I’ve realised I need to finally make a stand on this: No I will not fix your computer. I especially won’t fix it over the phone. This to me is the most frustrating thing in the universe, and it is not good for me, or good for our friendship. There are worse things I could say, but if you really do want to ask me a question or fix your computer, I will do it for $200 an hour and that’s only if I know you. If you really want a computer that just works get a mac, SERIOUSLY!

I was actually pretty close to burning out this year, and dropping everything and shouting at someone very loud. It was only that I was pretty drastic and was pretty decisive about stopping a lot of the things that were in my weekly schedule in order to spend time with friends and relax that I didn’t. Finally as things got really bad I got back to spending time with God, and taking Fridays off.

The bible says to remember the sabbath and keep it holy, but so many Christians, especially those in ministry rush about making themselves so busy, there excuse being that there is all this good work to do, with maybe even people’s very souls at stake. But this in my opinion is a wrong view of Christian faith. What I see is that we’re supposed to be bringing the gospel, bring rescue to a broken world, and we can’t do that at the expense of causing brokenness in our own lives, or being so busy we don’t spend time time with God, making ourselves poor, sick or exhausted. Yes we should self sacrificial, but maybe dying to ourselves means we say everything doesn’t depend on me.

I also recently watched Rob Bell’s latest Nooma, Shells. In it he talks about how busy we make ourselves, saying yes to everything and everybody. He finally makes the point that we need to learn to say no to things, not because they’re not good things, but because we’ve said yes to the one or few best things that we are meant to do.

Why then does someone paying me make a difference? Its not because I want to get rich, its not because money drives me, it’s that if you do pay me, it means I can really work less at everything else I do just to support myself so I can do the things I feel I’m really supposed to do.

Sorry that was written out of some frustration, but to end on a more light hearted note, I’m glad I don’t work here:

Words that You didn’t say were haunting these pages
Faces You didn’t make were all I was seeing
The way that they painted You wasn’t a picture
of one in control - and I don’t think they know who you are

Mainstay

In a small private press conference in Fo Tan, HK, political heavyweights James Low, Lillian Li and James Lewis added their name to the growing list of Obama endorsements.

There were some fears that such a close political alignment could cause division in the Sunday Lunch Bunch special interest group, but the trio assured the public that there would be no conflict of interest and that Lewis and Low would not be changing their stance on Politico.

And whatever you think of that you have to watch this:

So, for those of you that know me know I think, ALOT, and in the process I come up with lots of ideas. I’m also the type of person that tries to do EVERYTHING and too much. After listening to my Pastor’s (excellent) latest sermon on time, I’ve decided I need to be free of feeling like I have to do so much, and just concentrate on the most important things, if I’m really going to be successful in life.

So here I’m listing a load of the hair-brained business ideas I’ve had. They are now all public, so anybody can feel free to do them if they really think they’re good, and feel free to give a little of the profits if they make a lot

Finance

Control Systems For Market Making
During by time at DB I was involved in a lot of derivatives pricing and risk analysis. One of the ideas I had related to market making. In market making systems use programming logic to determine what price / spread / volume to apply to market making a security. It might be a good idea to model these as a control/feedback system (or even fuzzy logic) as applied in engineering to come up with stable yet fast acting pricing systems.

Fuzzy Option Pricing
There are a few papers published about this, but basically the idea is you model an option’s behaviour using a fuzzy logic system that is intuitive to people who know how options should perform given certain conditions. It might be faster than analytical methods, but maybe less accurate.

Fuzzy Vol Models
Again related to option pricing. While you might still calculate the price of an option using conventional methods, it might be a good way to construct a vol service using a fuzzy logic system. This would allow the construction of a smooth service, with no discontinuities using logic steps rather than adjusting parameters for skew / long vol / etc.

China

Snowboarding
There must be snow in China, and its cheap to construct and employee in China. Would stand to reason that opening a ski resort for snowboarding and skiing might be really good way to attract tourists and make money, especially since within Asia, Korea and Japan are the main places and are both pretty expensive.

Tailored Jeans
There are places in Europe / America that will do tailored jeans for you, any style, custom fit, warn, new, etc. Thought Hong Kong / China would be a great place to do this too, due to the cheap labour and easy custom production that is available in China. Similar to the way HK is a prime destination for tailored suits and shirts at great prices.

