The offshore westerly is my favourite surfing wind but my least favourite cycling wind. There is nothing worse than a stiff westerly in your face. Girls.I don’t know how you do it.

What odds that Nokia and Microsoft disappear into the back-end of internet technologies just like IBM disappeared into software services? This is not shameful but it does result in a lower PE ratio. Let’s just hope they don’t spend too much of their shareholders money trying to compete in the front-end…

The only task harder than coralling academics is shepherding investors.

Just when you think our political system is doomed, along comes a result like this to warm the hearts of all of us that care about Australian industry. It keeps the flame of hope alive, just.

More evidence that marketing types don’t understand politics.

For morning grumps like me there is nothing like a slow, lazy and solo morning breakfast to restore good humor.

It is true that the best lessons are the ones that are learnt painfully.

For example, I will never again store a razor, sharp side up, in my overnight bag.

At the polling booth on Saturday I chatted to my local MP, John Murphy. I asked him how he represented the local electorate in our federal parliament. Lots of gobbledygook later, his answer was basically that he doesn’t. The idea of a parliamentary representative in our federal political system is a furphy.

The federal government’s tax receipts are about 25% of GDP. Of this about 10% varies from government to government. That is, our feds effectively manage about 2.5% of our economy. Hardly “running the country” now is it?

If you plonked a large group of poor white trash onto a very large island full of space and natural resources then naturally they would (a) figure out how to exploit the island, (b) with minimum personal effort required, and (c) to the exclusion of other that might want to join the party.

Of course any pesky original occupants would be reclassified first as non-existent and then later on as mere custodians, awaiting the arrival of the true owners.

Who would have guessed that the poor white trash would then wrap themselves up in regulations, complexity and debt, to the extent that there was no joy on the island?

And the poor fuckers don’t even have a reverse gear.

I am pretty sure that the new Australian government will be much like the last. Hopefully, there will be less of a media witch-hunt around them, but don’t hold your breath. Budget-wise these guys are cutting here in order to to hand out there. I can’t see any policies aimed at actually growing our economy or addressing the long-term issues of diminishing resource and greenhouse gases. Basically they are a perfect Pavlovian response to the greedy and self-centered nature of the voting population of Australia. Collectively, we do get what we deserve, that is for sure.

My self-interest is limited to myself. How self-centered is that? Nuh, not true actually…just sounds good.

A sense of irony not shared may as well not exist, Fritz.

The trouble with affluence is that it breaks the cycle of life.

I remember moments in my twenties when for a short moment the madness stopped. Typically they were quiet moments, almost meditational.

In these moments, despite feeling lost and hopeless, for some reason I never felt despair. Thank Christ.

I always picked myself up and carried on. I never gave up. Sometime in my early forties I crossed the tryline.

The first one of many as it turns out.

Voice-to-text,typos, grammos and couldn’t-give-a-fuck-o’s. It leads to all sorts of weird and wonderful text messages and miscommunication.

I told Lola that, yes, I knew what a daisy chain was, and, no, I have never made one, and, yes, her one was beautiful.

I just noticed this after owning the stove-top for 5 years; someone at Smeg has a sense of humor.

Ideologically there isn’t a single party that is a match for me.

There are a hundred parties and, economically speaking, they are all based on serving the needs of rent-seekers.

I believe that this is the result of some fundamental flaws in our system of parliamentary representation. I must write this up an essay.

Plus I can’t think of a single parliamentarian that I respect and like.

They want more of them but I still don’t understand why psychopaths are green.

Whereas the useless upper house is purely for entertainment. So Julian, the ultimate dick head, gets my vote.

It’s feels like I have a choice between Holden and Ford when what I really want is a Ferrari.

The basics of city driving that Sydney has forgotten: if there’s a speed limit, do it. If there’s a space, fill it. If there’s a gap, close it. And never buy a Hyundai.

People don’t change their spots but they can invert over time.

I gave a talk to some 4th year graduate students yesterday on the subject of entrepreneurship. The oddest question I got was ‘where do I get my news from?’. Go figure…

The main impact of getting older is that, on average, other people start looking younger, better looking and smarter.

Actually scratch that ‘smarter’ – there doesn’t seem to be enough of the right sort of anxiety to drive kids to their maximum potential these days. I am not sure whether that is a good thing or not.

