Reading Time: 2 minutes One big news in the business world last week: Microsoft missed its earning estimate for this quarter and guided down its earnings for next quarter and next year. It caused the Microsoft stock (MSFT) to drop more than 10% on Friday. It was the largest drop in one trading day in 5 years. I did

Reading Time: 2 minutes This week is the National Turn off TV week, but I did not participate as usual. I spent some time watching the NBA playoffs. Although I am not a big fan of NBA and those super stars, and I always think we should only watch the last 5 minutes of the 4th quarter. Because in

Reading Time: < 1 minute What’s the common characters among book, coffee and music? Besides you can have them all in Borders or Barnes&Nobles. They all can fill your soul. One would wonder while that’s true for book and music, how can the coffee fill our souls? Well, that’s what I heard from Howard Schultz on today’s “60 minutes”. Mr.

Reading Time: < 1 minute I have not been to the Borders for a few months. This evening when I visited the Borders at Creve Coeur, I was glad to see, Gene Operle, a local musician, was getting ready to perform. I remembered I listened to his Country songs a year ago, also at Borders (can not remember whether it

Reading Time: 2 minutes MBA is a hot topic for many overseas Chinese students and professionals: for the money or the dream. I have thought about doing this from time to time, but I am still at ground zero due to reasons such as: lack of the money and time; not sure about the purpose of the MBA; don’t

Reading Time: < 1 minute I came across this top 50 best jobs list a while ago. I was very surprised to see my job, software engineer, as many of my friends’ jobs, is on the top of the list. I got the hard copy of magazine today and confirmed this. I have quite a few friends who are college

Reading Time: < 1 minute Went to the Business School at Washington U. this afternoon, to listen Jack Welch’s talk about “Leadership”. I read his two books, and have some idea of the topic. Some of the take aways from his talk: 1) Work with tough minded (rather than nice) and fair people, so that you will get rigorous training

Reading Time: < 1 minute A good article from Yahoo Finance. This may not directly be applicable to the restaurants in China, but I think we can all learn something from here.

Reading Time: 2 minutes There is a little piece of news in the software industry caught my attention this week. Red Hat, one of the biggest open source solution provider decided to buy JBoss, a not so well known open source middleware (application server) softare developer, for USD 350 million. I read an article on Business week about JBoss’s

Reading Time: < 1 minute My friend mentioned this real estate estimate web site to me. We were very excited to see the property value of our St. Louis homes went up sharply in the past month, according to the web site. While we are mature enough to know this is not 100% accurate, it’s good news nonetheless. Here is