Beyond the Rhetoric

Let’s have a look at some blog posts that caught my eye in the last couple of weeks.

We start off by visiting Rob Starr at Blogging Tips, where he recently wrote about some tips to increase your blog’s exposure. He uses the analogy of going fishing. For example, he says that it is important to show interest in other blogs by leaving comments and such, but “fish for these links only in the relevant waters.” Syndication can also be useful, but don’t get penalized for “having an illegal line in the water.”

He may be a proud French-Canadian, but Buzz Bishop traces his family heritage to another country. While in Edinburgh with Team Diabetes, he went hunting for his Scottish past. He ate haggis, he visited a war memorial, explored an awesome castle, and visited the “cute, kitschy town” of Drymen. Personally, I’ve been back to my mom’s hometown, but I have not visited my dad’s home village in China.

We can all be better people. We may do some random acts of kindness out of convenience, but Shelly Kneupper Tucker has taken it upon herself to complete what she calls her mitzvah project. She has pledged to do 1,000 intentional mitzvahs (meritorious or charitable acts) by next December. It also helps that one of the best ways to do well is to do good. And the world would be a better place if we all did better.

Changing gears, we turn our attention to Tris Hussey who has a bit of a workflow issue. As good as WordPress and other blogging platforms have become, they’re still not great for reviewing and editing blog posts. This isn’t a problem for single author blogs, but it does become an issue when blog submissions nee to be reviewed and edited by someone in a managerial role. There is a revision history, but where is a “track changes” like utility?

And finally, Stacey Robinsmith has a fun observation for us to consider. As helpful as Yelp and Urbanspoon may be for deciding where to eat next, some of those customer reviews are useless. If you’re a vegan and you go into a steakhouse, you’re not exactly setting yourself up to have a wonderful evening. I remember reading TripAdvisor reviews of stand-up coffee bars in Italy and people complained about the lack of seating. That’s just how it is there!

Even though I had gone in previous years, I knew that I wasn’t going to Taiwan this year for COMPUTEX Taipei. I had also assumed that I would not be attending the Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known in most circles simply as E3. That second assumption has turned out to be completely wrong.

It was a very last minute decision, but we were graciously invited by the good people at NVIDIA to see the show. More specifically, they have an extra special event tonight and they really wanted us to come. In fact, they were generous enough to provide for our flights and accommodations, “we” referring to me and Stephen Fung. I’ll be there under the MEGATechNews banner and he’s there representing Futurelooks. The two sites focus on different things, so there should be a good mix of content.

In case you’re not too familiar, E3 is the largest video game trade show in North America. A lot of AAA titles are announced here and, with both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 slated for launch later this year, there will be a lot to see, hear and demo. The console wars are really heating up, but based on what happened at the press conferences yesterday, many people are already declaring the PS4 the winner of the upcoming generation. Time will tell, of course.

I went to E3 2009 and again in 2010, but I haven’t been back to Los Angeles since then. Thankfully, I’m no stranger to covering trade shows. This is most certainly not a vacation, but I fully intend on enjoying myself while here. I’ll be surrounded by video games, I’ll be visiting with some awesome companies, and I hope to eat in Koreatown and grab some food truck tacos while I’m at it. I’m flying home Friday morning, so this will be a very short visit.

Do you play video games? What title has you the most excited this week?

I grew up in a pretty conservative home. My parents were very right-wing Christians and I remember them persuading me as a child to adopt the same conservative views. I think all parents are more right leaning when it comes to matters related to their children. If it wasn’t a pre-built survival mechanism, I’m sure the species would’ve died off. One lesson that my parents consistently told me was the idea of going to school and getting a good paying job. Keep low expectation and live within your means.

Although I’ve pretty much done away with a vast majority of my parents’ beliefs and values, I find that many of my friends continue to hold on to this basic belief. They convince themselves that you don’t need that much money to live. Just live a simple life and you’ll be happy. While that’s a personal decision people must make for themselves, there’s risk in living that safe lifestyle.

The World Won’t Leave You Alone

There was a great line in The Lord Of The Rings where a hobbit says, “Don’t go looking for trouble and trouble won’t come looking for you.”

