Some quick, stream of consciousness thoughts:

Q1

US economy continued to stagnate.  The stock market hit a low in March.  After the famous Sequoia Startup RIP presentation we put plans in place to shut down our Beijing R&D team.  I took the lead on the overall plan for the company.  It was the right thing to do but it was extremely unfun because the team was doing many great things and our Beijing R&D operations fed my interest in China-related activities.

Went to China February 22 – March 4 (or so).  Took two half-days off to tour Chinese contemporary art galleries with RedBoxStudio and Maya Kovskaya.  Still haven’t written about those 2 amazing half-days.

Q2

April. TravelCom in Atlanta.  We announced that we hit 1 mm UV/month.  I also picked a social media fight with TravelPost and Kayak.  Fortunately, that ended well, with a little bit of media coverage we wouldn’t have had, and everyone ended up staying friends.  Meanwhile we are making huge progress with our UpTake Blog Network and our idea to create Travel Insights 100.

On my China side projects, CNReviews was rebooted and reimagined by Kai Pan, my new lead editor and partner.  We also start getting contributions from BloggerInsight, which are invaluable for providing some more business-related content.

Q3

UpTake continued to do extremely well, but in part because of seasonality of travel traffic.  I took time off to attend a few conferences:  Gnomedex, Conde Nast World Savers Congress and the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting.  Finally decided to move on to pursue my interests in China and social media.  Yen and I started making plans quietly for my departure.  Everyone on my staff is past the 2 year mark, and doing a great job, so no guilt over leaving.

Q4

Left UpTake in October.  Announced my departure.  Yen wrote a very nice farewell post as well.  But then get pulled back into the PhoCusWright preparations.

In other matters, I spoke at AAMA Entrepreneurs workshop about lessons learned from my startup experience.  Led a case study at Plug & Play University with Professor Tom Kosnik.  Was on two panels at Rethink Hawaii: one on China and the Internet, the other on Fast Pitch.  Coached a Stanford E145 team called “Midnight Love.”

In November, attended PhoCusWright Conference.  Spoke at PhoCusWright at the “Blogger Town Hall” meeting.  Blogged about travel innovation.

Bummed out that I couldn’t attend CNBloggerCon this year.  Anyway, it was in a remote cave (in Lianzhou) somewhere in Guangdong Province near the Hunan border.  Amazing they had Wifi, but the location was chosen because it was not likely that authorities would shut down the conference.  In previous years, it was in Guangzhou (2008), Beijing (2007), Hangzhou (2006), and Shanghai (2005).  CNReviews sponsored the conference and we sent Kai and Min Guo there to cover it.  But Kai didn’t choose to write anything about it.  Rebecca MacKinnon did.

China trip: Dec 1-11 (or so).  Attended China Travel Distribution Summit and was quite honored to be sitting on the same panel as guys like Fritz Demopolous of Qunar.com, Ivan Zhang of Kuxun.cn, and Hao Wu of DaoDao.com.  I’ve know Fritz for a while and am always impressed by what he has accomplished, and his humble but intellectually assertive demeanor.  Someone said that they consider Fritz to be 70% Chinese.  That’s something to aspire to.

Return to California.  Spent the holidays at home, with Karen’s relatives coming to celebrate Christmas with us.  Dress up as Santa Claus for the first time.

She was on my team at Netcentives in 1999, and then left to learn photography and ultimately to become a flight attendant based in Boston for United Airlines. She was on United Airlines flight 175 when it crashed into the World Trade Center at 9:03 am EST / 6:03 am PST (full timeline of events on Wikipedia).

Every year I try to drop a quick note on her guestbook at her tribute site, SweetAlicia.org. I also posted about her on the then Kango (now UpTake) blog here.  Pat Jenkins at UpTake also posted on September 11 Memorials around the country.

Here’s a few pictures of Alicia from SweetAlicia.org:

While Alicia was Netcentives and worked on my team, it wasn’t until after she died that I realized that there was a lot I didn’t know about her. The crazy dot-com bubble days, where I felt like Keanu Reeves in Speed trying to keep the bus from exploding, wasn’t conducive to really spending time with people and building deeper relationships. Anyway, on 9/11 I often read her tribute site and other tribute pages like this one on BrokenHeartTrading.com and on Sep11Memories.org.

During this past year, I found an old waterproof film camera that I had failed to develop over the years. I developed it and found pictures of Alicia and my other team members on one of my most memorable offsites. I uploaded a those old Netcentives Offsite Photos from 1999 onto Flickr.

In the photo below, Alicia is 3rd from the right:

In the photo below, Alicia is 5th from the left:

In this photo below, Alicia is #2 from the left:

You come into contact with so many people in your life.  Seasons come and go.  There are so many people in this picture that I care about and consider friends, and yet we’ve lost touch.  Paul Erlicht, Deann Fairfield Work, Bethany Selland, Jonathan Blatt, Ashwin Verma, Tom Harvey, Lisa Cross.  And that’s just the people that decided to go surfing at that offsite.  It was a blessing to work with so many amazing people during that season of my life.

9/11 and Alicia reminds me to make an effort to go one level deeper in getting to know people, beyond the normal course of business.   I wish I had done so with Alicia.

Remembering her on this day.

I then went through and added some people that I know or wanted to follow that I wasn’t subscribing to, and also pruned some people that I was subscribed to for no reason that also wasn’t subcribing back to me. I didn’t really scrutinize the 90 reciprocal subscriptions.

