Christmas at the Jones

I helped Alex carve the turkey.

Chinese Madness in Honolulu

Robert Tai loves to gamble! He chose this restaurant and paid the bill!

A Hawaiian Year End

Anton and Thor grabbed lunch with me at the Outrigger Canoe Club in Waikiki one day. We had pretty good weather in Honolulu.

Staff Party for 2007 in Hong Kong

Stuart always gets more chicks in his pictures.

Hochiminh Stock Exchange

Well, Vietnam is going to be a new center of my activitiy. The stock exchange are interested in looking at a partnership and I am sending them a Cooperation Agreement to review in the new year!

The Theory of Everything, Mathamatically

A surfer has written a paper that is supposed to be a beautiful theory of everything. This picture from the paper is pretty good looking! His name is Garrett Lisi. The paper is here www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770.

Birthday Cake

Getting older is fun? People don't know what to get you for birthday preseents. You're not supposed to eat the fancy cake because of the calories. This year I had to do the cooking! Here is the cake. No!, of course I didn't make it.

Autumn in Izu

It's cooling down and the iconic images are lining the roads in Izu.

Naomi's prize fish to go to competition this week.....

She started with five of these show gold fish and now there are three in the tank in the kitchen. This is the big guy. The Winner?

Had another stint in Australia

And the nice thing is that I have a pretty broad base of friends in Sydney. So when I have a loose moment or two, it is easy to catch us with a few people. This time I had a brunch date with the Andersons in Balmain. Later Lindsay and I took the shopping back to his place and he sniffed the tomatoes once more for good measure. They have a great view from Louisa Place.

Anton's 17th Birthday - on the way to school

Sumo for Anton and Thor

The Singhs are visiting from Hong Kong and wanted to see sumo. As it is Anton's birthday tomorrow we decided to make this part of his birthday celebration. So the four Hoffs and three of the Singhs went to Ryogoku to see a mini sumo tournament. The Mongolian Yokozuna White Phoenix won!

Beijing is still growing. This view across the diplomatic area shows the building scene in relief.

The Autumn Moon

I caught the autumn moon rising over the Imperial Hotel car park looking out our office window on the back side of the Yamato Seimei Building. It was August 14th on the lunar calendar. I was off to Hong Kong the next day.

This is what China trade looks like in Hong Kong

Big container ships going in and out of the port.

The Beijing Weekend Flea Market

The Beijing flea market has an unbelieveable variety of jade and stones for bracelets and necklaces or whatever.

Our Boys

I'm the photographer and here are pictures of our boys Anton and Thor with their mother Naomi. My photo can be seen elsewhere on this blog. Ha!

Higan

Japan celebrates the autumn equinox and on the day the fields and roadsides are full of "higanbana", the Higan flower. This one, in front of Mr Sone's house in Izu, is different from the others because it is completely white. Normally they are fire engine red. Is this an albino higanbana? Why?

More anarchic than left

Here is my political compass. I urge you to check yourself out at the website www.politicalcompass.com and see where you are.

House painting

It's time! The Izu house was starting to turn green and definitely needs to be painted. We have hired a team to clean the red cedar and they will then paint the house and window frames. It's been 19 years since we put it up and even though it's well below its cost, we have derived a great deal of utility from it. And fun, fellowship, delight and relaxation. So it shall continue!

No invitation necessary! If you want to visit, tell us you're coming to Japan and we'll get you down here on the weekend for golf, tennis, bbq and a hot bath.

What if....

Bursa Malaysia is trying to get younger investors to trade on the exchange. They hired a PR agency to help them build up a database of youths. The hook was a night at a club in Kuala Lumpur. The strip of bars, clubs and restaurants was right out the back door of my hotel, so a 11 pm I was there with Azalina, Michelle, et al digging the vibes and getting youngsters to sign up.

FTSE and SET sign the Cooperation Agreement

After a year and half FTSE and SET finally signed the cooperation agreement. We'll be finishing up the data preparation and hope to launch all new indices for the market in January 2008. The whole thing started as part of our FTSE ASEAN index project and the Thais came asking for us to help them too. So off of that project and the FTSE Country Classification project we now have signed up Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. I'm still working on Vietnam.

Another drive by shot of the Beijing edifice of CCCP power

They say Mao never brushed his teeth, never bathed and loved swimming in rivers. A dissident who threw paint on Mao's picture here in 1989 was put in a mental institution and eventually went crazy from the torture.

Iwasaki Cousins at Yuji's Wedding

Cousin Yuji is the first to get married of the current generation of Iwasaki boys -- sons of Junichi, Naomi and Tetsuji. Anton and Thor flew in from Honolulu for the wedding.

Sunday BBQ

Today for lunch we had marinated chicken, hamburgers and a corn and pork sausage stir fry for our tacos. I got out on the hot deck in my Crocs to BBQ.

In Ho Chi Minh City you can buy nice paintings like this

Mayumi picked up a lovely oil painting of the historic Buddha for a cheap price. It's hanging in their new house in Kahala that I have yet to visit. But I like the painting so much I wanted to put it up on my blog. Naomi took the picture when she and the kids were there in July.

Hawaii for the Family

While I was slaving away in Shanghai and Taipei, my family was on the beach at Waikiki learning how to surf!

Launching in India

In Delhi Donald and I launched an infrastructure index with our new partners, IDFC. We had the Minister of Finance on hand to lend a lot of support and in Bombay aka Mumbai there was a party for the financial community. We're having the usual IPR problems in an emerging market where stock exchanges give away index data for free and providers like FTSE have to work on ways to get the locals to pay.

My Daemon Poll

Apple

An apple by definition......

A business dinner in Sydney, New South Wales

These guys loved hearing stories about setting up new offices and the personnel problems/challenges that come along with them. And we talked about a few other things too. After I took a photo of Michael in his plastic surgical gown used to eat crab legs in, we took this photo of a really happy group of diners.

It's going to be a lot of fun marketing ETFs with these guys!

Storm Watch

Roger and I had planned to golf. But Typhoon #4 decided to march up the coast and destroyed all plans. Instead we hung out at his beach house in Iritahama, cooked, drank, went to a local beach scene hip hop/Hawaiian party at the Spice Dog restaurant and checked out the other beaches' waves.