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5 April 2019, New York, USA: The Abidjan Principles – Regulating Private Involvement in Education
NORRAG and Teachers College, Columbia University co-organised a workshop about the recently signed Abidjan Principles on 5 April 2019 at Teachers College... Read More
Abidjan Principles on the Right to Education by Ann Skelton
This NORRAG Debates on the Right to Education is published by Professor Ann Skelton on the occasion of the publication of the... Read More
Landmark Abidjan Principles on the right to education published
The final text of the Abidjan Principles on the human rights obligations of States to provide public education and to regulate private... Read More
New landmark Abidjan Principles on the right to education and private actors adopted by experts
A group of human rights experts from around the world adopted, on 13 February 2019, the Abidjan Principles on the right to... Read More
Russian version of NORRAG Special Issue 01: The Right to Education Movements and Policies: Promises and Realities
In collaboration with Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education (NUGSE), Astana, Kazakhstan, NORRAG has launched the Russian-language version of NORRAG Special Issue... Read More
31 January – 1 February 2019, Magaliesburg, South Africa: Philanthropy in Education in South Africa: A space for learning and collaboration
Read the report published after the conference As part of the Philanthropy in Education (PiE) series, the Zenex Foundation, NORRAG and the... Read More
Event Report – Right to education for migrants workshop at "Education and migration" thematic day
NORRAG and RECI (Réseau Suisse Education et Coopération Internationale) organised a Thematic Day on "Education and Migration". The event, which took place... Read More
UNESCO Global Education Monitoring report shows insufficient progress on including migrants and refugees in national education systems
UNESCO's 2019 Global Education Monitoring Report, Migration, displacement and education, was released on 20 November in Berlin. The report shows that the... Read More
L'éducation des réfugiés en contexte urbain : renforcer les politiques et les pratiques d'accès, de qualité, et d'inclusion par Mary Mendenhall, S. Garnett Russell et Elizabeth Buckner
Dans le cadre de la journée thématique « Education et Migration » organisée par NORRAG et RECI (Réseau Suisse Education et Coopération... Read More
6 November 2018: Thematic day – Education and Migration
voir cette information en français NORRAG and RECI (Réseau Suisse Education et Coopération Internationale) organised a Thematic Day on "Education and Migration".... Read More


