moving art

This was sent to me from my Uncle in Germany. Fascinating.

The video shows the winner of " Ukraine's Got Talent", Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch.

The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears and she won the top prize of about $130,000.00.

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman's face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman's face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine , resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.

Kseniya Simonova says: "I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And there's surely no bigger compliment."

Please take time out to see this amazing piece of art.

help haiti

Great way to help all those pobresitos in Haiti. Although the clothig relief effort seems to be going the opposite direction.

Click here to help.

Happy Diwali!

we're number 37

Watch this video.

Need some town hall humor? Watch this, it's absolutely hilarious.
:)

interview with bro

This was a short mention of my brother, Michal, from a Hong Kong radio interview that he did recently. The interview can be heard here. I thought the following description of the interview described him well as an avid pursuer of the arts. Love ya, bro.

"Michal García is a Texan photographer and music professional based in Hong Kong. He is a graduate of the University of North Texas where he studied Music and Film. García has been a part of numerous collaborations including the jazz fusion group Snarky Puppy, singer Sarah Renfro, The UNT Jazz Singers and lab bands, independent music site "My Denton Music", The Texas Filmmakers, and as a host on Dallas-based radio station KNTU FM 88.1. With the University of North Texas Jazz Singers and other university groups he has traveled to perform in New York, California, and Colorado. He can be heard on the vrecordings "In Case You Missed It" and "Traveling the Route" by the University of North Texas Jazz Singers. García is an advocate of the arts and pursues positive change through community building."

recap for august

Let's see- earlier this month, Michal came from Hong Kong for a 2 week visit in which we had a great pool party with Mexican food. Mom and Dad back in Eagle Pass supplied the tamales that I brought over frozen, as well as the colorful corn tortillas from the Mexican grocery store in Piedras Negras. There were kids everywhere, which only doubled the excitement since they all got to play with each other in the pool, and the parents were relieved because they could relax and enjoy margaritas while the kids entertained themselves. It’s also great to have your brother around whenever Mexican food is involved (no dirty leftovers to clean up...haha)

We even played "Loteria", a Mexican version of Bingo that uses pictures like “la luna” (the moon) and “el pescado” (the fish) in the spaces instead of numbers. I never really paid attention to how politically incorrect some of the pictures were until I called out cards like "el borracho" (the drunkard), "el valiente" (the brave man with a razor blade), and "el negrito" (the black man).

The night ended with D standing on a chair and announcing that it was time for something special. Then someone turned out the lights and a cake lit with candles in the shape of "52" came out of the kitchen. D then explained about Michal and my birthdays being on the same day (July 18) and every year we try to get together to celebrate, no matter where we are in the world, and this year we were turning 52 years old cumulatively. Everyone then sang “happy birthday” to Michal and me and enjoyed the delicious cake. The party was a great success and everyone commented on how tasty the Mexican food was, so THANK YOU, Mom and Dad!

Just before Michal headed back to Hong Kong, I had previously been job searching (I quit working at Raffles, the Singaporean Design & Business University, before going to the USA this summer) and was called in for an interview for a company called International SOS ( www.internationalsos.com)- they were looking for a Marketing Manager. I was then put through interviews with the Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City offices and then was told I also had to be interviewed by the head offices in Hong Kong and Singapore. FIVE interviews later, I was offered the job.

So, now I’ve been working with International SOS for the past two weeks and things are looking ok. The company provides mostly medical services and has a 24-hour call center that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. You pay a membership fee to have access and this call center gets you in touch with doctors on the phone immediately. No matter where you are, even in the Vietnamese countryside or on a train traveling from Moscow to Paris, they can get international-level medical care to come to you. This is great in countries where there is no emergency service or even adequate medical care. They also do further services like if I get robbed while traveling in India and lose my money and passport, I can call the hot line and they get me in touch with the US embassy and can even front me some cash. This is even better in places like Jakarts where the hotel was bombed- the SOS members stuck in the hotel called the SOS call center and they were able to figure out the best way to keep them safe and get them in touch with people to help them It’s a pretty unique service but definitely tailored for people who travel in several different countries. International SOS has a medical clinic in Hanoi that is open to members and non-members, but non-members have to pay a higher price, so unfortunately the reputation of the clinic has been a bit negative since people can’t see why they charge so much (the reason is partly because they aren’t members, but also because it’s just a higher grade clinic).

