Follow-up

The work rant produced some interesting comments. Scariest was talking with one of the company directors over from the UK for a visit a couple of weeks after that post. We were talking about possibilities within the company and he said that 'he wouldn't want to place a do-er in a high-up customer relations role. If you do then they will be tempted to roll their sleeves up and try to get things working and having that kind of person at a senior level may be considered offensive by the client'. Scary for a couple of reasons - the idea that knowledge & competence is considered a negative when it comes to senior roles, and also the use of the phrase 'do-er'. When I heard him say it my first thought was that our politically slimey & ethically retarded sales guy had somehow heard of this blog and directed him to it. But it's a common enough phrase so it must have been a coincidence.

My mum also emailed me some comments, probably tempered from many similar conversations with my dad before he started up his own business -
But a ‘talker’ does not realise that this is what he is, it is how he has always gone through life and it is the norm, so he probably wouldn’t understand where you are coming from. He will assume that his expertise at leeching something tangible from you and turning it into sales/monies should be well rewarded, after all, he will assume that you would prefer to carry on with the interesting stuff instead of trying to enthuse boring business men who would rather be on the golf course. I resent it too, but the only way out is to join the ‘talkers’ – you have the personality, all you need is the bulls…..
and of course
so what are you going to do about it?

I'm working on it mum :)

I was also leant a copy of Eckhart Tolle's 'A New Earth'. I've not read much of it so far but it's an interesting read that seems to resonate with my world view. The owner has underlined paragraphs that have had an impact on them and I feel privelaged that they are sharing their viewpoints with me in this way. The main thrust of the book is that the human ego is out of control. It's almost impossible to fight against the ego as it's built around your own sense of 'I' - the way to move forward is to dissolve or transcend your ego and try to attune with what is around you. My favourite sentence so far (although I didn't underline it) is

Most people are still completely identified with the incessant stream of mind, of compulsive thinking, most of it repetitive & pointless. There is no 'I' apart from their thought processes and the emotions that go with them. This is the meaning of being spiritually unconscious.

which pretty much hits my personal nail on the head. It's easy to belittle this kind of book as 'new agey' but I think that anything that makes you think beyond the immediate helps you to achieve a personal balance. I haven't concentrated enough on that part of my psyche since arriving in Australia and this blog is in some ways a starting point to get me stepping outside of my thought processes again.

New skates

My old & trusty Salomon FSK skates are getting a bit long in the tooth so I've been keeping an eye open for a replacement.
They've still got a bit of life in them but the options to replace them are getting smaller as our local skate shop loses interest in in-line skates to focus on the more lucrative skateboard and scooter markets. I found these on sale in there the other day
the colours are a bit more - well, white than I'd like and I'm not sure how resiliant the boot will be to the scuffs & scrapes of everyday skating but they fit well & feel comfortable.
The scary thing about the new skates is that they have no brake and no easy way to mount one. I could just swap over the frames (ie the bit that connects the wheels to the boot) because the brake is mounted on the frame on the old skates - this is one of the main reasons why I wanted to go for this design of skate. But now I have them I'm curious to try them as they are. I managed to not use my brake on the 26km skate on wednesday and slowed down through a mixture of slides, turns, t-stops (dragging the wheels of one skate at 90 degrees to your direction of motion) and the occasional roll past the stopping point and return. But I always knew the brake was there if I needed it. In my mind the idea of skating without a brake is in some ways a metaphor for life - you should be adaptable and prepared to take a different route instead of just trying to grind to a halt when something gets in your way. I'll hopefully be able to let you know how that philosophy works when you you're rolling along at 2o miles an hour and someone pulls out of a driveway in front of you.
I've also been riding my fixed gear bike into the city a bit recently. Fixed gear bikes have no freewheel so if the pedals turn the rear wheel turns, and vice versa. You can slow down by pulling up on the front pedal and pushing down on the back pedal. It sounds foolish but it can slow the bike down pretty well - if you position your bodyweight right you can even get the rear wheel to skid.The classic 'fixie' film Mash shows how this works if you're brave enough. Those guys are riding brakeless bikes so they have no choice. Brakeless fixies are the current fad amongst hipster types & cool kids and for me they have a similar draw as brakeless skates. I was riding back home after a few social ales the other night thinking that I might takes the brakes off my bike to see what it was like, and pretty much as soon as I thought that my chain came off. And of course if you have no brakes then no chain = no way to slow down. I can recognise a sign when I see one - the brakes (or at least the front brake) stay on.

