Travels etc.

"We have a problem with waterproofing in the bathroom. Would it be possible to fix it?" "Yes, we can fix it. We will apply silicone." "There is job to attach a roof to the terrace properly." "Cool. We will do it by applying silicone." "The window frame is installed without flashing." "That’s OK. We will fix it with silicone." "Bathroom doesn’t have any waterproofing." "No worries. We will apply silicone." ... I have talked to a building quality specialist during the most recent (third so far) inspection of the same property where builders can't rectify their lousy work. The inspector said "it seems like builders in Australia build homes like it never rains here". It’s not fair to all builders of Australia to state that the quality of their work is not up to any acceptable standard. For sure many builders are good professionals and do their job at the highest quality level. ...

This post is a continuation of the long process that started in December 2011 and is still going. Here’s the link to the whole story: http://traveloga.blogspot.com/p/home-building-issues-sydney-experience.html An idea of this publication is to draw attention of people who are interested or involved in the building industry, property market, construction, property development and property management and ownership. That should help to raise awareness and to ignite conversations with relevant people in law making, business and other communities who could take this information to account when they dealing with relevant matters and think about quality of the work and of research and education. This matter is about building defects that are covered by statutory warranty, but in reality are covered by rather a joke. Well to be fair to all parties some minor defects (that are similar to paint a crack or to replace broken toilet paper roll holder) were brilliantly rectified by the resp...

While reading some paperwork regarding International Tax Law subject following statement drew my attention: "The complexity of the international tax rules makes it nearly impossible to diffuse the public sensibility about the issues." It is from the speech "Sense and Sensibility: The Policy and Politics of BEPS" by Manal S. Corwin.  The full text can be found here: https://www.kpmg-institutes.com/content/dam/kpmg/taxwatch/pdf/2014/beps-corwin-tillinghast-tn-100614.pdf That thought is not unique to tax law. In my experience of more than 3 years doing what I call “applied dispute resolution” which correlates with law research and paralegal activities I see that in any area of law, social matters, environmental, humanities, economics and others we can witness increasing level of challenges that our society face. Let’s take as an example The Law. Carefully crafted legal framework is one of the essentials of contemporary society. However ...

I have finally built and installed to the phone my first Android app: It has got the following features at the moment: - call to remote Web service to retrieve data from the database; - display received data in a timeline; - cool floating button; - form to submit data to the Web service. This is also my first ever project to build in Java. My profession is mostly related to Microsoft .NET and this project was an interesting variation from usual. Cool stuff!

Good communication is one of the keys to successful business collaboration. Business process designed and implemented properly is an important part of reaching a business goal. Business processes are designed and implemented by people. Contemporary level of technology development allows us to automate processes partially, but at the end of the day it is people who make final decisions and do the job to integrate those various pieces of a process puzzle into a working mechanism. People are communicating with each other. They are not machines and therefore interpret received messages according to their attitudes . Personal attitudes and combinations of those are different for everybody. They may match but not with every person you meet or have a chance to work with. It may happen that messages received from others are in a form, intonation and with content controversial to our personal views, traditions, knowledge and mental state. This situation is described as cogn...

There is usually two distinct perspectives on multi-tasking: 1. Multitasking is counterproductive. We get distracted by multiple tasks that all get our way and fight for our scarce attention, time and resources. This leads to a common fallacy that if you do multiple activities “at a time” you are not doing good work in any of those. 2. Multitasking is a way of getting many things done in a short period of time or in a long run. Indeed it can be either a disaster or a great helper depending on how it is used and practiced. Most recent research shows that we don’t do multiple tasks purely in parallel or simultaneously. That means we don’t purely multi-task, but switch between tasks and execute them one at a time, but by spending very small timeframes on each task. A good example from the history is a story about Julius Caesar capabilities in that area. Plutarch writes, “Caesar disciplined himself so far as to be able to dictate letters from on horseback, and to give directi...

We all have probably seen on the Web pictures which may look like the following: It implies that if someone quotes to a customer low (or lower than average, I presume) price for the services or products it necessary means low/lower quality of the services or products provided. This is very interesting assumption and I had a short conversation a while ago on Twitter with another SharePoint specialist about it: Original Bjørn's article should be here http://t.co/36brwYq4Kf A study in Journal of Consumer Research http://www.jstor.org/userimages/ContentEditor/1351717003127/DevalRelease.pdf in regards to the subject clearly shows: '" Consumers rarely have complete information and use various strategies to fill the gaps in their knowledge as they consider and choose products. One of these strategies involves using naive theories : informal, common sense, explanations that consumers use to make sense of their environment. For example, consumers may believe th...