Havana Nights...

Win a date?

What shocks and amazes me is that fact how far people are willing to go for publicity or for in need of cash or to end up on the local newspapers for a day... oh come why why why?

check this ebay link out:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6045981906

The up and down week...

Well lots of things happened this week...

Let's start with Monday:

Went to school in the morning expecting the Vietnamese Police shooting squad ordered by my boss to have me shot for the results of the Audit report that was done on the IT department during my birthday week. Well it was not soo bad as I thought it was going to be. There was not squad and he did not have to say much at all. In fact said nothing at all. Life is normal.. Time to continue. Went to play street Hockey outside my building at the UNIS Gym. It was nice and my co-worker friend Justin was there as he got Canadian ties to Hockey. Went to Jafa afterwards and watch HNIC where Toronto played against Ottawa. Good to see Don Cherry unleash hell again.

Tuesday morning, I get an email message from Justin telling me that his wife is in the hospital after she fainted and could not see. After a series of medical tests, it was confirmed that his 24 year old wife suffered a celebral stroke which cause pressure and bleeding in her brain. She was operated on and medically induced into a coma. Not a good day for everyone in the IT department.

Wednesday morning, nothing changed much except many were asking where Justin was and what was going on. Life continues...

Thursday was a hectic day because I had to prepare documents and technical facts for the IT committee meeting we had in the late afternoon. Once again, I expected the shooting squad on standby for my execution as we discussed the Audit report in detail. Well luckily I survived the meeting without a single bullet being fired. Perhaps it had to do with a last minute phone call from the hospital with the operation update on Justin's wife.

A bomb went off in the IT department Friday morning when I discovered that the school's connection to the Internet was down as a result of construction or repairs by the state-owned telecommunications ministry. It went down at 1:00 AM and came back up and running after school at 3:45 PM. During this time, everyone was calling in and inquiring what is going on. I had to communicate this information with management which took additional time out of my workaholic day in addition to my day to day duties with the school.

Minh Nguyet and I decided to try and visit Justin's wife in the hospital but the visitation hours were limited and also the family wishes for privacy while she is heavily sedated in the ICU department at the French Hospital.

Time to Invest in Tim Horton's ??

Pretty much every day for the past 35 years, Carl Long's routine has included at least one visit to Tim Hortons. That's more than 12,000 cups of coffee, maybe half as many doughnuts and, he figures, an investment of close to $20,000. After all that caffeine and sugar, the retired Ottawa tool salesman doesn't even want to think about the cost to his health.

This week, though, Mr. Long will be looking for a little payback.
Shares of Tim Hortons, Canada's iconic and wildly successful fast-food chain, are expected to go on sale this Friday on the New York Stock Exchange.

It's a complicated stock offering, and, ironically, one not easily available to Canadians. But that's not likely to keep Mr. Long and thousands of others from trying to get in on what some financial analysts are already calling the country's investment event of 2006.

"It's time to make my money count for something that gives me more than a few minutes of pleasure," says Mr. Long, a double-double drinker who gets his fix at one of several Tim's outlets in west Ottawa. His anticipation is easy to understand. In addition to its near-astonishing status as a Canadian cultural institution, Tim Hortons remains one of the country's most amazing business growth stories.

In the past five years, the number of Tim's outlets has jumped by nearly 50 per cent to more than 2,600 in Canada and nearly 300 in the U.S. Over the same period, sales increased 62 per cent, so that by last year Tim's generated a staggering $1.2 billion U.S. in revenue for its American owner, Wendy's International.

"It's a gold mine, pure and simple," says Peter Oakes, a New York food industry analyst. "It just keeps humming along."
Not everyone is quite so optimistic about Tim Hortons' worth as a stock investment. Some analysts believe its growth has peaked, that the Canadian market is saturated and that the company will never achieve a high level of success in the U.S., where Tim's is just another fast-food chain and not a national symbol.

But such talk is unlikely to deter those Canadians who consider an investment in Tim Hortons to be a show of patriotism, says Adrian Mastracci, president of KCM Wealth Management in Vancouver.

