Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

I'm in the final throes of getting ready for a 10-day trip Beijing and Seoul, including press meetings, two CTO breakfasts, all hands with the Sun engineering and field teams in Beijing, my staff meeting and perhaps some sight-seeing along the way. I tend to do at least one really long (by my intra-week standards) trip a year, which is about as close as I get to modelling a professional sports team talking about going "on the road" for a "critical swing along the coast."

I'm going to try out some new content and ideas along the way. Sin-Yaw Wang has promised to take me to the "Dogs Don't" dumpling place. I desperately want a t-shirt from the place, to join my "White House Subs" and "Primanti Brothers" gastro-clothing collection, so having Sin-Yaw with me to translate is critical. I also stupidly told SeChang Oh that he can bring it with the hot kimchi (my fault for suggesting that I can tolerate spicy food) but once the food intake is set, the engineering output can follow (very Dilbert-ish, I know).

I'm a huge believer in fate and coincidence, call it cosmic unconsciousness or karma or destiny, but my original plan was to fly out tonight. Unfortunately for anyone coming home from a week of vacation, there are half-day long delays at the local airports due to our first real snowfall.