“Oh life, it’s bigger, It’s bigger than you, And you are not me”. How good are those lyrics?

post scriptum bene (12 hours later). Must have been pissed.

I have just been to the dentist and I was struck by this logical truth; either God is a dentist or there is no God.

Crowd-funding is essentially charity aimed at would-be entrepreneurs. In exchange for a copy of the company’s future products a backer gives cash to the entrepreneur. The only benefit to the benefactor, apart from the promise of a future prototype, is a little kudos. This model will lose its shine pretty quickly.

Changing laws to make equity investments possible via crowd funding will make things worse since, as an asset class, crowd-funding is absolutely guaranteed to be loss making. There will be a few winners and a long tail of losers. Committed investors will regress to the mean and lose money just as surely as if they were playing the pokies. Any asset class that doesn’t cumulatively return enough profit (risk-adjusted) will ultimately fail.

I have been to a few functions in Sydney lately where the key speaker says this NSW government prescribed intro; “I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people, who are the traditional custodians of this land. I would also like to pay respect to the elders, both past and present, of the Eora nation, and extend that respect to other Aboriginals present.”

Well they must have spent a fortune on legal fees to get this right.

They carefully use the word ‘custodians’ and not ‘owners’, otherwise the issue might arise that they aren’t paying any rent or didn’t pay any purchase price.

And at not one of the events that I went to was there any aboriginal people present or even invited.

Fucking hypocrites the lot of them, pretending to be nice and new-agey. I suspect they believe their own bullshit.

Riding through Barangaroo (which used to be the Hungry Mile) a lollipop man insisted I stop along with the cars. I told him to fuck off and sailed right through. There’s way too many people in this world trying to tell us what to do.

Worth a mention;  when asked if her husband was religious, David Frost’s wife replied “Absolutely. He thinks he’s God”.

And now the do-gooders are going after caffeine. Not satisfied with annoying the fuck out of smokers and drinkers, they are looking for new targets.

The odd thing is, I drink four or five double macs a day and I don’t have one of the symptoms as listed in this article.

Especially worth noting is that my blood pressure is very low despite drinking, smoking and all that caffeine.

Health is a whole of life thing but these fuckers use academic arguments (of the greater good over the rights of the individual) to relentlessly impose their religions on us.

Truth is, they make a living out of it.

I read the sports pages thoroughly and then skim the front section for new lies. I bet you never knew that news is an abbreviated concatenation of “new lies”.

I can’t keep track of each fallen robin.
And the robins wouldn’t know me from Adam.

One thing about riding a single speed bike to work is that 30kms of Sydney’s hills really lets you know when you are feeling like shit.

WordPress are fools.

Ever wonder why the Australian banks make so much money?

Well they take ours and don’t offer us any service in return. Simple really.

I am working from home today.

All I can say is that the breaks are longer and far more enjoyable.

And the phone calls to work are shorter than the conversations that they replace.

But I didn’t get my morning ride in.

The probability that any specific forecast of the future (beyond the mundane near-term) will eventuate is zero; that being one on the infinity of potential futures.

Therefore from a forecaster’s point of view we can’t actually exist. We are a figment of our own imagination.

And therefore the most likely explanation for our imaginative existence is that we exist exactly as we imagine we do.

The only thing I learnt today is that I need more than one sleep to recover from a blinder. I would love to add “these days” to that, but it was ever thus.

To be fair to myself I am suffering from hayfever too.

Look what some fuckwit put on my windscreen. There are some true dickheads out there.

There is logic. And then there’s truth.

The latter uses all the brain and the former only a small sliver. Truth wins.

This is a logical argument. But I know it’s true.

Never let yourself get fooled by a great speech. Ask for the transcript and you will see all the flaws in the arguments.

In a cab at 2 am.  Drunk. Neil Young’s ‘Heart of Gold’ is playing. It’s God fucking with me. It’s a love song from my late teens when innocence ruled ambition.

Lola, at ten, asked me, no told me, that I should vote Greens. I replied “you don’t even eat yours”.

At the age of 49 I feel like Lucy Jordan except there’s not much I haven’t done. It’s the vibe of the thing.

Second worst cab ride ever today.

