Old Friends, Powerbooks, Tar Heels, and Spring Rolls for Bridges

It's been another busy travel time for BRINQ, as we get ready for the Base of Pyramid Protocol field test in Kenya, watch Carolina regain its college basketball throne, make the leap to Apple, and build a bridge in Viet Nam with hundreds of spring rolls.

Sheri Willoughby and I headed out to Cornell for the Sustainable Enterprise Symposium, hosted by the Center for Global Sustainable Enterprise and the local Net Impact club. We got to spend quality time with people whose work I respect the most, old friends Stu Hart (Cornell), Mark Milstein (World Resources Institute), Monica Touesnard (Cornell), Erik Simanis (UNC), and Valerie Cook-Smith (Citibank). New friends Claire Preisser (Aspen Institute) and Rubens Mazon (Fundacao Getulio Vargas in Brazil) also made the trip a wonderful one.

Of course, we also had to take a break in New York to watch Carolina's Final Four victory over Michigan State, which prompted another break to watch their NCAA Championship victory over Illinois. It's great to see how far the Tar Heel boys have come over the last 3 years, and to know that Dean Smith was in the crowd. I got to meet coach Smith briefly last year when he came to promote his new leadership book the Carolina Way, and what I remember most was how proud he was that so many of his professional players returned to finish their degrees. Go Heels!

Another distraction was the death of my main computer, an old HP Omnibook 6100, which prompted a replacement by this lovely 12" Apple Powerbook. Yes, I finally made the jump to a Mac, and only ten years after I worked at Apple (no, I didn't own one then either). I wish I still had those discounts, but I got a pretty good deal, and Apple's OS X is a beautiful example of great design in action.

And the final small distraction, my mother Mai Donohue threw a fundraiser to build a bridge in Duc Pho, our family's village in Viet Nam. The current bridge gets washed away every year, which can make travel difficult and dangerous for the kids on their way to school. So we prepared a menu of grilled lemongrass chicken, fried spring rolls, chicken noodle stirfry and more, a full dinner for the fundraiser's 300 some odd guests in Barrington, RI. "Her food is unbelievable", said fundraiser coordinator Joe Lombardi. Even when I'm a part of these mammoth marathons, even when I can see it happening, I can never understand how our mother pulls it off. A tiny 4'10", 95 lb, Vietnamese dynamo, she's a huge inspiration to anyone that meets her, she certainly is to me. Go Mom!