Here are the results:

You have 229 subscriptions and 181 subscribers. Here’s how they break down:

Here’s a picture of Shannon at the Blogtropol.us lounge at Web 2.0 Expo:

Shannon has an earlier post with tips on being productive.  I like them and thought I’d just capture them here:

1. Dress for success
2. Stay hydrated
3. Vary your posture and pay attention to your surroundings
4. Surround yourself with others who are getting things done
5. Have to-do lists that you refer back to on a regular basis
6. Cross off at least something from your to-do lists every day
7. Snack and eat healthily
8. Get some physical exercise every day

I feel like I already focus on 4-6 and I want to continue to do that better.

Maybe what I’ll tackle next is #8 and #1!  Number 1 is relatively easier to accomplish than #8 which has not been an area of success for me in the past.

Thanks Shannon for the tips

Here’s the storefront.

Here’s the front entrance.

Here’s some of the shelves, chock full of yarn.

Here’s the yarn I purchased.

Here’s how much it cost (in RMB).

Here’s the shopkeeper and me!

Christine Lu launched her Harmonious Fries award to celebrate people trying to bring people together rather than split them apart. Here’s mine!

Thanks Christine! Follow @christinelu at Twitter!

Here’s my TechCrunch comment:

It amazes me to see TechCrunch haters on virtually every topic here on TechCrunch. I feel blessed to live in the USA where freedom of speech and freedom of the press allows us to express virtually any point of view without serious concern about my personal liberties being curtailed by the state. I (L) USA!

At the same time, it disturbs me that the anti (L) China commenters are so much more judgmental and one-sided than the pro (L) China commenters. Look, I am not fluent in Chinese and can’t read Chinese media or BBS. BUT there seems to be ABSOLUTELY NO EFFORT MADE by most Western audiences to even UNDERSTAND the point of view of the Chinese people who feel Westerners are getting only 1 side of the story.

The amount of global awareness by educated Chinese people is on par with that of other educated people in most countries. It is the developed 1st world, and America in particular, where people have completely taken their freedoms for granted and not sought to engage in dialogue with others, and just take their own preconceived notions and allow events and news to just reinforce whatever they were already thinking.

On balance the pro (L) China commenters seems A LOT more reasonable and cosmopolitan than the anti (L) China commenters, at least on this thread. Doesn’t that surprise you? Aren’t “we” the ones who are free and “they” the ones who are brainwashed and held down by a repressive government?

Look — if “they” can climb over the Great Firewall via proxy servers (which btw is a total pain in the *ss) to see the outside world, maybe “we” can read Global Voices Online or Rolang Soong’s fabulous translations on EastSouthWestNorth blog (www.zonaeuropa.com) to climb in. Visit. Listen. Keep an open mind. Try to understand. Have a dialogue. Then try to convince. That is far superior than staying in our own little world with our own preconceived notions.

America may only have another 20+ years as de-facto world leader to steer the rules in place before we turn over leadership to a more complex multipolar group which will undoubtedly include China, India, EU, and Japan. Let’s regain our moral authority by reengaging the world with more humility and open-mindedness and only then will we get to create the world we want before we have to turn it over. The close-minded comments of the TC haters on this board convince me that we are still “same bed, different dreams” with the Chinese, and most other peoples in this world for that matter.

Here’s the first version with all the @ replies included:

Not surprisingly, the top words (including below the fold) are:

1. Twitter
2. @davidfeng
3. @chrsitinelu
4. post
5. nice

Here the version without the @ replies:

The top 5 words are, uninterestingly:

1. Twitter
2. Great
3. Nice
4. Post
5. China

There you have it. My Twitter zeitgeist.

I’ve always wished I had the same massive information processing gene as Robert Scoble and wondered if there was some upper limit. In fact, I even considered the possibility of the Scobleizer being a Cylon, because of his incredible ability to consume, synthesize, and publish information.

Probably not. Even Scoble has limits…20,000 Followed in Twitter.

Well it sounds like today is the day that the upper limit has been reached. @Scobleizer just Tweeted:

So the upper limit with his information processsing abilities is 20,000 followed. I am at about 200 followed and it is already generated “continuous partial attention.” So far I have loved Twitter and it has expanded my peripheral vision tremendously.

So its nice to know that Scobleizer is not a Cylon and has some upper limit on information processing.

UPDATE: Robert Seidman (@seidman) had almost the exact same idea only a day or two later. Read his take here. This seems weird. Maybe it is not @scobleizer who is the Cylon but…wait, what’s that song that I keep hearing?

CYLON WATCH ON TWITTER:

• @elliottng – Elliott Ng – CN Reviews and UpTake Blog
• @seidman – Robert Seidman – TV by the Numbers
• @scobleizer – Either NOT a Cylon or this 20,000 limit is a headfake

I have been investigating the obvious trend of RMB appreciation (or some would accurately point out, relative RMB appreciation to the declining dollar) and what to do about it.  I wrote about using CNY ETNs to hedge RMB appreciation and later shared more links on this subject.

I’m currently in process on setting up an Everbank account that is based on non-deliverable forward contracts.  Its a complicated and obscure thing to do for a retail investor so even though large, sophisticated players may have ways to hedge RMB-USD exchange rate, the little guy like me has only a few options.  More on this at my China group blog, CN Reviews.