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subset: commoncrawl


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Transport Tycoon has a very special place in my heart. It started back when I was a young lad, the game likely coming to me from my father who'd got it from some friends at work. I remember loving building little bus networks and trying to figure out just exactly how to make a business profitable. I was so proud when I made my first virtual million, ever so slowly creeping towards the goal as I finally began to understand the mechanics. Decades later I'd revisit it with my wife and house mate. All of us installing OpenTTD and having a blast competing with each other for hours on end. So when I saw Rise of Industry I was instantly intrigued, the gameplay giving me instant waves of nostalgia for those times. Whilst I can very much appreciate the mechanical depth that's been built into this game there just wasn't that something, that X factor, to keep me coming back after I'd grasped the base mechanics. It's a shame really as I think that there's probably a great game in there somewhere, it's just not where I'm looking for it.
The premise is easy to understand: you're a new business owner seeking to profit from the old fashioned game of supply and demand. You'll choose a place to plonk down your headquarters which gives you the rights to build various gathering and production buildings in the region. The town has demands that you can meet, although you'll want to pick your products carefully as not all of them will put you on the path to wealth. From there you'll work through a tech tree to build even more elaborate products and infrastructure, allowing you to extract even more profit from your town. Over time you can expand your empire to other regions and you'll have to set up transport routes between your different areas as there's likely going to be things one place has that the other needs. As you'd expect this can all get pretty complex and whilst the tutorial does a good job of giving you the basics from there on out it's up to you figure out how you and your company will profit.
Rise of Industry has the tried and true low poly look that's very much in vogue these days. For the most part the developers have done a good job of keeping the visual confusion down with most buildings being recogniseable from a decent distance, saving you the trouble of hunting for that one factory you put in the middle of everything. Performance is also quite good, only really suffering when you fully zoom out and numerous other towns come into view. By default the UI is painfully small but thankfully there's an option to increase the scale of it, making the game quite a lot easier on the eyes. The developers have also done a good job with the sound design, emulating a lot of other simulation style games. I'm not sure how to describe it, just that there seems to be a certain kind of soundscape that screams "You're playing a simulation game!" which everyone uses. It seems the 2 or so years it has spent in various beta and Early Access forms has paid off.
Where TTD was focused just on the transportation of a few kinds of goods Rise of Industry takes it well into the next level with multiple different industry types all requiring their own specific set of resources. The staple is the Farmers Market which is mostly focused on items that can be built directly but the rest of them typically have requirements for products that you'll need to manufacture. Of course that then means there's usually inputs to those factories that you'll have to gather first before you can start generating that item. From there you can start moving up different tiers of products which will likely require input of products from the previous tier. This then progresses up a further 2 more tiers, finally culminating in "prototype" products which win you the game once you sell one. There's also a city levelling system built in, essentially allowing you to help the city expand and, by extension, get more shops for you to profit from. I believe there's also trade built in here somewhere but I never got to the point where I needed to do that. Suffice to say there's an absolute truckload of stuff to explore in Rise of Industry which is both a blessing and a curse.
Logistics will play a large part in your success and whilst the tutorial gives you the basics of how to run things it also sets you up for a micromanaging nightmare. Warehouses by default will gather everything produced in their radius, you don't need to set up requests for them like the tutorial tells you to do. You can, however, direct places outside of their gather radius to send things to them, something which helps immensely if you didn't plan your layout particularly well. You'll probably need to make use of the manual routes quite often regardless as it seems that, even in an abundance of a particular resource (say water) some places will still not get their needs filled for whatever reason. Further on you'll also have numerous routes going everywhere, something that's easy enough to keep track of whilst you're building them but becomes a tangled web of crazy once you've moved onto the next item you want to build.
There were two things that killed it for me: the feeling that every product is essentially the same and a lack of overall driving force to keep me playing. The first is easy enough to explain: basically every product you produce is basically the same in the end. Progressing through the tech trees really doesn't reward you much more than giving you another building to look at. TTD at least gave you new vehicles, different kinds of transportation and a changing landscape with the passage of time. Rise of Industry by comparison feels pretty stagnant once you get everything set up and all you end up doing is counting down the time till the next research project completes. It's much the same feeling I got after playing Stellaris for some time as the mechanical depth feels great initially but after a while it gets tedious as you simply wait until you can do the next cool thing.
The lack of meaningful competitors is probably what's driving the latter as it's blindly easy to build a profitable business, taking a lot of pressure away from you. Sure, your competitors pop up from time to time when an event or auction happens but they don't ever seem to want to muscle in on your turf or say trash talk you when you're trying to expand and losing cash like mad. The game itself does warn you about these things though, so the mechanism is in there for them to make the AIs something more than the one dimensional automatons that they are now. Without a meaningful adversary and little drive to want to achieve the next tier of products I ended up just getting bored each time I played, ultimately only ever making one save and even then I didn't go back to it more than once.
Rise of Industry is a game I was so sure I'd like as it had everything that I'd want in a spiritual successor to one of my favourite childhood games. The aesthetics, mechanics and sound design were all done in a way that made buying it a no-brainer. However it just didn't grab me in the way I expected it to, instead lacking that driving force that used to keep me glued to my seat for hours on end. To be sure I recognise that it's a very well built game, one I'm sure many will find countless hours of enjoyment in, it's just that it just didn't hit the mark for this old reviewer. Perhaps if I'd been involved in it from its early days I might be singing a different tune but for me, today, Rise of Industry is something I'll be leaving up on the shelf.
Rating: 7.5/10
Rise of Industry is available on PC right now for $42.95. Total play time was 4.5 hours with a total of 29% of the achievements unlocked.
I have many fond memories of the hours I wasted in the Tycoon style games. Most of those hours were spent trying to build my business empire in Transport Tycoon but, every so often, I'd take a break for something more…cathartic. That's when I (and I'm sure many other gamers) turned to Rollercoaster Tycoon, a game which could satisfy that sadistic need every child has to wreck mayhem on unsuspecting NPCs. In the years since though I hadn't gone back to the various incarnations in that franchise, my attention drawn elsewhere by shiny AAA titles. However you'd be hard pressed to miss the fervor that has surrounded Planet Coaster the latest incarnation of Rollercoaster Tycoon to come out of Frontier Developments. It's an impressive game however I think the good ship nostalgia has long since set sail on these types of games, at least for myself.
Planet Coaster is your typical business management game; putting you in charge of the day to day tasks of managing an amusement park. You'll build attractions, rides and design your own rollercoasters to delight and terrify your park guests. There's numerous variables to fine tune that ensure your park stays clean, enjoyable and above all profitable. Depending on the mode you select you can either pit yourself against a set of objectives, race the clock or simply set yourself free to do whatever you feel like. As someone who hasn't played any of the intervening instalments in this franchise since 20 years ago Planet Coaster feels like the modern equivalent of that game I lost so many hours on.
The look and feel of Planet Coaster takes inspiration from The Sims franchise, favouring stylized models, a clean UI and a similarly styled sound track. The level of detail is impressive, especially when you see that all the models are constructued from different parts that are available for you to use. Occaisionally there are performance issues which seem to stem from menus not rendering properly but otherwise everything runs well, even at full speed. Considering Frontier Developments' pedigree this level of polish should come as little surprise as they've been invovlved in Tycoon style games for some 13 years now, having developed expansion packs for RollerCoaster Tycoon 2.
There are 3 main game modes in Planet Coaster: campaign, challenge and sandbox. Campaign sets you against a pre-established park with a number of goals that you need to work with and serves as a decent introduction for Planet Coaster's main mechanics. Challenge gives you a blank slate and a limited amount of funds in order to establish yourself as a self-sufficient park. Sandbox is, as you can probably guess, the creative mode that allows you to do whatever you wish. Depending on how you like to play these kinds of games one of the modes will likely suit you better than the rest. However I'm sure most people will just head straight for creative so they can start building the death-coaster of their dreams.
I started off playing in campaign mode figuring that it would be the best way to get introduced to the game's mechanics. If you've played these kinds of games before you'll be able to figure most things out and the pop ups on the left hand side will be able to fill in the blanks. However for new comers it'd probably take some getting used to as there's no clear direction on how to go about the rudimentary tasks that the game assumes you know how to do. As things start to get a little more complicated, like when you're trying to figure out your finances, this is where the tutorial system starts to break down and you'll likely be off to the Steam forums searching for advice. This is not a bad thing per se, however it does show that Planet Coaster is still polishing up some of the rough edges left over from its Early Acess days.
I have to admit though that after playing the campaign for a couple hours I simply lost interest in playing. Back in my younger days I can remember having lots of fun building all sorts of wild and whacky coasters. Now though? The idea of building a coaster just didn't have the same sense of joy it used to, echoing the feelings I had back when I played Contraption Maker (the spiritual successor to The Incredible Machine). I've been told that challenge mode is a far better way to play the game and I've been meaning to go back, really I have, but the drive to do so just hasn't been there. It's a shame really as Planet Coaster seems like an objectively good game, one that does its heritage justice, but it just didn't tickle me in the right way.
Looking at the stats of Planet Coaster though I can definitely see that I'm in the minority, with the average play time hovering around 13 hours.
Planet Coaster brings with it all the things that captivated many of us in our younger days: the freedom to build the amusement park of our dreams, the thrill of designing the perfect roller coaster and, of course, unleashing untold destruction on your park's denizens. For this old gamer though the magic just wasn't there, the couple hours I spent with the game just not hitting the nostalgia buttons hard enough to make me come back. Planet Coaster is an extremely well built game however, one that is likely to provide many hours of entertainment for those who love games like this. Maybe one day I'll find the drive to go back and change my mind but, for now, it's going to be sitting on the shelf.
Rating: 7.0/10
Planet Coaster is available on PC right now for $44.99. Total play time was 2 hours with 13% of the achievements unlocked.
4X style games aren't the kinds of games you start to kill an hour or two, they're the ones you start when you want to kill days. I can remember whole LANs that were lost to games like Alpha Centauri, whoever was "dragging the chain" on their turn ridiculed endlessly until they were done. Indeed when I first spun up Stellaris, the latest game from Paradox Interactive, I recieved a message from one of my friends saying I wouldn't have time to finish it. As the unfolding hours showed he was 100% correct as even 9 hours with this game feel like you're barely even scratching the surface. Still I can see the appeal but unfortunately Stellaris tends towards repetition very rapidly, making longer sessions more of a chore than anything else.
You're the leader of a young civilisation that's just discovered the miracle of space flight. Like all good civilisations your first task is to set about exploring the universe in the hopes of finding other planets and solar systems ripe for exploitation. Along the way you'll likely encounter other lifeforms (some more or less advanced than you), relics of civilisations of the past and all sorts of celestial phenomena. The tools you'll have at your disposal will vary widely each time you attempt this and will greatly impact the way in which you expand into the universe. Whether your civilisation thrives or perishes is up to you and the decisions you make in your journey across the great black.
Like most games in the 4X genre Stellaris errs on the side of simple graphics without too much flair. Since you'll be spending most of your time zoomed all the way out this doesn't come up too often, although the lack of detail becomes glaringly obvious for things like the ship designer. Of course these low-fi graphics are a deliberate choice as most of your rig's horsepower will be focused on churning through the simulations required. For the most part this works well however there are some rather glaring issues with the simulation system which can make your experience far more frustrating than it needs to be (more on that later).
The core game of Stellaris is your typical 4X affair, centred around finding new planets, colonising them if you can and repeating that process ad infinitum. Stellaris shakes things up a little bit by taking a different approach to the upgrade/technology tree system, dividing all upgrades into 3 categories. Each of these categories can be researched by a scientist but what they can research is random. This means that you could, potentially, go the entire game without getting the technology required to build colony ships. Armies, rather than being pre-defined types, are all fully customisable. This means that there's another element of randomness when it comes to combat as you can never be quite sure how well your army composition stacks up against another. Finally since your aim in Stellaris is to be a true galactic empire there's a system to add planets to "sectors" which are then controlled by an AI for you. There's still more to Stellaris however even summarising them all would take longer than I have to write and you to read, I'd wager.
Starting off Stellaris is a daunting prospect as there's just so much thrown at you that it's easy to get overwhelmed. The tutorial system does a pretty good job of walking you through everything however it'll probably take a couple retries before you get the hang of the basics. Once you get past that point however the early game can be quite interesting as you try to pick out the best upgrades, figure out where to best place your outposts/colonies and how you deal with the hostiles getting in your way. Indeed I think my favourite part of Stellaris is the early to mid game as it feels quite varied, progress is consistent and there are no major issues getting in your way. It's once the game starts to creep past the 2 to 3 hour mark that things start to turn south, usually for a variety of different reasons.
Typically you'll spend the first part of your game defining your borders and trying to cordon off sectors that you can exploit later. Past a certain point though all your territory will be exploited and your borders brushing up against numerous potential foes. It's at this point you have a tough decision to make: either start preparing for total war with someone (although you should probably do that anyway as it'll likely come for your eventually) or start attempting diplomatic relations. The latter is, honestly, a total crap shoot as it seems most alien races aren't willing to do anything unless you lavish them with resources. The former is the option you will be forced into at one point or another as there's simply no way to expand your territory otherwise. Worse still if you do want to play pacifist there's every chance that another race will simply not take a liking to you and completely decimate you, something that happened to me on several occasions.
The sector system, whilst a good idea, does little to reduce the burden of ensuring that your system is running as well as it can be. Sure you can set goals and whatnot but issues like a mixed species population, developing factions, etc. will all keep drawing your attention. As your empire grows these problems become more and more frequent making it incredibly draining to run an empire that spans more than a few sectors. Indeed I abandoned a couple games simply because they became too tiresome to continue with, instead wanting to try my hand at starting again to see if there was a better way to set myself up. In the end I didn't find anything which is probably why I didn't play as much as your average Paradox Interactive fan does (around 30+ hours, according to the data I have available).
There are also some niggling issues which need to be addressed. The fact that achievements can only be acquired in Ironman Mode is something the game doesn't make obvious to you and is honestly a pain to get working. It took me more than 5 hours of game play to realise I hadn't gotten a signle achievement and then another 30 minutes of getting the cloud save feature working so I could actually start a game with achievements on. Worse still the Ironman Mode saves every month, something that freezes your game session every minute or so if you're playing on fastest. Honestly it's more frustrating than its worth which is why I think most simply don't bother. This isn't to mention some quality of life improvements that are required, like being able to filter planets you've scanned by say habitable status, or your colonies by the type of shipyard you have and so on. Essentially a lot of it relies on your memory or simple brute forcing, something which takes much of the joy out of the experience. Indeed I'm not alone in thinking this either as many of the threads I read whilst trying to find these things led me to other players looking for the same features.
The emergent stories of Stellaris can be quite engaging though, both from the perspective of how you grew your empire to the various little pre-generated story titbits that are strewn throughout the universe. One of my empires tried, with varying levels of success, to infiltrate a less developed race to prep them for our arrival. Another alien race found out about this though and accused me of enslaving them. Whilst that was partially the point on my end (it was a strategic planet) the fact that they reacted in such a way was a surprise to me. This did mean the end of my civilisation however as the other alien race was far better equipped for war than I was.
Stellaris is an adequately competent 4X game with a bevy of unique features that keep the experience fresh and interesting, at least in the early to mid game. The random technology trees, procedurally generated galaxies and random alien races means every play through will be unique. However the game rapidly becomes a burden the longer you play it, even with the AI systems that are designed to make your life a little easier. The niggling issues that are still present even a month after release only exacerbate this problem, especially if you're someone who wants to hunt down all the achievements. Overall I think Stellaris is worth the price of admission, especially for fans of Paradox or the 4X genre, but falls short of my "must play" list.
Rating: 7.5/10
Stellaris is available on PC right now for $39.99. Total game time was approximately 9 hours with 26% of the achievements unlocked.
I was a big believer in the typical corporate structure for a very long time, mostly because I wanted to be the one at the top of it. There's something attractive about being the one at the top and for quite a long time I tried to position my career in such a way that I could become an executive in some nameless company at an undetermined point in the future. I didn't realize how bad I was at the whole management thing after I killed my university project, no it took me another 2 years to figure out that being at the top of a corporate structure wasn't for me. I needed to be the one building things.
That's not to say I can't succeed in such structures myself, far from it. Being in Australia's capital city, a town that is basically a giant shrine to bureaucracy, I've come to learn how to operate within traditional management structures in a such a way so that I have an incredible amount of freedom whilst also staying within the confines of my designated role. Sure I might not be able to simply up and change my job whenever I feel like it but I've rarely felt my creative freedom restrained when it comes to solving the various problems that get thrown my way. Still I've always been fascinated with non-traditional management structures and yesterday I came across an incredibly novel one.
It was that of the game development company Valve.
Yesterday one of my long time friends linked me to Valve's new starter guide book, a typical document you'd expect from pretty much any organisation. It made for some incredibly fascinating reading mostly because it's unlike any other that I've read before. Where there's usually pictures of organisational charts, links to company policies and reams of out dated information there was instead a comprehensive guide to how Valve functions as a company and how all the employees fit into it. Astonishingly the biggest revelation in there, for me at least, was that there is in essence no organisational structure at all.
For someone who cut his teeth in a world ruled by bureaucracy such an idea seems incredibly foreign, so much so I initially struggled to figure out how it would work. I mean how does anyone get any work done if there isn't someone controlling the whole process from the top? As it turns out the process mimics what I envision happens when a lot of talented people get together: ideas start circulating and once they reach a critical mass of supporters they form a cohesive group in order to achieve that vision. Valve in that sense is a kind of idea incubator that enables their employees to chase their passions and should those passions resonate with others it will find its way into reality.
That to me feels like an inspired way of creating a company. The guide admits that whilst this idea works for Valve they're not sure it would work for everyone as rogue agents operating in such an environment can do incredible amounts of damage. However when you note that Valve makes more profit per employee than Apple or Google then you have to figure that their process has some merit to it. Being fully privately owned also helps them quite a bit as I'm sure that share holders would be uncomfortable with a company that seems to be in a constant flux.
Would I start a company with a mantra like Valves? I definitely believe in some of the core principles (like hiring people smarter than you) and I do tend to favor less management than more so I could see some form of it working for a company that I'd like to start. Maybe it's just the residual "I need to be at the top" mentality inside me that's having trouble letting go of the idea but Valve's way of doing business seems a lot better than the way I've been thinking about it.
It's the beginning of 2006 and the end is in sight for my university career. It's been a crazy 3 years up until this point having experienced both the dizzying highs of excelling in a subject and the punishing lows of failing to understand even the basic concepts of some units properly. Still I haven't failed a single subject (despite some near misses) and really the only thing standing between me and that piece of paper I've been chasing is my final year, most of which will be dedicated to working on an engineering project. I had been looking forward to this for a while as I felt it would be a chance to test my meddle as a project manager and hopefully create something valuable in the process.
The year started off well as I found myself in a project team of 4 including 2 long time friends and a new acquaintance who was exceptionally skilled. After brainstorming ideas we eventually settled on creating a media PC with a custom interface based off the open source MythTV project which would handle most of the back end work for us. After getting a space to work in we covered the whiteboard in dozens of innovative ideas ranging from TiVO like recording features to remoteless operation based on tracking a user's movement. Looking at the list we were convinced that even that list of features wouldn't be enough to fill a year worth of development effort but thought it was best to settle on these first before trying to make more work for ourselves. With the features in mind I set about creating a schedule and we set about our work.
Initially everything was going great, we were making quite a lot of progress and the project was shaping up to be one of the best of the year. The hardware design and implementation was looking phenomenal, so much so that I made the brash move of saying there was a potential market for a mass produced version of the device. Our lecturers showed a keen interest in it and we even managed to come in second place for a presentation competition amongst all the project students, narrowly losing out to an autonomous robot that could map out and navigate its surroundings. We were definitely onto a winner with this idea.
