The Touch of Cincinnati...

Cincinnati is a city in and the county seat of Hamilton County, Ohio, United States. Settled in 1788, the city is located on the north bank of the Ohio River at the Ohio−Kentucky border, near Indiana (Wikipedia).  What I gain here, is what I am gonna share...It is all from 'the touch' of video calls, dishwasher and U-scan.

john-a-roebling-suspension-bridge-and-cincinnati-skyline (www.hiren.info)

I am very lucky to have the opportunity to visit Cincinnati for 2 weeks, even though it is on a business trip.  The adventurous part is that, I travel alone.  With a journey of almost 30 hours (inclusive of 6 hours transit at Narita & Los Angeles), I am really exhausted, but yet feel very excited, as this is the longest journey that I will always remembered.  Special thanks to Katie Radzhabova, to initiate the trip! ;)

A tired looking face...Selfy! ;) Photo taken at Narita Airport

At first, this is a very difficult decision to make as I need to be far apart from family, with a 12 hour different timezone.  Luckily with the existing technology that we have, make our life easier.  Thanks to Janus Friis from Denmark and Niklas Zennström from Sweden, the Skype founder in 2003.  According to Wikipedia, Skype is a freemium voice-over-IP service and instant messaging client that is developed by the Microsoft Skype Division. The name was derived from the word "sky" and "peer".  It is really easy, as we only need to download and sign up for an account.  We can start to use the instant message, voice or video call, to anybody that have the Skype account for FREE!  Our telecommunications become more lively with video call.  This is superb!  Whenever I have the opportunity to call, which we usually did around 7pm (MYT), my 2 year old son was the happiest person, as he said, I was 'on air'.  His mummy is an 'actress', as he can see me from the television???  Oh my goodness!!  Cannot imagine if this is true!!! ;) 

Print screen from my Skype account

Apart from that, I had a chance to fast for more than 16 hours since it is Summer.  The fasting time is between 4am to 9.30pm.  I feel excited to had a chance to break fast with my colleague, Zamri, at his house with his family.  Her wife is a good cook.  I feel like being in my own country.  Here, I got a chance to use a mechanical device for cleaning dishes, called a dishwasher.  The touch of dishwasher is amazing.  It cleans by spraying hot water at the dishes. A pump is used to mix the water with the detergent.  Water is pumped to the rotating spray arms, which blast the dishes with the cleaning mixture.  Once this is done, the water is drained, and more hot water is pumped in and later rinse the dishes.  Finally, at the bottom of the tub, the heating elements heats the air to dry the dishes.  Thanks to Josephine Cochran for her 'magic' invention in 1887.  What a history! :)

Zamri's and Family at his house in Cincinnati

A dishwasher ;)

The next touch that I want to share is regarding the U-scan.  So far, I have never seen one before in Malaysia.  My friend, Zamri, took me to Kroger to purchase some groceries.  I take this opportunity to buy some fruits for his kids.  During payment, I did not see any cashier sitting in-front of the scan machine.  How can this be?  Ohh...it is a self check out?  When it comes to our turn, Zamri started to scan one by one all his items purchased.  Next, he took out his credit card, and started to key in the credit card number and once completed, a receipt being printed out.  Hmm...In this case, I do think that the benefit mostly goes to Kroger...and not consumer.  What a pity!  We need to self scan the items before check out.  The worst part is, there is no discount given for all the hard work of scanning hundreds of items after waiting a long queue.  To make long story short, I had a chance to do it myself.  But this time, I am using cash!  It really works something like "Please insert your parking ticket...please insert your coins or bank notes...."...yup!  It happen when we want to pay our parking ticket at shopping mall!  I can remember this very well. :)  It is a very user friendly system, but if we have 2 or more of the same items, we still need to scan one by one.... ;(  This is disaster but a very good experience on what IT can do in replacing the human manpower. 

Example of Self scan machine: Photo by pin add / by NCND 2.0 CC

All these are few pieces of IT experience from the touch of Cincinnati...Memories in Cincinnati will always be treasured.  ;) 

Dinner with counterpart in Cincinnati