mass trends were seen to start in Asia and take hold in the West.

In February 2005, I had this to say:

And following on about globalization, I’ve been saying for a couple of years that we’ll know that it’s really arrived when it means that fashions start in Asia and go West, instead of Asians consuming Hollywood etc… I guess things like manga and anime, Bollywood and Feng Shui were the beginning of this, but if Chinese New Year becomes a world-wide festival, as Christmas has become, we’ll know that we’re in a real global society.

When I moved to Singapore in 2002, it seemed highly unlikely that the Welsh town where I’d been living would every hold a Chinese New Year Festival, and yet, a few years later, it happened.

It’s a theme I’ve come back to several times over the years. I mention now because of course other people have been thinking the same way, and I recently discovered an extremely interesting post by China-based Aimee Barnes, who has been taking a look at “What makes China cool”, with an eye on anticipating what might feed those trends. Worth a look.

My old G4 12″ iBook recently started making really loud grinding noises, which seemed to come from the bottom left-hand corner. Sometimes, when I started it, it gave an error message saying that it couldn’t find a hard drive.

Oops. Not good.

A trip to the new Apple Store in Sanlitun village led to me “checking in” my ailing laptop for inspection. Yesterday, the diagnosis was made: a new hard drive is needed.

Hmmm. That’ll cost me 3000RMB. While I was in Singapore recently, I spent SGD244 on a new battery, since the old one had lost most of its capacity. How annoying! But it makes me think that’s probably not worth it, to keep throwing money at an old machine…

OK. Well, I liked that iBook because of its small footprint. However, I’d already stopped carrying it around… my Asus EeePC 700 has filled that niche… I mostly used it as a home media centre, and for video editing. That suggests I should replace it with a Mac Mini, which would cost 5,388 RMB. 

I wonder whether Apple offer an educational discount in China? On their web page, I can’t see the icon, which is a little frustrating. In Singapore, I bought a few items from them and took the benefit of the discount, both as a student and, later, a lecturer. If they’re not offering it here, what does that say about their brand positioning in the Chinese market? Are they cutting loose the education sector as too insignificant, and just going for the urban hipster segment?

Well, I need to go to the store this afternoon to retrieve my iBook; I’ll ask them then.

Just a few photos, taken to test my new Nokia N73; I decided that what I wanted was an affordable phone that can take good quality pictures, and the N73 seemed to fit the bill.

The very first, taken at the counter where I bought the N73. Note the prices of the local-brand phones; even cheaper ones were also available.

Brand names are so important.

Construction and (not so) clear air.