Microsoft Publisher

Getting a cell phone number in China is very easy. All you need is a tri/quad-band phone and a ¥50 SIM card. Within minutes, you can be making calls and receiving spam text messages. However, it's just as easy to lose the number. If you lose your SIM card or have your phone stolen (with the SIM card inside... it happens a lot), you're out of luck. In my case, Leon got me a SIM card 2+ years ago and had it printed on my PMI business card. It worked fine until this March when my number stopped working. Evidently, China Mobile just cancels your account after 4-5 months of inactivity. Unfortunately, since my (one and only) analyst quit earlier this year, there was a six month gap between trips. My China cell phone number was gone and no amount of pleading helped to get it back. Anyway, I had to get a new SIM card which means a new number. Since nobody calls me in China, this was not too bad except now I have a stack of business cards with the wrong phone number. Awesome.

During college, I worked at an advertising agency as their computer artist and I did a lot of freelance graphic design work, mainly resumes and business cards. After work today, I went to Office Depot and bought a pack of Avery 5871 White Two-Side Printable Clean Edge Business Cards. Leon has sent me the new PMI logo so I thought I would just design and print some cards with my new cell phone number. After I got home, I found that I do not have any desktop publishing software on any of my computers. I was a heavy PageMaker user but have not used it for many years. I can also use QuarkXpress or even Illustrator but ever since I started my finance career, I've rarely used any DTP software.

Why did I start this post... oh yeah, Microsoft Publisher. I was going to use Word or PowerPoint to layout the new business cards but I found Publisher 2007. I've never used Publisher before since it was more of a consumer application and no one in the industry used it. Long story short, after about 2 hours of work (mostly trying to type Chinese text), I have some new business cards. I had to print them on my HP LaserJet 1022n so the alignment is not that precise... but good enough to hand out. They're mainly for the solar trade show next week in Chengdu. I doubt I'll hand out many cards so I've only made 30 for this trip. Now if something happens to my China cell phone number I can just print new updated business cards.

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I was tempted to use traditional characters for my Chinese name but decided to stay away from politics. I hate the ugly simplified Chinese characters.