However my desire to project manage 3 other people started to take its toll on the project. Realistically in a team of 4 everyone needs to pitch in to make sure stuff gets done, there's really no room for designated roles. I however kept myself at arms length from any solid development work, instead trying to control the process and demanding vast reams of documentation from those doing the work. Additionally I failed to realize that the majority of the coding work was be done by a single team member which meant that only they understood it, making collaboration on it next to impossible. Seeing the beginnings of a sinking ship I called everyone together to try and figure things out, and that's when things really started to turn sour.
The primary coder expressed their concerns that no one else was doing any work and I, still not realizing that I didn't need to be a project manager, instructed them to take a week off so the others could get up to speed. This didn't work as well as I planned as they continued to do all the work themselves, effectively locking anyone else out from being able to contribute to the effort. I did manage to get the star developer to collaborate with the others but by this point it was already too late as they'd usually have to rewrite any code that wasn't their own.
In order to save some face in this whole project I elected to do the project report entirely on my own, realistically a task that needed to be done by all of us (just like the project). I spent countless hours cobbling everything together, piecing random bits of documentation and notes together into something resembling a professional report. It wasn't amazing but it was enough to get the approval of everyone else in the team and our project co-ordinator so a week before the final demonstration I handed it in, wanting to be done with this project once and for all.
The final demonstration was no picnic either with everyone in the team (bar me) staying at university until midnight before the presentation. We managed to demonstrate a much cut down version of our initial vision to the class with only a few minor hiccups and the 2 honors side projects went along quite well. Afterwards we hurriedly bundled the project away into one of the members car (he provided all the hardware on the proviso he got to keep it) happy to be done with it once and for all.
For 2 years afterwards I struggled to figure out why the project that started off so well tanked so badly. It wasn't until I was officially employed as a project manager that I figured out that the most toxic element in the whole ordeal was me, the power hungry idiot who contributed the least whilst ensuring that anyone trying to get things done was hampered by my interference. I failed to get everyone to collaborate effectively and hamstrung them with rediculous requirements for documentation. In essence I was acting like a project manager on a big project when really I was anything but. The end result was a far cry from what it could have been and one member of that project team still refuses to speak to me, and I don't blame them for doing so.
I suppose the best thing that came out of this is that I finally realized my weaknesses and actively worked to overcome them. Sure it might have been too late for the university project that was but I'm glad to say I didn't inflict any such torment on a project whilst I was being paid to do it, instead taking on board those lessons learned to make sure those projects were delivered as required. I still hold out hope that one day I'll look back on those days with my former project members and laugh but those project management war wounds will stick with me forever, reminding me that I'm not as infallible as I once thought I was.
If I were to rewind back a couple years and ask my past self where I would be at today the answer would probably be something like "living overseas and applying for various MBA programs". It seemed ever since part way through university I had my eye on being in some form of upper management role in a large company, reveling in the idea of a high rise office building and being able to make a positive impact. It seemed every year I was doomed to delay those plans for another year because of other things that would crop up, with me finally admitting that anyone with a 10 year plan is deluding themselves.
Despite that my aspirations have not changed. I still lust after that high flying lifestyle that I attributed to the ranks of C-level executives and still yern to travel overseas as so many have done before me. However I've grown disillusioned with the idea of attaining such goals in the annals of an established company. My illustrious career, spanning a mere 6 years, has shown me that there's little joy climbing the ranks in such environments with games of politics and tit-for-tat deals the accepted norm. The engineer in me was languishing under the idea of being suppressed for years whilst I played these games on my way to the top where I could finally unleash it with the power to make a difference. At the end of last year it finally broke through and gave me the dreadful clarity I needed to finally change my way of thinking.
I needed to make it on my own.
It was around this time that I'd started to get an interest for the curious world of technology start ups. You see here in Canberra where everyone is employed by the government or doing work for the government there's no place for technological innovators, the captive market here just isn't interested. Thus the idea of lashing out on my own in the only field I knew was always put aside as a untenable notion; the environment to support it just isn't here. Still the idea gnawed away at the edge of my mind for quite a while and my feed reader started gathering information on all aspects of starting out on your own and how others had done it before me.
At the same time I had begun working on Geon, primarily as a eating my own dog food exercise but also as something to give back to my readers who'd been loyal over the fledgling months of this blog. The idea had legs though and I continued to work on it off and on for many months afterwards with many iterations making their way onto this site. After a while the notion of building my own business and my hobby of building something to satisfy a niche that was going unserviced began to merge and the dream I had once become disillusioned came back with a thundering vengeance.
There's always going to be that part of me that nags at the corner of my mind telling me that any plan I make is doomed to failure, and I've learnt to come to terms with that. When I can talk about my idea with someone for hours on end and walk away with countless ideas about where I can take my project in the future I know the work I'm doing is good. That voice at the back of my head keeps me honest with myself, ensuring that I apply critical thinking to all the problems that I encounter. In that respect my fledgling inner skeptic makes sure I don't bullshit myself into a corner and for that I'm eternally thankful.
I guess it all comes down to not knowing where you'll end up in life. 6 years ago I had my whole life planned out until I was 30 (and a bet with an old friend of mine I haven't forgotten) and today I'll happily tell you that I've got no idea where I'll be at 30. That idea would be frightening for many people but for someone like me who thrives on making the most out of his time it's extremely liberating. No longer am I locked into any preconcieved notion of what I need to do to get where I want to be. All I need to do is work in the moment to achieve the best I can, and that's exactly why I believe I'll succeed.
/egostroke 😉
I know I don't have much real world experience when it comes to managing people with the majority of my experience being focused in 3 short stints of project management. Still when I coupled that with my 2 years of formal management training I feel I've got a good idea about how to organise a team of people to achieve a certain goal. Additionally I've had a fair bit of experience working under many different kinds of people all with their own distinct management styles so I know what works practically and what doesn't. So when I say that one of the most common problems in management (apart from not knowing your own weaknesses) is a clear lack of strategic direction and planning¹. Whilst I'd love to say that this is distinctly a public sector problem, thanks wholly to our 3 year parliamentary terms, it is also rife in the private industry.
At its heart the issue stems from immediate needs of the organisation being given a much higher priority than long term goals. Logically this is understandable as the immediate issues generally have real impacts that can be measured and the benefits can be realised in short time frames. However this also means that, unless you're extremely lucky, you'll be sacrificing your long term sustainability for those short term gains. For the public sector this kind of behaviour is almost ingrained as goals that stretch beyond the current incumbents term don't usually get a whole lot of traction. For the private sector however it's usually comes down to maximising their quarterly/annual figures which usually makes the decisions even worse than those in the public sector.
A brilliant example of this fell in lap my lap yesterday when the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) decided that it no longer required the services of 17% of its contractor workforce and promptly told them that they didn't have a job anymore:
The federal Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations ended the contracts of 51 of its 300 IT contractors, some of whom had worked at its head office for years.
Staff in other workplaces across Canberra are anticipating similar news this month as the bureaucracy seeks to cut its technology budget by $400 million this financial year.
Stunned Education Department contractors told The Canberra Times that several staff were still unaware they had no job to return to today.
Now I haven't been able to source any of the reasoning behind the decision² despite having 2 family members working in the department but even without that I can tell you that the decision was made with no regards to the strategic direction of the department (although I'll also tell you how they'd argue the opposite). It all comes down to a game of numbers that went horribly wrong coupled with a distinct disconnect in the communication lines between the direct managers of the contractors and those who made the decision to let them go.
Taking a long term view of this situation would have you plan this kind of move out for at least a couple months before hand. The argument could be made that they didn't have the work for them anymore however my people on the inside tell me that's not the case as they're still understaffed for the workload they have. The flip side of this could be traced back to the Gershon Report which advocated slashing contractor numbers and replacing them with permanent staff members. That move however would have required them advertising those positions months ahead of pulling such a stunt which, if you checked the agency's job listings, you'd know hasn't happened. The only remaining reasons are either a huge management stuff up or an attempt to slim down their budget.
Both trains of thought completely disregard the long term goals that the department has. Dropping that many staff with such little notice means that the work that they were currently responsible for is no longer being taken care of. Additionally the short notice of termination means that there could not have been a handover to other staff leaving quite a lot of work in a state of limbo, either having to be redone completely or shoe horned in to meet their milestones. The quick termination would not endear the organisation to those contractors it gave the shaft to either and DEEWR already had a somewhat shaky reputation when it came to its contracted staff.
As it turns out though it was probably a massive management stuff up, since they've publicly apoligised for what they did and appear to be working to get them all back on board.
What is there to be learnt from all this? Well the over arching point is that major decisions should be made with a vision that stretches beyond any immediate time frames. In my example a misinterpreted directive was applied without regards to both its short and long term consequences. Had they stuck to their guns though the decision would have long lasting effects on the department's ability to meet their goals. As it stands they've already managed to make 51 contractors uncomfortable with their working situation there and the buzz has already had others question their positions there. Realistically no contractor that's aware of this news will look at DEEWR seriously from now on.
Snap decisions should never be made when there's the potential to have consequences that will stretch beyond the immediate time frame. The most common types of managers, those who rose from the ranks of their fellow employees, are unfortunately the most prone to lacking strategic vision for their team. There is unfortunately little that us underlings can do to steer our managers clear of these kinds of mistakes however you can minimize their impact by providing sound, timely advice to influence their decisions in the right way. Hopefully if you're in a position to make such decisions you've either already identified this problem or taken my advice on board, but I'm happy to discuss your points here should you disagree with me 😉
¹Strategic in this sense relates to long term ideas, on the order of 3~5 years. Ask your current boss to see if they have a strategic plan for your area/section/division, you might be surprised at what they give you back.
²As it turns out they pointedto the Gershon Report as the source for firing the contractors. Considering that the report specifically mentioned replacing contractors with permanent staff not firing them. So as it turns out the real reason was a little from both my trains of thought: a huge management stuff up done with the hopes of slashing their budget. Words fail me to describe how idiotic this is.
A good manager is a fungible commodity. You should be able to transplant them between different companies and, aside from minor operational changes, they will be able to adapt quite quickly to their new environment. I do appreciate that teams can benefit from having a leader that has direct experience in the field of work that their team is conducting but for the most part the role of ensuring that a team has an environment that is conducive to getting their work done is a skill that transcends any field. Unfortunately for most of us however the managers we labor under do not fall into my classification of good and whilst there are many causes for that it's primarily one thing: they fail to identify their own weaknesses and manage them accordingly.
It appears to be a commonly held belief that if your boss doesn't understand what you're doing then you're doomed to either struggle to get work done or never receive the recognition you deserve. I'm unfortunately going to have to echo this point as the majority of managers seem to arise primarily from one category I previously mentioned: those who rose from the ranks. Now inherently they are no worse than the other kind however the real world tendency is for us to promote those amongst us as a preference to bringing in someone from outside to lead. Whilst this does mean you have a leader with a good understanding of the issues at hand it also means that they usually lack the skills that make good managers fungible. Additionally they tend to be too involved in smaller issues that they perceive as critical, rather than forming strategic plans to address underlying issues.
There's a saying that I can't find a source for that states "Good managers are those who surround themselves with people smarter than them. Bad managers hire those who agree with everything they say". Part of being a manager of a group of people is understanding that you don't know everything and ensuring that the people under you have all the skills required in order to accomplish the task at hand. This is where many managers fall down as rising through the ranks to become the leader of a group of people can have the unfortunate effect of putting that person on the expert pedestal. Once their authority is officially cemented any notion that they weren't the best at something quickly evaporates and you now have someone with power and a false sense of expertise. They will then tend to hire those that agree with their new found expertise rather than those that disagree with them. Whilst I'm sure none of the real life situations are this melodramatic the core principals have rung true in practically all of the workplaces I've graced over the years.
Ultimately this comes down to a problem of them failing to identify their own weaknesses and delegating to their employees who are stronger in those areas. Taking this to its logical end point you can see why a manager with a core set of skills is fungible between almost any field of work in the world as they should be able to quickly identify the expertise required and where their own experience falls down. Over time they will be able to learn the nuances of the work that their employees undertake and should be able to approach the same level of understanding that a manager who rose from the ranks had. Still for much of the working world is probably the less common of the two types of managers to encounter, simply because we're still basing our entire management ideals on a model from the industrial revolution era.
The principals I've talked about in here can easily be applied to those of us who aren't working in the world of management, especially if you have your eye on making a career there someday. You'd probably find that if you get a reputation for identify weaknesses, creating solutions and managing resources that your colleagues will be recommending you to be the next top dog. Whilst there are still many more things to making a good manager the core principal of knowing your limitations and remedying them is probably the most frequent idea that managers get wrong, much to the dismay of the people they're managing.
I think I've written enough on management to get to the put up or shut up stage now, time for me to hire some underlings… 😉
I've only ever been in a managerial type position 3 times in my whole life, and 2 of those were at university. The first was for the most part a success due in most part to a solid team of people with one star member who was able to complete work in minutes that took the rest of us days. The second was overall a success but my role as a manager was completely and utterly useless and the project would have done much better if I had just not bothered trying to manage my 3 team members at all. Whilst you'd think an experience like that might have turned me off management entirely I still held aspirations of being a project manager some day, only to get into said position and leave it 6 months later. So whilst I may not have been anyone's boss for an extended period of time I've had a taste of the managerial world, so I know when people are, how does the Internet put it, doing it wrong.
For the most part I've seen 2 types of managers in my time: those who rose from the ranks of their former colleagues to become the managers they are today and those who were somehow born into management positions, either from an outside company or via qualifications. The first tend to have a good grounding in what it is like for their underlings and are usually pretty attentive to their wants and needs. However they also usually lack any formal managerial skills and tend to be too involved in day to day matters to make them decent managers. The latter are usually better at being managers in the general sense (shielding their underlings from the workplace politics) but will have more trouble interfacing with those they are supposed to lead. It then follows that these kinds of managers aren't as liked as their rise from the ranks counterparts (and forms the basis of the Pointy Haired Boss character in Dilbert). Overall neither one is inherently worse than the other, they're just different faces of the same coin.
Despite how they came into their position of power managers at all levels engage in what I like to call management theater. Much like its cousin of security theater, which details security measures undertaken to give the feeling of security without actually increasing security, management theater is the practice in which a manager appears to be managing a group of people but realistically they're not. The management function that they provide is in some way usurped from either below (I.E. underlings managing their own workloads and fighting their own political battles) or up above (another manager doing the managers job for them). Whilst most won't engage holistically in this behaviour many will in some way engage in acts that appear to be managerial when in fact that are nothing but.
Take for instance a recent event at where I work. The process was designed to give all the underlings, from the lowest ranks to the just under executive management, a voice with which to communicate their concerns to the entire section. In essence it was a good idea but as always the implementation was extremely lacking. The whole event smacked of management theater as the managers spruiked the fact that the goals set out then would be implemented by management, giving the illusion that the underlings had some power over their current work situation. Here we are over 4 months later and I've yet to see one of the ideas actually gain any ground or any reports from management about how all the wonderful ideas gained from the junket are changing the way we do our day to day work. The whole exercise was a pointless waste of everyone's time that was done as a management theater exercise to make it look like they wanted to do something about everyone's grievances, when in fact they never had any intention of following through.
I wish I could say that this kind of malarky was limited just to government agencies but it was rampant in the private sector to. A great example of this was back in my days at Unisys we were canvased for an opportunity to become CITRIX administrators with the juicy part being that we'd get sent on week long training for it. Seeing how much of a benefit this would be to both my current position and future career I put my hand up, along with 3 other people. The training was good and I was all geared up to take on some more work as a CITRIX admin but instead they hired 2 specialists to fill the role, neatly negating the need for the training I had just went through.
The management theater performed in this case was then to do with the managers wanting to look good for our client, saying that when the new system was installed they'd have 4 able bodied people ready, willing and able to take control of it. However with the project budget big enough to cover off 2 specialists when the system was in use by less than a few hundred people having a team of 6 dedicated to it was woefully inefficient and thus we were never called on to do any CITRIX administration duties. As time went on our skills in the area began to fade to the point of irrelevancy and my manager scolded me for leaving after they had sunk so much cash into me, oblivious to the fact that I hadn't used one bit of the training since I received it.
All these reasons have culminated in the realization that I probably won't be happy until I'm working for the one person I can't disagree with, myself. The last 6 months have seen me attempting to build an empire out of my own skills and for the most part I'm being successful. Time will tell if I can leave the work a day world completely but when I can easily lose a day working on my own projects I know I'm doing the right thing. I just hope it will be enough to keep the bills paid 😉
I used to have a lot of pride in the idea of big corporations. After spending much of my life working for the public service (and indeed I still am although in a different capacity) and lamenting at the inefficiencies the private sector looked like the greenest pastures I'd ever thought of. It was then interesting to note that when it came time for me to make the jump into the private sector my initial impressions were pretty much as I had expected. After a while though it all started to morph into the same story I had experienced for the past few years.
Take any large organisation and the one thing you'll notice is the increase in bureaucracy and this is not necessarily a bad thing. As organisations grow larger they will require more people to lead and facilitate communication between disparate sections. However what I traditionally saw in the public service was that restructures often caused redundant positions to retained instead of removed. This often lead to the too many chiefs problem where you get a lot of people who are in charge of something or someone which tips the management to underling ratio unfavourably. This is not to say I didn't see the same thing happen in the private sector, it was just less common as when you're trying to turn a profit from your business it becomes much easier to remove those people who aren't really adding value to the business.
More recently I've encountered this in my own personal financial matters. A couple years ago my fiancée and I took the plunge and bought our first house here in Canberra. The process was actually pretty easy for us and we managed to find our beautiful home in the first week, although we held off making an offer for a while to make sure it was the one we wanted. After a couple quick signatures and a couple of phone calls to our broker the process was over and done with in a matter of weeks. Needless to say we were pretty impressed with everyone involved.
Naively believing that it would be the same deal the second time around we took the plunge yet again to buy an investment property. Now I know most people would be telling us we're crazy for trying this (I did the figures, and believe me it still surprises me how good an idea this was) but we went ahead anyway. We found a beautiful place that would rent fantastically which unfortunately fell through. We since then found another house which was in good shape for its age and was in a great location. So we went ahead and decided to purchase.
Queue the last 2 months of my life spent dealing with the bureaucracy that is one of the big 4 banks of Australia. Our first loan was from a smaller bank that was from outside of our state and was a painless process. Our new bank had so many different sections that communications between myself, my broker and the bank would usually hit at least 3~4 different sections, all of which were responsible for different things. Not only was settlement delayed over a month because of a simple question I asked they also lost several critical loan documents twice over, something I'd never experienced before from a professional institution (let alone a bank). I was left pining for the smaller banks, at least then there would only be one central location that dealt with everything.
And so marked the end of the idea that a bigger corporation could do something better. It seems that there's a sort of bell curve phenomenon going on here. When you're too small you can't do all the things that the big guys do. Once you're at the peak you're doing just as well as the big guys without the inefficiencies. After that it's all down hill and whilst your company might be more successful you've traded in your efficiency to achieve that. It does keep the stock holders happy however.
I guess now its time for me to put my money where my mouth is and start my own company and do better then them. I'll take the easy route out and blame the global financial crisis for it instead 🙂


