adrift on a cosmic ocean

who moved my cheese Who Moved My Cheese? by Dr Spencer Johnson is another book mentioned to me last year (I think by my manager). It sounds like a book I already knew about, but maybe that is because of the conventional and obvious sounding title. And the content is obvious, in many ways - it's an allegory for change management. As the tale goes, four mice with strange names are feasting on cheese…

One Minute Mentoring One Minute Mentoring by Ken Blanchard and Claire Diaz-Ortiz is one of the well-respected One Minute Manager series by Ken Blanchard. Ken Blanchard himself has started a series of companies that specialise in management training and techniques - such as Situational Leadership II. I still have it on my list to read the original One Minute Manager, and assumed it was just a…

Turn The Ship Around! Turn The Ship Around by L. David Marquet is something that had been on my radar (no pun intended) for some time, but was also recommended to me early last year by my then manager. The context was - how to delegate more in the journey in leadership to higher levels of management. I think at the time I was trying to come to grips with the team I had at the time, which was doing…

Another book completed from the never-ending list: Zero to One by Peter Thiel. Not sure how this ended up on the list but I guess it's a seminal text when considering tech startups, which have featured pretty solidly in my career. Zero to One cover I probably saw it on the shelf at one of the companies I worked, and thought it deserved a read. In any case, I expected something more about founding…

My blog count for last year was woefully low, and I was struggling to think of what was worthwhile to write about. As I mentioned last time, I've been slowly getting through my management/leadership reading list and while I don't think I have the time or energy to write full book reviews (at least, full enough to do the titles justice) I would like to write something. So here it is: the first of…

Oh dear, it's been another long time since my last post. To be fair, this year has been very hectic. Earlier in the year I was focussing a lot more on spending my commutes meditating (somewhat successfully), but recently I've found that reading on the train and in whatever free time I can scrape together has almost the same effect - so I don't mind meditating less. When I was in primary school I…

Well, I've certainly had a lot less free time to write blog posts recently. I don't even have my actual desktop computer back in operation yet (the screen was cracked in transit). We have finally moved into an apartment in Sydney and life is returning to some definition of normal. With three kids and a new job there is a lot to balance, and not a lot of time for many things. That being said, I've…

It's 2019! Or so they say - I'm not very inclined to believe it, as most days seem like a dream. You know that kind of dream, where you are in the house where you live (or perhaps where you grew up), but you somehow know within you that it's not your house? This is the life I'm living at the moment. We've been living in Berlin, Germany, since 2009 and have now - after just over nine years - moved…

Picture the scene: you have a new project to start working on and deliver in a relatively short amount of time. You have done lots of research, know the problem to be solved, have worked diligently on whittling down the scope to just the bare elements that will prove or disprove the utility of the idea. You know how long it will take to build a first iteration, have a pretty good idea of how to…

This is not a ground-breaking new concept, but since I failed to find decent material on it when searching, and it's not entirely clear from the Blender documentation, I thought I'd write someabout about it with screenshots. Normally, when we are baking textures in Blender (e.g. for simplifying the render of a complex scene, or exporting objects and their textures to a game engine), we use the…