ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

Old folks in Chinatown San Francisco Chinatown, San Francisco-similar to many Chinatowns all over the wolrd A Dim Sum Restaurant in San Francisco Whether its Philadelphia, San Francisco, downtown Manhattan, Flushing, Queens in NYC or Orlando, Florida-Chinatowns in American cities are enclaves with an environment totally different from the rest of the district they are located in. With their food, noise, smells, medicinal herbs, Chinese signage, ethnic Chinese bus drivers and policemen, even their own newspapers, Chinese in America can, (if they choose to) live a life steeped in their own culture, only having to learn very basic English to communicate with the outside world. A casual visitor will have a general impression that these are thriving enclaves, with the Chinese acumen for business fueling all manner of enterprise serving both the inhabitants of Chinatown as well as the world outside. Governments all over the world deal with the problem of enclaves of minority communities n...

1. Freshly brewed Kopi Luwak 2. In the packaging of the kopi luwak, the story of its origin 3. The certificate, and serial number of the 10g kopi luwak satchel 4. Rawon dish: salted egg, chili paste, shrimp cracker, cucumber, and bean sprouts 5. The rich consomme of beef and buah keluak the poisonous seed To my many American friends who find their breakfast coffee as unexciting as their Budweiser Light, I recommend a cup of Kopi Luwak coffee. The Luwak, a species of Civet Cat ( Paradoxurus hermaphroditus ) that lives in the coffee plantations of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi islands of Indonesia has a nose for selecting only the best (in terms of ripeness and nutrition)coffee berries. In the process it deposits the undigested beans on the jungle floor where they are eagerly picked up by the locals. Somehow the stomach acids and enzymes of the Luwak turns these beans into arguably the best tasting coffee in the world. And definitely the rarest. A cup of certified-authentic kopi luwak c...

'72 Fender Telecaster Thinline G&L Tribute ASAT Classic Bluesboy Made in USA guitars are increasingly becoming beyond the reach of ordinary working jazz guitar players. With Gibson jazz archtops priced between US$6000-US$15000, its time to ask if we are paying a premium just for the brand name and the image that goes with it. In fact its time to re-look whether a jazz archtop is de rigueur for playing jazz. It is possible to get that fat mellow tone which is the characteristic of jazz guitar music without using a big hollow-body guitar. A favorite of many jazz guitar players has been the Fender Telecaster, a solid body guitar that is usually associated with Country music. When played with the neck pickup, using flatwound strings and good technique, a Tele with Rosewoord fingerboard can sound pretty jazzy. Ed Bickert, Joe Pass, Lenny Breau and many others have used Teles for their music. Perhaps its that string-through body, that sweet neck pick-up, the brass saddles, or mayb...

1. Stir-fried Mud Crab 2. Beer maid serving Thai Singha beer 3. A hearty fish stew 4. Pictorial Menu Singapore has a reputation as a country where everything works, the streets are safe and clean, and everything has been carefully planned. But there are a few areas in Singapore where the more colorful, unplanned and chaotic side of society can be seen. The enclave of Geylang, once notorious for its Triad gangs, prostitution and gambling has been sanitized, but not totally. Red-light areas have been designated (only permitted on even-numbered roads) and the girls who ply the trade have their hygiene enforced. But the new face of Geylang is as a place where the Mainland Chinese workers and immigrants gather. The large numbers of mainland Chinese come from all regions of China from Jilin in the North, to Central provinces like Hunan and Hubei, Western provinces like Sichuan, and the coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong. Dozens of restaurants and food stalls have sprung up to ca...

1. Indonesian Rock Star: Eross Candar of superband Shelia On 7 with me and my Gibson ES-335 2. 2009 Peerless New York. Street value US$ 1300 3. 1972 Gibson ES-175D: Street value US$4000 At last, after years of looking for an old Gibson ES-175D with the 'Mojo' , I am now the proud owner of a 1972 ES-175D. I must have tried out scores of ES-175D's but they either had no Mojo, or had the Mojo but were too expensive, especially those from the 50's and 60's. How this particular guitar ended up in Indonesia is a mystery since there were no Gibson dealers in Indonesia back then. Eventually it ended up in the hands of of Indonesian rock super-star Eross Candar, who used it for many years before selling it to well-known Indonesian guitar collector Hardianto Thenario also known as 'Ah Lok', the supplier of many beautiful guitars to top Indonesian musicians. On hearing of my quest for a ES175, and having heard me play jazz at a Surabaya club, Ah Lok graciously offere...

Two years ago, I made the acquaintance of a high-frequency algorithmic trader, and was invited to view his operations: In a small, darkened room a few doors away from our office in Princeton, NJ, three traders sat hunched over large multiple-screen computers. Colorful charts writhed across the screens like snakes, and numbers flashed and scrolled, updating in milliseconds. Just recently, such secretive operations were brought into the limelight with the arrest of the Goldman Sachs engineer who stole the codes for an algorithmic strategy. The public is now aware that at least 50 % of the trades on Exchanges across the world are algorithmically driven. That is, no humans are involved as trades are executed at the speed of 500-1000 trades per second. And large blocks of shares are broken up, bought or sold in split seconds to avoid detection. The machines send out probes and gather information to enable them to profit from statistical arbitrage i.e. differences in Bid and Ask of as small...

1. A Black-Naped Tern 2. Two chicks and an egg on the hot bare ground of our oil-rig construction yard 3. The beach front has been filled with discarded concrete waste for a gentle slope for rig-launching 4. Part of the vast expanse of the yard 5. Low loaders bringing yet more of the pre-fabricated buildings 6. Erection of a steel workshop in progress Amid the hustle and bustle in the development of our oil-rig construction yard, on the burning-hot bare ground, Life begins for two Black-naped Tern chicks just out of their eggs. And in the midst of a technical discussion on the Master Construction Schedule, padeyes for winches and load analysis for jib crane pillars, a beautifully irrelevant email conversation insidiously emerges that for a brief moment bonded us with a consciousness of the Beauty of Life and the Greatness of the Universe and its Maker whoever it may be. And for a few minutes, the two little chicks loomed larger in our life than thoughts of 12000 ton cranes, 100 a...