Wednesday Night Skate - the long one

This week the wednesday night skate did one of the longer skates in it's repertoire. We headed out through Roma St parklands, past the Royal Womens hospital & Northy Street markets, out to Albion and then across to Tenerife & back through New Farm. I was hoping to be able to show a GPS plot but my laptop crashed when I was downloading it and wiped the record of the journey from the GPS. This is the route from a similar skate a few months agoWe started at around 7.45pm and were back at the cars at 10.30ish having covered just under 26km.

Unfortunately what I can't show is my GPS plot showing my speed reducing from around 16km/h (10pmh-ish) to 0 in the space of around 6'. I wasn't paying attention and my front wheel dug into a crack on the pavement, dumping me onto my hands & chest with no warning. My kneepads & wristguards saved me from the worst of it but I was a bit grazed & winded. The first skating stack for a while when I was just 'skating along'. Nothing broken so it's all good :)

Smurfette ride

One of our group got a new bike this weekend so there was a breaking-in ride on Saturday morning. It was unusually early for me (an 8.30am start) but I set several alarms and managed to make it out. It was a great ride and the 'early morning' start (which was derided by several people as 'way too late') was worth it.

There was a good turnout with a wide variety of bikes - firstly the bike of honour 'the smurfette', which is a scandium-alloyed aluminium frame 29er 29ers (ie 29" wheels) are the latest fad in mountain biking, particularly for people who ride enduro races or distance rides (and tall people as well). I have a steel framed single speed 29er and it's a great cruising bike, although personally I prefer the smaller & more traditional 26" wheeled bikes that are a bit lower and snappier. Saying that I found that the bike frame looked like this in the dark (same bike, not my photo)which makes me want one more!

Other bikes out there were a fully rigid carbon-forked steel framed On-one 29er Inbred

a Santa Cruz superlightand a beautiful Black Sheep titanium framed bike (one of the the best looking bikes that I've seen), which deserves a better pictureThere was also this On-one 'monster crosser', apparently the fruit of 'a few cans and too many bike bits lying around'. Makes you wonder exactly what he was on..... If you've got an MTB frame and some drop bars lying around, you're tempted to give it a go and you have the ingenuity to make it work then take a look at this shot. The rider was actually enjoying it less than he looks (but go for it anyway 'cos it might work for you!).
Some people had more fun I got the chance to get some good photos around some of the berms & corners, although my little camera suffered a bit with the strong light reflecting from the shiny bike bits

Had some fun with photo-editors afterwards too

Not sure if I prefer the fade-out or the solid look below - let me know which one you prefer!

Wednesday Night Skate

Had a good WNS last night - a new leader meant a different route. Not sure if that was through navigational mishap or design but it was good to see some different parts of town, including Brisbane's oldest standing building (picture linked from Wikipedia)

The windmill was built by convicts in 1824, which I think makes it younger than my parents house :)
We skated along some of my favourite tracks and I had plenty of time to work on a new slide stop I'm trying to perfect. Works 90% of the time, but 10% of the time it spits me onto my knees. It's also taking a toll on my wheels - these are a couple of years old and have probably done over 1,000km. Could be time for replacements...

The constraints of success

Bit of a different one tonight. I’ve been watching the political dynamics at play in the office recently and mulling over the why’s and wherefore’s of who gets what – and more importantly how those who get what they’re after go about getting it. This has been bobbing around my mind for a few weeks now and I need to get it down to get it out of my head. Hopefully it won’t come over as a whinge or a whine, and it probably won’t come over as anything new to most of the people who read this, but humour me or at least go watch a bear falling out of a tree instead and come back when I’m in a less contemplative mood.

