The bank ad, as seen in the gym this morning, said ‘You have to be interested to be interesting’. I agree.

But the images that accompanied this message were composed of good looking couples ogling a lot of potential (and supposedly interesting) purchases.

The only interest in this scenario is what the bank is going to earn from their debt.

Its hard not to be a contrarian when you are surrounded by lies.

The mothers of the East (of Sydney) think that I am the spawn of the devil since I will not change my plans to fit around their kid’s birthday parties. Lola keeps missing out on them, just about every weekend it seems. And therein lies the root cause of my attitude.

Sometimes there is a build up of advocacy groups in the one space, such as Innovate Australia, Australian Innovation, Australian Science and Innovations and even the Knowledge Council of Australia. There are probably a dozen more ‘innovations’, but I can’t be arsed Googling them. As an aside, one strange thing is that not one of these organizations has the first clue about innovation.

In Monty Python’s ‘The Life of Brian’ they introduced the Judean’s People Front, the People’s Front of Juedea and even the Judean’s Popular People’s Front. This has been going for a while now!

These clutches of Advocacy Groups either totally ignore each other because they are competing for the same government handouts, or figure out how to collectively conn even more money off the government to build, say, a Council of Australian Innovations Councils, which then goes on to host an annual innovation summit in Port Douglas at tax-payers’ expense.

Here is one of my favourites Advocacy Groups that I did not, and could not have made up.

The patrons are Dame Leonie Kramer AC DBE and the Hon Sir Laurence Street AC KCMG – which just goes to show that a lifetime of sucking off the tit doesn’t improve one’s judgement.

The CEO and Chairman is one Harold Scruby (love that name…in a former era he would have been president of the local RSL) who pops up on TV whenever a pedestrian gets run over, primarily because there is nothing else to video for the news.

“The Pedestrian Council of Australia Limited is an Incorporated (Public) Company, limited by guarantee. It was incoporated on 1 August 1996. It is a non-profit organisation whose objectives, as stated in its Memorandum of Association are:

1. the continual improvement of pedestrian safety, amenity and access;

2. the promotion of walking as a legitimate transport mode and an important, healthy, social activity;

3. the encouragement of the inclusion of pedestrian safety, amenity and access provisions in all urban and transport planning;

4. the enhancement of community health and welfare and particularly the enhancement of the health and welfare of those members of the community who are aged, infirm, disabled, young, socially disadvantaged, tourists or included in any other special interest group or group of persons under any kind of handicap or disability; and

5. research (including experiments and surveys and their publication) into all aspects of the objects set out in 1, 2, 3 and 4.”

If there is a problem in Australia of any sort, from an excess of dog shit on the footpaths to a lack of corporate innovation, you can be damn sure that an organization will pop up to address it.

These advocacy groups have names like Getup Australia or Innovate Australia, or even Cleanup Australia.

The first action of the day is for the ‘executives’ of these organisations to promote themselves on morning TV, and then they have to round up a bunch of geriatrics with impressive resumes for their boards and advisory councils.

Apart from the stated goal of the organization (to get your local dog shit cleaned up, for example) the key objective is for the executive and the board/advisory council members to get payment for their services (because generally they can’t get employment otherwise). For this, the most likely source of income is a government handout – hence the publicity requirements.

The very successful advocacy groups turn into political lobby groups and also get money off interested parties, such as companies in their particular sector. The less successful groups just keep plugging away with government handouts.

There are literally thousands of these groups and I don’t think it is possible to kill them. There is no Round-Up equivalent for advocacy groups, more’s the pity.

I have figured out what it is that my young nephew is missing.

I believe that he has been brought up in such a secure, loving and safe environment that that he is comfortable in his own skin, when he really shouldn’t be.

I have always thought that those years of anxiety when I was young were a very horrible period, but now I can see that this period forced self-awareness on me. And that is a key to growing and developing beyond a vaguely functional person.

The local Liberal candidate’s name is Cedric Spencer. Really.

Nissan used to have one too.

You oughta see what they have done to the university entrance system in Australia.

Whereas once it was just ecentrically obscure, nowadays it is beyond reasonable comprehension other than to those that have a PhD in the subject.

Watching an average high school student, slightly removed from the local system due to a stint in a foreign country, attempt to figure out what they have to do in order to get into an Australian university is bloody hilarious. And shameful.

Have you ever noticed that autocrat rhymes with laundromat?

I will say this only once….we are not doing our kids any favors by protecting them from life’s hazards and realities.

My nephew is staying with me right now. At seventeen he has the guile, insight, fortitude and sharpness of a three year old.

Apart from that he is a lovely kid.

How the Australian political system really works…

The Dutch have a word, gezellig, for which there is no English transition.