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In this Scholar-in-Residence Program monograph, Globe and Mail columnist André Picard aims to answer one question: "How do we reform our health care system?" He says we must continue to focus on the principles of medicare: universality, accessibility, comprehensiveness, portability, and public administration. He argues that two opposing extreme views—that medicare is an unsustainable failure or an unalterable sacred cow—have made it impossible to have a constructive debate, and that the way to reform lies somewhere between them. After examining the history of health care systems in Canada and other developed countries, Picard argues that Canada's system needs to be modernized by conciliatory, cooperative, pragmatic leaders. We need to set clear limits on what the system covers, build on successes, find the most effective funding mechanism, and address five key gaps: pharmacare, primary care, community care, social determinants of health, and health care quality.
Three distinguished health care experts offered their insights into health care reform at the 2012 CIBC Scholar-in-Residence Lecture.
Introduction—Principles and Goals: What Are We Trying to Achieve?
Section I—The Path to the Present: How Did We Get Here?
Section II—Frozen in Time: The Canadian Health Care System Today
Section III—Health Care Reform: What Needs to Change?
Conclusion—A Call to Action
Transcript of the Lecture
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Tag Archives: brides in black
Poetry Readings and Launches
October 1st Poetry Reading: On October 1st Windsor Atelier Virginianne welcomed four Black Moss Press authors to the stage. Peter Hrastovec warmed the crowd up with his humorous poetry, specifically the piece from his latest book in which he makes the acquaintance of Earnest Hemingway. He was followed by Mary Ann Mulhern who rendered the room... Read more »Continue reading
Brides in Black
Brides in Black is Mary Ann Mulhern's follow-up to her popular first book of poetry, The Red Dress. In The Red Dress, Mulhern explores her own experience living in a convent for eight years and her ultimate decision to leave. Brides in Black picks up where The Red Dress leaves off, with the nuns who... Read more »Continue reading
Uwindsor Daily News Covers Brides in Black / Day Moon Rising on Print on Demand
This past Wednesday, the University of Windsor bookstore officially launched their Espresso Print-On-Demand machine by printing up the first copy of Mary Ann Mulhern's forthcoming Brides in Black and Terry Ann Carter's Day Moon Rising. Read the full article from Uwindsor's daily news here.Continue reading
Brides in Black blog
Black Moss is excited about the upcoming Spring 2012 release of Brides in Black, Mary Ann Mulhern's follow-up to her successful poetry book The Red Dress. To keep up to date on news about Brides in Black, as well as some great related content, be sure to check out www.bridesinblack.wordpress.comContinue reading
Photographs from BookFest Windsor
Black Moss had a great time participating in this year's BookFest Windsor last weekend. Our Girls' Night Out reading featured the Windsor launch of Rosemary Sullivan & Juan Opitz's new children's book Molito and Karen Mulhallen's latest poetry book The Pillow Books. The event also featured readings from Mary Ann Mulhern, who previewed her upcoming... Read more »Continue reading
A Few Words with Mary Ann Mulhern
Mary Ann Mulhern's upcoming book Brides in Black, a follow-up to the successful poetry collection The Red Dress, has been gaining a great deal of attention over the last few weeks. Set to be released in early Spring 2012, Brides in Black takes Mary Ann back into the convent. Her signature minimal poetic style allows her to share the stories... Read more »Continue reading