I think this initially stems from a P.J. O’Rourke comment on Barack Obama - about how his major failing was that he was a success at school (an ‘A grade student’) and how this didn’t equip him to become president. It’s a well oiled saw that a lot of successful businessmen who were B grade students still end up employing A grade students. I think that is because A grade students, in whatever discipline, have an eye for detail and a desire to get to the bottom of problems. The most important thing is to figure out the answer to the problem, to tackle the obstacles that are placed in your way and overcome them through the application of your own effort. And if you have the mindset to do this then you get rewarded with high marks, maybe scholarships or prizes, the accolades of your family and at least some of your peers. This leads to a certain mindset – you can achieve great things by thinking things through, by problem solving, by finding solutions. You’re a do-er.

But it also makes you a details person, someone who looks ‘down’ to approach the challenges that you’re trying to overcome. It’s less of a job and more of a vocation. In some ways the thing that you’re working on, be it a piece of software, an architectural drawing, a project implementation or a design, becomes an entity in it’s own right and it’s easy to feel that you somehow have a responsibility towards that thing to help it become the best it can be.
However not everyone takes the same approach. There are many people out there who feel no responsibility towards your project, people who’s only interest is not what they can do for it (or you) but how they can talk it up for themselves. These are the people that you leant your homework too, who wrote the formulae on their pencil case or who smuggle a mobile phone into the local pub quiz. The task itself is meaningless – the only thing that matters is how the outcome reflects upon them. There is no sense of personal accountability. Bending the truth is easier than learning the truth, deliberately misleading people is still considered to be honest and outright lying is an acceptable way of getting what you want.

I think the problem is that the do-ers treat the talkers with a mild contempt and derision borne of knowledge - but this knowledge is a weakness. The expensive car the talker drives, the high-end camera lens they use or cutting-edge computer that they have just bought may not deliver an equal performance to the cheaper, better equivalents that are easily available but this is not the point. A flashy, meaningless, self-appointed title added to a business card may seem to be vain and ridiculous posturing but only to do-ers – only to people who know the details. Other talkers, other people who are looking up instead of down, will take this information at face value. They will try to challenge it not through knowledge but by the further use of symbols. The do-ers may exchange wry looks and sly sniggers at their desks as they attempt to wrestle through the problems they are working on but the talkers are the ones walking the corridors getting noticed. A flashy Rolex may only tell the time as well as an understated Seiko but that isn’t it’s primary role – it’s there to catch the eye, to project a certain aura regardless of what is underneath. The symbol is everything, the information itself is meaningless. Look up not down.
The detailed nature of a do-ers job helps maintain the divide. It’s hard to take the time to play the game, to have the lunches, make the ‘casual’ phone calls, ‘coincidentally’ be on the same plane as your boss when there is a deadline to meet. The talkers are the ones with the time to play the games, and it is those games that get them what they want.

And of course once a ‘go-to guy’ reputation is established the trap is firmly sprung. You will not escape from that role because you’re too good at what you do, you’re too valuable to be moved. You have double-glazed your own glass ceiling. And don’t think that you reverse out of this position by failure. Your long days, sleepless nights and successes may well have been seen as excellent teamwork that reflected well on your management and helped bring great success (and many commissions) to the sales guys but mess up and it will land on your head and your head only. And after that – well no-one wants to promote a failure.

Not really sure if there is a solution to this - true success should be measured by your own internal values, not by outside markers, and I think that a lot of do-ers would struggle to turn their backs on their projects, cross their own personal moral codes and become a talker. But it’s ironic to think that by doing so well at those tests so long ago I’ve created limits for myself. Until I stop talking and do something about it, that is….

Happy birthday Andy

My best mate from the UK turns 40 today. He's a friend that I've known since when I was about 11 and we've helped each other through (and got each other into) all kinds of trouble over the years. I'm also godfather to his first-born, Freyja. Hopefully he won't mind if I post a recent picture that he sent me
I bought Andy a goat for his birthday via http://plangifts.org/ which seems like a great way to pass on best wishes, stop cluttering up someones flat with random tatt and help people who need it far more than you or your friend does. Plus someone else has to wrap it which makes life easier (I can't even wrap a book or CD without half a roll of sellotape and much cursing so a goat would be almost impossible). Andy also writes a great buddhist blog at http://endlessriver.wordpress.com

The hardest part about emigrating is not the new challenges that you face but the friends & family that you leave behind. It's theoretically a lot easier with phone calls, emails, skype, blogs and something I once heard about called 'Facetwitter' or some such thing but something always seems to come up. But true friends are people who you can pick up with as though you were never apart and hopefully sometime soon Andy & I will be able to do that.