My job as Marketing Manager is to help people realize some of the great things SOS does. SOS participates in a ton of community work here and all over the world, so it’s just a matter of getting people to know the work that they do and the quality if medical service they provide. It’s a big job, no doubt.

Study towards my Masters degree also continues to go well. For those who don’t know, I started my MBA with the University of Hawaii a year ago. It’s an executive program, which means we enter as a cohort and I have the same classmates throughout the full two years and classes are held at night and on weekends. It gets tough when you work all day and then have to sit in class all evening then go home at 10pm and write a paper, but all of my classmates are in the same boat and we manage. Our professors fly from Hawaii to teach us here and their focus is on Asian Pacific business, with an even narrower concentration on Vietnam. It’s been tough but I’ve managed to keep a 3.5 out of 4.0 GPA. I even got to go to Hawaii for summer school, studying Japanese Marketing, and really enjoyed it. Graduation date is July 10, 2010 and you are ALL invited, so book those flights to Hanoi soon. :)

D has been working hard too. He’s done quite a bit of training here in Vietnam over the years, from hotel managers at the Sheraton and Hilton hotel openings to United Nations Water filtration systems training in the countryside. In his nine years in Vietnam, he’s definitely had quite a bit of experience across the board. In order to bring some of that together, he’s been branding himself under the company name “VietPro”, which has 3 parts- Academic, Executive, and Corporate. All three parts focus on career coaching and helping people get to the next step of the potential.

Under the Academic portion, he coaches individuals who are looking at full-ride scholarships such as the Fullbright and Hubert Humphrey’s programs that basically focus on a very high academic group of peple in Vietnam to be accepted into the program. For Executives, he does interview and resume coaching and has already successfully coached four people into getting the job they wanted (one Irish, one Swiss, one American, and one Belgian). On the Corporate side, he designs and leads workshops for companies to do staff development and such. He’s hosted a workshop on leadership and cross-cultural communication for the Australian embassy and tomorrow he’ll do a 3-day workshop for the World Bank on project measurement for their 4-year country development plan (so, basically he will help them figure how much work they’ve done to aid Vietnam in becoming a developed nation and how much more they have left to go). The website is coming soon (Bethany is currently working on it in Austin) so I’ll let you know when it’s done.

It keeps him very busy but I’m very proud of him, as you can imagine. :)

Church is going well too. Our Hanoi international Church had a “kick-off” Sunday to welcome new arrivals to Hanoi and kind of start off the new school year with a blessing. The service was done with a special focus on prayer for our congregation as a whole. At the beginning of the service, we passed out paper so people could write down specific prayers (for sick persons, kids at school, friends who are traveling, etc). We then collected them and redistributed them to other people to then pray out loud throughout different parts of the service. It was really neat to have so many people praying for each other in a variety of accents and ways. The whole thing was followed by a big pot luck at one of the members’ homes, which was really enjoyable.

I am also especially proud of some of my Phu Tho students this month. I taught out in Phu The province for about 2 years, which is one of the poorest areas in Northern Vietnam and students who get into the University where I taught realize what a great opportunity it is for them. Unfortunately, the usually don’t get much other opportunities beyond that. Michael, one of our LCMS volunteers who joined us from Hong Kong, has arranged for a group of students from the University in Phu Tho to go to Hong Kong with him. They are being sponsored by various people (I think from Michael’s church in Hong Kong) and will be there for a total of ten days. I’ve taught a lot of the students, so it is wonderful to see them getting the opportunity to travel outside Phu Tho, much more, Vietnam. Pray that they have a great trip and bring back a wealth of experiences and excitement to share with other students in Phu Tho.