"I think there will be a lot more heart, a lot more more emotional attachment, than usual involved in people's decisions regarding Tim Hortons," he says. "I'd never say it's a bad investment, but I'd advise people to have a coffee and doughnut and think things over before jumping."

Even so, it's easy to understand why owning a chunk of Tim's has a magnetic, almost mythological appeal for many Canadians.

"In so many ways the story of Tim Hortons is the essential Canadian story," the late writer Pierre Berton, whose annual garden parties were known to feature buckets of Timbits, once said. "It is a story of success and tragedy, of big dreams and small towns, of old-fashioned values and tough-fisted business, of hard work and of hockey."

It also a story of marketing genius, one that seemed even to seduce Mr. Berton, a Canadian legend himself, with its nostalgic appeal.

Tim Hortons, which is after all simply a fast-food chain that offers safe and reliable fare, achieved its iconic status in large measure through a careful application of down-home, folksy branding.

It's difficult to say which came first, the reality or the market image, but the company's "True Stories" ad campaign probably resonates with Canadians because the tales it tells contain the ring of, well, truth.

Given that Tim's kiosks were set up in Turin for Canadian Olympians, and that Canadian soldiers have been promised an outlet in Afghanistan, it's not difficult to buy into the TV spot featuring the young Canadian travelling through Europe with the Tim's mug attached to his backpack.

Or considering Mr. Long's 35-year-long pilgrimage to Tim's, nor is it hard to believe the ad featuring Lillian, the gentle grandmother who trudges up a hill every day, rain or shine, to visit the Tim's outlet in Lunenberg, N.S.

Then there are the hockey ads.
"You look around the arena some mornings and every parent is holding a Tim's coffee," says Leigh-Anne Bifolchi, a Barrhaven hockey mom and a Tim Hortons regular (she takes a single cream). And, adds her husband, Grant (a double-double guy), "they're all stamping their feet to stay warm. It's so Canadian."

The down-home image goes beyond mere marketing, though.
Tim Hortons insists its franchise operators get involved at the grassroots level, supporting community recreation and sports activities, including the hugely popular Timbits hockey tournaments. One day every June, franchisees are required to donate the proceeds from their coffee sales to the Tim Hortons foundation that operates six camps for underprivileged kids in Canada and the U.S. Last year that amounted to a $5.5-million infusion for the camps.

"It's not an accident that this huge company makes people feel at home," says Tommy Chi, another double-double customer at the Barrhaven Tim's on Strandherd Road. "They work hard at cultivating an image and then they deliver."

Even some people who don't much care for the coffee and doughnuts are regulars. Middle-aged sisters Betty Anderson and Jean Dagenais meet two or three times a week at the Tim's outlet in the Greenbank Mall for a chat over bottled water, a muffin and an occasional coffee.

"It's convenient, it's clean, it's quick and it's inexpensive," says Ms. Dagenais. "There's really no other place you can go that gives you those things. I guess I'd say we feel comfortable here."

Marketing hominess might be a business strategy these days, but when Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Tim Horton open his first outlet in Hamilton in 1964, the ambience was naturally folksy and modest.

So were Mr. Horton's ambitions. Although he played on four Stanley Cup-winning teams and was an NHL all-star six times, Mr. Horton was not especially well paid, like most players of the era. He was looking for a way to make a few extra dollars after his hockey days were over.

In the mid-'50s, before he became a fan favourite for his "heads-up" puck-rushing style, Mr. Horton had tried the fast-food business. His Toronto hamburger joint went bankrupt after a year, but he developed a taste for selling food and was open to the idea of a doughnut shop when approached by three friends in 1964.

They chose Hamilton for their first outlet because a potential competitor, Mister Donut, had no stores there. With Mr. Horton's name emblazoned on a yellow sign outside, the new outlet received a encouraging welcome from residents of the blue-collar city, who spent about $35,000 on coffee and doughnuts in the first year.

