A tough couple of days

Life has been good recently. I've reeled back my impatience and stubborn weekend studying, and have relaxed as of late. Bbqs last weekend, go-karting the week before, even a spot of ice-skating and having dinner with friends. And reading (shock horror) an English novel. (Da Vinci Code) All quite good fun really.

At work, things are getting better for me. I'm leading our asian research efforts for the World Wealth Report, well at least the new and exciting ASIA PACIFIC version of the World Wealth Report. (Oh yes, calling all private bankers, calling all private bankers, I'm looking for private bankers in Asia to interview.)

The last couple of days were trying though. Good full days working on my research. Resourcing problems early evenings for a UK project in Beijing, which meant leaving various voicemails and lots of coordination. Bit political, commercial, complicated, all sorts really. And preparing a simple sales proposal for an HK conglomerate. All this at once made me a little tired really.

It's good to be busy in a way. It's good also that I'm only sometimes this over-busy. Usually it's just the day-job that I need to do, in which case I can nicely manage that into a working day. The bad news is that I'm not getting enough exposure to Chinese clients - much of my working day is still working on English documents and conversing to clients in HK, Japan or America.

The good news is that tomorrow I'm joining a sales pitch team to Fuzhou, where we're pitching to a bank. We have a 108 page presentation. Apparently with no summary. I'm not sure how we're going to present it... and I don't have time to read it through before we go!

I (finally) bought a TV video recorder. Actually a one with a hard drive, which means that I can program it to record multiple programs each week, and watch them one day when I have time. (I bought a Sony HX710 from HK (thanks yonnie!), which cost less than the rather basic philips
model that was the Only option I could find all over Shanghai).

I'm happy with my TV video recorder. TV here really is a wealthy source of information. It's also pretty accessible for me, whereas books, newspapers and even the internet still are pretty cumbersome for me. There are many interviews for example with famous businessmen, and tourist descriptions of places and cultures within China. Over the next weeks I'll be slowly working my way through the TV Guide to find out what weekly programs I can record and archive.

I certainly don't have time to watch everything, but I can store lots, and then use it as a library when there is something specific I want to learn from or watch.