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Moments later, Benjamin jumped atop a concrete wall, with the boughs of the tree hanging above, and gave last-minute orders as if he were a field general before a military siege. My boyfriend and I have been together for a bit now. Amanda Uren Additional curation:
Day One: Drinks With Friends
You can watch it by clicking here. I had to go to the grocery store, so I dug deep into the back of my closet to find this dress I used to wear to work. Is it empowering to be here at the event by yourself and to see that there's many other women that came here alone as well?
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New Youth Soccer Tournament Selects Decatur-November 22-24, 2013
The city of Decatur has been selected to hold the 2013 The Alabama Junior Cup Tournament, an Alabama Youth Soccer Association and United States Youth Soccer Association (USYSA) sanctioned tournament hosted by Premier Soccer Services. Organizers are expecting approximately 150 boys and girls club teams from across the state of Alabama for the three-day tournament set for November 22-24, 2013 at the Jack Allen Recreation Complex.
The Alabama Junior Cup is a new tournament offering USYSA affiliated Premier, Challenge, Classic, and Academy level U9-U12 girls' and boys' competitive soccer opportunities. There will be a minimum of two divisions per age division/gender – an elite level of play and 1-2 competitive divisions tiered lower. Trophies will be awarded to the championship and runner-up teams in each age division.
Each team consists of an average of 12 players, with each player accompanied by three or four family members. Majority of the participants and their families will utilize hotels, restaurants, and other businesses in Decatur throughout the three-day tournament providing a boost to the local economy.
The Jack Allen Recreation Complex will also serve as host venue for the tournament November 21-23, 2014 and November 20-22, 2015. For complete registration information on the tournament, visit www.premiersoccerservices.com.
For more information on the Jack Allen Recreation Complex, visit www.decatursports.com.
About Premier Soccer Services
Premier Soccer Services (PSS) is an events and consulting service organization in business since 2006. PSS organizes events and programs from the grassroots to the international and professional level. Services, programs, and events include youth soccer tournaments, coaching education clinics, soccer development programming, exhibition matches (domestic and international), international tours of professional clubs and national teams in the USA, international training tours and programs for US based teams to Mexico and Latin America, and international relations with Federation and professional clubs.


