His own attitude changed when the Asian tsunami of 2004 struck while he was on holiday in the Maldives with his family—he has been married twice and has two children from each marriage. “Water is here,” he says, raising his hand to his chin. “My younger daughter’s taken by the water, someone saved her.”
The experience left him with an injured foot and a conviction that it was time to “pay back to society, to the world”. He spent two years studying how to build an effective foundation, seeking out advice from the best in the giving business, Bill Gates among them, and officially launched the One Foundation in 2007.
Another natural disaster, the huge earthquake that struck China in May 2008, proved catalytic—both for One and for Chinese philanthropy in general. Many of China’s super-rich felt that they had a civic duty plus the all-important government approval to give publicly for the first time. Meanwhile, Li provided the vehicle for China’s emerging middle class to give smaller amounts to help their compatriots. In response to his text message, One received 50m yuan ($10m) in a week.
P.S. It should be noted that the word “隨” took me a long time to write without success in the above demo. Since it would be rather boring for you and me to see me write the word “隨” for much of the demo, I eventually gave up after trying for about 38 seconds. As for the rather simple word “生”, I got stuck again. It proves that sometimes simple words also tricks me.
I think sometimes it was my pen stroke and other problems that lead to the system missing the words.
P.P.S.For the record, in this demo, I used Snow Leopard 10.6.1. This video is shown in real time, only two edits were made for the words “隨” and “生” to make it fit into the YouTube 10 minute per video limitation.
P.P.P.S.By the way, here are the words I typed in the demo.
Because of the proximity of Hong Kong to Japan, I grew up watching many Japanese cartoons and children shows. And the original 手塚治虫‘s Astro Boy (dubbed in Cantonese《無敵小飛俠》) was one of many Japanese cartoons that I enjoyed.
So when a friend (a former publicist of CIFF) reached out to me and told me that she has promotional audio interviews/chats of some of the cast members of the new Astro Boy film (see HD trailers), I jumped at the chance to have a listen.
After checking out the four interviews (streaming audio and downloadable mp3), I found them all very interesting and enjoyable to listen to. Since the chats are actually fun to listen to (and not just “advertising”), it is my pleasure to share with your the following four interviews,
- Bill Nighy (voice of Dr. Elefun, love him since his performance in Love Actually and then Underworld, The Girl in the Cafe, etc)
- Eugene Levy (voice of Orrin, he is a super funny man)
- Freddie Highmore (voice of Astro Boy, he was the boy in The Spiderwick Chronicles)
- Kristen Bell (voice of Cora, the charming Kristen also plays Elle Bishop in Heroes)
Introduction
The idea of a virtual get-together was first proposed by Kempton who took upon himself to arrange for the inauguration event on October 24, 2009. Four friends of 2week1gather were available for the on-line tea-party.
Highlights
All participants were connected promptly by Kempton using the Internet-based voice-Skype technology.
Although there was no set agenda, the participants had no problems engaging in a 55-minute conversation in Cantonese that consisted of the following topics:
* A quick self-introduction: Personal info such as education etc was provided on a voluntary basis.
* Hobbies and interests: These include everything from Broadway shows; skiing; urban planning; to in-depth discussion of architectural designs in Hong Kong in references to masterpieces by Frank Gehry and Douglas Cardinal.
* Hong Kong: The participants touched on the blogging scene (age groups, language styles, and other characteristics); workplace culture (e.g. people throwing tantrums vs dealing with the issues at hand); and key values of a society (profits becoming both the means and the end, opportunities or lack thereof for talented people to innovate; brain drain; a place where we grew up; etc).
* Philosophy: Departing from HK, the participants brought the conversation back at the global level and started to discuss whether people’s principles were non-negotiable, as opposed to behaviours. True to form, our philosopher friend responded to a “poke” from the facilitator and made his position. Alas, the discussion had to be cut short as some of us had to leave.
* Happy One-year Anniversary: The participants would like to raise their tea-cups and congratulate our readers, especially the organizers, on this special occasion of the one-year anniversary of 「兩周一聚」2weeks1gather.
“May you always, be a dreamer,
May your wildest dreams come fulfilled;
May old acquaintances be remembered;
And our cups of kindness filled !!! “
Do you want to join us?
If you are interested to join us in our next Friends of 2weeks1gather virtual tea-party, please leave a comment in this blog entry to let us know. Oh, you have to have written a 2weeks1gather article first to join.
Prepared by:
Haricot with input from Horace, Kempton and Tsubasa – October 24, 2009
Posted by kempton 
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