Worst one was an eight hour kidnap effort in Shenzhen, China. That was much worse.

There are large swathes of Sydney’s east which are totally gridlocked around 3 pm everyday as mums pick up their kids.

There has to be a better way…walking, bikes, public transport, no mums.

One warm spring day and I am happy. Remarkable what a bit of weather will do to the mood.

For some reason I have troubles typing the word ‘chracters’. Just can’t seem to get the fucker right, no matter how slowly I go.

About 4 months in and I am glad about this blog. It serves a number of functions. First, it gets this shit out of my head (especially the shit). Secondly, it allows me to record the odd valuable idea, and I often have trouble remembering my good ideas. Thirdly, it seems amuse a few mates and I don’t mind providing comic relief especially since that is a free set of steak knives. Fourthly, it gives me something to do when I am stuck with little to do, e.g. on a bus. Finally it really is a weird sort of diary so Lola can have the thing if and when she is interested.

Brutality is the simplest solution to every problem.

Oh-la-la. I just took a tour of Linkedin’s most popular blogerists. Here are today’s top titles:

How to Self-Promote without Being a Jerk

Yes Men? No Thanks!

Miley Cyrus Inc.’s Branding Tips

Any efficiencies gained by the presence of Linkedin must be more than offset by the fuckwit information being hoovered up by a distracted workforce.

Just about everyone I know has a lot more undone work than they have hours available to do that work. That is, just about everyone in the white collar sector lives their lives with a mountain of undone work in front of them.

Imagine the joy of blue collar work; where there is no undone work left at the end of the day?

One impact of this undone work is that white collar workers are forever making choices as to which of the undone work is to be prioritised. Sometimes outside forces decide, sometimes not. But I am guessing that there are a lot business efficiencies won and lost in this process.

The other upmarket Holden is called a Statesman. None of them in Australia.

I can’t think of one good reason why the CFMEU’s headquarters have been designed to look like a Commonwealth Bank.

Holden’s upmarket conformadore is named the ‘Caprice’.

The dictionary tells me that means “A sudden, unpredictable action, change, or series of actions or changes”.

That is, an accident waiting to happen.

I find it amazing that I can take photos of strangers and they never complain.

Hanging around Smith street feels like waiting for death.

There’s a market for vegan cat food.

Maybe it’s so there’s cats for vegans to eat?

Stories of me. They go around and around. In my head.

An article on Linked-In, ‘Twenty five of the smartest women on Twitter’.

From their photos I can assert that most of them aren’t foxy morons.

I find myself on the tarmac on a cold winter morning, before sunrise. I must, I must, I must do better.

Life is a little like the kid’s game of ‘truth or dare’. Maybe better stated as truth or love. Whatever, it sounds about right.

I have to admit that I don’t mind it too much when drivers do stupid things to me on the bike.

It gives me a chance to get aggro and I need that sometimes.

So long as they aren’t behind me I can usually guess as to their upcoming stupidity, so it’s not too dangerous.

Schools like to think that students are the proverbial frogs in water, slowly and unwittingly coming to the boil.

Well it’s not working; my daughter has seen right through it and is not very impressed with the continually increasing load of maths.

She asked me when it’s going to stop. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it doesn’t.

Sadness: we all have limited capacity to withstand it. You need to know when the tank is empty.

Money, lies and videotapes.

Today the world is very bleak. It’s my own fault. I will just have to ride it out.

This is a weed hunt. Don’t ask.

Midnight in the garden of pestilence.

Wealth is better measured by how little you need and not by how much you have.

Iconoclasm is the deliberate destruction within a culture of the culture’s own religious icons and other symbols or monuments, usually for religious or political motives.

I have decided to coin the term monoclasm. A monoclast deliberately tries to destroy another culture’s religious icons and other symbols or monuments, usually for religious or political motives. An example would be a terrorist from the middle east, or a politician from America with a foreign policy agenda, or the Chinese in Tibet.

Why monoclast? First, it rhymes with monoculture (where all these problems start from). ‘Clast’ derives from the late Greek, Klas; the past tense of the noun, Klan -‘to break’. Mono refers to the attempted destruction of one monoculture by another, insecure, monoculture.

I saw the idiot most likely to be our next PM standing on a road, promising federal funds to fill in a few potholes, if and when he gets elected.

