February 2017 – Jared Diamond Books

And Confidence is Key

Posted under Construction on February 27th, 2017 by admin

folding platforms steps I read an article once that said if you’re in a situation where you don’t know what you’re doing…you should just go ahead with confidence. Confidence literally is key, so you can’t fail in whatever you’re attempting. That’s generally the philosophy I have whenever I’m starting a hobby of any kind, and it ALWAYS works. 100% verified, and you can take it from me because I’ve been involved in a lot of hobbies. I was once part of a guild of people who sought out the most bizarre hobbies, once a week, just so we’d always have a story to tell at parties (and for the fun). We did some strange things, I was often terrible at them, but with my guiding philosophy I was able to greet every new challenge.

The time when I think it came into the sharpest focus was…well, I know it was after the week of extreme chess. That’s chess where you dress up as the piece, someone directs you and you can only be removed from the board if the opposing player is able to judo flip you. No, this was the time with the aluminium work platforms. There was a veritable jungle of them set up in the CBD for a special festival, and with some strict safety guidelines, we were allowed to assemble them ourselves in a sort of speed run.

Now, we had construction workers as part of the club, so I thought I didn’t have a chance. But i’d only just learned my guiding principle of confidence, so I decided not to let my inexperience bother me in the slightest. I was captain of my team, so i organised everyone and told them to be confident alongside me. We were presented with a large pile of metal tubes that ostensibly were supposed to become a ladder platform at some point. It’s easy to panic, or just decide that it’s a bit of harmless fun in that situation, but I did not. We rallied the tea, found putting together folding platform steps to be a relatively intuitive activity and soared to victory.

There you go. Next week is ‘Ukelele Duelling’. No idea what that is. I’ll probably be brilliant at it, though.

-Gary

My dad’s office obsession

Posted under office design on February 14th, 2017 by admin

office designers Melbourne Okay so normally I wouldn’t talk about this kind of thing, particularly not on the internet to a bunch of strangers, but I’m beginning to think it’s more of a problem that I originally realised and I’m starting to get a little worried about it.

About two months ago now my dad decided he was going to remodel his office space at work and, well, he’s become kind of obsessive about it. It started out in the most natural way possible. One night, over dinner, we were talking about our days as we normally would when he casually mentioned that he was thinking about hiring someone to reconfigure his office design. Melbourne is a market where things change really quickly, I mean we didn’t get the reputation of being the trendy city for nothing, and particularly in dad’s industry you need to keep on your toes. So the idea of him doing some work to keep the place looking fresh and inviting really wasn’t that much a stretch. It made sense. I didn’t think any more of it.

However, over the next couple of weeks, he started to talk more and more about all the changes he was going to make. I’d wake up in the middle of the night (I’m talking like 3am here) and his study light would be on. We started to find office building plans littered all over the place with things marked in frantic red pen. Sometimes you’d even find them scrunched up in weird places. When he talked about the re-design, he started to babble on about how Melbourne office fitouts were some kind of conspiracy and only his design company knew what was what.

Part of me thinks I might be overreacting to this. I mean, it’s perfectly natural for people to become inspired and passionate about random things. But I don’t know, this seems a little extreme and I’m getting worried.