after_alex

A quick mental overview of my past few weeks:

The end of my long vacation has finally come. After about 6 weeks of visitng, re-visiting, scoping, and coping…my journey is near the end of its segment. Today I’m in Tokyo, getting ready to head off to Narita Airport, recalling all the events (and non-events) of the past several weeks in Vietnam and Japan.

Travel Basics: Green Tea, Sunglasses, and Lonely Planet Japan

But the vacation was not only vacation, really. I ended up meeting with clients, observing business meetings, mingling with Vietnam’s commercial elite, and scoping out possible business and employment opportunities in Asia.

Park Hyatt Saigon: the Meeting Place
Hotel lobbies, especially at the 5-star locations in Hanoi and Saigon, provide just the right mix of proper surrounding and neutral environment for your next business meeting.

Takako’s Happy Birthday with UC Berkeley crew

Japan was full of the Tokyo-tour blended with a pilgrimage to the countryside – Izakaya’s, clubs, and awesome restaurants interspersed with moments of reflection and quiet next to the rice paddies of Wakuya-cho in Miyagi-ken.

It’s been a ride, and after every good ride it’s always an adjustment to return to the next life event on the menu…

What have I been doing in Vietnam, you ask?

Vietnamese people LOVE their hammocks…

Just lounging… of course!

A new day has dawned…my computer breathes new life with a brand new 120 GB hard drive from Hitachi with a 3-year warranty. All for just $90 (USD). Who could ask for more? Indeed, my faith in Vietnam, and the future of the computing industry here as a whole, is revived.

Now, I sit in the dark 5-star bedroom of my brother Tony in the Park Hyatt hotel in Saigon, while he sleeps, so that I may mundanely proceed to download all the necessary drivers for raising this stupid Dell into the machine it’s supposed to be. Already, it’s China-made battery runs low (only 27 min total), so I’ve gotta act quick. Where are you, cord?

Tonight has been an interesting night, as it has been one of my first tastes of the international underground party scene – with pictures to come soon – full with Chicago House music and live band…stay tuned. “After Alex” lives…

Today, one of my ghosts finally caught me. My laptop’s hard drive crashed.

A truly sad event, as so many pictures, documents, and other important things were on the hard drive. I doubt that the data can be recovered, but we’ll see what happens.

True, I should have known better. Working in the IT industry, data backups are an everyday fact of life…that I’ve willfully neglected. I’ve even written a white paper myself on the importance of data backup and redunancy. So possibly this is a punishment I deserve despite the ironies.

Meanwhile, my most pressing challenge is to breathe new life into the laptop with a new hard drive. But my feeling is that this will be extremely difficult in a place like Vietnam. From what I hear, laptops alone have something like a 100% mark-up because of tariffs…so I can only imagine what it’s going to cost me to get a new laptop form-factor HD here. …that’s if I can even find one.

So until then, my narratives of Vietnamese Dining, dog meat, and chocolate buffets will have to wait…