Wedding planning, too many details

I heard from my cousin (as a joke a few years ago) that you will be told by friends to just elope, the planning is a royal pain. You laugh and then half-way through realize that it WOULD have been a lot easier…My parents did not think that a trip to Vegas was funny by the way. I am starting to get a first-hand understanding of everything that is going into wedding planning however. Just setting up the website takes hours. And then you find out that they charge for the type of website…(it took me another couple of hours to get all of the information back down!)

Some great moments recently

Two great quotes, one from work: "Come and find fruitful information that makes you exciting and sleepless!" And the other a company near my apartment "Reality World Consulting" Still trying to figure out what that means!

I had an old moment the other day. While waiting for the elevator, I looked down and realized that I had walked out of the apartment wearing two different shoes (this was definitely a first!)

Talk about a parallel to the military

An overseas assignment requires you to be married, AND that you only come home once during your year abroad. Your family? Oh, you are not allowed to see them, and at the end of the year, they have to submit their passport to HR to ensure that they did not visit you. I mean seriously, what sort of power-trip do these people get? We want you to concentrate on work and not family. Oh, did i mention you are not even allowed to call your family? Wow. I wonder if skype has made that harder to track...You would probably need another computer though, since I am sure that there are people in HR tracking your online activities as well ;)

2 weeks of recruiting in the US

For some reason (I am sure it was a good one, or that is what I will believe), I was chosen to do 2 weeks of recruiting in the US for new candidates. It was great to be back in that environment (although I did get tired of seeing the same two presentation concepts after more than 60 interviews!) We had fantastic food though, dim sum, tapas, fusion, etc. I saw friends in most cities, managed work back in Korea, and crashed out pretty exhausted each night.

The final day was great, I went to >play, a digital media conference at Berkeley. It was great to run into a number of old friends, and to hear about some new trends. Perhaps most amusing was hearing a VC talk about Samsung's mobile phone business going away in 3-4 years. When I went up to him afterwards he said "well, maybe I was a little harsh…"

Fun with reimbursement

So I have two outstanding reimbursement items that I need to work out. The first was a cab ride from London. The receipt said, "minimum tax of 2 pounds", but the "total" came out to 11.25, which was 1.25 pounds in tax. Needless to say, the credit card charge was for 12.00, and Samsung wouldn't let that one by. So now, about 6 months later I get another flag in my email from the finance department. 6 months!??! The senior manager in the group said he would give me $25 in order to have people not work on this for me. The finance department really makes things easy as you can see (like needing apparently 3-4 levels of approval to get "overtime" pay, which is a problem when your department is judged based on how much overtime you have worked…Since obviously time in the office will make you a better marketer…)

Okay off that soap-box and on to another one. On the recruiting trip I was not allowed to use my "personal" Samsung credit card, I had to use my "Corporate" one (which believe it or not, has a MUCH smaller limit, I went over budget halfway through the trip). This doesn't happen with Electronics, only with my official company (the Professional Males…this is an old reference, I won't bother explaining). I booked my hotel on hotels.com, and therefore had no "official" hotel receipt. Needless to say, a call to the hotel (not helpful, they in general were rude, surprising of a Westin), and then my credit card will hopefully have solved all of this!...WOW is all I can say in the end…

Camera phone in market, sort of

So we created a great commercial: http://youtube.com/watch?v=GwVq2Djiit0. The only downside was that in many of the markets, the phone was not actually ready. It was something due to challenges in production (and I have ideas as to why, but I don't want to get in trouble). Needless to say, there wasn't much to say, great camera, great research, tough break…At least I got to work on a cool commercial!