November 2006 Archives

I haven't posted anything in a little while, but over the last several months, work has been getting to me. Just regular visual effects work. It's quite fun and entertaining, but like many of you know, I have higher aspirations. Since I filed for a business license (sole proprietorship, at the moment) at the beginning of the year, I've run through several ideas that have been backlogged in my head, of which only Lisa, and a select few coworkers with NDAs, have been privy to.

The last several weeks have involved me banging my head against a wall to create a workable prototype with materials I acquired from Burman Industries in Van Nuys. They were great in helping to decide what materials would be beneficial to the construction of my product. However, next week will be the culmination of several months of preparation and decision making, as I have a consulation with T2 Design, a local manufacturing and marketing firm here in the Santa Monica area. I hope to gain a little more detail in final prototyping for my product, and possibly arrange for some marketing and distribution. They were one of the companies featured on American Inventor last year, and my research led me to them as well as several other product design and marketing companies in the area.

Anyway, I thought I would do some time/money breakdowns for what's in my head. While Time Value of Money strictly relates to investments, I found it could be another apt description for gaining money while not actively working, which begins below.

I was looking online at NetJets, which has fractional jet ownership.. Don't ask me why I jumped onto that page, but I was interested. They have a Marquis Jet Card, for the low price of $115,900, you can use their jets for 25 flight hrs. That's about $4600/hr.. That got me thinking. How could I earn that much an hour? It's an exercise in futility, as it'll take forever to work up to that amount, but let's try it anyway. I'll round it out to $5000/hr. Which comes to about $43,800,000 a year (24hrs/365days). For comparison, Steven Spielberg made $332 million last year. That's about $38,000/hr (24hrs/365days).

If I wanted to sell my product, let's just say for a profit of 20 cents each ($0.20), I'd have to sell 416 of them per min, or about 7 per second. If there are around 3000 Walmarts here in the states, I'd have to sell about 0.13 of my products per store.. Rounded up to 1 per store is definitely overkill, but there are times when stores are closed, things are out of stock, etc. But the greater problem arises. There are not enough people to buy this product! The US Census predicts a rise to 115 million households by the year 2010. If each one of these households were to buy my product to meet that 416 items sold per minute, I would reach my target audience in 191 days. Each household would have that product and wouldn't need it again. But what about the population of the states? 300 million people. It'd take only 500 days for everyone to have one. At that's at a rate of only 416 per minute.

In a nutshell, in order for me to make $5000/hr, it would take, in a perfect scenario, selling my product continuously every second of every day for 191 days for a personal profit of 20 cents each.

Almost a month ago I had the chance to travel around the world to China. Some of our outsource work is being done there, so a few of us from work spent a week there to help tutor some of the guys. We first stayed in Hong Kong, only an hour drive away from mainland China. It is an amazing city, and we managed to take a quick day tour around Hong Kong island to see most of the sights. It was fairly easy to get around, as English is an official language as well as Cantonese. Going an hour north to China, however, was completely different... almost like going from the U.S. to Mexico. English is not an official language, and the border crossings are quite intimidating (so no pictures). We were no longer in the "safe zone" of English-speaking Hong Kong. We did have a driver and English-speaking hosts so we managed to survive for the week!

Click picture for more pictures!

Never having been to China before, I had all kinds of pictures in my mind. I imagined rural huts along a river, lots of noisy motorbikes, and an occasional concrete building. Maybe 20 or 30 years ago my vision would've been accurate. The China of today is growing in more ways than one. The border city we visited, Shenzhen, was merely a fishing village a few decades ago. Now it's a huge metropolis of over 8 million people. At the fancy hotel where we stayed, we overheard a few different accents, from American English to British to Eastern European. We weren't the only ones outsourcing! With the population size that it has, China has a seemingly infinite work force of people eager to feed themselves, and eager to prove to the world that they are very capable (and all at a much cheaper price). We could sense this from the busboys who helped us with our baggage, to the waiters and waitresses serving us dinner, to the employees of our outsource company. China will be a huge competitor in the workplace for decades to come.

And then there were 4....
well it was just the 4 of us for dinner this year..Lisa, Aruna, Panya & Rachelle..so here are some fun pictures of thanksgiving day at Arunas brothers place in Phoneix! Rachelle and I cooked the turkey and the rest of the stuff while the boys had to do the dishes..hehe..what fun!!!

check out the pictures on the link below..thanks

I woke up early that day to get a head start on the food, so I checked in on Aruna to see if he was still asleep at 10:30..and sure enough he was..hehe...Panya and Rachelles cute dog "Havanna" wanted to keep company with Aruna while I cooked.. everyone say awwwwwww :) And since they were "dog-sitting" for a friend I couldnt resist getting a picture of me with these 2 ADORABLE little puppies...everyone again!!!! awwwwwwwwww

for the actual dinner ( which was awesome ) as you can tell from the pictures, we ate off of the pool table which panya had a top made for..no he doesnt have a dining room table, so this was the next best thing! Aruna being the big brother and all, also had to show Panya how to carve a turkey, since Arunas had lotsa years of experience now....( I love making turkey dinner )!!!

November 5th to be exact..

Here are a few pics from my birthday the other week. Aruna had planned breakfast in bed for me that day and it was REALLY nice...hehe thanks Aruna for an awesome day...Also, my mom reminded me now that I'm 35, I'm officially closer to 40 than 30..OH MY GOD, ...yup I think I peed my pants when she told me that.....sucks getting old dont it?

...and yes the cake candles are for the age of "21" but Arunas friends wanted to make me feel better/younger so they got the "21" candle for me instead...muchly appreciated :) thanks again Jenn and Brandon

In early September, Bounheng,my mother, and I spent a couple of weeks with family and friends in Switzerland and England and visiting a few places in between. Below are a few photographs, with brief narrative, of some of the sites we visited as "tourists".

In the posting that continues below, left-clicking on the small photos will enlarge the image and then clicking your browser’s back arrow will let you return to this short presentation.

A poppy is placed on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier following Remembrance Day ceremonies in Ottawa, Canada Saturday, Nov. 11, 2006.

Remember all the Canadian soldiers who gave up their lives for us and our freedom.