Travels etc.

On the 24th February 2015 (six months ago) the Owners Corporation of an apartment block lodged an application to NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) seeking orders to appoint compulsory manager of a strata scheme and to refund the fees paid to the former strata manager. The application caused by negligent and inacceptable behaviour by strata manager and included the following concerns: -        No proper service for two years -        Breaching of the rules and not following the orders of Owners Corporation -        Spending money on items that were not agreed or ordered by Owners Corporation -        Not servicing fire safety inspections and insurance for the building appropriately -        Other issues   All the documentation related to the above-mentioned problems has been submitted to the ...

Meetings are important part of the business activity. Our basic need to communicate is topped by necessity to deliver meaningful results at workplace. As usual though reality is not as rosy as the ideal that many of us trying to achieve with meetings. What is a good work-related pastime for one is at the same moment a time wasting and useless activity to another. This contradiction is coming from a few factors (among other things): 1.     Core difference in perception of meetings between different levels of workplace hierarchy or among committee/board members 2.     Meeting audiences and agendas 3.     Involvement and focus level of participants during the meetings Therefore usually instead of being an effective business or private processing tool, meetings become the opposite. There is an opportunity to adjust existing practices to meet new expectations of the work related activities to be more productive and fun....

"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...