It is customary around this time to make New Year resolutions, so that we can break them at leisure in the next 12 months. The more popular ones include, not in any order, read up the weekly magazines, clear the desk before going to bed, reply to all e-mails within one working day, do not…
It is Christmas again. For me, this is the first Christmas I don’t get invited to office parties or get involved in organizing one. This is hardly surprising, for I no longer operate in any office as such. You may think then that I would have plenty of time organizing parties and writing Christmas cards….
I left off last time when we were leaving Los Angeles, which was more than a month ago, with hopes that my laptop would work more diligently in Toronto. It did in a way, but not much more. I was able to upload an issue of Kingspark News on the Website, but for reasons I…
You may have come across Shrek while watching cartoons on TV or DVD with your children or childlike friends, but I had never heard of Shrek or any of the adorable characters created with him in the scripts, not until I met him in Universal Studios Hollywood this week, that is. This was one of…
It was four years ago when Typhoon York struck. I spent the unexpected holiday trying to get on top my Rotary work and among other things wrote a letter. Since then, I always feel the urge to write when a typhoon strikes. We had a few already this summer, but they were nothing compared with…
Francis must have been sufficiently troubled if not upset that I had apparently not written anything for two months publicly, either in this series or through Kingspark News, to have sent me two emails some ten days ago, demanding a coffee session. We did sit down for coffee at the Café in Chater House, but…
John Naisbitt is probably amongst the first pioneers if not the first in social forecasting and trend analyses. He published his Megatrends nearly 20 years ago. Much of what he said therein had become facts while the rest can hardly be disputed. Little wonder why he has been a much sought after speaker at international…
It was an eventful week for me, to put it mildly. I began my pre-retirement leave on Monday, the day I reached the official retirement age as defined in the terms of appointment at the time I joined the Hong Kong Government, nearly 33 years ago. The week before, I was in between lunches, dinners…
If you were there – the day before Rotary began – you would be at least 98 now. Most of us would be a small kid in a previous reincarnation, doing some good deeds one hopes. That was what John Thorne alluded to this morning when he spoke to participants at the District Team Training…
It was some ten weeks since I last wrote to you in this series. I thank the friends and readers who took the trouble of asking me what had been happening, what I had been doing or why I had seemingly stopped writing. Well, I did not write for the sake of writing. I thought…
