Humble Opinions

I came to Adventure and Party City with the intention of taking another bungy jump off a high bridge, but that hasn't happened yet. Two days were spent with colleagues from Griffith Uni taking a brief holiday after the conference - main activities: drinking, eating, drinking, bonding, slandering previous heads-of-department, current deans, pro-vice-chancellors and associated sociopaths, and drinking. Worth doing. Now I've converted an Introduction to Paragliding day into a full course! The Intro day was exhausting. And painful. The day involves learning how to make a safe takeoff, and a relatively safe landing. Takeoff involves racing downhill as fast as you can trying to imitate an angry goose - chest and head down, arms stretched out high behind your back holding on to the glider controls. The result usually is to pull the glider in front of you so that it pulls you over onto your face, or lower one hand/control just slightly so the wing moves suddenly to one side an...

The ANZMAC conference in Dunedin, New Zealand, was a lot better than expected. I arrived a couple of days earlier to attend the Doctoral Colloquium with one of my PhD students, Jannie Adamsen. Jannie found it all really helpful to meet with other Doctoral candidates, potential examiners and professors who may be able to offer advise. It was fun for me too. Good to see how other candidates tackle their problems and how other supervisors manage. Some students were doing trivial rubbish, some were trying to solve all ultimate questions at once, and some were doing stuff that could be really useful. And It was really gratifying to not hear a single mention of the "five chapters model" for a PhD - a rigid template approach that seems to me is designed for witless students, and supervisors with zero abstract thinking skills. The good people at CENGAGE (was Thomson Learning) had set up a big display featuring the new Marketing Research text book I've written with St...

Sri Lanka is a wonderful country! I'm here for only a week and my dear friend Amal KarunaRatna, with whom I started my PhD program with about 20 years ago, is my host. It's also a poor country. Crippled by a constant war between the Singhalese Sri Lankans and the Tamil Tigers in the North for the country, plus inept and corrupt government and inefficient bureaucracy, the country has only rudimentary basic infrastructure: roads, schools, and other services. Bureaucrats are so poorly paid that things get done only when they're bribed, or they're commanded to by their bosses, who have been bribed. Teachers and hospital employees are terribly poorly paid. Today our driver, Mohinda, was picked on by a tired and frustrated police officer and was fined 1000 Rupees (about $13), about two day's pay. To take care of the fine, we had to go to one place to get the forms to fill out, then another place to actually hand over the cash, and a third place to recover the dr...

I took a couple of days off to see Gallipoli, the site of the WWI fiasco that killed thousands of Australians and New Zealanders (and French and Canadians, and Britons) in a useless attempt to capture some territory held by Turkish forces so as to control the Bospherus Strait, linking he Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Many more Turks also were killed, so it's of great importance to them as well. More importantly, the Turkish defense was commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, the man who soon after lead the Young Turks movement, essentially a political rebellion against the old military guard, that created a united Turkey. Ataturk saw that long prosperity for Turkey lay with the progressive West rather than with the East. So the story of Gallipoli is something that all Turkish children learn about. Kemal Ataturk ; (Inscription on Gallipoli Memorial put up by Turkey in 1934, also on Ataturk Memorial at Tarakina Bay, Wellington.) "Those heroes who shed their...

From Braga, Portugal I probably didn't give Braga, Portugal, a fair chance. After all, the VirtualTtourist website lists the 800-year-old city as one of the beautiful cities in the world. It also says that in a very religiously conservative country the people of Braga are the most conservative, verging on fanatical. It certainly showed up in the city's total lack of any nightlife - I went searching for a cafe or bar where there would be people listening to music and talking. There simply aren't any. Maybe it's just that I was in Academic conference mode. The food served at the conference dinners was interesting though. The staple seems to be dried salted codfish, reconstituted in water or milk, served on beans, or inside a pastry, or on bread. And of course thinly sliced ham. That's it. Even then perhaps I'm not being fair. Salt cod (water), salt cod (milk), in pastry (three kinds), on bread, mixed into beans (three kinds), sliced ham, tomatoes, cucu...

Madrid and Barcelona were way too rushed. I spent too much time messing about making arrangements for trains and flights to and from places and too little time just enjoying the places themselves. Anyway, I did get to see some of the wonderful architecture of Gaudi in Barcelona: Park Guell, Casa Batllo, and the cathedral, La Sagrada Familia - still under construction. I got lost in Madrid trying to reach the Prada Museum via the back streets and instead found, in short order, the red-light district, some very up-market apartments, and the financial district where I stumbled into an art gallery just opening an exhibition of neo-realist photography spanning the fascist periods of Spain and Italy through to the late'50s. I should have slept on the train from Madrid to Barcelona but instead spent most of the night in the dining car with a Peruvian family man with a US green card who takes a class in Madrid every Friday for his accounting qualification, a Canadian IT specialist o...

From Last days in ... I succeeded in my first solo crossing of a Cairo street today, and I rode four times in a Cairo taxi in the last two days. So, having faced death, it's time to move on to another challenge. Off to Madrid where the Basque separatists have just announced that their "permanent ceasefire" has expired and they're all set to restart their campaigns. I'm in the cafeteria at Cairo airport. Like all airports, it's a monopolist's paradise - I've just paid the same for a bottle of water as I paid for two people to share a huge lunch earlier in the day. From Last days in ... My guide and friend, Mr Ibrahim, took me for a walk through some parts of old Cairo yesterday afternoon and today. Wonderful history of course, most of which went in one ear and out the other. Not that I was uninterested, but it's hard to keep track of which sultan built which grand mosque to honour which brother he had murdered in order to gain the sultanate ...