Happy birthday mate - hope you have a top one, and I wish I was there to share it with you.

Melbourne Zoo

In the rest day during the Melbourne trip we went to Melbourne zoo to check out their baby elephant Mali.

It turns out that most of Melbourne had a similar idea

We were allowed in in groups of 150 people for 5 minutes at a time. It was worth it though as Mali was very lively
although sometimes she just wanted to stay close to Mum
We stayed at the zoo for pretty much the whole day. I'm not a big fan of zoos and some of the cages here did seem a bit small, but they had an excellent seal house with an underwater viewing area

The penguins seemed pretty content to just dip a flipper in the water too
but sometimes it's hard to believe the animals are really enjoying it in there

Melbourne Day 7 - Dawn skate

The last skate of the trip is always a dawn skate on the day that everyone flies out. It's a struggle to get up for but it's worth it as you skate along dark quiet streets, passing surprised workmen and drunken revellers straggling home.

In Melbourne we skate down to St Kilda (approx 20kms). We start before dawn and the sunrise can be breathtaking

We made it to St Kilda with a couple of falls but only one casualty. There is a pier at St Kilda with a stone breakwater at the end, and it's a great place to look back at the city
It's also the home of a small but thriving wild colony of fairy penguins. Unfortunately we arrived too late to see anything other than a penguin bum thrust out of the rocks in our general direction no matter how we tried to sneak up on them

On the way home we skated through Albert Park, which had hosted the Melbourne grand prix the weekend beforeAfter that all that is left is a farewell breakfast and some sad goodbyes
Well we stayed on for a couple of days, went wine tasting and had bracing walks by the seaside - but that's another story.....

Melbourne Day 6 - Mitcham

Day 6 was a little cold & overcast at the start and we were all hoping the rain would hold off - we would be a long way from tram & train stops for a while. We started off from Mitcham station with 45 hilly kms between us & the city.We soon warmed up as we got going
We soon met up with the freeway - the bikeway that ran alongside was fast and flowing so we made great time

but there was still time to show the locals that you're never too old to have fun along the way
We stopped for lunch at a pub called 'The Harp', who were very gracious about the large amount of sweaty skate stuff we dumped in a corner
After the pub there was time for a photoshoot
before a stiff climb to help burn off the calories and show us how far we still had to go

There was a fantastic little twisty downhill section just after this that I managed with virtually no brake, so I was happy to hit the level ground of the pipebridge at the bottom
From here on in we followed Merri creek bikepath past the Carlton & United brewery - lowering our heads in silent prayer for the senseless waste of so much promising barley & hops - and finally reached the Yarra. From here it was a long 6km to the apartments and a much needed sit (or lie) down

Melbourne Day 5 - Cragieburn

Day 4 was a rest day so on day 5 we strapped on our skates again and caught a train out to Craigieburn (approx 45km of skating). Craigieburn is one of the outliers on the planned development schedule of Melbourne. I think that they built infrastructure (train lines & highways) out to the outside points of their development area and are now building inwards. This means that Craigburn is a bit isolated, but as part of the infrastructure is a smooth, open & almost empty bike lane it's a perfect skate if the wind is behind you.

The marshals were as always both attentive and ruggedly handsome
and all the skaters seemed to be enjoying themselves

About halfway through the skate we had the choice of catching a train home or continuing on along some paths that hadn't been previously explored. The second half of the skate proved to be harder as sometimes the paths would turn to muddy tracks, we all ran out of water and the pace was up to be back in time. It was worthwhile though as it went through some beautiful scenery

threaded our way across narrow bridges (those slots are a perfect wheel-catching size)
Past some unexpected architecture
and across more of Melbournes industrial memories