It means anything from cozy to friendly, from comfortable to relaxing, and from enjoyable to gregarious.

Our loss.

Have you ever seen people imagine themselves into hysteria, due to social pressures?

An example is feeling the presence of the Lord in a gospel church. Another, closer to home, is the quasi religious experience supposedly found in the tainting of food with truffles.

It’s a cross between bullshit, hysteria and a desperate desire to belong; is there an English word that describes this phenomenon?

Life is very, very short. As tempting as it is to immerse oneself in the pleasure moment, far too many of us find out, (alas) too late, that a little serious exploration and learning about life and ourselves makes the nearing of the end acceptable.

In the current era of venture capital in Silicon Valley the only types of businesses getting investment are web enabled disintermediation plays, from e-commerce to corporate services, and new web services such as data mining for the e-commerce sector.

The technology in these businesses is generally fairly trivial and not that expensive to develop, but yet the businesses absorb tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of venture investment.

This is because they need all that money for business development and marketing. Essentially they buy market share ahead of positioning themselves to get acquired by the larger web-focused corporations that are hoovering up emerging companies in every new web sector.

Two observations. First, the music will stop one day and a bunch of VC ‘s will be left with a clutch of worthless companies. Second, there is no point taking investment from outside of Silicon Valley because that money doesn’t have the scale or connections and hence can’t execute the exit, which is the only thing makes this model economically viable as an asset class.

After 13 years in the game I have finally decided that venture capital is a silly idea.

What is ok is the capitalization of a young business by would-be owners or operaters, in return for equity.

Venture capitalists invest in young businesses and then often totally screw them up because of their requirement to ‘exit’, i.e. to sell their shares or, more likely, force the sale of the whole company to a third party. This VC model is justifiable if everyone involved is aware of the game and occasionally money is made by some or all of them.

But the structure of a VC funded business leads to a construct of human interactions where honesty, honour and trust are simply tradable commodities, to be plied at some stages and abandoned at others, subject to the requirements of personal gain.

It’s not good for the soul. After a while, if you look carefully,  it’s very hard to tell the difference between a VC and a sixty-year old hard-core salesman.

For the life of me I can’t tell the difference between borrowing a book from the library and downloading one free of charge, and illegally, from pirate bay.

Especially since a book and its contents have no value to me after they have been consumed.

In both cases all I do is read something without paying for it. However in one case I am committing a criminal offence.

Only a gen y would be gullible enough to buy this piece of marketing BS by the content industry.

It just sort of creeps up on you and then one day you realise that you have entirely escaped the orthodoxy of your parent’s world view. Rejoice!

When you spend time in a third world country you often get to squat a lot.

After a month or so, it gets easy and you find yourself squatting at any old time.

It gives strength where needed and also stretches you where you need it..

It just goes to show that exercise is best when it’s part of a daily routine and not some extramural effort.

If Adam and Eve were around today they could have patented parenting. It would have a first claim something like “a method for raising children without fucking them up”.

The embodiments, like in most patents, would have been a work of fiction.

I can see that the bulk of my work with my daughter (at the age of ten) is almost ‘done’. That is a surprise for me.

She is a good person, she cares about others, she socialises well, she has the capacity to be self-aware, and she understands that she needs to work to achieve results. She is doing quite well at school with minimal parental input. She listens when she has to.

She has faults, but these are relatively minor, and ones that with a bit of life experience and a bit of parental input, she will surmount.

I am sure there will be dramas and critical moments in the next ten years where parental guidance is absolutely required. But the ground work has been done.

I had no idea that the first ten years would be so overwhelmingly important. But, just in case, I will revisit this entry in another ten years…

I am not at all simpatico with the staff at my daughter’s school. There is not one area of potential discussion where there is mutual understanding. It’s like I am from a different planet.

As a result I have been very careful with my interactions with them, mostly erring on the side of saying and doing nothing. Otherwise I would just confuse them and achieve nothing good.

Except on the subject of T-ball. I feel like I am strong grounds when I explain to them that it’s an activity not a sport. And it’s unsuitable for a 9 year old to play, as their only sport.

My company sells manufacturing equipment to China from Australia. A reverse on the norm I must say.

It can be pretty frustrating watching our Chinese customers run their factories because they ‘leave’ so much profit on the factory floor by running their factories very inefficiently. Fortunately for them, their costs are so low they can still dominate this industry.

My customers counter that they cannot run any complex operational models that would make them more profitable because their labour is not interested or trained to do so.

Typically employees in China shift around jobs every year, often within the same industry, looking for a higher salary. This is because no one has thought to offer them, the fully trained operator, a pay rise within their current jobs. It just isn’t done.