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David Wenger serves as our Associate Pastor; leading the worship experience on Sunday morning, and overseeing the Adult Bible Study Groups at Hallmark. He is a graduate of Liberty University; with a B.S. in Biblical Studies and an M.A.R. in Church Ministries.
David and his wife, Dawn, were married in 1996 and have been blessed with four beautiful children: Devan, Delaney, Danae, and Drew. They have served a variety of local churches in: Virginia, Florida, Alabama, Illinois, and Georgia; but felt like they came "home" when they were called to Hallmark in 2004. The Wenger family resides in Burleson, and can probably be found at a school activity on any given night of the week.
David's favorite passage of Scripture is Proverbs 3:5-6,
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct Your paths" (NKJV).


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You're different in every way.
You've adapted by becoming a Lone Seeker with few masters and even fewer colleagues.
You live in an aggressively contentious society full of those whose minds have succumbed to "programming" in the materialist Western culture. You find it difficult to express yourself publicly without fear of ridicule.
Even amongst your own colleagues, you're an alien.
You practice acupuncture so differently that colleagues think it's too weird. You practice a qigong energy healing lineage that is so outside of traditional techniques that it brings out the angry, aggressive, and pretentious egos of other practitioners. Within the spiritual healing realm, it's hard to find practitioners who simply and genuinely want to help others who aren't attached to money, fame, and/or control.
When they let you down, you become your own hard-won ally. Forgiveness becomes a thing to cultivate. Most of the time you're happy, but sometimes the disappointment in others gnaws away at you so hard that you start to bleed. You keep your hands in your pockets and try to let their insults bounce off you. And you want to hate them all, but you can't… that's not what you do. Hate is just a mask for fear and grief, and you know this well.
So you spread light and love and compassion to where ever there's darkness, to whomever needs it, to whomever wants it. And when the job is done, you go back on your seeking path alone.
And that's okay. You do things your way. You express your own inner brilliance. You don't need a community that can't handle you being you.
See you, Renegade Seeker.


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Staying out for the summer
I've been really slack with this writing business. One would have thought that having no need to be at the office will create more time for updating this blog. That fact is, I spend much more time faffing around when I'm at the office then when I'm at home.
I don't feel like I've been running as much as I had been before the summer. I remember I used to run like three or four times a week. Now it's down to twice, sometimes twice. Last Sunday I ran to Kadoorie Farm, after not having done so in what seems like weeks. It felt good – I wasn't any faster though, 90 minutes as before, but on the uphill stretch I felt much stronger and what used to a torturous ten minutes now seems like a breeze. The runs up to the Peak on Wednesday nights are also much easier now. Last night I ran up without stopping to walk and there were moments when I felt I could have put in the extra effort to go a bit faster even. I'll do that next week. I did the medium run, for the first time. Took me an hour and 45 minutes. When I arrived at the recreation centre I saw Aya and Andy already showered and dressed and standing about so I asked has everyone finished? And they said yeah. I felt so bad. I thought I was the last even though I'd only done two loops. Then it turned out that not everyone did the long run – most did two and some did only one. Instant relieve. Those spinning sessions seem to have done my fitness some good.
I'm still working hard at blocking out all thoughts related to work. I have an AAF thing due tomorrow and I haven't done anything about this term's classes at all. I'm really trying to enjoy the last of the summer holidays as much as I can. It's been great spending more time with the boys, sleeping in, staying up late, working out, shopping, painting my toenails, enjoying life! It'll be hard getting back to a routine where I only see the boys a few hours a day at the most.


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Elizabeth Ross, Rn, Appointed To Nmahhc Committee Chair
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Elizabeth Ross, RN, executive director of the Compassus programs serving Albuquerque and Santa Fe, has been appointed co-chair of the New Mexico Association for Home & Hospice Care (NMAHHC) hospice committee.
NMAHHC represents 150 home care and hospice agency members who provide care to New Mexico residents. Through its advocacy and education efforts, the organization aims to provide every resident with information on the availability of affordable, high quality home and hospice care services.
Ross will lead the organization's hospice committee alongside co-chair David Rodriguez. The committee holds quarterly meetings to discuss best practices for home care and hospice, as well as advocacy efforts for adequate reimbursement, appropriate regulation and code of ethics.
"I am honored to have this opportunity to co-chair the NMAHHC hospice committee," said Ross. "I am inspired by the organization's vision and look forward to having a hand in strengthening the home and hospice care industry in New Mexico."
For more information about the NMAHHC, please visit nmahc.org.
For information about Compassus programs in New Mexico, please call (505) 983-9212.


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(You're getting two posts in one day because I had already written 700 words about cookies and if I had kept writing it would have been too much. This will probably be too much anyways.)
This year, I am calling my New Year's resolutions my user's manual or guidebook to 2013. This is because I have four pages of goals, specific actions, and motivation to achieve those goals. Yup. 4 pages.
Yeah, I'm a little nuts. I think you would have figured that out by now though.
This is how it works. I can't just write down, "Lose weight," or "Exercise more," or "Eat better." I need to have specific ways to achieve those resolutions. This year, I have five over-arching "resolutions." They are:
1. Put good things in your body.
2. Make your body work.
3. Be pretty.
4. Work better.
5. Who are you? Be you.
(And by the way, by saying that I want to eat better and exercise more, this is not a cry for compliments. I'm not saying I hate the way I look. I don't. I actually look better than I did in high school. But I know I could look even better, and this year, I might just do it.)
Under those five big directions- I like direction more than resolution, I guess- I have various actions that will help make 2013 the fabulously spectacular year that I want it to be.
Here's a sampling:
Under "Put good things in your body:" I'd like to give Meatless Mondays a go. I want to try and lay off the caffeine, and keep drinking herbal tea at night. I'd like to eat less at night, so I'm going to brush my teeth earlier in the night, so I'm less tempted to grab a snack.
Under "Make your body work:" I'm already a pretty consistent exerciser, but in terms of intensity and variety, I'm missing out. So I'm going to make it hard when it gets easy. I'm going to try something that I think I might not like- like running outside in the winter, for example. I would like to do 10 real push-ups by March.
Under "Be pretty:" I'm going to try and dress nicely all the time, even if I'm just working the library all day. This helps me focus, I swear. I want to paint my nails most weeks. I'm going to play with my hair and try new things.
Under "Work better:" So I don't get caught procrastinating too much, I'd like to brainstorm ideas for papers and projects when I just have a few minutes. I should try going to office hours. I will only go on Facebook once in the morning and once at night. I'm going to keep my to-do list concise and manageable.
Under "Be you:" I'm going to say yes more. I need to live it up more. No, dear parents and relatives, that does not mean I will be going to the bar every night. But I need to try some new things, whether it be a new exercise, different foods, or another extracurricular activity. Now is the time to do all the stuff I keep saying I'm going to do, all the stuff I think I'll have time for later. Well, it's later, and the time is now.
When I think or say something negative about someone, I will try to think or say something positive about them as well. I'm going to journal as much as I can. I want to compile an awesome list.
So those are the actions or things to keep in mind. Then I have actual, tangible goals I'd like to achieve, things that I can cross off and say, "Yes! I did that!" Among those are: run 5 miles; go to Mass more than 4 times a month (aka, more than just on Sundays); take or post a photo a day; remember all of the birthdays in my family; and take a minimum of two days per month without social networking.
The last part of this is the words to live by. These are just buzzwords I'd like to keep in mind when I find myself falling into old habits and patterns. Among them: Efficiency. Brilliance. Grace. Faith. Stillness. Slowness. Chances. Patience. God. Questions. Learn. Work. Try. Challenge. Beauty.
I know it sounds like a lot, and I guess it is, but for me, this is much easier to handle than general resolutions. It makes things more concrete, and I can visualize what the end result will be. And I really like what I'm visualizing.
I haven't done much baking since Christmas. I've been busy with other things, and my body feels better for it. Here's a little of what the day-to-day has looked like, via Instagram (@gmtnunez, if you're on that wagon and would like to follow along):
I hope many of you have seen Forrest Gump. If not, please do and we'll be better friends. In the movie, Forrest celebrates New Year's in NYC with Lt. Dan and his exotic dancer "friends." When the clock nears midnight, one of the girls says she loves New Year's because everyone gets to start over. "Everybody gets a second chance."
I'm feeling a little bit like that this year. I have a lot of new stuff coming up for which I'm absolutely pumped, but on the other hand, I'm also getting some second chances- with Santiago, with my studies, with some people. I want those chances.
And I'm taking them. I hope you take yours, too.
Please comment, tell me about your resolutions, what you think of mine, whatever! I do love hearing from all of you!
Happy New Year! May 2013 be your best year yet.
With love,