TV Aggregator
There’s rise of having a ridiculous number of TV channels in Asia these days. In the US there are sites like Titan TV and Tv Tv in Europe which aggregate TV schedules from all the different networks so you can find out in one place what’s on. They also offer services so that DVRs like Elegato can query and programmatically record all of your favourite series like a Tivo.

So those of you that know me, will know I say this a lot. But I just listened to this talk and it blew my mind. Never understood anything from relveation as clearly as the exposition on the part of revelation to the Ephisans. Its by Rob Bell (haha suprise suprise) speaking at Willow Creek. An awesome combination.

You can get the whole video here.

Or play it embedded here, but its much smaller.

Enjoy.

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie
The lie of authority
Who’s buildings grope the sky
No one exists alone
Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or police
We must love one another or die,
We must love one another or die

WH Auden

I really bad a a few things, accepting love and complements, and saying thank you is another.

But in an attempt to do all of them I’m writing this post and hopefully honouring everything and everyone did and said in the best way I can; To simply say its a sign of what Jesus can do to someone, when they let him.

So thanks for making this the best birthday.

Not all of you have heard my whole story, hopefully one day we’ll talk about it, but I would not have the quality and quantity of friends like all of you, if he hasn’t rescued me from my addictions and self-centeredness and if I have touched any of you in anyway, you owe that too him too.

I’m really happy all of you are in my life. Sorry I can’t tag more of you, facebook only lets me do 30.

Some of you may no that I’ve been trying to slow down a bit recently. I realised that I had become so task focused not people and God focused, was lacking intimacy with people, and it was leading to generally not a very healthy life.

I decided I was going to be drastic, I was not going to use my computer for a week, then I chickened out and decided that was impossible given things at the moment. So I decided no computer before mid day. My habit had been to get up immediately and check my mail, and then start work, and the realise some time around 3pm I hadn’t eaten breakfast.

So the first day came, woke up at as usual sometime just past 7 and I read my bible for 5 minutes, and prayed a little. Looked at my watch, still 4 and a half hours to go, so back to the bible, half an hour of prayer, sitting in a hammock and learning the harmonic minor on guitar, all things I’ve been trying to do for the last 7 years, all because I took a break and slowed down. A week of this, revelations that someone really did design my mobile phone and how there must be a God and a long chilled out argument discussion with Lewis, Lil and Sherin about determinism and in-determinism and I was starting to feel the zest for life I’d been lacking over the past few months. It all culminated in watching Rob Bell’s everything is spiritual on Friday night with Shaun and Janakan, by the end we were just silent, and peaceful, awesome. Yet still more to do, thinking of taking a holiday sometime, maybe somewhere like this.

All this is really just backdrop as to why I was out walking. In trying to keep with taking more time over things, life being a journey, not a destination, I decided to walk down to the shop and by some fruit, but mainly just for the walk. As I walked I noticed I was stepping on everyone of the dried up looking leaves. I reckon I suffer from mild OCD, so I had to step on everyone, but in general we can’t help it can we? The sound its just so…satisfying. 300,000 people on the facebook group can testify to this. Then it dawned on me, there must be a God. There was no other possible explanation.

Now I’m not for second proposing this as a serious argument, but revelation can be found it the strangest of places, and for me it works. I mean why else would I and millions of other people do it? Could it be an instinct of our hunter ancestors, having evolved it as a habit that they would partake of when in a relaxed mood for clearing away debris around there regular hunting grounds, that would then not be present when hunting and thus lessening the likely hood of them making unwanted noise that might give away their location to their prey. I think not. There was much more that I thought as I walked back up the hill tossing my mango up in the air nonchalantly (if that’s even a word), but it escapes me now, I’m sure it would have been mind blowing, but for now thus endeth the lesson of the crunchy looking leaf.

Here are a few pointless sites on the internet:

http://www.isitaprilfools.com/

http://www.isitchristmas.com/

http://www.isitaleapyear.com/

http://www.istwitterdown.com/

As most of you know, I’ve wanted an iPhone since forever, but I’m waiting for it to be released “officially” for various reasons; the sdk, upgrades, and 3G.

Hong Kong is one of those places that you can quite easily get them unlocked, but even I was suprised are seeing a listed company giving them out as a promotional campaign: