Welcome to my blog

Recently, we discovered a very good small restaurant that serves vegetarian food. The chef is very creative in using different ingredients and the dishes are very delicious. We really want to eat more vegetable rather than meat, but usually, vegetarian food in Hong Kong is not very tasty. Therefore, discovering this restaurant has been a nice surprise for us and it has since become our favourite place. The price is also very reasonable, there is no menu, you eat what is offered on the day, the owner even grows some of the vegetables in his farm in Tai Po. It is always a three-course meal with soup, salad and the main course, desserts and tea or coffee are optional. We also enjoy the interior decoration and reading the books and leaflets which we can borrow.

Récemment, nous avons découvert un très bon petit restaurant qui sert la nourriture végétarienne. Le chef est très créative en utilisant différents ingrédients et les plats sont délicieux. Nous avons vraiment envie de manger plus de légumes plutôt que de la viande, mais en général, la nourriture végétarienne à Hong Kong n'est pas très savoureuse. Par conséquent, la découverte de ce restaurant a été une belle surprise pour nous et elle est devenue depuis notre endroit préféré. Le prix est très raisonnable, il n'y a pas de menu, vous mangez ce qui est offert sur la journée, le propriétaire même de la croissance des légumes dans son exploitation agricole à Tai Po. Il est toujours une période de trois plats avec soupe, salade et plat principal, dessert et thé ou café sont en option. Nous avons également profiter de la décoration intérieure et de la lecture des livres et des brochures que nous pouvons emprunter.

最近では、私たちはベジタリアン料理を提供し、非常に良い小さなレストランを発見した。シェフの料理と非常に異なる材料を使用してとてもおいしいです創造されています。われわれは肉ではなく、もっと野菜を食べるには通常、香港でベジタリアン料理をとても美味しいではありません。したがって、我々にとっては良いこのレストランを発見されており、それ以来、私たちの驚きのお気に入りの場所となっている。価格も非常に合理的ですが、メニューがない場合は、日に何が提供されている食事は、所有者も、いくつかのタイポー氏の農場で野菜の生育する。それは、常に3スープ、サラダ、メインコースとコース料理、デザート、紅茶やコーヒーはオプションです。また、インテリアを楽しみ、本を借りることができると私たちはチラシを読む。

I had the misfortune of being on a bus where a really silly incident occurred. Two unrelated passengers quarreled over a tiny matter where one of them moved the other one's bag to free up a seat for himself. The heated argument escalated in no time to one of them suggesting to report the incident to the police, and he did ran down to ask the bus driver to halt the bus just before the Aberdeen tunnel and wait for the police. By this time, many other passengers are cursing the two trouble makers with such foul language that I shall not repeat here. The bus driver signaled to another bus that passed-by to take unlucky passengers like me to get on with our journey.

I think what they should have done is to ask the two trouble makers to get off the bus and wait for the police if they like and let everyone else gets on with their lives.

I shared this unfortunate story with my uncle and he said it could have been worse if the police arrived on the scene decided to detain everyone until the so called incident was clarified. Well, imagine that...

The moral of this story, don't take the bus?

The Friends of Cambridge University in Hong Kong hosted the 2nd mentorship program this summer, the topic was Travel and Charity. The speakers were Melody who spoke about her experience working at Cathay Pacific as a management trainee, Elaine spoke about her trip to Vietnam with Orbis, Maggie spoke about her trip to Calcutta, India and worked at Missionaries of Charity established in 1950 by Mother Teresa, and also Gloria spoke about her experience in teaching English in remote area of Thailand and also worked with UNESCO at their Bangkok branch. They shared interesting photos and videos of their trips.

"Why do you choose to become an independent professional?" - that's a question I got asked a lot at the beginning when I turned independent. Nowadays, the question that I got asked a lot is "Can I become an independent professional too?".

I shall answer this question with a list of questions that you should ask yourself:

• "Do you have multiple skills, experience and knowledge that are sought after by many potential clients in the market?"
• "Do you have a good network of friends or business associates who can either refer projects to you or connect you with the potential clients?"
• "Do you have the necessary administrative skill to take care of all the managerial aspect of an independent professional business?" (think about no more colleagues to take care of your accounting, IT, office supplier, document filing, phone calls etc.
• "Can you stand a famine/overfed business income cycle?"

more later.

A Global Expert Network is a network (usually an online platform) where people with different domain knowledge, i.e. experience in different vertical industries such as telecommunications, insurance, pharmaceutical, banking, finance, retails, marketing, health care, semi-conductor and many more.

The platform, usually with its resource matching capability and sometimes a payment system, will try to supply these experts to the clients who need to seek their advise in various business aspect.

In the case where the platform takes care of the payment system, the experts can name their own rate for providing their consultation service and the platform will charge the client at a mark up rate or bulk sell rate.

The consultation is usually over the phone (since the expert and the client are likely to be in different locations), face to face meetings are of course possible.

