Meltdown1955

American expatriate currently living and working in China as an engineer in the power industry.

I have worked with industrial controls and factory automation for much of my career. I was lucky to work for a company that was an early adopter of Ethernet communications and spent time working with early proprietary versions of embedded systems that were based on Unix. I happened to get interested in Linux and open source back in 1992 with kernel 0.96. When vendors later started shifting to embedded Linux systems, I was accidentally 'in the right place at the right time'. At various times I have worked as a software engineer and a networking support engineer as well as industrial controls. In 2007, one of my sons ...More and I started a web services infrastructure business. Our business was based upon delivering open source based solutions delivered on virtual Ubuntu servers in the Amazon Web Services cloud. We were a 100% open source shop.

I have worked internationally in Brazil, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands and lots of other places.

Since I have several years on assignment in China, I decided to try and get a feel for the country. So, I spend much of my free time exploring small town China, not the few major cities like Shanghai and Beijing. I like to wander into grocery stores, dry goods stores, and other small shops to see what stuff is for sale...and who made it. I like to talk with locals about their businesses. I talk to farmers, fishermen, people selling vegetables and meat in the markets, and restaurant owners. Sometimes I look at local apartments for sale in new development projects. I ask for locals advice on what is the best bank, how to invest my money, whether or not I should buy gold Pandas, and if it is really safe to bank via telephone. I ask the locals what they think to try and get a feel for their world. Let me tell you, it is very different in many, many ways.

I have not run into people or businesses that are trying to export a product internationally. Virtually everyone that I meet is working to produce goods or services for consumption here in China. Most people have never been out of China and many have never been out of their province. They remind me of growing up in small town Oklahoma. Often I get into really fascinating discussions. I find it interesting that there is such a large disparity between what American media has to say about China and what Chinese people think. My opinion is that the Chinese government and its concerns are just as far removed from the small town Chinese citizen as the American government is from the small town American citizen.

I have been investing and trading for many years. I have personally made just about every investing mistake possible. I probably invented a few dumb trading mistakes. These days I favor dividend growth, gold coins, and selling puts for my investment activities. I trade trends on dividend growth companies with a small portion of my capital. Most of my strategy is buy and hold dividend growers. The majority of my holdings at this time are in CL, EMR, ITW, JNJ, KO, MCD, MKC, O, PG, and WMT.

My picture is with a toddler friend I met in July 2012 at Shepan Dao. He was fascinated by my beard and spent quite a bit of time trying to pull it out. You can see that he is looking at my beard. Right after the picture he reached up and got another handful. He would not let any of the other laowai (foreigner) get near him. His mother said he liked me because I was fat and soft like a pillow. Ouch!