Why I love October...

It's always been my favorite month - since growing up playing soccer with early morning games on Saturday morning when the frost was still on the grass (and froze your toes)... Now there are even more reasons to love October!

1. I resisted the temptation to subscribe to MLB.com's live video feed throughout the playoffs, but for ALCS Game 7 - I couldn't resist! I was clapping and hooting on the outdoor deck of my (newest) favorite cafe on Monday morning - and I still had plenty of time to have lunch afterwards and go to my first class @ 1:30pm. (I'm seeing a trend emerge - the Sox have the best post-seasons when I'm out of the Boston area. In 2004, we lived in DC.)
   
2. The Lenovo plant tour was yesterday morning. It was a cool experience - and it was more focused on final assembly than industrial manufacturing. Totally different from the only other plant I've been to (and worked at) which was an automotive facility in Germany. For those curious about the operations, we couldn't take pics but here are some facts about this plant:
   
• produces 3 million Lenovo-branded desktop PCs/year (no thinkpads...sorry!)
  
• 6 production lines
• carries 15 days inventory
  
• two 8-hour shifts, no work on weekends, & no production schedule on Mondays
• 2500 employees (900 in factory) - largest plant in Northern China
• Largest plant in China is probably in Shenzhen, where all "think" products are produced (thinkpad, thinkcentre - desktops, and thinkvision-monitors)
3. 
   
4. Have to run in 3 minutes because of the Google information session at Tsinghua. I was told to get here early b/c the auditorium was packed last year (since non-students from around Beijing also come to the session - it only recruits at 2 schools in China..Beijing University [Bei Da] being the other one).