In fact, that's all they could buy. The first Tim Hortons offered only coffee and a few types of doughnuts. Everything cost 10 cents. Right from the start, the outlet's most popular baked goods were the apple fritter and the Dutchie, two of Mr. Horton's personal favourites and still among the biggest sellers 42 years later.

Although Mr. Horton left the business to others -- his role was to be a figurehead and help bankroll the enterprise -- he readily agreed in 1965 that franchising was the answer to some cash flow problems.

It was a brilliant, and lucky, stroke.
The first franchisee was Ron Joyce, a ruggedly handsome Hamilton policeman whose relationship with the doughnut would turn out to be much more than the stereotype.

A high-school dropout who left Nova Scotia at 15, Mr. Joyce possessed a powerful instinct for business. Within two years, he opened two more outlets and by 1967 had become Mr. Horton's full partner.

As Mr. Joyce began to develop Tim's corporate culture -- carefully screened franchisees, clean outlets, food products and coffee of consistent quality -- Mr. Horton continued his NHL career.

He had agreed to play one last year for the expansion Buffalo Sabres in 1974 when his exotic Italian-built Pantera spun out of control at 160 kilometres an hour on his way home from a game in Toronto. He was killed instantly at 44.

By then, the chain had grown to 40 outlets and was already something of an institution in southern Ontario. Mr. Joyce decided it was time for a big national push.

In 1975, he became full owner after paying Mr. Horton's widow Lori, a former Ice Capades star, $1 million and a Cadillac for her shares. (She later sued Mr. Joyce to regain her half of the chain, claiming her decision to sell was affected by prolonged drug and alcohol abuse. The suit was denied.)

As he expanded throughout Ontario, Mr. Joyce introduced the chain's first major menu change, the Timbit. Although similar bite-sized doughnuts -- they are not actually the holes, as many people believe -- were already being offered by some U.S. doughnut chains, Timbits became an instant sensation in Canada.

"There's nothing better than a box of Timbits for the kids in the back of the car," Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell wrote a few years ago. "Nothing better to pick up spirits during a grim winter morning at the office, either."

The 1980s brought bigger change. In 1983, Tim's became the first national chain to introduce, albeit gradually, no-smoking outlets. The company's expansion was broadened to include smaller outlets and kiosks in gas stations, highrises, hospitals and shopping malls. For convenience, drive-through lanes were added to many outlets and dozens of car service-only sites were established.

There were also major menu additions, starting with soup in 1985, followed over the next decade by chili, sandwiches and bagels. As the chain evolved from a coffeeshop to a restaurant, the word "donuts" was quietly removed from signs outside the stores.

In the early '90s, with Tim's amid its most extensive expansion ever, Mr. Joyce authored a surprising new chapter in the Tim's story. While vacationing at his winter home in Florida, he became a golfing buddy of Dave Thomas, the Wendy's founder who had transformed his aw-shucks personality into an advertising coup.

It turned out the two men had something in common besides golf and their passion for the food industry: children's charities. In 1975, Mr. Joyce had established the Tim Hortons Children's Foundation in memory of his former partner. Mr. Thomas, adopted as a child, had contributed millions to children's causes in the U.S.

"It's amazing how our attachment to working with children blended with our attachment to working with the restaurants," Mr. Thomas, who died in 2002, once said.

They started modestly by opening 13 combination Wendy's-Tim Hortons restaurants in Canada. In 1995, they stunned the business world with a $620-million merger that made Mr. Joyce the biggest shareholder in the third-largest hamburger chain in the U.S. and made Canada's largest coffee-and-doughnut chain, and a national icon, a division of a U.S.-based company.

If anything, though, the move seemed to enhance the essential Canadianness of Tim's at home.
"While Canadians are normally sensitive to the threat of American-owned companies, the sale of this 'national institution' to an American hamburger company did not seem to affect Tim Hortons' link to national mythology at all," says Toronto historian Steve Penfold.

In his essay Eddie Shack Was No Tim Horton: Donuts And The Folklore Of Mass Culture In Canada, Mr. Penfold argues our national obsession with doughnuts in general, and Tim Hortons in particular, is "curiously disconnected" from the product's American origins.

