Category: Life & Times
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Self-isolation, OK. Self-directed Portfolio, Not OK.
COVID-19 has hit home. My wife and I are under voluntary self-isolation. We have shown no symptoms. Just doing our part to limit the coronavirus from spreading. COVID-9 does not discriminate. It transcends geographical boundaries, colour, race, and age. Sophie Gregoire Trudeau in Canada, Tom Hanks in Australia, and the fashion industry workers in Italy…
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Cloud Services Adoption – Should It Take a Pandemic?
There is a familiar ring to this. It often takes a crisis to drive technology adoption. Cloud services adoption is no different. COVID-19-related queries for technology upgrades are on the rise. Despite the growing rhetoric around digital transformation, cloud services adoption has lagged. C-suite executives are big on vision. However, when it comes to putting money…
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Luxury Brands and Services Are Targeting the HENRYs
As the Uber driver dropped us off, I wondered if we had the address wrong. We were looking for the entrance to a cocktail bar that my daughter had categorized as “secret.” My wife and I were back in San Francisco for the long weekend. The plan was to have a couple of pre-dinner drinks…
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Good Enough – When Failure is an Option
If you have not been paying attention, you may have missed this. There is a shift away from the pursuit of perfection. The world is going with “good enough.” Perfection is dynamic Products and services have to evolve continually and adapt to the needs and wants of consumers. Many successful products of the decade, have…
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Don’t Walk Left – A Perspective on Homelessness
I could see her from a distance. For that matter, I wasn’t sure that it was a woman until she briefly lifted her head to tuck her straggly hair back behind her ear. She didn’t look a lot older than my daughter. She was bent over the garbage bin by the roadside. Looking for food,…
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Living the Dream – A Reality Check!
The patio of the Taj Malabar Hotel is quiet as I sit nursing a drink and working on an e-book for a client. I am in Kochi, a coastal city on the southwest coast of India, often referred to as the Queen of the Arabian Sea. I am living the dream! Travelling and working; mixing…
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Living in a Cannabis-Friendly Condominium
The email from the building management had an innocuous subject line. It read: Owner Survey. Typically, surveys are not my thing; but this one was different. The building management rarely sent surveys out. As I read through the questionnaire and the attached “explanatory letter,” I realized that it was a feeler of sorts. The condo…
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Recreational Marijuana: When the Government Sells Pot
After a lengthy political approval process, the Canadian Government recently legalized recreational marijuana. Considering that marijuana has been illegal in Canada since 1923, It’s kind of a big deal! Effective October 17, 2018, you can walk into a designated store and buy marijuana like you would buy beer and cigarettes. As various players such as…
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Meatless burgers and alcohol-free beer?
Imagine showing up for a barbecue where they serve you meatless burgers and alcohol-free beer! As someone who likes burgers juicy and beer medium-bodied, I am confused. It all started with some research into “meatless” meats. It was for a blog post on the subject of business disruption facing the meat industry. In case you…
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Bye-Bye Byron – A Matter of Life and Death
It turned out to be a matter of life and death… “You should have won that match,” I said, as Byron came off the squash court. He had just wrapped up a closely-contested house-league match in which he lost 2–3 to an opponent who I felt was less skilled than him. I was early for…