Korean BBQ in HCMC

You can't really go wrong with grilled meat. At Seoul House up the
street from the Riverside Hotel in D1.

Not exactly Fedex

Had to ship some stuff internally within Vietnam. It's charged by
weight; 35 total kgs went for about 400k VND and arrived from Hanoi to
HCMC in about four business days.

That's the good news. Part of the bad news can be seen in the pic. The
boxes not only got pummeled like a 16th seed in the NCCAs, it got
holes chewed thru it like a box of Cheez-its stored in the cupboards
of a slum tenement.

Good thing I was only shipping some dry ramen.

Last meal in Hanoi

I am leaving Vietnam's capital for a bit, so for a farewell dinner I
went out with some coworkers for a celebratory nosh of dog.

It is typically prepared seven ways but the restaurant was short this
evening so we only got five versions. The braised/stewed one was the
worse while the crispy stir fried one really good, especially with the
flavorful but weak rice wine (ruou nep).

Typical Breakfast at Highlands

This is what I typically eat at for breakfast Highlands - cause it is
the best deal. Also their wifi is more stable than my hotel's.

iPhone Hates Vietnam

Playing around with an OTB iPhone (that would be an out-of-the-box for the acronym challenged), I discovered that when you enter a contact on the phone, you cannot choose Vietnam as the country location of your contact.

You have Indonesia and Singapore, but not other ASEAN countries, such as Thailand.  I guess the same is true for South America, where you are limited to Mexico (which is in North America), Argentina and Brazil.  

I understand that the phones are not meant to be supported in these omitted countries, but this omission means that Apple doesn't think you should have friends in these countries either.  

There are hacks to fix this, I am sure, but it should be standard.  Good thing for me, I'm a xenophobe.   

vCard to CSV Converter

One of the downsides to migrating to OS X for work is in its handling of contacts, and particularly, using your contacts to create a mail merge.  

To be sure, one can use Entourage (part of the MS Office suite), but I do not like Entourage for my mail mainly because of backup concerns, its integration with my phone, and mail merge doesn't work all that great with the interface anyhow.

Effective mail merge for me means exporting a batch of contacts to an Excel file.  

To do this with Address Book contacts, one builds out a group, export the group's vCard and then find a third party vCard to CSV conversion tool.  Tools such as A-to-G (Address Book to Gmail) and Address Book to CSV Exporter do not work, despite their names, because their CSV format is designed for Gmail imports, and not for an Excel based mail merge.

What works better is this online vCard to LDIF/CSV Converter.  It is by no means perfect, and you will have to manually import the created CSV file into Excel, as the automatic import creates a lot of errors.  

But going through this multi-step tango is still quicker than retyping data in Excel.  Someone should figure out an easier way to skin this cat, but for now this works.  

Lunch of rice

At Bun Bo Hue, the chain in HCMC.

Return to Vietnormalcy

Less than 12 hours after landing, it's back to 'Vietnormalcy.' In time order, the following occurred:

1. immigration/customs: I knew-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who was going to help grease my way through customs. No, I wasn't bringing any incendiary pamphlets in tow with my overweight luggage.

Rather, I was bring in a suitcase of IT equipment to outfit a small office. I wasn't about to sell the equipment, so I don't think I should be taxed on it, but who knows what the customs guy would think and how would I explain it to them. It would be the same as me bringing cash into the country to start a business - I shouldn't (and don't) get taxed on that. So I was (morally) comfortable with trying to slip through. This was my version of FDI (foreign direct investment), as I am adding capital assets to this country.

Bypassing (or at least quickly being processed) by immigration and customs is definitely a Vietnam thing. I got escorted through the diplomatic line and got out of the airport pretty darn quickly.

2. highway accident: so the off-duty customs guys drove me back into town. On the highway back - the Thang Long bridge - we crossed the scene of a deadly accident. Some person was evacuated 20+ meters from their motorbike. Luckily for me, it was dark and I didn't have good visibility out - it's sad but true, I can't bear to look at the bodies on the ground. In the year or so, I'm up to about half a dozen now. And folks wonder why I don't own a motorbike.

3. ripped off by customs: so I got back to town and the customs guy demands payment. I figure we sorta split the difference or something, but nope. Full payment. For every single computer. Normally, you would get credit for at least one computer as personal use or something (I've brought in two, went through legit channels and no tax or duties).

So, basically I'm getting ripped. It's past midnight, there are two guys, I have 150+ kgs of luggage, I'm a bit hung over from the flight and my local contact is fast asleep. God dammit. So I paid up.

Lesson learned - getting reamed by the government is less painful than getting reamed by crooked government employees on the take.

4. pho breakfast: next morning, jet lagged and pissed as heck for getting separated from my VND, I attended a pho breakfast. Not a big deal, but this was with a group of shareholders of a publicly listed company. We were eating at a local joint that is popular with the local business crowd, enjoying their 20k bowls of noodle. I can't imagine going to a NYSE-listed shareholders' breakfast in a local diner or something back in the States. Certain things are a bit different 'round these parts.