The experts are not employees of the global expert network, they are simply a resource on its "menu" for client to purchase.

Global expert networks usually do not check, verify the credential of the experts, other than the business email address does match the company that they claim they are working at.

The frequency of being call-upon for consultation is highly random, and are usually low, unless your rate, the popularity of the industry, your knowledge and experience, location are all in a unique combination of a much sought after area.

Therefore, the consultation income should be considered as an occasional supplement pocket money and not a reliable source of main income.

"Professional Staffing" firm is a company, market maker that makes a living from matching the clients' need, in the form of jobs or projects that usually have a predefined time and/or scope, with the necessary human resource such as a highly skilled independent professional who has the appropriate experience, skills and knowledge to execute the task.

The independent professionals are NOT employees of the staffing firm, they are independent, free agent who can work for anyone else. A contractual relationship is formed only when the staffing firm finds a project for the independent professional, i.e. a contract between the staffing firm and the client, a matching contract between the staffing firm and the independent professional on a pre-agreed daily rate called "per diem".

That means, the staffing firm makes a handsome margin of reselling the independent professional's time to the client. Typically 30-50%.

Unless the independent professional is a super-star and in a hot industry that is always sought after by the staffing firm's clients, otherwise, the independent professional should not rely on the staffing firm as its only source of work. The independent professional must be able to develop its own client.

Some staffing firms will pre-qualify the independent professionals by interviewing them or even background check, some don't and will only do so if a potential project materializes.

Some staffing firms take responsible of the quality control of the project and may dedicate its own resource to oversee the project, some don't.

Associations:
Independent Professional Association ip-a.org
About Independent Professional Association (IP-A)
Independent Professional Association (IP-A) is an organization of self-employed knowledge workers. Formed in 2009, IP-A aims to create, sustain and promote an eco-system for local and international independent professionals by providing business, social support and services such as continuous learning, networking opportunities and membership benefits.

Professional Staffing Firm: a-connect, Eden McCallum

Global Expert Network: Gerson Lehrmen Group, CapVision

How come you know so much about "Independent Professional"?
I am myself an Independent Professional and I used to run a company that help independent professionals find project

How come you know so much about "Professional Staffing Firm"?
I used to run one - I co-founded and ran the first Asia office of a global professional staffing for matching independent professionals and client business consulting projects.

How come you know so much about Global Expert Network?
I have been working on many specialist projects for a global expert network platform and conducted many business interviews with the global experts sourced by this platform.

I have been spending quite some time now to learn French (3 months in France) and Japanese (6 weeks in Japan). I want to keep practicing the two languages and to learn more new words. However, with a busy city life, I find it very difficult to keep up and have yet to find the right method. So here is a new way that I am trying. Write a short passage everyday in English, use an online translator to convert it into French and Japanese, hand copy the two translated passage for practicing the written form and use a text to speech reader to read them out in French and Japanese. You are reading my very first article for this purpose.

J'ai été passer un certain temps maintenant d'apprendre le français (3 mois en France) et le japonais (6 semaines au Japon). Je veux continuer à pratiquer les deux langues et d'apprendre de nouveaux mots. Toutefois, une ville avec la vie, je trouve qu'il est très difficile de suivre et n'ont pas encore trouvé la bonne méthode. Voici donc une nouvelle voie que je cherche. Ecrire un court passage en anglais de tous les jours, utiliser un logiciel de traduction en ligne pour le convertir en français et en japonais, part copier les deux traduit le passage à la pratique de la forme écrite et d'utiliser un lecteur de synthèse vocale pour les lire en français et en japonais. Vous êtes en train de lire mon tout premier article à cet effet.

私は）フランスでフランス語（ 3ヶ月）を学習し、かつ日本語（ 6週間、日本ではかなりの時間を費やすことになった。私は2つの言語の練習を続けるより、新しい言葉を学びたいです。しかし、忙しい都会の生活で、私を維持するのは非常に困難を感じると、まだ右の方法を見つけなければならない。そこでここでは新しい方法ですが試みている。短い通路で、日常英語、フランス語、日本語、手のコピーに書かれたフォームの練習のための2つの翻訳の通路に変換すると音声の読者に、フランス語と日本語で声を出して読むにテキストを使用して、オンライン翻訳の使用を作成します。この目的のために私の非常に最初の記事を読んでいる。

We had a book club session, there were 8 of us and we shared the following books:

Business Cycles: History, Theory and Investment Reality - Lars Tvede
The four-hour workweek - Timothy Ferriss
A pale view of Hill - Kazuo Ishiguro
中國大歷史 - 黃仁宇
Screen play - Syd Field
0-1 - 澤田尚美
香港社會企業妙點子 - 謝家駒
關於跑步，我說的其實是? - 村上春樹

Wonderful event, always fun to hear about what other people are reading and why they like the book.