In addition employees simply do not feel much obligation to their employer, and are not particularly interested in making the place ‘better’. In fact they typically want to come to work, do their job in rote fashion, not have to think and then get the hell out of there at the end of the day.

When a problem arises there is usually a concerted effort to cover it up, or pass on the responsibility to someone else. The Chinese really are practised in the art of getting around and avoiding authority. And they see their employers as ‘authority’. I have seen senior managers in Chinese companies spend months coming up with and executing expensive ‘contingency’ plans that allow them to hide problems when they arise, just so they keep to their KPI’s.

I don’t want to be too hard on the Chinese and I must say I have dealt with many people here in Australia, say in the public service, who have a pretty similar set of attitudes. The whole thing is a sort of historical left-over from the days when labour really was labour. It really should have no place in Australia today.

But in order to break this cycle of indifference and boredom, I think it is really up to management to make the first step. Now that will be hard when the ‘owner’ of a business, in the case of the public service, is the government…

Here in Australia we now virtually do not have any subsidies for solar panels.

But they are getting so cheap (and will continue to get cheaper) that it makes sense to buy them at full cost and reduce your electricity bill, especially if you have high daytime consumption (e.g. air conditioners, heaters, electrical hot water running at peak time etc).

However if too many people put solar panels on their roofs and then are not buying daytime peak electricity the traditional power generators and distributors will have to charge their residual customers a lot more to maintain profitability.

I fully expect traditional power generators and distributors to lobby government to enact laws that restrict solar panel deployment, or make it more expensive, so that they maintain their revenues and margins.

They will argue that if government does not do this then the poor, who may not be able to afford the capital outlay of solar panels, will suffer higher electricity prices and that, in any case, we will need to keep all our (fully depreciated) coal-burning power plants in full operational capacity since we need the base-load power at night when solar panels do not work.

The government might even decide to charge us for ‘their’ photons, like they charge broadcasters for ‘their’ radio frequencies.

You wait and see.

I pity the guru sitting on top the hill that feels nothing but ‘contentment’.

He feels nothing because he cares about nothing, not even himself.

And nobody cares about him.

This is a fool’s solution to a very difficult problem.

Sometimes it is very hard to get ‘outside of yourself’ and conquer an unproductive set of emotional responses to a situation that you may find yourself in.

However, the harder it is to do, usually the more important the issue is to your life, and the more important it is to channel your emotions into productive outcomes.

Emotions can’t truly be ignored or blocked, but they can be channelled into productive activities. With lots of practice and some guidance, that is.

The number one cause of premature marital divorce in the western hemisphere is, rather oddly, fitted sheets.

The first problem is that, after five years of marriage and 250 changes of the sheets, the bloke still doesn’t know what a fitted sheet is.

However, if the bloke is a bit more modern, he is still going to get in big trouble when he can’t fold the fuckers. No male can.

If we are talking about a total metro-sexual, divorce will be precipitated by a joint changing of the sheets. Advice from the instigator will be forthcoming that is as welcome as map directions in a car.

Finally, the male may think that one fitted sheet is all that is needed. It can be washed and dried and put back on the bed on the same day, over and over until it wears out. It is fatal to express this belief.

42, 42, 42, 42, 42…

It is often said that it’s pretty silly to keep asking the same question in the hope of getting a different answer.

Well, explain sex then…

The starting point is how you want to feel about it.

Then there is how you actually feel about it in anticipation.

Then there is the experience.

And then then there is how you actually felt about it.

I could call it emotional hysteresis but you never really get back to the same starting point, do you?

You forget how you actually felt about it, then you are back to how you want to feel, like it never happened. And maybe it didn’t.

The emotional hysteresis collapses into a removable singularity.

I would recommend that everyone gets continuous coaching in an activity they love. In my case it’s squash.

I have every shot in the squash handbook (almost) and move very well around the court, and yet in terms of people who play squash well (and all the time) I am a pretty average player. This is partially because I have just taken it up again after a 10 year break and also because I don’t spend the hours on the court that some do. But another problem I have always had is in my mind – if I am not feeling good in the head, and I often I don’t even realise it, then my squash goes to pot. And then I get depressed about it, then sort of do an internal dummy spit, and things get worse.

I am determined to crack this issue this time around, on the squash court. I reckon that if I can crack this on the court then I can crack it in real life. Because my fear is that I am doing this in real life without even realising it. In squash its obvious what is going on – you lose three games in a row and only get 2 or 3 points. In real life the score card is pretty bloody obscure.

