Blog Yellek

This morning as I was out for my morning walk I was contemplating the little gems that life often throws your way in unexpected places. I was walking down Prospect Road, not the most beautiful of stately avenues with its collection of Stoby Poles and hodge podge of run down architecture thrown together for no apparent reason when I turned into Muratti for my Saturday morning ham and cheese croissant.

Immediately I was transported into another reality entirely. Before me was a tastefully lit counter with a delectable array of treats arrayed in all their variety from the little biscuits to the mouth watering cake. Behind the counter were people dressed in smart professional baking uniforms not the least dirty or grease stained but pristine and crisp. The smell of fresh coffee filled the air and to my left and right were patrons taking a morning tea or brunch at one of the tables set in the sunshine. Behind the counter against the wall there was a huge Eiffel tower constructed from a vast number of small round biscuits.

I walk up to the counter and ask for a ham and cheese croissant, the one with the red gum ham and the norweigan cheese. One of the uniformed staff is directed to take the croissant back into the kitchen to warm it up properly by the French head chef who serves me, no microwaves here. Will I be having it here? “No” I say can I have it to take away? “Certainly” he says, “Please take a seat while you wait”. I sit down at one of the tables and watch as he serves another customer who has come in to pick up a large cake for some celebration. The cake looks huge and delicious in its open topped white box but I can’t read the writing. The head chef checks that the spelling is correct with the customer before covering the top of the box with paper.

My croissant arrives packaged into a paper bag with a serviette and carefully taped shut and I sadly have to leave the little world of Muratti to wander back down dirty dusty Prospect road only accompanied by the drone of passing traffic and a double row of Stoby poles. Luckily I have my delicious ham and cheese croissant to remind me of one of the little hidden gems that sit so incongruously in the suburb in which I live.

Leadership | sYp: “Is leadership a personality that was born with you, or is it something that can be acquired later on in life through study or training?”

Definitely something that can be learned. I heard John Maxwell at Hillsong and he talks a lot about becoming a leader. Here is someone who talks regularly to the world’s largest corporations and uses leadership principles from the Bible. I’m reading Winning With People at the moment and it is really good.

Man that was the second week in a row we nearly beat someone! 6-5 this week with some of the longest points I’ve ever seen (lots of dropped disk). Congrats to the Meerkats, they put a really good zone on us and when they did they usually scored. Oh well there’s always next week.

Of course I’m so pumped up now I don’t know when I’ll get to sleep <sigh>

I have a confession to make, I’m a whiteboard junkie. Nothing excites me quite like having an expanse of pristine whiteboard to fill with the ideas that are swirling around in my mind but an expanse of pristine whiteboard and a bunch of ideas lack just one important ingredient: Lots of different colored markers!

Take yesterday for example, there I was attempting to take stock of my life and make some decisions on some areas I need to pursue and of course I had my modest little home whiteboard in use with my 6 different colored markers in heavy use (Black, Red, Blue, Green, Purple and Magenta just in case you were wondering) because I love to color code as I go. Pretty soon it became apparent that I needed more space so I got out my flip charts (yes I have flip charts at home, now you see how really weird I am ) and started drawing on them. Now being a melancholy sort of person it just wouldn’t do to use whiteboard markers on flip charts so I got out my flip chart markers. The only problem with that is that I only have four different colors for flip chart markers so there was a necessary restriction on color coding which was so frustrating!. Anyway 3 diagrams and a whiteboard later I had managed to come up with what I thought were my three defining characteristics (passion, strategy and creativity) as well as the 6 areas of my life they applied to as well as some things to work on which I then dutifully transferred back to the whiteboard so I could use all the colors again.

Never Again will I be caught with too few flip chart marker colors, I resolved to go to the stationary shop on Monday and all will be well. Whilst I’m there I might see if there are some other whiteboard marker colors (Yellow, Pink, Brown or Orange spring to mind ), I really am a sad case

It’s been a long time coming but in an announcement this week IBM finally killed off OS/2.

I sheepishly remember in the glory days of OS/2 I was something of an OS/2 zealot going so far as to help start an OS/2 user group in Sydney and organize a volunteer group within IBM to promote OS/2. There was something righteous about having a technically superior product and taking up the crusade against the evil minions at Microsoft with their non functional windows. Of course IBM marketing for consumer products sucked back then and IBM never resorted to the dirty tricks that Microsoft used on PC OEM’s like Osborne to get Windows preloaded on all PC’s. That would have been bad enough but IBM’s user interface design back then was awful and OS/2 required more system resources than the average consumer PC came equipped with. It’s no wonder that no-one wrote software for OS/2 despite all the time we spent trying to get it to happen.

I bet there are still OS/2 die hards ast IBM that are absolutely livid at the company’s betrayal of OS/2. I had to come to the conclusion a long time ago that it just wasn’t working, I can still remember the day when I removed it from my PC at home. It was a sad day then but it was more than time and I had to move on.