After reading the Creative Philanthropy chapter in Redefining Success and some careful thinking, I’ve decided on a creative way to give the book away! Here are the rules for a chance to receive a FREE copy of Redefining Success for yourself or one of your deserving friend!
1) Share a true story of a good deed that you’ve done during this holiday season in Alberta.
2) Please keep your story short, may be 100-200 words max. If possible, please post a link to a photo or very brief YouTube video, etc to help tell your story.
3) There is no age restriction, so if your young children want to submit their stories, feel free.
4) Please post your submission here in the comment section under this post. Make sure you leave your contact email (visible to me only to contact you if you win).
5) Contest starts today and closes Saturday Jan 12th, 2013. And the winning entry will be announced hopefully within a week after the end of the contest.
P.S. A good book give away lead to one happy winner. I am hoping the shared good deed stories here will inspire us all to do more good!
Over the last four years since June 2008, I’ve the pleasure to interview Brett Wilson(businessman & philanthropist, “Dragon with a heart”) many (see my 2008 pre-Dragons’ Den interview videos)andmany times. I also slowly get to know Brett from industry events (we’ve met at Banff World Media Festival quite a few times (see 2009 interview)) and from his annual charity garden parties (thx Brett for inviting me & my better half). I can honestly say the “up close & in person” Brett is pretty much the same nice & straight talking no non-sense guy that many viewers of CBC’s award-winning Dragons’ Den have come to know.
Earlier this afternoon, I had the pleasure to conduct an insightful, open and frank video interview with Brett to talk about his Globe & Mail best-selling book “Redefining Success: Still making mistakes“! I hope you enjoy my interview with Brett as much as I in conducting it. Please share this article & video. And comment too.
note: this article is cross-posted by me at examiner.com
Forty-two months! Thats how long I’ve been eagerly awaiting for Carol Loomis‘ new book ”Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012: A Fortune Magazine Book” (368 pages, on sale Nov 26th and online amazon.com & indigo.ca). Carol is Fortune magazine senior editor-at-large and a long time (40+ years) close friend of Warren Buffett! I am thrilled to see Carol’s book published and in my hands as it feels like having an insightful person who knows Warren really well to guide me through some important and insightful articles. It will take me some time to read & review the book, please stay tune for my detailed review. Until then, my first impression of the book is it looks awesome!
Long time readers of Warren‘s news and insights will be familiar with some of key articles in this collection and also see many (for me) new articles that are important but less well known. Carol has added many insightful commentaries before the articles to give us context and share with us her views. For example, the article “The Inside Story of Warren Buffet” (April 11, 1988) is Fortune’s first profile of Warren and Carol’s preamble explains what lead her to finally wrote the first profile about Warren after knowing him for 20+ years at that point! And then the afterword for articles like “Buffett Hits $200 million Downdraft” (Nov 17, 1994) reminds readers that Warren actually made money on the USAir investment (which many people may have an impression of it being a money losing investment).
P.S. Now, let me explain my wait of almost forty-two months in this postscript. You see, in April 2009, shareholders of Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway NOT physically presented at the annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha were given opportunities to ask Warren & Charlie remotely in advance via email for the first time. And I jumped at the chance by emailing my question to Carol! Along with my question, I told Carol that,
“I am a big fan of your Fortune articles about Warren and BRK. (I have taken the time to look up some of your older articles and really enjoy reading them.)”
In Carol’s email reply was where I first read of the mention of a possible book (the book that I am finally holding in my hands)! So, yes, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the book since Apr 2009, and that is about forty-two months! :)
P.P.S. Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed there is a stack of five books in the above picture. Can you guess the titles of the Warren related books in the stack? Find out how many you guess correctly by clicking here to see this picture.
To many readers, Sir Salman Rushdie is most well-known, unfortunately, for his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), which lead to death threats made against him, including a fatwā issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in February 1989. To some film-loving Calgarians, Rushdie will also be known for his second novel, Midnight’s Children, the 1981 Booker Prize winning novel which was made into a movie that was premiered in Calgary International Film Festival last week.
So who is Joseph Anton? Rushdie answered, “Strangely enough, it is me. Because during those years, the police who were protecting me [from the fatwā] at these undisclosed locations needed to have a pseudo name to call me by so that they didn’t accidentally use my real name when they were at the local corner store. So they asked me to invent one. So I invented a name based on two of my favourite writers. Joseph Conrad. And Anton from Anton Chekhov. Put them together and that name lasted for ten years. Truthfully, I always disliked that name.” Rushdie used that name as his memoir’s title because he wants to give readers a sense of how strange it was during those ten years.