One thing I have decided to do is not to let certain people in my life behave badly without me saying something. Whereas previously I have always played the peace-maker or the “parent” in these relationships, and let these people get away with their self-centred madness in the interests of the “long game”, I am now committed to telling them what I feel at the time despite my dislike of conflict. The truth is that self-centred people will abuse your goodwill, no matter what your reason is for giving it, and then take more where they can.

The scorecard is in!

Egocentrism is characterized by preoccupation with one’s own internal world. Whereas Egotism is slightly more inclusive of slaves; it means placing oneself at the core of one’s world with no concern for others, including those loved or considered as “close,” in any other terms except those set by the egotist.

They are both simply extreme versions of plain old fashioned selfishness which involves placing concern with oneself or one’s own interests above the well-being or interests of others.

A child automatically feels at the centre of its own universe because, quite frankly, it is. But when children are loved and where they feel secure, they get to trust the world around them. As they grow and mature in a trusting environment they expand their circle of trust away from their ‘ego’ core. They also have a greater chance of learning the ineffectiveness of acting out of self interest at all times – there is a positive feedback loop which effectively expands their ego to include others.

Egotists and other poor souls with clinical labels are simply at one end of a continuous spectrum of people. Due to a conflict of parenting and personality their egos simply never get a chance to tour beyond their epidermis.

The rest of us are more or less selfish, and typically we have our strengths in areas where we have learned to be effective and less selfish, and then we have other areas where the feedback loop has never kicked in.

And as we mature we build ramshackle scaffoldings that prop up our favourite dodgy self-centred behaviours. We call these addictions. These remain in place all our lives unless some catastrophe comes along and blows the whole construct away and we become helpless children again.

If you practice an art incessantly the results do follow.

In the ideal football scenario we poison the Rabbits who are then eaten by the Lions, thus getting rid of two plagues in one effort.

The Scroos gets disqualified from Brazil on some technicality so we don’t have to watch them lose three pool games.

The Swans hire some quality players so we don’t have to always rely on them being the hardest working team on the planet.

The Wobblies go to a boot camp laying train tracks in the Great Sandy Desert for 3 months over summer, and then come back to win a tournament, any tournament, by being the best team from start to finish.

Finally, the Tigers get demoted to the NSW cup so we can watch them go around at Leichhardt Oval twice a month.

Erc X. Li, a venture capitalist from Shanghai, claims that there are three key factors that determine the superiority of the Chinese political system – adaptability, meritocracy & legitimacy. However, all three factors will be strongly challenged when there is a strong recession in that country.

Eric’s efforts just show, once again, that beliefs are the bastard children of self-interest and stupidity, in both the West and the East.

My personal view is that modern economies, once they get to a certain size and degree of complexity, pretty much run themselves. Many people erroneously believe that our politicians ‘run the country’. The truth is that the country runs itself. Our parliaments, alongside many other institutions, are allowed to tweak things a little here and there in response to change. Its not too different in China.

In China I have discovered that the core competency of the people seems to be getting around authority. After a couple of thousand years of being lorded-over they simply don’t believe in authority, nor do they believe that rules are there for their own benefit. This means, in business for example, that it’s very hard to find ‘bed-rock’ – the whole thing appears to be built on foundations of sand.

What Eric X. Li should have said is that the Chinese political systems suits China because of the history of the country and the nature of the people. It would probably be a disaster to graft a Western representative system onto China. But it would also be senseless to try and imitate China’s system anywhere else. I would leave it at that.

And I fully expect China’s system to morph over time, but to remain unique.

One thing is for sure, the old expression about the emperor’s clothes definitely refers to a Chinese emperor. “Face” will hold China back at some stage, probably when they least need it to.

Many beliefs are the bastard children of vested interest and stupidity.

I am just watching the 2012 version of Abraham Lincoln, the movie. It occurs to me that righteousness is a recurring theme in US politics and media. Righteousness, unfortunately, fails any practical test of human character.

And it’s one thing to talk about God’s will in politics, but it’s pretty silly to actually believe in it.

What happens when you mix a smart phone with a dumb user?

I have always struggled to ‘know things’ in the context of being able to recall stuff as needed for, say, exams or conversations.

But strangely, I actually know a lot more than most people. Its just that I store information differently; not as ‘facts’ but rather as private advisory theorems.

Effectively, in the interests of efficiency, I model information on the way in and then store the ‘model’ and ‘discard’ the facts. Well I don’t really discard the facts but store them in inaccessible memory cells, only to be rediscovered when they are otherwise rediscovered.

And this efficient process allows me to process a lot more information than most people.

Try and explain all that to your ambitious (for her son to succeed) mother! Especially when I used to get a bare pass in a very boring subject at school, based on yet another fact-regurgitation exam effort.

