The good part about my job - travel

I enjoy traveling, seeing new places, visiting airports, filling my passport, etc. With my job and location, it's been very good for me. I flew more than 100,000 miles last year - unfortunately, not all on one airline :(

I'm really enjoying this 6 week stretch:
March 13-17 Singapore
April 11-12 Taiwan
April 13-21 Australia

and the rest of the time I am in China. And I might have SG again in May, or maybe Israel. And the US. It could only be better if some of the trips were by motorcycle. I miss my VFR :( maybe I'll try to look for a bike again here in China.

Sunday I was looking at a huge stack of work and it turns out I've been able to keep up the pace. I'm finding every month that I am more capable than I use to believe, especially in terms of management (prioritizing, steering engineers, making decisions) and customers. A customer visit can be a very humbling experience, especially since we are usually visiting to apologize and swear we will do better.

Tonight, I can't decide between a 100 minute massage and German dinner or watching TV and cooking at home. Either way I'll be smiling :^)

One final note - Happy (belated) Birthday to Erin! I'm so so so so sorry I didn't mention yours earlier, sweetie. Just for that, you don't have to count that birthday this year :)

Back in Suzhou and moving as fast as possible

The Singapore trip (which I hadn't mentioned before) went well, though we accomplished less than planned. As always. When traveling to another site for work, you still only get to concentrate 1/2 the time on the work, even though we left the hotel at 7:30am and usually didn't return until 10pm.

Back to cold Suzhou and a week of meetings. Customer meeting for 1/2 day today, monthly review for 3 hours tomorrow, weekly review Thursdsay, monthly review for 3 hours on Friday. And I have to put together a customer response with no time or people to actually do the work :p It's time to lay things out for my boss as to what *can* and what *can't* be accomplished. One issue is, my boss doesn't really know what I'm working on.

In 4 weeks I'll be relaxing in Australia. Just have to make it until then.

It works!

I tried to post from home, but it didn't work. in fact, Blogger came up in Chinese again :p I tried to download a software from the local service provider (China Telecom). My landlord told me to download and run it and they'd see what my connect speed is. I downloaded twice and both times the zip file was corrupt.

See? I can't even fix things that don't work here?

Speaking of fixing, I slid my car into a wall in my parking garage Saturday night. the big, concrete building has sealed floors that are like wet ice with the condensation here (moist air + cold building = wet floor). Anti-lock brakes chattered for the whole 5ft skid at 5mph. It should be fixed in the next day or two, though. they do quick repairs here, probably because there aren't that many different car models in Suzhou.

If you want to learn some more about China and Chinese, check out this site I found. Sounds like an English teacher in Suzhou. Chuck's China Pages