I’m going to Hong Kong! Last minute booking, for 5′250 baht ($125 USD / £80) I’m flying into Macau and then I’m hoping to hop on a boat across the water.
I’ll charge the camera, throw some stuff in my bag, and hit the road, photos to follow soon…
Monthly Archive for November, 2006
There’s a wonderful relationship between the artist and her studio. To the budding and the accomplished artist alike, the studio is an almost sacred place. A great deal of time and effort is put into creating the perfect environment in which to create masterpieces, or in business terms, work most effectively.
I think we can take an important lesson from this. I believe most companies could benefit from focusing more energy on the spaces in which they ask their people to work. I know that in my own office, I rarely get any work done when other people are in the office. If I really need to do something, I either come in earlier than everyone else or go to a client’s site. I also know when I’m at a client’s office, I achieve far more than when I’m surrounded by the distractions of my own open plan office.
To the artist it is obvious, without the perfect environment she cannot achieve perfection in her work. Why, then, do so many people in business think differently? Why do business people settle for acceptable working environments instead of pursuing perfection with the passion of an artist?
I’ve just finished reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (new window). It’s a fascinating book on how groups of people make decisions.
I’m sure most people are familiar with the competition where you have to guess the number of beans in a jar. If you take a room full of people and take the average of all their guesses, the average will almost always be within 3% of the actual answer and the average will be a better guess than almost everyone in the room made individually. An interesting book to read on this Election day in the United States.
It’s a fascinating book with some very interesting insights into the behaviours of crowds and their decisions. There are some wonderful examples from arenas as wide as Zara (the fashion retailer) and the stock markets to sports betting or decision markets. An excellent read, highly recommended from the desk of me!
For those of you who haven’t been here and met the crew, here’s a choicey snap from the other night in one of my favourite establishments…
As always, a little treat for your viewing pleasure… 
I’m going in for my first and very hopefully last Thai root canal treatment this afternoon, in a mere hour actually. Oh joy to the world.
I don’t quite understand the little white things that we call teeth, they’ve always been something of a mystery to me. It wasn’t until I was about 12 that I actually learned how to brush my teeth properly, oops! It seems that since leaving home almost a year ago (a year to the day to the day in a couple of weeks…) that I’ve been forgetting to brush my teeth.
Well, either I’ve been forgetting or the change from an electric to a manual toothbrush has had a dramatic effect. I seem to remember having forgotten (how odd is that!) to brush my teeth while I was on the road. But since settling in Bangkok almost 8 months ago I think I’ve been ok at remembering.
Anyway, had a bit of toothache, went for a 500 baht ($12 USD, £7) teeth cleaning and was told I need 2 fillings. I opted not to go with the dentist at 400 baht ($10 USD, £5.50) per filling and instead opted for a slightly more upmarket establishment. In a purely joyful hour she hollowed out two of my teeth, told me one was almost a root canal and the other needs root canal. Then she kindly relieved me of some 2′000 baht ($50 USD, £30) for my trouble.
Today I’m told she’ll be lightening my wallet by a mere 9′000 baht ($225 USD, £130) for my root canal. Oh, I almost forgot, and I’m going to get my first crown, which sounded a little scary at first. A quick Scroogle settled me a little, here’s hoping it’s included in the cost she quoted… eek!
Apologies to the non-geeks reading this, you probably want to stop now and go get a glass of organic fruit juice instead!
I’m working with web sites at the moment in Bangkok and the majority of our clients host their site on Linux servers. However, a handful choose to host on Windows servers. I’ve always thought this was a bad idea, but never been very vocal about it, well today that changes. Today I say, f*** the Windows web servers, they blow. Linux is vastly superior for a number of reasons I shall try to outline here.
Web hosting is almost always on a remote server. So you need some method of remotely controlling that server. On Windows, you can use some sort of virtual screen, but it’s ridiculously slow and inefficient. Linux on the other hand has SSH, one of the sweetest, simplest and most effective pieces of software. You can run commands remotely, forward ports, copy files, and most importantly, it just works. Simple.
Microsoft’s IIS (their web server) blows. It doesn’t suppport things like mod_rewrite, has way more security issues than Apache which take longer to resolve. Admittedly it is possible to run Apache on Windows, but come on, it’s an open source appliation, it runs on Linux. It’s just meant to be that way.
So in conclusion, I’ve now solidified my opinion, Windows for web hosting sucks ass.
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