I have a very hectic 2 weeks ahead of me. So I scheduled 20 minutes of me time at the park over the road from my office. This is the view from just below my chin watching the early bird autonomous robots on their way to work.
In a world full of variety, knowledge and potential it’s so easy to operate tomorrow how you did today, yesterday and many days before that. For most of us less than 1% of our lives is truly spontaneous or new. Life can become an inevitable future, what I call an IF. So I try to [...]
Automation is more than machines doing work for you. It’s about MACHINES and HUMANS following RULES religiously. Keeping multiple todo lists is very bad. That would then be a list of lists = FAIL. One work list and one personal list is plenty. Coincidental results are when you shift your approach to a task in [...]
Wikipedia describes Flow as, the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. It’s difficult to achieve this state but if you can it is an amazing feeling. I [...]
Recently I walked the South Coast Track in Tasmania’s Southwest National Park wilderness with a friend and neighbour, Michael Sainsbury. It is regarded as one of the top bushwalks of the world because of it’s pristine, remote and wildlife rich nature. Having done it I completely agree. In summary the trip is a flight into [...]
One of the joys of being a parent is seeing your kids learn something themselves through the discovery process rather than training. Our son Caleb hasn’t ever had a Piano lesson. Emma and I don’t play the Piano either so he has had to find out for himself how to use it. He generally finds [...]
I had quite a stressful day at work yesterday and sometimes the best thing to do when that happens is watch a few videos to help pull me back to the big picture rather than the single moment I’m currently in. Observing humanity is one way to do that. A few years ago I worked [...]
A surreal start to the day with a massive dust storm. The picture left is one of my snaps on the way to Hornsby Station in Sydney. There’s been some great photo’s of the event on Flickr.
I remember as a child walking out of the movie Tron and thinking "I love anything to do with the future". Movies like Tron, War Games and Star Wars were the seeding inspiration around my life as a product builder in financial markets and more recently in web applications. What’s really interesting is how Apple [...]
You try and pass off your less than 1 year old iPhone to your non geek partner so you can get the new 32GB video enabled one. Life looks like a big content opportunity or a chance to have a say on the very obscure but mildly intriguing (that probably will be of zero interest [...]
Often I find myself sitting next to Emma on the couch working on watching my laptop while she watches the TV. I realised I am only about three TV shows from zero dependence on traditional TV content (House, Boston Legal and NCIS are the TV shows if you are interested to know). If they were [...]
Tired of the same old, same old, perspective of life. Here’s some alternative ways of seeing things that help snap you out of that automaton existence, that is the day to day. Sub orbital flight around earth When catching a plane at altitude turn you head to be horizontal and pretend you are in a [...]
I have had a few discussions with tech savvy customers about avoiding tech during your holiday break. This topic is clearly a divided camp. Personally I can switch off from tech for about a week but that is about as long as I can handle going dark (as Geeks call it). Here’s 7 reasons supporting [...]
Sometimes perfection can have a debilitating effect on execution. Almost disease like, it can arrest your progress. Perfection is actually an unnatural state. Ironically natures imperfections seem to give it a feeling of perfection. I’m as guilty as the next person for wanting all the ducks lined up but this is only in some areas. [...]
Wotnews.com.au the news arm of Wotif.com has posted the 3 big stories of 2008 according to various CEOs, Gov and Industry leaders. My three were: The Death of Capitalism (as we know it) A defining year in financial markets with the emergence of a new species of company that will cause the re-writing of so [...]
Watching my 5 year old sons face as he watched this video on TED.com was priceless.
Kevin Kelly presented at TED on The One. It’s about the new Internet, the semantic web. Watching it, I couldn’t but help think Kevin Kelly was very aligned to the Gaia Hypothesis without realising it. Maybe he is, and just doesn’t mention it in his speech. Since reading Peter Russells “The Awakening Earth” back in [...]
I was reading through celebrity chef Benjamin Christies website tonight and found this post on How to Cook the Perfect Steak. Well I was hungry in just a nano-second after reading this marinating idea… dry marinate using sea salt, black pepper and macadamia nut oil Macadamia nut oil ! My friends and I have spent [...]
Simplicity is Sustainables Best Friend is an article I’ve just done for TheCalmSpace.com. Simplicity is a key area of interest for me on many levels, business and personal, so this article was a fun one to write. Society has somehow decided that simple is bad in many situations. There is a fight to give simplicity [...]
Some time ago I wrote about transition time costs and how they are a big cost to personal and business efficiency. Problogger Darren Rowse was right on the money today in his post about batch processing tasks together to get efficiency in his blogging business. I think he misses the “why” it works but the [...]
The Powerhouse Museum has posted over 400 Photo Plates on Flickr. You really have to take you hat of to them. It’s wonderful to make this so available to Australians. Hat tip to Sean Carmody. This shot is quite sentimental for me. I grew up about 100 metres around the bend on the left from [...]
I often do a spring clean through folders, bookmarks, contacts and now my twitter account. I could use the time savings excuse not to do it but I know it’s an excuse. Small amounts of time spent on cleaning pays wonders in productivity. The kicker is that great clean mind feeling. It’s so much easier [...]
When any group of people operate at a new level of difficulty, scale and focus then the arguments and wars of the day become smaller issues and begin to lose their power. If humans can change our point of relativity from local/country to global/universe then I believe it can help stop wars, bring countries closer [...]
How much of your time is spent in transition? Home to work. Desk to Water Cooler. Email to website to blog to blah. Do we need to analyse this to work out what transition time is costing the human race? It’s a cost. I’m confident we would find a correlation between the quantity of stuff [...]
For a while there our kids were fighting a lot and sometimes it would crescendo with a fight over something stupid like toothpaste sharing just before bed. Yep, fluoride, a really stupid thing to fight over. So I hit the net, the books, and even a few Super Nanny episodes to work out this fighting [...]
I’m intrigued by the whole area of applying natural world systems to the business world. This area has fascinated me since I went on my first Nature excursion at nine years of age to the bushland at City Beach (Perth, Australia). We learnt about termite nest construction. Despite being young I understood that the ants [...]
I’m an X-files fan, I admit it. I love a search for the truth but there is a major problem. Truth and reality are constrained by the observers knowledge, wisdom and measurement (senses). We know that scientific process is designed to maximize observation, but it is still always so constrained. While you have not obtained [...]
In an old movie called The Gods Must Be Crazy a light plane pilot throws a coke bottle from his window and it hits an African Native on the head. The African Native hasn’t had much to do with western culture and thinks it came from God. He decides it might be a weapon because [...]
My new years resolution is very low key. It is to add a little more rigour and discipline to life. People tend to go for big ticket resolutions but it takes a revolutionary change in your life to have them happen. We all know they don’t, humans just fail badly honouring their New Years resolution [...]
Procrastination is easily my biggest weakness and I always delay working on it. Yes, that was humor. I even delayed writing this post for a year at least for fear it needed to be perfect. However I was inspired by a great read on the Pick The Brain blog. This post is far from perfect [...]