Big Time Birthday, Late Night T.V. and Startup.com

My son's first birthday was a blast. Lots of my relatives were there (many of my wife's were there for our first son's b-day in Seoul, so it evened out) as well as a few of our friends' families. The foreigners/non-Koreans were pretty impressed with the whole show and the food was pretty tame on the spices so no one got scared off on account of the food. We now have a ton of clothes and toys for both kids (on top of all the stuff I brought) which is a change from the Korean tradition of giving cash, but that's alright by me.

As I noted, the jetlag here is pretty brutal on me (no less because I know I'm heading back soon). So, if I'm not out with one of my friends (as I was tonight, a bud came over to watch a DVD: more on that later) I end up watching a lot of latenight TV. Now, in Korea there are many infomercial and shopping channels but I got to admit that Canada/the US has some interesting ones, to say the least. Here's a shortlist of some recent ones:
Beach Body, Cortislim - Your typical diet crap
Core Secrets, Bowflex - Your typical exercise machine/program crap
MHR USA - Hairloss miracle!
NGR - the secrets of how to get government grants
ProActive - the name of a dogfood...but in this case it's a skin care lotion.
Little Giant Ladder - how much for a ladder?!?
Transformervac - how much for a vacuum?!?
DirectBuy - Wow! Enter the exciting world of wholesale home furnishings!
Jack's Powerjuicer - You need vitamins!
MDR Vital Factors - You need more vitamins!
TurnerShop - Lots of stuff, compliments of Ted.
Inside Approach - The newest golf swing fixer-upper
MyAuto - Buy the factastic Tornado Fuel Saver!
The Shopping Channel - Anything and everything
4x Made Easy - Make millions of $ by trading the foreign currency markets...they give you all the tools of the top traders on Wall Street...except the advanced degrees, trading experience, talent and access to massive amounts of capital. Pure crap.
Making Money with Notes - Some sort of get-rich-quick scheme
Teach me to Trade - trading stock for fun and profit...it's so last century.
ePower and Profits and Auctions for Income - turn your worthless crap into gold by selling it on Ebay!
And finally: Tony Robbins - the king of the infomercial and he can be your personal life coach!

Ok, enough time wasted there. Like I said, my bud Minaz came over tonight. He's also threatening to come to Seoul just as Yusheng is...but he's planning on September for his trip. Cool. I've know Minaz for over 10 years and we've managed to stay friends even though we work in different areas of different industries and have about as different backgrounds as you can get. I guess we give each other an interesting viewpoint whenever we talk about stuff...which is cool. Deep down I think we're more similar than we care to admit, though.

Anyways, we watched Startup.com. It was a pretty cool movie. (I think I have to think of a better word than cool for everything.) It reminded me of when I had some dot bomb expereince in the ol' Internet gold rush age with a little firms in Vancouver. Man, we went to VCs (venture capitalists) and got the same reaction. The CEO dude was even extremely similar to the CEO of our firm. The difference was we started a bit later and didn't get the easy money...but from what I understand it has gotten funding since I left (and went to Seoul) but it's still looking to hit the bigtime. Minaz works in a pretty large Net concern now and we both saw parallels with some of the firms we've been involved with too: sweat equity, each person having a slightly different ideal in mind, conflicts and their resolution (or explosive end) and the simple fact that too many were trying to make too much with too little (well, not too little capital, that was the problem). Anyways, if you want a good idea of what went on during the Interet hey-day this is a good one. It's a documentary of a real firm, so the actors (of course) have no idea what is going to happen next...all real people. If you need constant action or don't have an interest it'll probably put you to sleep quick-like, though.