I have assessed my daughter’s schooling and things haven’t changed much. In the Internet era, where knowledge is just a keystroke away, they still want kids to incessantly memorise stuff. There is still not an emphasis on the use of information to create novel outcomes, as compared to recalling it, on demand and under pressure.

The ancient Greeks had four temperament types – these were sanguine (pleasure-seeking and sociable), choleric (ambitious and leader-like), melancholic (analytical and thoughtful), and phlegmatic (relaxed and quiet). In this model we all have more of less of each of these types.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, so loved by corporate HR, also has four dimensions of personality types. Based on Jungian psychology the four types are; the “rational” (judging) functions: thinking and feeling, and the “irrational” (perceiving) functions: sensation and intuition. Again, in this model, we each have more or less of each of these functions.

And now, a US-based biological anthropologist (what is that?) has correlated brain chemicals and neural networks systems with personality types. There is the dopamine system – dominant in ‘explorers’ who like novelty, experience and adventure, are susceptible to boredom, lack introspection and are intellectually curious. Serotonin types, ‘builders’, are cautious and orderly, respect authority, show self-control, are interested in detail and like precision. The ‘directors’ are testosterone dominant and are notable for enhanced visual-spatial perception and a keen understanding of ‘rule-based systems’, from mechanics to computers, maths, engineering or music. They have deep but narrow interests and tend to be less socially aware, with poorer emotion recognition, less verbal fluency and reduced empathy. The last group, those expressive of oestrogen and the closely related oxytocin, are called ‘negotiators’. They exhibit holistic and long-term thinking, as well as linguistic skills, agreeableness, co-operation, intuition, empathy and nurturing. This group are also characterised by generosity and trust, heightened memory for emotional experiences, imagination and mental flexibility. We are all, more or less in each of these personality type ‘systems’.

I have even come up with my own version of ‘personality types’ in the context of teams and meetings, as a way of (a) figuring out why teams sometimes don’t work, (b) what can be done to fix it when they don’t, and (c) to resolve my boredom in a particularly bad board meeting a few years back.

The evidence is in. We are, all seven billion of us, describable by just 4 personality dimensional types. Seems amazing doesn’t it? That gives us 16 dominant personality types, which proves what I have always thought – that astrology is rubbish. They are 4 dominant personality types short of a theory, for god’s sake!

Most people erroneously believe that our politicians ‘run the country’. The truth is that the country runs itself.

Our parliaments, alongside many other institutions, are allowed to tweak things a little here and there as times change. And that is about it.

The other role for politicians, together with our sporting stars, is to provide us with cheap entertainment.

I remember when I was growing up I used to spend a lot of time with a family around the corner.

In this family there were four kids – three boys and one girl. The dad was a plumber who lived permanently in a pair of King Gees and a blue singlet. The mum was always at home or at the RSL with her husband. The house was a chaos of clothes in piles and there was stuff just lying around everywhere. The backyard was a homage to a clutch of working-class hobbies – greyhounds, pigeons and off-road motorbikes, with the ubiquitous Hills Hoist centrally positioned.

I used to spend more time around there that at my own, very sterile apartment. My mother was always studying at university, or when home, writing an essay. My brother was five years older and was out doing his own things. My dad was a cop and when he wasn’t at work he was out playing various sports or drinking with his mates. So this gave me plenty of time to be around the corner and not at home.

I did all sorts of stuff with this family – prawning at Abbotsford (in Sydney harbour for god’s sake), fishing at the Cook’s River (even worse), cricket, footy, speedway and I even used to go on holidays up to Forster with them, where they had a fibro coastal classic.

My memories are old and my young awareness may have been limited, but I strongly recall this lot being extremely happy. They didn’t have a lot of goods by today’s standards but they had enough and very little interest in matters outside their immediate daily experiences. Notably, everyone in this family always did things together – they didn’t sneak off to their own corners like my mob.

I cannot think of a single family I have met since which has even a semblance of their inherent happiness. In fact, the contrast to the modern families that I know is remarkable. I would say the families I know now are anti-happy; not necessarily unhappy, but a sort neutered neutrality on the subject of enjoyment. They are just grinding it out whilst trying to tick all the boxes, the ones that the global marketing machine assures them brings universal happiness if all ticked.

How do you judge a person? By the good things they do and say, or by the very predictable and intermittent ‘dog bites’ you are going to receive from them?

If you understand someone can you forgive them their faults? Especially if you know they developed their faults through no fault of their own.

How much do you give and how much do you forgive? All relationships have to be balanced to be healthy – an equal sharing of the giving and the forgiving is ideal. If one is doing the taking and the other is doing the giving then the survival of the relationship depends on even further emphasis of entrenched character traits which do the owner no good at all. In fact relying on these is like feeding an addiction.