Rushdie initially wrote the book in the first person “in the ordinary” way. He didn’t like it. He felt it “too much self-regard, too narcissistic“. When he finally wrote it in the third person, he felt he could have “a little more distance” from himself. Rushdie said, “Also it was a long time ago, the story began in 1989, twenty-three years ago.” He felt there is enough of a difference between him now, and him then. So using the third person allows him to express the idea that the person he is now is different from the person he was then.
Rushdie’s new book is out, check it out from your bookstore or library, “Joseph Anton: A Memoir“.
P.S. It was an honour for me to hangout with Sir Salman. Many thanks to the wonderful Maria Quiban and the Fox LA crew for the great hangout.
Note: This article is cross-posted by me at examiner.com
I have an interesting discussion with my friend DeAno. The main discussion point is this:
Given an upcoming movie, will you read the source material before or after you watch the movie?
Here are my comments:
- Don’t know why I do it but I read a ton of spoilers from the Wikipedia entries for the books some months ago. Fortunately I’ve forgotten most of the details now. :)
P.S. I think it can still be fun even if you know what may come from the books. Many people who watch the Harry Potter films are avid readers of the books and I don’t think their fun was spoiled much.
- Totally see your points in not wanting to know what’s coming next. Very different personal preferences I guess. And Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power Of Introverts has helped me understand why this difference in personal preferences.
I’ve previously shared my views re child soldiers in my #Kony2012 post which I stated the focus should be less on the hunt for one bad man but instead addressing the much deeper and meaningful challenge of the demobilization and rehabilitation of child soldiers.
I’ve both books on my desk and will be spending more time on “They Fight Like Soldiers” to start.
Question 2) Do you find the violence in The Hunger Games so stylized that you forget that these are children being killed?
When I watched The Hunger Games yesterday, there were two young teens, probably less than 13, 14 years old, plus their mom sitting besides me. If I were a better reporter, I would have asked them after the film how they felt about it. During the show, the kids were already asking the mom questions and I would be interested to know if the mom explain or talk much afterwards and at at dinner time. I found this timely clip about the movie posted by Emory University.
Now, in a calculated stark contrast, David Cronenberg‘s A History of Violence is a film that has been designed to put violence front and center, strip away any stylization or pretence, and force us to face our guilt when “enjoying” the violence. Rolling Stone’s Travers put it this way,
“Cronenberg knows violence is wired into our DNA. His film showed how we secretly crave what we publicly condemn.“
Lets not forget, The Hunger Games depicts a reality TV show where children aged 12-18 have been fighting to death for 74 years in a row! It just seems to me the movie lets the audience (yes “us”, as it you and me) get away free without any guilt. I agree with what EW writer Darren Franich wrote in his “‘The Hunger Games’: What the movie missed about the book“
“But there is one important aspect of the original novel [by Suzanne Collins] that is almost entirely absent from the movie: The darkly funny way in which Collins directly accuses the audience. As in, us. Weirdly, by turning the book into such a fan-baiting crowdpleaser, the movie version of Hunger Games seems to oddly miss the point of its own source material.”
Note re question 1: I haven’t forgotten the shameful ways the US and Canadian governments have acted in the handling of one particular case of child soldier prosecution as I wrote in my #Kony2012 post.
The following is my review of the book, video interview clips, plus some additional bonus materials about characters trimmed from the book.
*** Book Review ***
I love biographies in general and reading Hannibal and Me to me was like reading the crucial slices of lives of many interesting people’s stories of “successes“, “failures“, and sometimes “impostors” (successes that actually lead to failures, or failures that become foundation of future successes) all in one book woven into many cohesive lessons.
Don’t let words like “history“, “military strategist“, “Hannibal” in the title deter you from reading the book. I had to study history for six years and pretty much hated every minute of it. Andreas’ Hannibal and Me managed to bring all these characters to life to teach me, Kempton, teach us, readers of the book, important life-changing lessons. I originally thought I would have to skip a few pages so I can get to the interesting/fascinating modern real life stories sooner. To my pleasant surprise, I ended up reading every page over a few days. I find the lives, decisions and actions of the charters in the book absolutely fascinating and illuminating.