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Hera's Sky
This loose glitter eyeshadow is a beautiful black glitter with blue and silver reflects!
Available in 2 sizes!
- 5 gram container with flip top sifter
- Sample is approximately 1/8 of a teaspoon
Ingredients: Polyethylene Terephalate
Made in USA
No Animal Testing
Cruelty Free
Size: 5 gram/5 ml/ 0.17 oz


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When you're in the investments game, you win some and you lose some. But the question of when to sell an underperforming fund is one of the hardest to answer. Recently, this question has come up time and again, as one of the most popular funds on the market – run by Neil Woodford, the male Beyoncé of fund management – has plummeted 17% in just 12 months.
UK income funds across the board have had an awful time as Brexit has rumbled on. Woodford has had the worst time. At the same time, by contrast, the big US tech firms have been having a party, shouting "whoopeeee" and going gangbusters. Here's the problem. Any investor should be a bit worried if all of their funds are doing brilliantly at the same time. Because trends come and go, and that's why we diversify. And all those global share funds across the board that we're loving? Hmm… You might think you are diversified because you own 10 different global funds, but what if 5% of all of these funds is in Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon?
At some point I suspect we'll see a shift, and all those big global giants which we probably all hold far too much of, will have their day in the doghouse.
Take Apple. Most people who could ever afford a smartphone, have a smartphone. It's now a replacement market, not a growth market. At some point, the growth worm will nibble this Apple. A modern media-fuelled tragedy? There's a modern twist at play with Woodford and the like which
I find more interesting than endless speculation about his performance. The impact of the media. When he launched 5 years ago, his high profile took him high. But today the media has turned, and they have become as much of the problem as his performance, because this barrage of negativity creates a structural problem Why? Well, the regulator wants fund managers to have the ability to pay up if investors want to bail. So lots of funds are not allowed to have more than 10% of their money in unlisted shares, which take time to sell. Woodford has had to adopt some cute strategies to stay within the rules. But at the same time, after every negative article, there's a stampede for the doors. And when people want their money back, you need to sell shares to get cash to pay out. The last thing I want as an investor is for my fund manager to be a forced seller, especially of unlisted stuff, some of which will be about to float or potentially be acquired.
The thing is, underperforming funds like Woodford's could have their future day in the sun. Or they might have just picked rubbish companies. The actual truth is that no-one knows what the future holds. So if someone claims to know the definitive answer to 'sell or not sell', plug up your ears. The future is yet to be seen.
By Holly Mackay, CEO of financial guidance website Boring Money


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Event ID 1288 — BCD File Access and Creation
Applies To: Windows Server 2008
Each boot image is represented in the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) store as an available boot loader option. The BCD store contains boot configuration parameters and controls how the operating system is started in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems. These parameters were previously in the Boot.ini file (in BIOS-based operating systems) or in the nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM) entries (in Extensible Firmware Interface–based operating systems).
Each boot image on the Windows Deployment Services server has a corresponding BCD file that contains a Boot Loader entry. The entry describes how to boot that particular operating system image. The BCD file contains information such as the boot device (RAMDISK), the image name (obtained from the .wim metadata), the detect HAL option, and the operating system type (Windows PE).
Event Details
|Windows Operating System
|Symbolic Name:
|The Windows Imaging (WIM) file %1 does not contain any bootable images. Images in this file will be ignored.
Add a bootable image to the .wim file
Boot images must be marked as bootable. When you are capturing an image with ImageX, you must specify the /boot option to mark the image as bootable. For more information about ImageX command-line options, see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=104386.
To resolve this issue, do one of the following:
- If the affected image is a custom image, you will need to recreate the image by using the /boot option. For more information about how to do this, download and install the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=81030.
- If you accidentally added an install image as a boot image, delete the install image from the server by using the Windows Deployment Services management tools. To do this, open the MMC snap-in, right-click the image you added incorrectly, and then click Delete. (Note: To perform this procedure, you must be a member of the local Administrators group.)
Note: The name of the image that caused this issue is specified in BINLVC event 1288. To find this event, open Event Viewer, expand Custom Views, expand Server Roles, and then click Windows Deployment Services.
To perform this procedure, you must either be a member of the local Administrators group or have been delegated the appropriate authority.
To verify that the BCD file has been generated correctly and is accessible:
- Locate the following file on the Windows Deployment Service server: **RemoteInstall\Tmp\<arch>.{<GUID>}.**bcd, where <arch> is x86, x64, ia64, or x86x64 and <GUID> is 32 characters. Note: By default, the RemoteInstall folder is on drive C.
- In the Command Prompt window, run the following command for the file you located in step 1: bcdedit.exe /enum /all /store: <Drive>:\RemoteInstall\Boot\<arch>\default.bcd. The output should contain the contents of the BCD file.
- Verify that the output contains entries for each of your boot images.


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The boys have an excessively large Carbon Footprint driving some very large cars this week, Trev's talking about refurbished phones and how Bowen just wouldn't ever buy one but you certainly should consider it. Airport Hire Car scammers and how on earth they work, Bowen discovers the potato scallop and has his mind blown, and Trev's whacky news of the week.
Trev is a Technology Commentator, Dad, Speaker and Rev Head.
He produces and hosts two popular podcasts, EFTM and Two Blokes Talking Tech. He also appears on over 50 radio stations across Australia weekly, and is the resident Tech Expert on Channel 9's Today Show each day and appears regularly on A Current Affair.
Father of three, he is often found down in his Man Cave.


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Glendullan Whisky Distillery & Story
Glendullan whisky distillery is located in the middle of the Speyside whisky region in the Scottish highlands.
Situated 3/4 of a mile to the east of Dufftown on the east bank of the River Fiddich.
The Glendullan (glen-dull-an) whisky distillery house style is a rich fruity malt whisky. The malt whisky is now marketed by Diageo under "The Singleton" brand along side the Dufftown and Glen Ord distilleries.
Popular with independent bottlers such as Connoisseurs Choice By Gordon and MacPhail.
Older labels such as Flora & Fauna and Rare Malts Selection can sometimes be found in the discontinued whiskies.
How the Glendullan story began
Glendullan whisky distillery established by Williams & Sons in 1896-98. Was the last of the seven distilleries to be built around Dufftown in the 1890s distillery-building boom.
Although the fact that the whisky market collapsed the same year that distillation at Glendullan started, the owners managed to remain in business.
In 1902 the Glendullan malt whisky is introduced to Edward VII becoming a favorite with the Royal household.
Macdonald Greenlees purchases shares in Williams & Sons forming Macdonald Greenlees & Williams Distillers in 1919.
Seven years later the Distillers Company Ltd (DCL) buys the Glendullan distillery.
The distillery is transferred to Scottish Malt Distillers (SMD) in 1930.
The only period, which the distillery was silent, was due to government restrictions enforced during World War II.
The Glendullan distillery was remodelled in 1962.
Ten years later in 1972 a second distillery was built in the field alongside to increase capacity of the single pair of stills in the old distillery.
This was a self-contained unit with three pairs of stills. Both distilleries used the same water, 'recipe' and techniques and, despite having stills of different sizes, produced a similar spirit.
The 'old distillery' was 'mothballed' in 1985.
During the early 1990s a 12 year old single malt whisky was introduced under the Flora & Fauna label.
Rare Malt Selection cask strength limited editions followed; a 22 year old in 1995 and a 26 year old in 2005.
During 2007 Diageo create "The Singleton" brand using the output from three of its distilleries. Initially each distillery named had a specific market;
The Singleton of Glendullan aimed at the US Market. Singleton of Dufftown for Europe and the UK and Singleton of Glen Ord for Asia.
Glendullan shared a railway siding with the Mortlach distillery next door.
A favourite whisky of King Edward VII. However, it has taken a back seat compared to the other single malt whiskies that have been heavily promoted in recent years by their owners.
The whisky produced is a contributor to Bell's Dewars, Johnnie Walker and Old Parr blend.
The Glendullan Whisky Distillery
Founded in 1897-98 by Williams & Sons.
Location; Speyside region, central district Dufftown.
Water Source; Conval Hill Springs.
Glendullan whisky Distillery Equipment;
The original distillery was powered by a large waterwheel that supplied 16 horsepower to drive the machinery. Wooden worm-tubs were used to convert the vapour to spirit.
12 tonne lauter stainless steel mash tun.
8 Larch washbacks + 2 Stainless Steel. 75 hour fermentation time.
3 pairs of pot stills. Unusually the spirit stills are larger than the wash stills.
Making 21 mashes a week = to produce 5 million litres of alcohol spirit a year.
Matured in American oak bourbon casks.
Our Glendullan malt whiskies
Glendullan Single Malt Whisky 2001
Speyside Single Malt Whisky
Connoisseurs Choice Range bottled by Gordon & MacPhail
46% ABV 70cl
No visitor facilities at the Glendullan whisky distillery
The Diageo distillery at Dailuaine was first to use Clearfleau's anaerobic digestion (AD) technology, becoming operational in 2013. Since August 2015 the site at Glendullan has been using the system to manage distillery co-products.
This bio-energy plant is:
• Generating over 2 million m3 of biogas
• Delivering 8,000 MW hours of thermal energy
• Turning 1,000m3 of co-products into 1MW per hour
• Saving over 1,000 tonnes of carbon each year
• Cutting over 15 truck journeys daily, with a new pipeline supplying the AD plant
Our Glendullan Whisky Range - In stock and available to buy
Glendullan Single Malt Whisky 2001
Speyside Single Malt Whisky
Connoisseurs Choice Range bottled by Gordon & MacPhail
46% ABV 70cl


