chinese rock

Anil Dash's blog is always insightful, I should visit it more often. I was struck by the reference to design in cooking. We're going to have a push on design at work as a way of stimulating some 'value-adding' (sorry, there must be a non-bureaucratic term for it, but...) in other product and service industries. BRW had an article on design last week, someone was quoted as saying the next wave of prosperity will come from right brained people. You can choose to disagree and call it a fad if you wish, but it should at least spark some reflection.

Recently we've had the Richard Florida phenomenon which induced all sorts of Councils and other organisations to start claiming that their communities were more tolerant or creative or whatever. And that as a result all sorts of marvellous, economically desirable things would transpire. Given that some of these claims came from regional areas famed for demonstrating behaviours that were precisely the opposite, it's all a bit much to get excited about.

That said, ongoing reliance on raw materials exports seems to me to just economic suicide. Similarly, and this will damn me as a troglodyte, I think we need to put much more effort into maintaining manufacturing capability in the country. It's the old self-defence argument or whatever you want to call it and I'm perfectly aware of the arguments against. I just think we need to retain a substantial ability to actually make things. Financial services, hedge funds, clever financing mechanisms that enable things to happen when there actually isn't the money to pay for it are all well and good. If the crunch comes, they'll be worthless, but the ability to make a functional cart might be like gold.

This is terrible stuff, that's all of that for now...

Back to Anil. And I also liked the story on 'pixels are the new pies' - how screen design is influencing more traditional ways of imparting information. Good stuff.

On another tangent entirely, Mrs VVB has not been well and so I was thrown onto my own resources to make me some vittles tonight. And I couldn't be bothered, so I trotted down to the local Chinese for some chicken chow mein.

This dish bears as much resemblance to good Chinese food as Corn Flakes but when I was little, a trip to the Mee Lee Wah, the then only Chinese in town, was real treat. A bit later when the old man and I would be collecting new cars from the factory in Sydney, or undertaking some other road trip, a meal at the Chinese in some country town was a must.

And I still love it, it still tastes the same, if you could term chicken chow mein a comfort food then that's what it is to me. It brings back the memories and the feelings of those childhood days, which is something I think many of us yearn for more than we care to admit.

P2B=you've seen it.

The next day....update....

"The scale of the problem is absolutely massive because there's very little manufacturing done in Australia these days.
"There's very little engineering or technical support into the process at all within Australia."

What I said... you give away the ability to do things, you bear the 'unintended' consequences. Surely the fanatics of pure comparative advantage also heard the one about the number of baskets that one should prefeably put one's eggs into?