Humble Opinions

Acknowledgment: Picture by Stefan Brandlehner on Flickr i.e. those are Stefan's feet, not mine. But they could have been. I've been wanting to fly Rainbow for a while now. In fact I and two of my flying buddies, Tashi and Reid, had arranged to go there several weeks ago, but the weather forecast was not encouraging. Now that I'm heading off to live in Sydney the project had taken on some urgency. So I headed up on Boxing day morning and returned last night. Despite the season, there was room for a one-man tent at the camping and caravan ground. Rainbow Beach is a little over three hours drive North of Brisbane. It's the staging post for 4WD enthusiasts and beach-fishing types to cross by ferry to Frazer Island or to drive along the beach at the edge the famous Cooloola National Park The "shorter" route, calculated by whereis.com or your GPS navigator, has you driving for nearly 100Km along corrugated dirt roads to Rainbow. Maybe this is a practical ...

I'm progressively getting better at paragliding. I'm still pumped after an excellent flight this afternoon at Beechmont, inland from the Gold Coast. Ridge-soaring and some thermals that kept me up for more than 40 minutes! Next weekend we'll be up again. These pics taken by my daughter, Grace. That's me with the orange wing with "silver" trim. Tashi Sherpa has the custom purple wing.

My grandson, Charles Francis Fleming, was born last week. Mother, Lauren, is tired & sore but very happy. Charles is healthy. Father, Mitchell, is beside himself. And I am officially old. [Wt: 8 lb (3.6Kg) All fingers and toes. Feeding well.]

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...