Its odd that nobody thinks that this dip into extreme banality and triviality should actually disqualify the idiot from any office of note.

How fucked up is Australia?

Snoring is a vestige of our evolutionary amphibious past. It’s how frogs find each other in the dark. For a root.

The dead hand of the Lonely Planet is everywhere. Their job is to destroy authenticity wherever they find it, by sending in hordes of backpackers and other travelers. They must have trouble lying straight in their beds.

What do you give an American who has everything? One more thing.

If you have offended one god then you may as well offend them all.

The Chinese driving points scheme…

Twelve points, just like us. Suspicious; we may be exporting bureaucracy. Apart from minerals it’s just about all we have.

You lose six points for running a red light or going 20 kmh over, but you get them back in one year.

If you lose your license you have to do one months worth of remedial driving school and then pass a test.

You have to laugh at the clown that took liquid explosives onto a plane. If there was one at all; it might have all been in the imagination of some US bureaucrat.

Now hundreds of millions of passengers concern themselves with liquid, aerosols or gels. Aka fluids.

A multi billion dollar industry has been created for miniature packs of fluids that people like to use. And there has been billions wasted in chuck outs at customs.

All of this because, deep down, we are all quite scared of flying; it’s quite unnatural. So it makes a great high-profile target for the emotionally retarded monoclasts who want to go out with a bang.

Geez, this bloke’s raincoat is the height of optimism..

Oooh I would hate to be in charge of China. On one hand the party guys have to keep everyone fed. Then they face the wrath of the middle classes when the bubble finally bursts. And the gap between rich and poor threatens to erupt into violence at any time. Oh, and they have to pretend to be communists rather than autocrats. They are shackled with a sense of face and shame which forces them into doing things they would rather not. And they also have to hide their own personal wealth. Infighting means they are always watching their own backs…Stressful…!

Look love, it’s great that you have three carefree and happy kids. But you should have taught them about being a little aware of people around them. They think the whole world is their playground.

How good is this photo of J.D. Salinger with the wife of a good friend? It asks so many questions

In Australia a honking of the car horn is an angry response to some stupid act of another driver.

In China it is an announcement by the honker itself that it’s about to do something stupid.

From a little beep, for everyday stupidity, through to a sustained alarm for an upcoming full scale hail-Mary.

Well I outsmarted the great fire wall of China and figured out how to get WordPress to work in China. Take that you fuckers!

The Chinese have built latency into Google’s services here. Every now and again, at regular intervals, Google’s sites simply won’t load. It drives one to Baidu.

The Chinese government blocks WordPress. Go figure. It’s either a scary and uncontrolled source of disinformation or some party members have shares in the local version. I lean to the latter explanation.

This much I can say about China: what doesn’t kill you doesn’t kill you.

Sydney at dawn on winter can be very beautiful, if you can see at all.

The first victim of an expat community is village chic. Brands, any brand, will do.

A good looking girl with a glass eye is rare. So is a wealthy American with ears that need pinning back or bad teeth. It’s getting harder to be perfect.

Shanghai cabbies often can’t drive to save their lives. And then you get the occasional star. Right now I have a dude that I have nick-named Fangio.

Fearless, stupid, and skilled. He and I have I life expectancy that is measured in minutes. I haven’t even bothered with the seat belt.

Every time I groan or wince at his latest manoeuvre he turns and laughs at me. At 160 kmh in a rattly box on wheels

I am in the hands of the gods and Fangio.

You can still smoke and drink in China, simultaneously and inside or out.

And you can easily get killed by the electric motor bikes in Shanghai. Silent assassins.

Ok i get an email to tell everyone they have just moved to Shanghai and we are all welcome to drop in at any time. Well I am in Shanghai so I dropped in on the same day. Careful what you wish for…

And the good Lord did pick my brains….

Note to self; it makes no sense to eat a vindaloo the night before an all day flight to China.

My parents last pub in its painted glory. It’s says on the back “hand painted by Ron Rowles”. Well it wasn’t done by a machine, now was it? Nobody would program a machine that badly. And I spent ages photo editing the thing to make it look as good as I could.

They one and only squash comp that I won came with this as a prize. I will cherish it whilst it lasts.