Depending on the style of life you decide to live, this could very well be true. If you’ve decided to live amongst the majority of society, you are very much a part of a system. And in that system, you simply cannot live without money. You need it to eat, to sleep, you need it to save for emergencies, for buying a house, and even retiring. Now, I’ve basically beaten to death the concept of inflation — and I promise I have a lot more, because it’s a cool topic (for me, anyways) — but this is a topic that is inseparable from inflation.

Ahem… Inflation

The old saying went, “A dollar saved is a dollar earned.” Looking at US history for a moment, from 1665 to 1905, the average annual rate of inflation in the United States was 0.001%. That’s basically zero.

It was such that the economy moved so slowly, you literally could save your money and have enough to live off of and retire. This is also considering that this time period saw numerous major wars, including the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the American Civil War and so on. Only when World War I came along did we see a new trend: one where inflation constantly and consistently went up. This brought with it implications for the average civilian. Ever since then, all the way up until today, the idea of simply saving your money hasn’t sufficient since, every year, your dollar was getting eaten up by the printing of more money.

The Options

If you have a job (or maybe you are a business owner), as inflation keeps going up, you have essentially three options for achieving your long-term savings goals:

• First, there is the idea of making more money. This is an option that has captivated a vast majority of the population. You only need to look at the success of the multi-level marketing industry to see how anxious people are to increase their wealth.
• Second, you can hold off on your savings goals. Again, you only need to look at the number of people who are working until the day they die.
• Third, and the option that most seem to take, is to invest your money. Assuming that most people want to save money and retire at some point, unfortunately inflation has put them in a position where they must now put their money at risk in the stock market. Since simply saving alone won’t cut it anymore, people are forced to hope that the stock market will work in their favor and no matter what any financial advisor tells you, mutual funds do not offer any more or less in the way of average returns. If only there was a non-depreciating asset that held its value against inflation over time… if only (cough)gold(cough).

The Solution

I’m wary to offer any sort of solution, since it simply is either to make more money or to change your goals. I really want to encourage people not to be so nonchalant when it comes to their finances. If you well and truly don’t care, then all the power to you. It’s just the people who typically feel that way, I find, are also the most blindsided by the eventuality of realizing what they had spent their lives hoping for is, all of a sudden, completely different.

As far as I can tell there’s never any harm in increasing your earning power. Which side are you on?

“Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating out in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald’s? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.”

The world is a wide, wonderful and deeply diverse place. You may think that you have a relatively firm grasp on humanity and what it means to be a human being, but then you can go traveling to an entirely different culture and you realize that the people there have an entirely different way of living. What you thought was “Mexican” food isn’t at all what actual Mexicans in Mexico eat. You might think that your city’s metro system is advanced and then you see what they have in Tokyo. Go somewhere else and you’ll realize that you really take “clean” electricity and indoor plumbing for granted.

While I don’t necessarily agree with everything that Anthony Bourdain has to say, I do find myself identifying with much of what he does. And I completely agree that when you go out and see the world, you should make the commitment to similarly eat the world. Why on Earth would you go to Scotland and not eat the haggis? I’ve had sulfuric black eggs in Hakone, medium-rare goose gizzards in Paris, whole duck tongue on a skewer in Taipei, and kangaroo steak in Australia.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Anthony Bourdain, he was a chef for a good number of years, but he is far better known these days for experiencing the world through his stomach. Most of us know him from television shows like No Reservations, The Layover and, most recently, Parts Unknown. Through his programming, we are reminded that so much of a culture is ingrained in its food. You haven’t really seen a country or really come to understand a people until you’ve eaten their food.

Absolutely, there are all sorts of health risks involved when it comes to eating questionable food in a foreign land. I’m not saying that you should throw caution to the wind, but it is important to sample the local fare. Generally speaking, if the locals eat it regularly and the food item is reasonably cooked, you’re probably pretty safe. You might recall when Ed Lau ate raw chicken on purpose and he’s still alive and well. Given the right opportunity, I’d gladly try balut in the Philippines or deep fried water beetle in Thailand.

“If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel — as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them — wherever you go.”