Ultimately, each reader will learn different lessons from the book depending on our own life experiences and life stages. Hannibal and Me is one of the best books I have read for years. To me, the book crystallized some of the life decisions I have made over the last few years and will be making in the future. I know I will be re-reading Hannibal and Me again and again over time as I grow older and gain more experiences. I hope you will enjoy the book as much as I did.
I highly recommend “Hannibal and Me“ and will write a book review later. For now, have a watch of my interview with Andreas. I hope to give you a sense of why I love the book so much.
I am very disappointed with my Amazon Kindle apps for Mac, Android, iPad and I am giving them a big #fail !!!
Destroyed Highlights & Notes
After the recent Amazon Kindle app update, all my pages and pages of highlights and notes are lost! And after some googling, this problem has been around for months! I am one of those readers that add lots of markups and notes to books I read so that I can go back to interesting passages months and years later. To me, a blank new book is pretty much pointless because I can always get a new unmarked book (or an unmarked ebook) from the book store!
Poorly designed and unreasonably slow UI
The User Interfaces of Amazon Kindle apps for Mac, Android, iPad have been poorly designed and thought out. When you select something on the top 1/3 of a page to add notes/highlight, the menu blocks the next few lines. And then to make matter worst, a simple highlight can take not 2, not 3, not 4 seconds to complete! It has taken 21, yes, TWENTY-ONE beeping seconds to highlight a few line of text! What the beep is going on with the Amazon Kindle app when there is nothing running on my Mac (with nothing else running, right after a restart)?
I haven’t got around to complain to Amazon to try to get the lost notes back (I have synced to the Amazon cloud) but I am not optimistic. Until and unless Amazon fix its bugs, admit to these problems and improve its apps, I don’t think I would buy another e-book from Amazon.
I am surprised to see Kindle out for so long when these apps with simple and minimum functions being so buggy and unreliable! Feel free to share your Kindle app experiences.
Update: After a day of missing highlights & notes, they seem to be back on the ebook on the Mac Kindle app now. But the highlights and notes are still missing on the Kindle Android app and the sync didn’t sync the notes!
Update 2: Some notes are back on both Mac and Android apps. Unforunately, some notes in some chapters are missing! Beep!
“Here’s to the crazy ones”,
a timeless Apple Computer advertisement that showcases
the core DNA of ideas Revolutionaries. We aspire to Think Different
This chapter now completes my knowledge of the back story re the creation of the Think Different campaign. For this alone is probably worth the price of the book for me as I’ve spent many hours (without success) to find out the info in this chapter.
To me, this excerpt in the Think Different chapter is very telling in Jobs’ thinking (emphasis added),
Jobs couldn’t decide whether to use the version with his voice or to stick with Dreyfuss. [...] When morning came, Jobs called and told them to use the Dreyfuss version. “If we use my voice, when people find out they will say it’s about me,” he told Clow. “It’s not. It’s about Apple.”
I admire Steve Jobs and have bought many Apple products over the years but I am not an Apple “fan boy”as I removed Apple from my list of admired companies last year.
But I still eagerly picked up a copy of Steve Jobs (biography) yesterday so that I can learn from it. I think Steve Jobs is an important book that it should be made required reading for all serious and self-respecting competitors of Apple. There are many good insights that entrepreneurs and business executives can learn from Apple and Jobs. It will be foolish to think we can replicate and copy Jobs but it will be stupid to not to try to understand, to learn, and may be to be inspired.
‘She [Laurene Powell, Steve Jobs' wife] is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. ‘There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.”‘ Read the rest of this entry »
“It takes a few days to get my head around how much I like a film, if I really like it a lot, and longer to start to figure out why.” - William Gibson in this tweet
“When you love a film, as when you love a person, why isn’t necessarily that meaningful.” – [via tweet]
“The why’s of disliking something are easier to find, and make for quicker, juicier copy.” - [via tweet]
“Michael Mann’s theory: We only begin to really experience the film as we leave the theatre, in memory. And *backward*. I agree.” – [via tweet]
”Unwanted Guest“ is great story and wonderfully designed app by the creative people at Moving Tales. The story about “a poor old man, down on his luck and living in a tumbledown house, is visited by an unwelcome house guest“ was very engaging that I ended up finishing the app/book in one reading! The animations are beautifully imagined, stunningly designed and rendered. The English, French, and Spanish voice-over all sounded very engaging and worked great with the story. I can imagine some parents using the foreign languages option to teach their children one or more of the languages. I highly recommend you check out ”Unwanted Guest“.
