by cameron | May 19, 2012 | Uncategorized
Aaron Sorkin, writer of THE WEST WING, THE SOCIAL NETWORK and the upcoming biopic on Steve Jobs, recently gave the Commencement address at Syracuse University.
The text is, surprisingly for a man of his talents, mostly blech – work hard, stay off drugs – but here’s a few lines that really resonated with me:
Every once in a while, you’ll succeed. Most of the time you’ll fail, and most of the time the circumstances will be well beyond your control. How you live matters. You’re going to fall down, but the world doesn’t care how many times you fall down, as long as it’s one fewer than the number of times you get back up.
As some of you know, the start-up I spent the last two years of my life building (Perdomo Cigars Australia) just went belly-up. Not because it was a bad business – it was doing quite well – but because the other guy involved in the business was involved in ANOTHER business that closed down and because of a whole bunch of things I won’t bore you with, it dragged the cigar business down with it.
In times like that, it’s easy to kick yourself for a bunch of reasons – like getting involved with the wrong people, not trusting your gut (or your wife) when it/she tells you “this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing” – but that doesn’t help. Hindsight is great later on when you are doing a post-game analysis of the lessons learned. But the most important thing you need to remember when the shit hits the fan and your life cracks is GET BACK UP.
I’ve got two questions I always ask myself when things go bad.
1. What does this situation enable me to do that I couldn’t do before?
2. How can I turn this situation to my advantage?
I’ve found that these two questions quickly re-program my brain in times of drama to think about the upsides and not worry about the downsides (or about how the downsides came to happen in the first place). There’s time for analysis later.
by cameron | May 18, 2012 | Uncategorized
(Photo: Philippe Moreau Chevrolet)
French President Francois Hollande’s new Socialist-led government adopted a 30 percent pay cut Thursday, a gesture of shared sacrifice by leaders who must now reduce the country’s massive debts and tackle spiraling unemployment. (AP)
Can you imagine the Australian government cutting their own pay by 30%?
On the contrary, they recently awarded themselves a massive pay rise.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s pay will soar by $90,000 to about $470,000 – more than either US President Barack Obama or British PM David Cameron are paid.
I appreciate that we need to offer reasonable compensation for people who devote many years of their life to public service, but surely their pay packets should be in line with the salaries of people in private enterprise. In 1999, PM John Howard had to survive on a paltry $289,270. It’s amazing that he could even get by.
It seems to me that we should have salary caps for our politicians and executives from private enterprise. How much is enough?
by cameron | Dec 20, 2011 | Uncategorized
A few weeks ago the nice Fredu Liu from BFM 89.9 business radio in Malaysia did an interview with me about how TPN got started and our current business model. The interview is now online.
Listen here if you want to hear me get called “The Podfather”. Don’t tell Ricky or Adam.
by cameron | Dec 9, 2011 | Brisbane, Melbourne, Uncategorized
Dear Melbourne IT Leadership Group,
I would like to send my sincere commendations to a member of your hosting support team by the name of “Sank”.
In the last week, I have been screwed around ROYALLY by several of your staff. Sank was the only one who seems to know what he’s doing.
On 30 November, I received an email regarding one of our domain names ‘nelsongoc.com’. The email advised “The following account has been deleted and is no longer accessible.” This is, I might add, a completely useless email. It tells me nothing about the situation. So I rang your support line and spoke to a gent (whose name I unfortunately didn’t write down) who advised me that our domain name was registered through to 2019 and that this email was only regarding our hosting service. I asked if allowing this hosting service to expire would affect our MX records on the domain, as they were pointing to Google Apps. He assured me that letting the hosting expire would not affect our MX records in any way. So we let it expire.
A week later, our email for this domain (which we use to run several businesses I might add) stopped working.
So I rang again last night (8 Dec) and spoke with someone else who told me the same thing as the gent on 30 Nov. I explained that our email had stopped working but he assured me it had nothing to do with the MelbourneIT side of our service.
After scratching my head for another 15 minutes, I rang back AGAIN and this time spoke with a gent called “Niz” who explained that everything I’d told had been incorrect and that I did, in fact, need your hosting service to re-direct our MX records to Google Apps. He offered to set up this service for me – at a cost of $219 p.a.! I asked him if there wasn’t another way to change the MX records – after all, every other domain name registration service we use has this functionality built into the domain service – but he assured me that there was no other option. So I agreed to proceed with setting up the new hosting service. He sent me an email with the new login for the service a few minutes later. However when I tried to login to the DNS section, I was asked for the login a second time but it wouldn’t work.
So I rang your support line for the THIRD time that day and spoke to a young lady who assured me that the DNS login was the same as the Hosting login and worked on her side. She advised me to send an email to the support department with the details of the MX records we needed changed and that they would do it for us. This was about 6pm Brisbane time last night.
This morning, around 9am Brisbane time, I rang Niz again to see if the MX records had been changed. He put me through to Sank.
Sank advised me that what Niz told me about needing the Hosting service was INCORRECT. He said there is a way to change the MX records on the backend of the domain. He then proceeded to walk me through how to set it up. He then put me back through to Niz to cancel the hosting service.
SO……. it took me FOUR calls to your technical support department before I actually got hold of someone who knew what they were talking about.
What kind of operation are you running in there?
by cameron | Nov 17, 2011 | Uncategorized
My wife and I were lucky enough to attend the opening night of QPAC’s performance of Pygmalion last week.
It’s a terrific show – even if I must confess that really didn’t understand the second half of the play much at all.
More on that shortly.
Let me first say that I thought the production was excellent. The sets, stage design and performances were mostly impeccable. My only concern was the performance of the actress playing the wife of the American ambassador. What the hell was that accent? My wife, an American, could barely contain her disgust. Fortunately, said actress isn’t on stage very long. Aside from that, the accents and performances were excellent.
For people like myself who have never read or seen Pygmalion before, think “My Fair Lady” without the songs or the Hollywood ending.
Written by George Bernard Shaw in 1912, it’s the story of a wealthy London aristocrat, who happens to be both an expert in phonetics and a complete dickhead of a human being, and a young, poor, flower girl. He meets the girl on the street, makes fun of her lower-class accent and manners, then jokingly suggests that within three months he could teach her to pass herself off as a princess. Much to his chagrin, she turns up on his doorstep the next morning, determined to take him up on his challenge.
Despite it’s advanced age, the play is timeless in many aspects. In a country like ours that has a Prime Minister whose accent is the topic of much discussion, your accent and how you conduct yourself can still make or break a job interview or even determine the success of a professional career.
Where the play lost me was the second half. Not QPAC’s fault at all, of course, as I’m sure they are being true to the original text. I just couldn’t understand why Eliza seemed to give two cents what Higgins thought of her. He was a complete dickhead from the moment she met him. Even though I can appreciate that she may have grown a little fond of him during their three months working and living together, he seems to have treated her like an indentured servant. Perhaps she was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? He was twice her age (at least) and didn’t seem have have any fond feelings for her, except for a regret to be losing his best student and servant. As most of the second half of the play is devoted to the end of their working relationship, it seemed to drag on a little.
Anyway, these minor complaints are probably due to my lack of understanding of the play. All in all I’d highly recommend going for yourself. Congrats to QPAC for putting on another fine show!
by cameron | Nov 1, 2011 | Uncategorized
Honeycomb bracelet by CharlesWyattJewelery on Etsy.