I’m not 22 years old anymore, nor am I particularly all that physically fit, but I am hungry to learn and I am hungry to be better. I love to travel and it is one of the biggest regrets from my 20s that I didn’t do more of it. It wasn’t until this year that I took my first trip to Europe and it wasn’t until a couple years ago that I touched down in Australia. But there’s still so much more world to see and there’s still so much food to try. As authentic as your local restaurant may try to be, there’s nothing quite like eating Italian pasta in Italy or Peruvian ceviche in Peru.

Maybe it has something to do with novelty-seeking. That personality trait can be connected to troublemaking, but it’s also a predictor of well-being. So, if it means that I might get into some trouble for going out to see (and eat) the world, so be it. I’ll be all the happier for it.

Considering how many places we visited and how many interesting things we saw during our three weeks in Europe, I guess it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that I am still sifting through all that content. You may recall the posts I did with Amsterdam photos and Paris photos, but this is my first post with our time in Italy. Even though we ended up visiting a total of seven cities during our trip, more than half of those were in Italy. Go figure.

The first stop in Italy, not counting the brief train station layover we had in Ventimiglia, was Florence. Called Firenze in Italian, Florence is a beautiful city in the heart of Tuscany. One thing that we learned very quickly is that Florence is a surprisingly small city. For the most part, aside from taking the bus to get from the train station to our accommodations, we spent the entire time on foot. You can walk to all the major attractions, really, so there’s not much of a need to familiarize yourself with the public transit system or to take a taxi.

What you see at the top is Ponte Vecchio, which translates to “Old Bridge” in Italian. It was the only bridge in Florence to survive German attack during World War II. What’s interesting about this Medieval stone-closed bridge is that not only is it closed to vehicle traffic (it’s pedestrian-only), but both sides are lined with shops. For the most part, these are jewelry stores, but historically, it was originally occupied by butchers. In terms of shopping, you’ll find plenty of great Florentine leather goods and silk ties all around town too.

The many churches in Europe are all beautiful, but Basilica di Santa Croce (Basilica of the Holy Cross) in Florence is particularly special because it is where you will find the tombs of such notable Italians as Galileo, Machiavelli, Rossini and, pictured here, Michelangelo. Entrance is free, but donations are obviously appreciated.

Similarly, entrance to the Florence Duomo (officially called the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, or Basilica of Saint Mary of the Flower) is free. However, you need to pay 8 Euro per person to take the stairs up to the dome and the roof of the Duomo.

This entrance, if you are facing the front entrance from the outside, is to the left. It’s open until 6:20pm during the week and 5pm on Saturdays. Arrive earlier than that, though, as there can be a lineup. Also bear in mind that you will be ascending 463 steps to get to the top (and 463 to get back down)… but it’s totally worth it. You’ll see the inside of the dome, as well as get a bird’s eye view of Florence’s rust-colored rooftops.

We didn’t have a chance to visit the Uffizi Gallery, but we did go to the Galleria dell’Accademia to see Michelangelo’s David. That’s really the highlight of that particular museum, but there are some other great sculptures and artwork to see. You will want to hop online and buy your tickets ahead of time; they divide entrance times into half-hour blocks. There is a small booking fee, but it sure beats standing outside in the standby line for hours on end.

The food in Florence is pretty good too, as you may recall from my review of Trattoria Bordino last week. Another great place we found was all’Antico Vinaio. Indeed, it’s rated as the #1 restaurant in Florence on TripAdvisor, even though it’s not really a “restaurant,” per se. Instead, it’s a humble deli that serves up a mean sandwich where you can choose all your toppings (including meat and cheese) for a set price. Glasses of wine are self service for 2 Euro.

We ate a lot of gelato while in Italy. Most places give you the choice of cup or cone in about five different sizes, typically starting at about 2 Euro and going up to about 5 or 6 Euro. And yes, it’s good. I think we each had gelato five or six times by the time we left Italia.

Florence isn’t a huge city, but our brief two days there may have been one of the bigger highlights of my trip. While we had to rush around to see everything there was to see in Paris (and still not seeing most of it), we had far more opportunity to experience la dolce vita in Firenze. It’s a wonderfully charming town that is well worth visiting.