But the answer to that conundrum is simple, says Mr. Mastracci: It's not just the doughnut, but the entire Tim Hortons experience that is Canadian.

"I think we feel a certain pride that we are exporting a bit of our culture to the U.S," he says. "It's the reverse of the usual."

For Mr. Joyce, the deal was his chance to make it big in the U.S. Tim's move south of the border actually began in the 1980s with a few stores around Buffalo. Although growth was steady if modest, the outlets never caught on in the U.S. in the same way as Canada.

But inside Wendy's itself, Tim's soon emerged as a white knight.
"I don't think it gets nearly enough credit for giving Wendy's whatever lustre it has," says Mr. Oakes, the food industry analyst.

Although the Ohio-based hamburger chain has 21/2 times more outlets, its revenue was barely twice that of Tim's in 2005. Even more significantly, in pure dollars, Tim's profits actually outstripped Wendy's by more than $50 million.

Some of that gap can be explained by the hit Wendy's took after a California woman claimed she was served a severed finger in a bowl of chili. By the time the hoax was uncovered, several carnivorous American hedge funds had scooped up shares at shrunken value and began to lean on Wendy's to spin off its doughnut sidekick as a separate entity on the stock market.

After some resistance, Wendy's eventually agreed last summer to put 18 per cent of Tim Hortons on the market by this spring. The remaining shares are to be distributed over the next few months, first to Wendy's shareholders, and what's left later into the open market.

Only 35 per cent of the shares have been set aside for Canadian dealers. By the time the big institutional clients get a first-crack look at the offering, there's not expected to be much more than slim pickings left for ordinary investors.

But Mr. Long has already primed his investment dealer. He doesn't expect the shares to reap big dividends. In fact, he thinks all the hype means the shares will be fully valued when they come on the market, leaving little room for profit.

All the same, he wants a piece of the action. "I'm a Tim's regular and a Canadian. We fit together."
- - -
Tim Hortons: A chronology
1964: Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Tim Horton, opens first store in Hamilton with partner Jim Charade. Ron Joyce, a former policeman, buys the franchise a year later as Horton and Charade begin to expand into southwestern Ontario.

1967: Joyce becomes full partner in Tim Donut Ltd.
1974: Horton, now playing with the Buffalo Sabres, is killed in a car crash. In 1975, Joyce buys Horton's share of the business from Horton's widow, Lori, for $1 million and a Cadillac.

1985: First first U.S. franchise opens in Amherstburg, New York.
1986: Tim's introduces its now-famous "Roll Up the Rim to Win" contest.
1988: Tim Hortons takes "doughnuts" off its signage as it evolves from bakery to fast-food restaurant.
1993: Tim Hortons expands its menu and moves heavily into lunch business with soups, sandwiches and chili. Bagels are added in 1996.

1996: Joyce sells Tim Hortons to American hamburger chain Wendy's International Inc. in a $620-million deal. Joyce joins Wendy's management. As part of the deal, he gets about 16 million shares in the firm.

2001: U.S. doughnut giant Krispy Kreme challenges Tim's on its home turf with plans to open 32 stores in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes.

2002: Recently retired from Wendy's, Joyce sells his Wendy's shares saying he is frustrated by the company's poor performance.

2004: The Canadian Oxford Dictionary is amended to included the phrase "double double" -- the way two-cream, two-sugar coffee is ordered at Tim Hortons.

April 2005: Krispy Kreme admits defeat, declaring bankruptcy for its Canadian operations and putting its assets on the market.

July 2005: Wendy's gives in to activist American investors and announces plans to take Tim Hortons public in March 2006. The initial share offering is expected Friday.

--National Post--

To be Audited or not to be Audited...

I am getting Audited...

Well what a hectic week it has been still not finished yet. First of all it was my birthday on Monday night where my best friends tricked me in a surprise where I went into my apartment full of people that I don't know and they were hired Nha Quay!! (country-side) people who came for the free Beer Hanoi and cake goodies. Of course I am kidding but mmmm the thought of such reality would be interesting would it? Anyway, back to the surprised birthday party of my close friends and people from my work, we celebrated my last crazy up and down 3 decades and a beer toast to the next 3 up and down decades which I am not really looking forward to.

