It has been a super-busy month. My ideas-file is filling up with stuff waiting to make it onto this blog. Oh well, such is life. More thoughts and posts are coming when I get to them. Promise.

Here’s a question for you: would you like to see (selected) blog posts in Mandarin?

I notice that quite a few of you are reading this blog from China and Taiwan. I thought it may be useful to you if I had some of my more considered posts translated into Chinese. It will give me an opportunity to improve my own use of the language in a professional context.

This is just a thought at the moment to see what sort of response I get. I am not promising anything!

Please let me know your thoughts below.

When a sandwich de-sandwiches itself on contact, is it still a sandwich?

I am not at all adverse to generous sandwich fillings. But when it no longer holds together, when you can no longer hold it without it spilling its guts, when you cannot cut into it without extruding all the filling, the whole affair becomes a usability problem.

And it is also false advertising to boot. I contend that a sandwich is “yummy stuff held between slices of bread” and that usability means it can be eaten without the insides falling out.

What does this have to do with business or creativity? Dunno.

People working finance get to hang out and live in palatial glass towers.

Artists, musicians, and creative types work and live in hovels.

The in-between people – marketing departments and advertising – lived in palatial converted warehouses.

(I have no idea where this leads to. Please share your thoughts.)

… about living life with more enjoyment and less pain.

Quote from a TED Talk by John Maeda: Simplicity patterns. Worth listening to.

Thanks to Jany Chau for the link.

I had a council rubbish collection day last month. I threw out two PCs, a pile of SCSI storage devices and a scanner (leftovers from my mi$$pent Apple days).

I almost threw out my 100Mb ZIP drive. But at the last minute decided to see if it will work with my current Thinkpad (via an Adaptec SCSI PCMCIA card). It did, and I spent the next hour or so sorting through a pile of old ZIP disks.

The whirling sound brought back memories. 10 years ago I was just starting out on my own! It feels like a lifetime ago.

I used these “huge” 100Mb ZIP disks for my backups and to transfer “large” volumes of data to others. It was fun to uncover some old web and touchscreen application prototypes – which still worked on today’s browsers of course

What’s your tech-nostalgia moment?

I am sitting in a cafe in the middle of Singapore, catching up on emails and writing. SingTel provides free wifi city-wide. And people do use it. About 25% of the patrons of this cafe are currently on their laptops. And they seemto hang around and buy drinks, as I am doing.

But Sydney can’t get its act together. Too hard, too expensive, says the state government.

Obviously we are not serious about the provision of what is really a basic telecommunications service. What a pathetic lack of vision.

I have been travelling around China for the past 10 days or so with friends. Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjing – the three largest cities in China.

Today is the first opportunity I had to be by myself for a few hours. Not walking around looking at things, not engaging with my friends or the locals, not seeing something amazing, or eating great food.

I realised that it has been a long while since I had had so many days where my primary focus has been people and events external to myself. And this has reduced my self reflections and the awareness of my own thoughts. Hence the reduced number of blog posts.

Normally, I spend quite a bit of time by myself. And it is during these moments that ideas and thoughts present themselves. They bubble up from nowhere and demand to be noticed and thus blogged about. When I am travelling, especially with others, I get distracted with stuff on the outside.

[Written on 8 April]

I am writing this from the top deck of Singapore Airline’s A380 on my way from Sydney to Singapore. It has been an extremely busy few weeks since Easter, hence the sporadic blog posts. I shall attempt to catch up over the next four weeks.

My plan is to spend some time in Singapore talking business with associates and friends. Plus a couple of weeks getting a feel for China by visiting three to four cities. I have never been to China before, so this will be interesting. I will share my relevant thoughts here. Stay tuned!

(The seats in Cattle Class are thankfully wider than a 747. There’s loads more headroom. But the tray tables are surprisingly wobbly…)

As businesses develop and grow (and I mean this in the larger sense beyond simply size and profits) over time, their strategic needs change. This is a rough diagram that sums up my thinking thus far on the matter. Click on the image to get a PDF version where you can actually read the text.

I am using this to clarify (for myself) how and where my skills/services can be best offered to businesses; and on which level on the evolutionary scale.

My friend Christina Jayne Duncan said in an email:

“The heart core of the issue is the only way!”

“Heart core” immediately made me think of “hard core” (mind out of the gutter please, just for the duration of this post).

So much of the conventional business world is about the hard core stuff – we are business MEN and must therefore must only make hard core MANLY “rational” decisions; we must be hard to WIN because winning is everything; hell, to SURVIVE we must stick to being hard – the business world is a dog eat dog one after all…

Nor surprisingly, we suddenly find ourselves mired in bureaucracy and cover-our-arses processes for just about everything we want to do in business. We eye everyone we do business or work with with distrust. Employee and customer loyalty is at an all time low.

Our advertising says all the warm and fuzzy stuff but our actions are hard and cold. Of course customers will just believe what you tell them.

If you went out and asked people how much they agree with the statement “business is heartless”, the responses would not be surprising.

The bottom line is, if we don’t engage our hearts when making decisions; if we just let our rational mind take full control, we run the huge risk of pissing off a lot of people, including ourselves.

Think of the last time you made a totally rational decision that your heart was against. Maybe you stayed in a job too long because you needed the money, or did something against your ethics and values because that is what you have been told, or buddied up to someone you distrust because they have good contacts.

What did that feel like? How easy was it to rationalise yourself out of that hurt?