Passing over a lot of thought to get to the end point, any relationship (and I am not just talking about couples here) depends critically on both people having, and further developing, the mirror they have on their own behaviours and on their own souls. Self-awareness and caring in both people in a relationship – that’s the starting point.

Yet another bloody TV show set in inner suburban Australia (I suppose this is so the cast has a short daily travel). It’s all angst and anxiety in the context of a group of family and friends.

I think there is something rotten at the core of our affluent society. I guess that’s why this show makes me so squirmy.

Having said that, the show is overdone. It’s like a weird dream version of reality, where all the issues are over-emphasised and the background mood is very dark. It’s like “the slap” without the slap.

Everyone in the show seems to be in survival mode, at best. There is no real joy in their lives just fear, loathing and suffering. And the fear of losing what they have, which in any case appears to be shit. I don’t get it.

Why is this stuff made?

You would think that a farmer’s market is all about cutting out the middle man, Coles and Woolies for example, and offering produce at lower prices. But not at this farmer’s market; the prices are through the roof.

The people attending seem to have the wherewithal to underwrite the farmers lifestyles. Although I doubt there’s many real farmers amongst them.

Back to the consumers; they have money in their pockets and fear in their eyes. And they seem to have a magnetic attraction to rootsy, organic food. Possibly they feel disconnected from reality? They all dress in this casual manner that doesn’t reveal their relative wealth, except for their glasses and sunglasses. No one skimps on these.

And, get this, hundreds of them are prepared to queue for an hour to get a roast suckling pig roll. What’s that about?

Back in the mid-eighties I had this Benetton t-shirt that I was very proud of.

It had written on it, in multi colors, “warm, sunny, colorful and no pollution”.

I still like the sentiment, but I wonder who I was that cared about communicating banalities to the world?

Of course, it was all driven by insecurities and the desire to be liked and wanted.

It is possible that removing the whales from the ocean might just counter the effects of rising sea levels, resulting from global warming. The Japanese might be onto something.

Around sunset in my part of Surry Hills we get the taxi crush. A good fraction of the taxi drivers in Sydney must be Muslim and they all seem go to the Surry Hills mosque around sunset. It’s this tiny mosque squeezed in between a few Chinese terrace houses in this tiny, former slum street which still contains a brothel or two; its really quite a perplexing place to put it.

There is no parking in Surry Hills and the parking inspectors here are vicious – I think they have a block each and are on very good commissions. So the whole experience of getting to the Mosque on time and avoiding a parking fine must be pretty stressful for the taxi drivers.

I do believe that they must believe in their god. There is no other rational explanation for anyone going through this daily hell.

Goget, my local car sharing outfit, has an eclectic taste in cars. But I would say there is a definite penchant for Hyundai’s and i30’s in particular. The i30 is the ‘fast-food’ effort of the auto-world. It’s well built to a price, but it’s not driver’s car. In fact it handles like a fridge on wheels. But mostly it works. Mostly.

For the last few months I have noticed that not one of Goget’s i30”s has had the right time on the internal clock. And, trying to correct this, I found out why. I couldn’t figure out how to change the time, nor could anyone else, especially considering that the manuals have been removed.

Now I am pretty good techie so I tried every hidden combo known to mankind. Eventually I gave up and Googled it on the run and it turns out that, while the radio is on, you have depress the power button for a few seconds and then a very complex menu pops up. Now, who in their right minds would have thought that one up?

I have just been perving at some lovely photos taken by Ansel Adams in the 1940s. People pay a lot of money for the original prints, which are virtually indistinguishable from copies. If these photos were taken today they would struggle to get into a toilet-door calendar.

Adams is collectible because he was (sort of) the first to do what he did, and I argue that the value of his prints is purely historical and hysterical. Value only exists if a lot of people agree that the subject is valuable.  And people, oddly, tend to want to agree with each other – people, in general, are very eager to please, especially when there is vested interest involved.

Two of my favorite things, unexpectedly found conjoined this morning. What joy!

Gears on a bicycle; it’s an odd thing. They have been around for more than a hundred years and yet still they are shit.

After more than a hundred years of engineering, gears in cars will last for 200,000 kilometres or more without servicing.

Gears on bikes, on the other hand, need servicing every 1,000 kilometres or so and the major parts, the chain and chain rings, often need changing every 10,000 kilometres. This is because the drive-train is a chain that is shifted from one cog to another to make a gear change, which leads to uneven wear all over the place.

This system survives because bikes have such a weight constraint on their engineering. An extra kilo on the gears is like 10 kilos of fat on your arse; I am not sure why but it’s something to do with unsprung weight versus sprung weight (the legs being the springs). All the alternatives to dérailleur gears that have been imagined all weight substantially more.

