Posts Tagged ‘relationships’

On cancer and chemotherapy

// August 12th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Me, My life

I try to keep my personal writing separate from my work, but sometimes when I’ve written something I’m proud of I’ll link to it from here, since writing is writing. This piece got a lot of response on Twitter and Facebook when it appeared on Bigyahu.com earlier today. Hope you get something from it too.

My wife feels like cancer has taken her body hostage

She’s got two more weekly chemotherapy treatments to go, but that doesn’t make it any easier when she feels as crappy as she does today. She says it was easier, sort of, when she was sicker, because back then she was able to sleep through some of the day. Now she’s not sick enough to sleep that much, she’s left with no energy to do the things that might take her mind off how bad she feels.

She says for her, it’s been like a hostage crisis. The cancer has taken her body hostage, and her body is no longer something she can take for granted, something that is just part of who she is. (Read more…)

Bigyahu.com: on chemotherapy

Giving, getting, and the Three Types of People

// November 3rd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Industry, Startup

Photo by Nite Scape

Whether it’s business or charity, the money almost never comes from where you expected — have you noticed?

Last weekend I took part in the Sydney to The Gong bike ride, a 90km social fund-raising event put on by the MS Society. Participating with 14,000 other cyclists, volunteers and support crews is inspirational. I try to raise some donations from friends and business contacts too.

I’ve been doing a lot of fund-raising lately; for Oxfam, another MS Society event, the Juvenile Diabetes Assocation, GetUp, the Smith Family, and for the Serkong School in the Himalayas. I’ve noticed that my ‘regular’ donors have started drying up as they received repeated requests for just a few dollars more. Fair enough, that’s expected.

But what’s unexpected is who donates. Every time, there have been high-net-worth friends who have the cash but don’t donate, and friends and colleagues of mine who I know are doing it tough, yet they donate generously and often. In between, there’s some noise in the data that ruffles the line on the graph — people I happen to catch on the right day, people who know someone affected by multiple sclerosis when I happen to be raising money for the MS Society. But it’s not hard to remove the noise and see that there’s only three types of people in this world:

  1. People who give more than they take;
  2. People who take more than they give; and
  3. People who believe there are only n types of people in this world ;-)

Whether it’s raising funds for a charity, finding time to help refine the idea for a new business, or even the number of days outstanding on your accounts receivable, it’s always the same pattern.

Some believe the winner is the one who dies with the most toys, and every dollar you give away will take twice as much effort to earn back. Bills should never be paid until the last minute. Do unto others before they do unto you. (more…)

This is not about me.

// January 30th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Media, Social Media

A new post from Nic Hodges helped coalesce some of my recent thinking about social messaging and social networks. Nic talks about how two-way, conversational media is now becoming as involving and entertaining as, say, ‘60 Minutes‘. And a lot more entertaining than ‘Girls of the Playboy Mansion.’ No, really.

Why is this so? How can smileys out-engage boobies?
The simple answer is that rediscovering that real people’s real lives can be entertaining, informative and engaging too.

But the complex-erer answer that I don’t yet have any evidence beyond a strong gut feel is that documenting the events in your life – and how that changes you – is an activity that doesn’t only gain you an audience, it also helps you define and refine who you have been, are currently, and are becoming.

Defining who you were/are/will be is as compelling as it gets.


Girls of the Playboy Mansion: come on, seriously, you can’t tell me this is entertainment…

Your identity isn’t just who you are now. It’s a vector, or a series of curves perhaps. It starts in the past, charting your passage through the events and ideas you’ve experienced and your reaction to those events and ideas.

That vector passes through the present, and that’s what we see of someone and usually think of identity. But the present is only the thinnest possible cross-section of your identity and in isolation gives only the slightest suggestion of who you will become as you continue on into the future.

I think social messaging and social networking is so fundamentally engaging because it gives us an opportunity to capture key moments of our identity as we move forward in time, leaving a documented history behind us, interwoven with the events, ideas, and people we’ve been introduced to along the way, and leaving evidence of how we’ve been influenced by them.

My prediction: browsing real people’s lives and documenting our own for others to browse will be the new entertainment hit for the 2020s. Partly because network television quality can sink no lower, partly because social messaging and social networking is just plain fun.