I am getting Audited...

Yes, I do have wrinkles forming on my face and a hair line starting to look like the Bow River where the erosion is taking place near Prince's Island and my sleep hours are becoming shorter that I do see the sun come up everyday instead of waking up where the sun goes down.

I am getting Audited...

Well guess what? What can possible be happening on your birthday? You get audited at work!!! Wow huh? So yeah this American living in Bangkok married a beautiful Thai wife who is a IT consultant that knows exactly every byte or bit coming inside out of my school's network is watching over my shoulder making sure I am doing what I am suppose to be doing.

I am getting Audited...

So monday night, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday all day, I have a dude who following me around taking notes with his super duper WIFI, bluetooth, 3 GHZ, 2 GIG RAM, 17 inch monitor, Tablet laptop computer inspecting my keystrokes and asking very uncomfortable questions (not about my sex life you fool) about the network that I built at our school.

I am getting Audited...

Exactly 2 hours from now, I will be sitting down, legs crossed next to my boss while my verdict (Perhaps I am on trial for my technical and managerial expertise) is being read out to the senior managers and the members of the IT team. I am sure everyone in the room is thinking is this Scot guy know what he doing and we want him to continue working at the school for a long time or it time to get some old fart who experienced in IT management to come and take over the fort.

I am getting Audited...

Did I not forget to mentioned that at 4:15 PM I am playing on a teacher's football team playing against the number one student team? I could consider that this is my only opportunity to find some useful excercise (Step #1 -> After turning 30, look after your body) out of the entire long week of stress to de-stress myself and return to the happy Scotty he once used to be. Well, here is to my crossing fingers that I don't have an appointment to hear my verdict at 4:15 PM today in my boss's office.

I am getting Audited...

Where will life take me now?

Well for those who don't know, I am officially 30 today. Yes I was born and arrived on this earth 3 decades ago out of my mother's tummy and now I am writing a journal entry on the other side of the world in a country that not my own listening to a relaxing piano solo to fill the ambiance around me.

Today was good, very busy day at work living the life of a manager trying to meet everyone's expectations but finally at the end of the day mission accomplished. My co-worker was trying to get me out of work and leave the firewall in pieces in the IT office and go home and then go out for a coffee or drink as part of my birthday celebrations.

When we arrived at the apartment building, he said he had to go and get something while I wait for Minh Nguyet to arrive at the lobby so we can go and get some dinner. Later we arrive at the apartment and there was everyone from work and my friends to throw a mini surprise birthday party for me. Food, fruit, candy and a few beers to fill up my belly and finally to finish the party with a home made black forest cake from Melissa.

Now just heading into bed wishing everyone thanks for the emails, Kraft dinner and their love from all over the world.

God bless you all!

Love Scotty

P.S - now where did Phil leave the ham again?

The night before the big 3-0!!!

Well today been interesting because its sunday and its suppose to be a day of relaxing and taking chill pills. Work is hectic but managable. I guess that's why they call it managment. Spent the whole day yesterday doing some film work with another canadian teacher friend who making a school project movie about a psycho teacher who takes over the world and implements communist ideologies with Choco pies as the energy that powers him in his world taking adventures. Today I played baseball once again with the canada team and we kick the crap out of the Teipei team with our beloved auzzie girl and her new bat. Two out, bottem of the fourth, bases loaded and she belts the software over the right fielder's head and scores the improbable grand slam.

Went for beer afterwards and we all got slammed celebrating our first win of the year. Came home and passed out for 3-4 hours and now writing this journal entry with a nasty headache. What a way to prepare for the next decade of my life. I cannot believe it... it is hitting me that I am no longer a twenties.... oh groan...

Anyway, I found a cool photo website and I really like this picture...

Mine...Mine...Mine... (AKA Finding Nemo)