Bike engineering has also got stuck in a rut; there has been little incentive to figure out a system that works properly when there is so much money to be made by polishing the turd. And also when there is so much money to made made by selling the wear parts.

I keep changing the rear change-ring on my single speed bike to gear the thing higher. My rate limiting hill is Lilyfield hill, which is a real heart starter in the mornings. My journey to the current high ‘gearing’ has been in a few increments, each new chain-ring being adopted only when my legs adapt to the stress. They, the legs, are getting pretty strong. The issue is, that after a few durries and schooners, the plan all goes to pot; I can’t get the bike over a speed-hump.

Toughen up and Suck it up.

These are two common phrases being thrown about by the Gen Y’s as they pretend to be as tough as a baby boomer’s parent.

It doesn’t work and we can all see through the fraud. They could’t toughen it or suck it up if their life depended on it.

When my daughter was young I coined an acronym for the pre-bed activities. It is PTTB which stands for pyjamas, toilet, teeth, bed.

Ok, its an initialism not an acronym but who gives a fuck?

In any case, for some reason neither of us could ever get this acronym right. It variably came out as PTBB, PPTB etc.

So I wonder is there a descriptor for Spoonerisms of acronyms and initialisms? I know the answer to that one already.

I had a debate last night about on-line retail. I pointed out that shops are doomed and she disagreed because she doesn’t like on-line shopping.

I then countered with the clear trend towards on-line shopping and she countered with the concept that only certain categories of shopping are suitable for on-line retail, and that, for example, only retards like me would even consider buying jeans on-line.

I said that this is just a technology challenge and that in retail the lowest cost will always win despite constraints of practicality.

She retains the right to have a different opinion. I retain the right to be right. And I am.

I have two bikes – one with a zillion gears and one with one gear.

I randomly ride one or the other to work and back but I am increasingly finding that I am choosing the single speed. Which is odd because it is a lot less efficient to ride because I can’t keep a constant cadence by changing gears to suit the terrain.

However the time to work and back is about the same on both bikes because the single speed forces me to step on the peddles going up hills whereas I might coast up hills in low gears on the expensive option. This gain in time up hills is offset by the losses going down where the geared bike allows me to crack down in overdrive whereas the single speed is maxxed out and I just coast down.

The bikes weigh about the same (7.2kg) despite one being worth a fortune (the carbon fibre one with gears) and other costing me $175 on eBay; the gearing and associated engineering weighs and costs that much!

The very nice thing about the single speed is that it doesn’t need maintenance; I never have to adjust the gears when the cable stretches and both the chain and chainrings do not wear out. The chain never pops off the chain ring and I feel very secure that the machinery will stay in one piece and operational, no matter what I do to it.

The small challenge in getting on a single speed bike in Sydney is having enough torque in the legs to get up hills; but this is simply a choice of gearing and as you get better you can crank up the gearing by changing the chainrings.

All up, the single speed makes sense.

What’s the difference between thinking something and believing something?

Two things really; firstly, belief generally allows for less consideration of data, and, secondly, fucking semantics.

Bob Carr, the current foreign minister of Australia, recently admitted that, not only did he not write his own Tweets but that he had never even read them.

For politicians their Tweets are really micro-press releases each in an individual 140 character burst. Rather than a weekly press release there is a continuous stream of constructed dribble, each a little sketch point that in total is supposed to create an image of the majestic one that is lovable or at least not despicable.

The content of these micro-press releases is often inscrutable since they are constructed without arguments or reference points, and indeed are often very ambiguous.

I think the audience is two-fold – first, there are fellow spin merchants who are very busy reading each others smoke signals for a living, and, second, there are the faithful followers (for who else who bother with these missives?) who suck up all of this random bullshit as droppings from their god on earth.

I think its odd that the motivational calendar has found a new life as the viral philosophical-validations of the vaguely educated on Facebook. It could have been anything, but they latched onto the motivational calendar, probably because they used to have them on the back of their toilet doors. They probably still do.

Now why would anyone come to Australia seeking an asylum? Maybe our asylums are nicer than anyone else’s? They should march the asylum seekers into Parliament house and the mission will have been completed.

I don’t believe in a god but I do believe that some people believe in a god. It’s a start, isn’t it?

To be good at something takes both talent and interest. If one or the other is missing then it’s an uphill battle. And then of course it still takes lots of perspiration.

And yet, everybody can be good at something. It’s just that most people don’t know what it is. In fact most people incorrectly think they are good at a specific thing, when they are not. And this often stops them seeking the thing that they could be good at.

