It’s All Fantasy
It’s proven, so it has to be true And now there’s not a thing that we can do Yet another litany of lies Pulled off in front of our very eyes It’s a free show though So we mustn’t complain Hollywood in real-life Actors showing grief and pain The news isn’t so good And we are all so afraid Pulled in so many directions Playing out this dark charade Lies become truth become lies Who the hell can really tell? Stories and often, just rumors Everything merges simply so well But amongst all these sleepers One or two still think and question Suspect that they smell a rat Don’t swallow that suggestion Remaining single-minded Looking inwards and deeply Ignoring all this bloody nonsense Staying true; the free me It’s pretty
Read More »Keeping Everyone Happy
Last week in London, we pulled off our first conference. Pulling together something like a conference is a real feat of organization and hard work I can tell you! It also has a lot of stakeholders who all want something different from the event. The attendees, the sponsors, the exhibitors and so on. Pleasing them all is really tough to do and none of them really care much about how complex everything is or how difficult it is to pull off a complex event like this – they just want you to meet their objectives. To be honest, it reminded me a little of life! In life, I think it is exactly the same way. People expect things from you and they are not actually in possession of the facts
Read More »Duty Free?
I have been traveling quite a bit recently and indeed, I am just back from London. Me being me, I couldn’t help wondering why we still call the shops in airports duty free? Plainly, they are not or if they are, something else is wrong. I ended up asking the manager of one such store why, if the store was duty free, could I buy Maltesers much cheaper in the High St.? He didn’t seem to know so I asked about cigarettes – same price as the High St. Well, inside the EU apparently, duty free isn’t duty free anymore. It is my friends a con and I counted several items in a duty free that were more than 20% more expensive than the corner store near my Hotel in
Read More »A Pain in the Neck
Today, I woke up with a pain in my neck and upper back which rapidly became a headache to boot. I wish there were chiropractors in the Czech Republic but there are not so I make do with a heat patch and two headache tablets. I know that the heat patch will probably do the trick and that the headache pills will not. It’s bizarre really but I had this problem for about 15-years now and it must be related to the way I have slept. My chiropractor in The Woodlands could fix it with a quick twist of the neck! He always told me I had knocked a vertebrae out of alignment high up in my neck most likely by hanging my head off of the back of the
Read More »Rock Hound
Back when I was a kid, I became fascinated by geology. In part, my father was responsible for he was also fascinated and together, we would walk up and down beaches at every opportunity, hands clasped at our backs, eyes peeled and a slightly bent back, searching for the one stone or rock that might be special. Many a time, people would watch us puzzled and ask, what it was we were looking for. Pretty stones really was the answer. My dad polished, ground and sliced stones in the garage, made them into jewelry and sold them on the side back in the 70’s you see. Stones that we found were the special ones amongst the tigers eye, rose quartz, agate, amethyst and other purchased semi-precious stones. I was lucky
Read More »If Only…..
These days I find myself reminiscing a lot. Usually its music that takes me back. A song on the radio, one played while I work or perhaps that tune that suddenly haunts my mind and will not go away. The problem is I have caught myself questioning a lot of things like I would never have imagined myself doing in the past. I have even caught myself thinking it might be nice just to be dead. I wonder, is this what all mid-50’s people think? You get up and you feel the aches and pains and then you look in the mirror and this wrinkled, rumpled, worn out and overweight looking creature stares back and you think – Who the fuck is that? Of course, you know it’s you……. and
Read More »Heart
This is my heart It is yours Symbol of my love Also yours Please don’t break it Or ever lose it Just let it beat Next to yours From Poems for the Little Room.
Read More »Rip Off
Its quite incredible to me how people are quite comfortable ripping other people off. Last night, I accidentally stumbled upon a report on offer on several websites for the amazing sum of $3500. The report was about the CTRM software market (everyone scratches heads and says – The what market?). This is actually the software category that I cover as an analyst and so I was interested in this report that must originate with a competitor – naturally, I wanted to know who that competitor might be. Well, firstly, the report appears to be for sale across a number of websites that offer reports, it’s authors well hidden behind a mass of different company names. The language used to describe it told me three things almost immediately; 1. The authors
Read More »The Lord of the Elements
The Lord of the Elements is the prequel to The Last Observer and it focuses, for reasons those who have read The Last Observer will understand, on Edward Bright. Edward is the friendly, well-meaning and debonair magician and businessman who attempts to rescue bookworm Stanley from Zeltan and his black Lodge but in The Last Observer we do not learn much about the man, where he came from and why he is, well – who he is. The Lord of the Elements follows Edward through college as his interest in magic grows. After college, he is taken under the wing of a rich banker who becomes Edward’s adopted father in many respects. As well as being a successful private banker, Cyril Bainbridge is also the Grand Master of a Magic Lodge based
Read More »Free Stuff…..
These days when it comes to books and book promotion, a lot of people |(me included) will from time to time, give their work away for free. The general idea is that people will read it, like it, review it and buy more. If that philosophy works, it is a very small minority that write reviews and an even smaller minority who will then but something. In fact, I am not at all sure that this strategy really works. Some people claim giving away books for free is destroying the business altogether. Who knows? In other areas I would say that if something is free, people do not value it. And what about that U2/ Apple mess up with the free album? So what do you all think? Are free
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