But mostly because, way down deep inside, we’re learning about ourselves. 
And nobody’s more interesting than me. Or you. Unless you happen to be me.

Early morning, Lavender Bay

// June 6th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Uncategorized


Morning Walk Wooden Boat
Originally uploaded by oliverw.

Time out: let’s take a moment to reflect.

Lavender Bay is my favourite bay in Sydney harbour, and the walk along the foreshore from the bridge to Berry Island and beyond is all beautiful. The whole way I’m thinking, “how the hell can this be free? in what other country in the world would you be able to do this, for free?”

In the Web 1.0 days I used to take our golden retriever, Jemby, along to work at Yahoo! up the hill in North Sydney. I’d take her for a walk at lunchtimes down along the foreshore.

Any time there’s water nearby, she starts pulling like a team of oxen, and this one fine winter afternoon I decided to let her climb down the timber steps along the foreshore (just out of bottom of frame of this pic) and go for a quick swim. Problem was, the steps ended just above the water, she’s an old dog, and she couldn’t get back up again.

So when I climbed down on the timber steps and began hauling her out, the rotten timber of the steps collapsed, and the dog and I went into the harbour. I managed to grab the remaining stair as I went down and so was able to keep the top half of my body out of the water, but needless to say, by the time I got me and the dog back up on dry land we were both pretty wet and seaweedy.

One of the weirdest experiences in six years at Yahoo! (wow, that’s saying something!) was trudging back to work, sitting down at my desk, me and the dog both still dripping seawater. To their credit, Yahoo! didn’t have a problem with me still bringing Jemby to work, but they did ask that I try to keep us both from swimming in the harbour again.

Believe it or not, it isn’t the only time I went in the sea fully clothed during a Yahoo! working day. But that’s a whole other story…

(Thanks Oliver for the inspiration!)

Early morning, Lavender Bay

// June 6th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Uncategorized


Morning Walk Wooden Boat
Originally uploaded by oliverw.

Time out: let’s take a moment to reflect.

Lavender Bay is my favourite bay in Sydney harbour, and the walk along the foreshore from the bridge to Berry Island and beyond is all beautiful. The whole way I’m thinking, “how the hell can this be free? in what other country in the world would you be able to do this, for free?”

In the Web 1.0 days I used to take our golden retriever, Jemby, along to work at Yahoo! up the hill in North Sydney. I’d take her for a walk at lunchtimes down along the foreshore.

Any time there’s water nearby, she starts pulling like a team of oxen, and this one fine winter afternoon I decided to let her climb down the timber steps along the foreshore (just out of bottom of frame of this pic) and go for a quick swim. Problem was, the steps ended just above the water, she’s an old dog, and she couldn’t get back up again.

So when I climbed down on the timber steps and began hauling her out, the rotten timber of the steps collapsed, and the dog and I went into the harbour. I managed to grab the remaining stair as I went down and so was able to keep the top half of my body out of the water, but needless to say, by the time I got me and the dog back up on dry land we were both pretty wet and seaweedy.

One of the weirdest experiences in six years at Yahoo! (wow, that’s saying something!) was trudging back to work, sitting down at my desk, me and the dog both still dripping seawater. To their credit, Yahoo! didn’t have a problem with me still bringing Jemby to work, but they did ask that I try to keep us both from swimming in the harbour again.

Believe it or not, it isn’t the only time I went in the sea fully clothed during a Yahoo! working day. But that’s a whole other story…

(Thanks Oliver for the inspiration!)

Another two entries in pseudodictionary

// December 20th, 2006 // 0 Comments // Uncategorized


My geek biorhythms must be at their peak – this week pseudodictionary.com accepted two of my submissions: “ex-cel” and wifeframe.

Don’t spend too much time wondering why both words refer to failed relationships – I was inspired by an IM conversation with a friend having relationship troubles.

Honest!

Another two entries in pseudodictionary

// December 20th, 2006 // 0 Comments // Uncategorized


My geek biorhythms must be at their peak – this week pseudodictionary.com accepted two of my submissions: “ex-cel” and wifeframe.

Don’t spend too much time wondering why both words refer to failed relationships – I was inspired by an IM conversation with a friend having relationship troubles.

Honest!