Another early morning. Good morning, Shanghai. Or good afternoon San Francisco, and good night, New York. Ops. For London, I’d rather don’t say anything since it is late night and people are sleeping.

Just finished another conference call, as one of the hundreds of conference calls I had. I found it interesting to have conference calls – for people from around the world, having different time zone, and different places to talk simultaneously over the thick line of phone. Well. I should not have been amazed by the telephone technology in this Internet era, but when you really think about it, this is quite amazing.

A time zone does change a lot of thing. Do you have the feeling that although you are talking someone in another time zone, you feel you share many context in common, you still feel something strange. For example, you cannot great the other party the way you great people around you (physically around you), and you can sense a feel of sleepiness when it is early morning (like myself), or the energy in someone else after completing one day’s of work (like in San Francisco), and at the same time, you can imagine what a beautiful night and the scene out of the window of the office building in New York – sweet night in a great city! To mix these different background together in a small telephone line is interesting experience.

Address of a place sometimes acts as subtle indication. Yesterday, when I trying to write down the address of a place, I smiled:

1 Wall Street, New York, USA

It is the Bank of New York.

What that address tells you in a subtle way? It echoes exactly what the conference call and timezone reflects.