“Poon’s concise, well-argued analysis is one of the few available English-language sources on Hong Kong’s predicament. While Hong Kong’s once-vigorous and argumentative press has lost its teeth following the takeover, new outlets such as blogs have assumed huge importance as a barricade for free expression and democratic principles. With Shanghai rapidly eclipsing Hong Kong as the banking and finance powerhouse for China’s breakneck growth, there’s a chance that competition may in fact re-emerge and make for the kind of “popular” entrepreneurship long absent in Hong Kong.“
The following are video clips of my Skype video interview with Joe Weber, CEO and co-founder of FlyingWord, to talk about their Treasure Island iPad app based on the classic Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. (beautifully narrated for about 7 hours)
The following is a review of the pre-release version of FlyingWord Treasure Island iPad app. And I will post my video interview with Joe Weber, CEO and co-founder of FlyingWord, later.
- Lively and very engaging narration of the original full-length classic Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. (beautifully narrated for about 7 hours)
- Excellent music and sound effects at the right places.
- Nicely rendered 2D illustrations into “3D projections”, camera angle controllable by readers. [Note: the 3D here is not real Avatar 3D, but closer to what Ken Burns does with his "layers" of photos in a scene.]
- Some of the pages have objects for readers to play with. For sure to check out the cannon. (These objects have “physics engines” behind them to allow users to move them around.)
Cons
- The initial version of the app has a few bugs that I’ve reported to FlyingWord.
-The app has problems waking up from “sleep” or “auto-lock” modes. Narration fails to restart gracefully. In a few instances, waking up after sleep actually tripped the narration and it got stuck in repeating a word/sound.
- If the reader flip to a page where part of the text in the paragraph is in the previous page, the narration will read from the text in the previous page. This result can be very confusing for the readers as they may not know this is the “expected behaviour”. To me, readers may expect when flipping to a new page, the narration will match the text she/he reads on the page.
- Many of the objects are a bit too small and difficult to control.
+ e.g. in the breakfast scene (bottle is ok, but the egg, plate, and sword are difficult to manipulate)
+ in the scene with the apple barrel, the barrel can be easily moved but the apples are not controllable even though the readers will likely spend time to try to move it. It may be more enjoyable if the apples are made bigger and controllable by readers like the barrel.
- This one is technical. Currently, the space outside of the edges of the 2D to 3D projections are blank (set to black space). I think it will look nicer and gives a more immersive experience if the whole background are filled and readers won’t see black space around the edges of the original 2D frames.
Comments:
As discussed in the Pros section, the narration is lively and very engaging and I really love it. At the same time, the app may have been a bit ambitious in using the full-length original Treasure Island in its launch version. The good news is that an abridged free update will be released in a few weeks after the initial launch. To me, the abridged version with shorter audio (~1.5 hour long) and text will be a nicer fit for kids who will appreciate the physics engines games and 2D-to-3D effects more.
To write this review, I also found and checked out a LibriVox free audio book version of Treasure Island on the app store and it has the original text and the audio is reasonably good but definitely not as exciting/engaging as FlyingWord‘s version.
Thanks to my wise and loving English teacher, she not only helped improve my English when I first came to Canada in the late 80s, I also learned important lessons in ethics (and medical ethics) in high school via medical doctor turned writer A. J. Cronin‘s The Citadel! Interestingly, over the years, I may know more about “medical ethics” than some medical doctors that I have come across! (note: you see, I actually have “ethics” as a blog category. :)
The following are some highlights of what Erin and I talked about in the video interview,
- What lead Erin to write and self-publish the book? I asked if she has got any help in writing the funny bits in the book? For example, did she have a comedian friend to help her write?
- An update on Erin’s deal. On TV Erin & Arlene agreed to: $5,000 cash, $20,000 in travel miles, and $25,000 in PR services, in exchange for 30% of the proceeds from the book sales.
- How did Erin come up with the 300,000 copies sales target? Thats one out of every 100 Canadians! How far along has Erin reached the target so far?
RT @emmgryner: OMG just got off the phone w @Cmdr_Hadfield who signed off saying "see ya when I get back to Earth"...and I got chills 4 days ago
RT @WilliamShatner: I watch @Cmdr_Hadfield 's Space Oddity video last night and I have 2 words for him: "SHOW OFF!" I'd even look good floa… 4 days ago
RT @emmgryner: I am going to bed blown away by all the feedback and love re @Cmdr_Hadfield's Space Oddity. So proud to be a part of it. Wow… 5 days ago
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