We’ve all got out own - style, that is. Hair, personality, speech, thinking, clothes, car and ways of living.
What’s good for me is definitely not good for the gander - believe me. Whenever I try to slip into the shoes of my teenagers, I wipe out big-time. “Dad, you’ve got no style!” I hear. Wrong. […]

“You gotta experience the bad in order to appreciate the good, Dad” my daughter tells me. Smart kid.
A while back I went out of town for a few days and the chlorine levels in my pool dropped. The result was no chlorine, a nice warm summer, plenty of sunshine and . . . a […]

Money is like sex and air. It’s no big deal really, until we don’t have enough of it. I’ve spent years scratching around trying to pay the bills and get ahead financially. Sometimes I’m loaded and other times I’m as broke as! It seems like some people really know how to make good money and […]

People with power will use it. A shame those with power aren’t always nice benevolent model citizens, though. Power and money are real killers. It’s not that they are wrong in and of themselves, its just that these two brothers in arms seem to be able to represent the ultimate in evil on earth. […]

The game of politics has kept me entralled since I was 17 years old, when Robert Muldoon was presented as the miracle money-man - billed as the answer to New Zealand’s economic woes. Oh how cruel it was when his spin got unspun a year or so into his reign, and his marketing machine “let […]

While some people never seem to get off the starting blocks when it comes to this thinking thing, others of us have brains that seem to work in overdrive.
Mine generally works at around about 110% of its capacity during the working day, and seems to slow down just a little bit during sleeping hours. I […]

The problem with having a brain is that we have to use it. Don’t laugh - it can actually be a serious problem for some of us sometimes. No, really - not like that - I’m serious!
As a teenager, trying to work everything out, I got exhausted trying to figure it all out. Why this? […]

According to my calculations, loving truth is relatively uncommon, but everyone loves love. I mean how could we possibly find it within ourselves to reject that “lovely” warm fuzzy feeling we call love?
While there are different types of love. I love a good pork roast and snowboarding and being creative, but those types of love […]

There are a few things I love. Love is one of them and truth is another.
There’s something so beautiful, refreshing, and clean about ferreting out the truth and getting to the bottom of a situation. Whenever children tell a porkie, their demeanour changes. Their hands cover their mouths in embarrassment, and they try to keep […]

We select our insurance company based on both the premium, and the probability of getting paid. The last thing we want is a dodgy underwriter, so we usually do our homework (or pay a broker to do that for us). No insurance company is credible that doesn’t have a written contract, doesn’t explain the contract […]

Risk management is thinking through the question ahead of time, “What would happen if . . .?”
Coming from the computer business, for years I’ve recommend clients consider the three biggies with data security:

Computer failure
Fire and
Theft

They’d ask, “How often should I back up?” The answer was always, “As often as you cannot afford to lose the […]

When I lived in the Thames/Coromandel district, I built a boat and lived on it for a few seasons.
I bought the hull in an unfinished state, and was told when I got it that a fisherman in the West Coast designed it. It was a nice little bilge keeler - a sixteen-foot cabin boat that […]

When we dig deeper, we find that things are not always as they seem.
Wisdom is the art of seeing things from a bigger perspective than others. If the majority believes that the mass media have our best interests at heart and want to give us the truth, then wisdom requires us to test this. Asking […]