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HSA for America
How to Choose Your HSA Administrator
September 3, 2011
Vol. 7, Issue 7
There are two basic steps you must take before you can take advantage of the many financial benefits a health savings account offers. First, you must have a qualifying high deductible health plan. Then you must establish your health savings account through any approved HSA administrator, whether that be a bank or an approved non-bank custodian or trustee. The decision you make about your HSA administrator can make a big difference in your long-term financial situation.
How Funding Your Health Savings Account Can Really Pay Off
When I set up my HSA early in 2004, I went with HSA Bank. The main reason I chose them was because they offer a discount brokerage option through Transamerica Financial Advisors, allowing the HSA-holder to direct his or her investments as they choose. I made the maximum contribution, which in 2004 was $5,100. I kept a couple hundred dollars in a savings account so that I could pay for small expenses like aspirin without having to save and add up those receipts. The rest I put in a mutual fund, with the intention of letting this account grow tax-deferred, and of reimbursing myself in future years after the account has grown.
I am in no way offering investment advice, but am just sharing my story to illustrate what can happen. I invested my funds in a mutual fund called Columbia Acorn International Z (ACINX). In 2005 and 2006 I also deposited the maximum amount. In 2004 the fund had a 29.5% return, in 2005 it grew by 21.8%, and in the first 3 months of 2006 it has grown 13.23%. Making these deposits has earned me about $4,500 in tax savings, and about $5,000 in tax-deferred investment growth. The combined $9,500 is more than I have paid for my health insurance during this same time period - in effect giving me "free" health insurance.
Though I can pat myself on the back about my brilliant investment decision, I know that I won't always get this rate of return. But I now have enough in my account that I can comfortably choose a very high deductible (and low premium) plan, without having to worry about covering the deductible.
My strategy, which I talk about in Issue 3 of Maximize Your HSA, is to let my money grow tax deferred, and reimburse myself at age 65 for any expenses I incur over the years. If I can average a 12% return on my money, I should have about $550,000 in the account when I retire.
Insurance Company Partner or Independent HSA Administrator?
Most insurance companies now partner with an administrator, enabling you to send in one monthly payment that can cover both your health insurance premium and an HSA deposit. This makes the process more convenient when you first get started. Some also offer an automatic claim rollover that allows account holders to have their account automatically debited to pay for claims.
However, there are a couple of important reasons that you may want to choose an administrator independent from your health insurance company. The most important reason is that insurance rates change frequently, and most people who are covered by individual plans (as opposed to group coverage) will find it financially beneficial to switch insurance companies every few years. HSA accounts that are tied to a particular insurance company often have increased fees and lower (or no) interest if the account holder no longer carries the accompanying health insurance.
The second reason many people choose an administrator separate from their health insurance provider is that these administrators often have lower fees and provide more investment options.
Examine Fees and Returns
As a consumer you should be just as smart, informed and cost conscious when shopping for health savings accounts as Health Savings Accounts encourage you to be when choosing a doctor, procedure or medicine. The first two factors you'll want to look at are the fees the administrator charges, and the rate of return on your investment.
Banks earn much of their money through various fees - most are pretty small, but they can add up. If you plan to slowly fund your account, you may want to be particularly conscious of the fees being charged. Some of the fees you may see include set-up fees, monthly fees, annual fees, and even account closing fees. Two administrators I am aware of that don't charge any of these fees are American Chartered Bank and Fayetteville Bank.
Other fees to be aware of include charges for checks, ATM withdrawals, debit card usage, and online bill paying.
All administrators offer a savings account, with interest rates that range from less than 1%, to up to 4.5% or more, depending on the account balance. There are some administrators that also offer a select group of mutual funds, and there are several administrators that offer full-brokerage services, giving you the option to purchase virtually any stock, bond, mutual fund, or other similar investment. Two of the most popular administrators with full brokerage services are HSA Resources Bank and HSA Bank.
What Do You Get For Your Money
The most basic HSA accounts require you to mail or fax a request for withdrawal. If you plan to take money out of your account on a regular basis to cover household medical expenses, prescriptions, or other regular medical expenses, a debit card is an important feature to look for.
Some administrators are now offering a credit card with their HSA accounts. This solves a common problem that many first-time HSA account holders face - a large medical expense before the HSA balance has had a chance to grow. The expense can be paid with the credit card, and then the card balance can be paid off as funds are made available to the HSA.
Other administrators offer additional services to set themselves apart. Sterling HSA will review the EOB (Explanation of Benefits that you get from the doctor or hospital) for accuracy and errors, and will then pay your bill for you from your account.
DataPath Services offers an electronic HSA claims repository where account holders can store their receipts indefinitely and then access the receipts quickly and easily with a few clicks of the mouse. Expenses incurred today can be reimbursed decades later, allowing interest to build tax-free and ensuring that account holders do not miss out on any of the tax-advantaged benefits of their HSA.
A list of preferred administrators can be found at our website on our HSA Administrator page. Another resource is the Directory of HSA Administrators website.
Set up an HSA - What Are You Waiting For?
HSA-qualified health insurance plans offer much lower premiums than traditional co-pay plans. But the biggest benefits of Health Savings Accounts come to those who also set up and fund a health savings account. Any money deposited in the account is tax deductible, effectively reducing your net health insurance premium by up to $1,700 or more each year. Money can be withdrawn from the HSA to pay virtually any type of medical expense, thus making all medical expenses tax-deductible. And money left in the account grows tax-deferred like an IRA, making an HSA the best way to save for future medical expenses.
Within the last two years, Americans have deposited nearly $1 billion in tax-advantaged health savings accounts. HSA administrators and custodians have collectively opened more than 820,000 accounts and say they are adding about 60,000 new accounts each month.
If you have an HSA-qualified plan but have not yet opened your health savings account, I encourage you to do so immediately. Only then can you take advantage of the tax-deferred growth, as well as the ability to run medical expenses through the account, thus making them tax-deductible.
To your health and wealth!
Wiley Long
President - HSA for America
P.S. - Every month my goal is to provide practical information that can help you make more intelligent financial decisions and maximize the benefits you get from your HSA. We do this to help our clients and subscribers, and to build our business. If you find this information useful, please forward it to others who might be interested.
P.S.S. - HSA popularity is booming. This is exciting for doctors who wish to get out from underneath the stranglehold of HMOs and other managed care organizations, as well as consumers who will benefit from increased competition for their business. But it is very scary for politicians and others who see their chance at nationalizing healthcare slowly slipping out of their fingers. Next month I'll discuss the societal benefits of consumer directed healthcare, and what things might look like in this country under socialized medicine...


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Halsey To Play Wonder Woman In New 'Teen Titans' Movie
12 March 2018, 16:46
The singer will make an appearance in the big screen animation alongside Lil Yachty and other big musical names to be announced.
Halsey will voice the role of iconic superhero Wonder Woman in the new animated film Teen Titans GO! to the Movies.
The 'Bad At Love' singer joins a cast of celebrity cameos including Lil Yachty as the Green Lantern with further big names to be announced shortly.
USA Today broke the news earlier today (March 12th) with the film set for release this July. Based on the popular Cartoon Network series, it will follow the super-crew of Robin, Starfire, Raven, Cyborg and Beast Boy as they try to make it in Hollywood.
Fall Out Boy and CeeLo Green are among the other musical names who have previously appeared in the TV show, with both acts also performing versions of the cartoon's iconic original song 'The Night Begins To Shine'.
Halsey meanwhile looks set to continue on her Hopeless Fountain Kingdom tour in 2018 with UK dates expected to be announced shortly.