nan | 楠木

Small maintenance.

With Real Madrid staging another late comeback to win both the match and the league title, this season’s Spanish La Liga came to a close. It has been a unbelievably dramatic season for the team.

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I’ve just started my Facebook experience a few days ago, partially due to the recent hype over the Facebook Apps platform. I felt that if I wanted to develop some expertise and become sort of a rookie observer of web2.0, well, I need to experience it personally.

Taken at face value, Facebook is an interesting playground. It’s got a nice set of features that makes it sticky and addictive, and it’s easy to see its potential as a gossip / rumor factory among friends. Good for 八卦, as we Chinese like to say. Read more…

Ong-Bak (2003) is a fierce and violent action film that put its male lead Tony Jaa instantly on the map as the next martial arts super-star.

The film is well-made, and while the plot is easily forgettable, the action certainly isn’t. Tony Jaa shows off some amazing stunts throughout the film. And he can run, jump, ride and fight. Some free running sequences are especially enjoyable, as they are designed with a sense of humor.

The film’s plot is mildly enjoyable but it does setup an interesting premise. Jaa is a simple, straight-forward kid from a rural village. When the village’s most important relic – a buddha statue – is stolen, he volunteers to retrieve the artifact. (And of course kick some bad-asses along the way.) I say this premise is interesting is because there’s some room to look at the dirty urban city from the eyes of an innocent rural guy and the interaction between the two is always good material. There are indeed some good content along those lines, but it’s just a small sideline of the film.

Regarding the action, this film is non-stop. And the level of brutality is persistently upgrading, ending in a finale that is quite bloody with some shocking images. I hadn’t expected that the film would go that far – but it did.

7/10

Last week, I was invited to be a judge for OVAL 2007′s Chinese candidate selection process. For those of you not familiar with OVAL, it’s a business plan competition for Chinese, Japanese and Korean students. It’s probably self-evident from the countries’ names that this competition is more about Northeast Asian community building than actual business plans. (And OVAL stands for Our Vision for Asian Leadership.)

Anyway, I had attended the 2005 OVAL in Beijing, and had had quite a good experience. So when the OVAL staff this year asked me if I could help out, I agreed.

The interview round I judged was the second round, and is a group interview round where 5 contestants had to tackle a case together and finally do a presentation. Some of the cases had “consulting” written all over it. There was immediately an issue since none of the judges were familiar with the cases, and they were supposed to be able to guide the contestants through the case. The issue wasn’t that significant, though, since the cases were generally very open-ended.

There were two judges in each room. My peer was an American doing a small start-up in the education industry, with a background in economics. I felt we generally had a good interaction and shared a lot of common feelings towards the students.

Some of those feelings were very general. For example, it wasn’t very surprising to me that the students were not very structured in their discussion, and that they lacked creativity. That has always been the problem of Chinese students.

Another issue, that was again very common, was that we saw little passion in the students. When we were asking the students individual questions about their career plans etc., they all responded that they want to be professional managers or something. Or, start their own business. But a manager or a entrepreneur is not a profession – what industry? What function? What do you really want to do? What’s your real passion?

Even for students that came up with unconventional answers – one mentioned she wanted to do NGO work – they didn’t know what they really wanted to do. What’s the issue you want to address? Do you want to solve poverty in Southeast Asia? Or tackle AIDS in Africa? We kept asking, and yet she could only say she wanted to do finance work in NGOs. So again,  she wanted to be a manager.

One student even simply stated that money is the goal. Oh well.

At the end of day, all this is nothing new. But we probably should be a bit concerned by this lack of passion – if anything, it shows that our students are very naive and very ignorant about their future careers.