So I was a few days late paying my Telstra phone bill. And then I got a call from a robot and the first thing it asked me was for me to identify myself. I tried to explain that I knew not who the robot was and it rang me, and therefore this was arse about.Then I hung up and then the robot kept ringing back. On and on. Monty Python is alive and well at tech retard-central.

I can see a pattern; what used to give me pleasure does not necessary do so any more. Surfing and soccer are examples. Cycling is heading the same way.

I have finally realized this is a good thing if I just embrace it. It forces me to move on and seek new pleasures. That can’t be a bad thing.

Winter in Sydney is long enough, wet enough and cold enough for me. If you live somewhere worse then you only have yourself to blame, or your parents.

A Cooperative Research Centre (here in Australia) brings together second-rate researchers and second-rate managers with second-rate corporate R&D concepts in order to create third-rate outcomes. Only a government would be silly enough to invest in this proposition.

This afternoon required me giving my daughter a long lecture on the subject of grace and the ramifications of not having any in certain circumstances. If only we could live up to our own billing!

Life is very short and it is tempting to be doing new things all the time. Yet this morning I was hanging around downtown by myself, and I had so much time to sit and think about myself. And there it was…

I have taken an addict (my daughter) into a crack den (her cousin’s place).

Cheap carbs and a three-day viewing..

I was forced to watch “despicable me 2” yesterday. And it was appalling.

Set in suburban USA, complete with exotic mall scenes, the plot is basically “shoot and chase” with a PC subplot of new love between mature agers, inclusive of approval of adopted kids.

You have to wonder if even the Americans get bored with the disappearing act (up their own arses).

After my third double mac the barista said “respect”. Maybe time to dial to it back?

There is “reality” and then there are emotions, which seem to be a second derivative of one of many realities.

Attempts to control emotions, in order to realise a better version of reality, have dominated the thoughts and writings of many of our great spiritual leaders.

As it turns out it’s not about domination: rather it’s about balance, awareness and “weighted” constraint. These attributes lead to a freedom of the spirit from the tyranny of the mind.

Here is a quick cheat sheet on the subject; (a) age helps, such that our pattern-recognition thought-processes have data to work with, (b) caring about the subject matter is important, (c) and it is key to somehow have freedom from orthodoxy of thought, (d) awareness of the previous journeys of the spiritual leaders helps, but this has to be tempered with the understanding that one person’s journey cannot be codified into a blueprint for all others, (e) one must have love and other genuine emotions in abundance, rather than an over-emphasis on left-brain or no-brain living.

The rest is up to you.

Love, it’s ok to hope for change but it’s a waste of emotional energy expecting it.

He took the old expression that “knowledge is power” very literally. All he ever did was to know things.

Jesus crossed the finishing line but he still got a DNF.

Life is less about what you do and more about who you do it with.

Jaye the pig was spammed; the first compression algorithm.

If you ever get to hunt for les truffe you might find it quite handy to have a steering wheel on your pig.

Give me an old three wheeler, a time machine and no budget. Yeah, and maybe a Babel fish too.

Love in the time of pestilence is as useful as a steering wheel on a pig.

Seven billion extra-special people: God is a joker.

Affluence affords the luxury of complacency and then seeds desperation that follows.

If you and someone you can’t avoid are having trouble communicating, then try another language.

The pig was in an existential mud heaven, rolling around in the muck while it could. He could feel the end point. I told him not to worry too much because we’ll all be there with him.

This blog only contains original quotes. I am not quoting others at all….all my thoughts, pictures and words are original so far as I can recall. This is a reaction to the Facebook plague of people posting ‘picture quotes’ and rotating madly in the reflected glory, as substantiated by the ‘likes’ and ‘comments’. Its not plagiarism because the source is usually noted, but it is dodgy, so we need a new term – I will call it ‘pagerism’.

3.14159265359…….fucking irrational numbers keep on going, going, going. Just like irrational people.

I am a legend on my own mind. Aren’t we all?

It’s very bad karma to change the name of a boat. Equally bad karma to change the name of a pub!

Doodah….

The more I care the less I care.

The less I fear the more I care.

Ticks all the boxes. Box tickers. Boxes. Ticks. My cat likes to hide in tick boxes. Boxes. Ticks. wtf?

The less I judge the less I fear.

The more I know the less I judge.

Proof of services tendered….I love Australia; we run on services rendered as required by regulations engendered.

I would say before any couple goes to counseling they should try rubbing bare skin together once a day as personal therapy. It may or may not lead to sex, but that is not the point

You do need to monitor your love of your work. If you get that pit in your stomach when you turn up in the morning then it’s time to look around. It can’t always be good, but it should never make you frightened or depressed.