Tag Archives: Priceline

Travel, Budget Airlines and the Lilt of a Foreign Tongue

September 10 1:26 am ,
Reaching Up, Out

Reaching Up, Out

I like vacations.  Whenever I can take mini ones – I take lots (can I smile greedily here?).

It started when I was 21.  I just won the top cash prize at the office raffle and what better way than to squander it all at a grand Hongkong vacation.

Okay, it was not grand.  We stayed at a three star hotel and had breakfast everyday at the McDonald’s but I was with my bestfriend and we went around Hongkong and had so much fun – going to the parks, seeing the day life and the night life, tasted all the local delicacies, shopped for satin underwear, luggage and Giordano shirts, haggled (oh boy can I haggle) – that I wanted to do it again (and again and again).

And again.

From then on, I promised myself that I will take at least one vacation at an international destination every year.  Hey, I was single, I was employed, I had no financial conscience (it was fun while it lasted).

This year, I am taking 5 mini-vacations (to my financial planners – uhm, ehrm, sorry?).

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Are You On The Internet?

August 31 5:20 pm ,
Virgin Territory

Internet: Virgin Territory

My mother had foresight.

She had the two of us enroll at a computer school at a nondescript building, with an area not exceeding 40 square meters.  I forgot where it was located, but I remember we had to look over the shoulder of the teacher and we had to share a computer, tinkering with DOS and binary numbers and floppy discs together.  We were no longer mother and child, but two people trying to ride with the times.  I am not sure if I (or she) learned anything.  I know that back at home I continued to type my thesis with an electric typewriter.

Not that it mattered.  What we had learned would be relegated to the annals of computer history, because in a few years, mankind was to take several quantum leaps into the information age.

In his book “The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty First Century”, Thomas L. Friedman catalogued the shift of the philosophy of the world – from working hard, man had to work smart.  He said, “… One way small companies flourish in the flat world is by learning to act really big.  And the key to being small and acting big is being quick to take advantage of all the new tools for collaboration to reach farther, faster, wider, and deeper.”

From the computer came the Internet.  And the internet is the new frontier where this is possible.

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Posted in: Mentors , Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,