Entries from January 2009 ↓

• HUGE couple of days thinking about the next chunk of time. Time to see
  my honey now! #
• Fridays are normally downtime for me but no rest for the wicked today.
  Much too much to finish off for the week. #

I’m currently faced with a small dilemma…

I have been a longtime Twitter user, which is a pretty one-dimensional and simple networking tool, but in recent times far more people in my more immediate zone of relationships are all over Facebook. Preaching a sermon series called “Beyond Facebook” may not have helped in this regard. The bulk of my Twitter connections are in the US.

For a while now, though, I have been updating both services with my status changes. Now I’m starting to wonder whether it’s worth keeping both running, and re-assessing my rationale for participating in each of them.

In a lot of ways I prefer the simplicity of Twitter, but Facebook seems to have the numbers in my world at the moment.

Perhaps I should preach a series entitled “Topping Twitter”…?

• On staff off-site retreat. We have such a great team. Locking in our
  plans for the first half of 09. Looks good. #
• Hate not having good phone reception! Don’t like my connectivity being
  hampered. #

The principles of war could, for brevity, be condensed into a single word – “Concentration.” – Basil Liddell Hart

This is, I think, true in most of life, from sports to business, study to chess, politics to reading.

via

Apparently, here in WA we’re
to be confronted with yet another vote on daylight savings in May. This is ridiculous!

When are we going to have a government in WA that will simply exercise leadership and do the thing that needs to be done? On purely economic grounds, and especially in the current situation, can we afford to head back to the old scenario where you can’t do business with anyone over East (in our own country!!!) for half the day?! I remember some days when the window for eastern state contact was as little as 3 hours, depending on lunch breaks, etc. That’s crazy!

I like daylight savings for a range of reasons, but even if I didn’t, it just doesn’t make sense for us not to have it in place. And yet this is where modern democratic, poll driven “leadership” lets us down… politicians who are afraid to make the hard decisions because it might make them unpopular and hence remove them from “leadership”. So they exercise this “check-the-wind” style of following not leading. This daylight savings issue is a classic example of it in this state.

I can hear some saying, “But, it’s what the people want…” Baloney! The people might also want massive tax cuts and free trips to Hawaii too, but that doesn’t make it possible or right. Leadership is about doing the hard thing, about making decisions that are for the overall good. This daylight savings thing has been a stupid issue for 3 decades now (in my memory) – just do it for the benefit of our state. Be leaders.

Having said this, I must confess to having little hope that our current state government has the capacity for this sort of leadership, so off to the polls we go… again…

• Back to work today after a 5 week break. I’ve never been away that
  long, so it’s been awesome. #
• After a long-running pirate joke around here, the staff greeted me back with
  a bunch of pirate gear and a treasure hunt! Onya, team! :-) #

Peter Schiff was right. Everyone argued he was off the planet, but he was right. Very right.

I wonder whether he took the bet…

The old truism used to be that, apart from sporting events, Australians level of patriotism was directly proportional to their distance from home.

But, suddenly, I’m driving around seeing people with multiple flags hanging off their cars, banners proclaiming “Happy Australia Day!” and similar sentiments, and I caught myself thinking that this is all, ironically, strangely un-Australian behaviour. What’s going on around here?

Next thing you know, we’ll be standing with hats off and hands to hearts when the anthem plays…

Crikey!

Eight years ago I wrote an entry in my blog where I noted that I thought the election of George Bush as President was not only dangerous for the US, but also the world. This entry was lost in the sands of time when I lost a couple of years’ worth of stuff due to a small backup problem… :-)

I think I was right.

A few years before that, I had predicted that W would become President. This was while he was Gov of Texas. I was right on that too. Weird.

But, here we stand on the cusp of something new. I really do pray that Obama is a good President. I feel for him in that he had inherited two huge messes to deal with that may entirely swamp whatever else he had planned for his first term, but if he is the leader everyone is hoping for, perhaps he will push through to better days.

It’s going to be interesting, that’s for sure….

• Deeply weirded out by the choice of leading lady in Transporter 3… :-O #