Other than those things, it’s all really boring around here. :)

campus closeup

A posting on the KU website about my brother-in-law, Dilawar:

Dilawar Grewal, associate vice provost for Information Services
Years at current job: About a year as the Director of Research IT Services and less than a year as the Associate Vice Provost for Information Services.

Job Duties: As the associate vice provost for IS, I head the IT division of Information Services. The Libraries are the other division of Information Services under the unified leadership of the Vice Provost for Information Services.

In the capacity of the director of Research IT Services, I am focused on enhancing IT capabilities and capacities at KU specifically in support of its research mission

What is one thing that would surprise people about your work? As is common knowledge, KU IT resources are distributed and so is control over the same resources. While it is not necessary to centralize everything, it is essential that development and planning for resources be unified at an institutional level. In a distributed environment, our collective abilities become limited by the lowest common denominators. Further, to the rest of the world, especially the research funding world, KU is one entity. Those funding agencies do not differentiate between the abilities of KU as a whole and those of individual components of the university.

Building an infrastructure for the common good is what I was hired for, is what I believe in and that is what I spend most of my time on. Infrastructure to me means more than computers and networks. It means the machines and the networks, as well as the expertise, ideas and energy people contribute, the goodwill essential for effective communications, the ways and means to achieve success for many, and the reputation of KU.

How has evolving technology improved IT’s abilities to serve the university in your time at KU? Evolving technologies provide people with operational duties better mouse traps for the problems they are trying to address. It is always a fluid situation when it comes to information technology. The biggest difference in how IT is better able to serve the university comes not just from the better mouse traps that become available, rather from the desire of the IT leadership and the employees that comprise IT to make a genuine difference in the work of the university. We are truly putting our thinking, expertise, efforts, resources and even emotions, into reaping benefits for KU. This translates into better processes and business practices, better communications and most importantly, looking at things holistically. Enabling success elsewhere at KU is also a success for IT.

Initiative One is under way to improve KU’s information infrastructure. How will this university wide effort improve KU’s teaching and research mission? There are essentially two major components driving Initiative One. a). Garnering efficiencies in terms of harnessing the power of the collective. This means that KU, and KU constituent entities, save money when we negotiate special hardware, software and even service rates in bulk as compared to piecemeal retail purchases. Examples of this would include the Dell volume purchasing licensing and Microsoft agreement for campus. The “weight” behind these agreements helps faculty, students and researchers buy machines and software at a fraction of the cost, thus enabling expanded use of base technologies in teaching, learning and research. b). Coordinating planning and enhancing the infrastructure: as part of Initiative One we are engaging the users and the community. You may have noticed, this summer under the direction of the VP for Information Services, IT launched a series of advisory groups to craft paths forward for all of KU in the areas of desktop acquisition and imaging, desktop support, enterprise document imaging, enterprise document management, storage, network architecture and high performance computing.

Our intention is to open up communications, better understand user needs, more efficiently invest limited resources, and in the end, make the user experience better than before. These advisory groups include more than 100 participants from many different departments and academic/research units at KU, and are tasked with looking at the fundamental issues, needs and requirements related to having robust infrastructures in all those areas. Examples here would include an upgrade to the network backbone, Hawkdrive as a common document storage facility, better delivery of end-user support, be it for desktop support or high performance computing support. These successes can only be achieved and sustained if many different parts start contributing towards a common planning paradigm.

Thus far, this engagement has very quietly and subtly enabled IT to build planning bridges that take into account not only the IT reality, but also the reality of the people it serves—faculty, staff and students— the reality of other units at KU, and the reality of where KU wants to be as a major research institution. For me, personally, this is the most powerful of all efforts and will help IT better serve faculty, researchers, students, and KU the most.