Amy’s dad has been kind enough to recommend and lend me “Free Agent Nation – The future of working for yourself” by Daniel H. Pink. Mr Pink used to be Al Gore’s chief speechwriter and while doing this job noticed that more and more of his colleagues were leaving to strike out on their own to become self employed, independant contractors or micropreneurs.

The book drills down into statistics and first hand accounts to illustrate its main point, that is the move away from Organisation Man to the Free Agent. In practise this is a move from the traditional career ladder inside one company or associated companies towards micro or individual enterprise. Handily it gives a per chapter ‘quickie’ summary page, and stats throughout the book, which I will give you the most interesting below:

• The largest private employer in the USA is a Manpower Inc – a temp agency. Historically this was ‘job for life’ companies such as ‘ma’ Bell , IBM, Ford etc.
• Two out of three workers in California do not hold traditional jobs ie. permanent full time. Oddly enough work laws and social assumptions are based around everyone working like that.
• Netscape was formed in 1994, IPO’ed in 1995 and was gone by 1999. A 4 year life span – is that a project or a company?
• In 1982 (recession time) 12% of USA workers feared they would be sacked. In 1999 with a 4.3% unemployment rate 37% feared for their jobs.
• When Roosevelt introduced 65 as the USA’s retirement age the life expectancy of the average American was 63. Today it is 76 and rising.

One further observation in the book is for the Free Agent they often face the lure of expansion, yet the majority find that building into a larger company goes against their strengths. Thus a nanocorp culture is born which fits both a personal philosophy and due to its agility it could be seen as a competative strength.

It is not so much a guide to becoming a ‘Free Agent’, more validation of the growing trends in employment (or non-employment!) and its impact on society. There is a ‘resource guide’ containing steps to getting started and surviving as a free agent but that is not what the book is about.

To use a Maslow quote (the fuller one than in the book) :

“Real achievement means inevitably a worthy and virtuous task.
To do some idiotic job very well is certainly not real achievement.
I like my phrasing, ‘What is not worth doing is not worth doing well.’”

Quite simply make sure you add this book to your next Amazon order or pick up a copy when you are hovering around a bookstore.

Next up on the bookshelf is another Pink book – “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future“. The right brainers are often said to be the more creative and free thinkers and this covers the move from the information age to the conceptal age. All good relevant fun

Roast Pork with Apple and Honey Glaze Recipe
This makes a nice smelling roast – I am writing this while it is still cooking, so hard to comment on taste EDIT: It turned out delicious.
Ingredients:

• 2KG Lump of Pig Leg
• Decent glug of olive oil
• 1 brown onion, diced.
• 2 cloves of garlic minced
• 2 apples peeled then finely chopped
• 1/2 cup honey – I used the remains of our manuka honey. Worth a look at ManukaHoney.co.uk and getting some. It is awesome tasting and really really good for you. Just not for the piggy.
• 1 sprinkle of oregano
• 2 spooned dollops of dijon mustard
• 2 squeezes of lemon juice
• 1 glug of worcestershire sauce
• A couple of scrunches of salt and black pepper

How to do it:

1. In a saucepan, add a glug of olive oil so you are setup to saute the onions and garlic
2. Turn your oven on 180C , place a roasting dish in there and a glug of oil.
3. Saute for a few minutes until onion and garlic are soft and translucent.
4. Stir in the sliced apple and turn up to a high heat stirring and then putting the lid on. The aim is to get the apple nice and soft.
5. Add the honey, oregano, mustard, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce. Keep stirring on a high heat until it is a nice smelling gooey mess.
6. Take the dish out of the oven, it ought to be very hot and have uber hot oil. Get the lump of pork and place it in the dish and then rotate it. The aim is to to sear the outsides where possible.
7. Get the gooey mess aka. apple honey glaze and

It is handy to put 1-2cm slices into the pork before starting as it grips the glaze better and the flavour enters the meat.

As promised here is a brew update!

Three weeks ago we laid down the first of the NOB (Nick n Rob) brew, a Munich style lager. The basic recipe was based on the BrewCraft ’starter’ kit so Munich Lager wort a hops bag (for the life of me I cannot remember which at the moment!) 1Kg of bew enhancer, ale yeast, a pile of Brisbanes finest water (quite possibly the most expensive ingredient) then when bottling some carbonation drops. It ought to be drinkable, or should that be openable, in a couple of weeks time.
Since that inital brew I have been looking on quite a few different brewing forums and found much more information on homebrew. It seems that homebrew has quite a bad reputation due to dodgy 1970-80’s kits that had normal household sugar and rubbish worts. It seems this stigma may be hard to shift so the trend is now towards the term ‘Craft Beer’ , so now NOB is a Craft Beer. I am guessing after a few bottles the insults of it being a Crap Beer will magically turn into complements due to this change

Top Quality Beer.

Little Creature – Pale Ale

I was looking in the bottlo today for a deeper ale however as it was a normal BWS (think threshers etc in the UK) its range was quite lacking. The only none standard beers on offer were a pilsner and pale ale, both brewed by a wester Australia company called Little Creatures. I opted for two bottles of the pale ale @ 5.2% 330ml each costing about $3.40 or £1.40 each in Proper Money . It is pictured to the right but in a Melbourne Bitter glass as Simon insisted on having a ‘proper’ beer glass rather than an unbranded one!

The beer itself is a decent pale ale that pours well with a nice white head. It is quite light in the mouth, hoppy overtones, yet has a lingering bitter yet not unpleasant aftertaste.

It is a decent drinkable beer which is individual enough to warrant more.

Lord Nelson Brewery – Three Sheets

I was sitting in a pub in the Rocks in Sydney when Amy suprised me with this bottle. We have visited the pub before, during which I ordered my first ‘proper’ auzzy drink. Over here they do not do pints as per the Proper British Pub but have things called midis and schooners (A midi is half a schooner) and as a result I had resorted to ordering ‘a big beer, please!’

The beer itself was quite cloudy and I drank from the bottle so I cannot comment on the head etc. It was a fine drinkable paler ale which their website states is 4.9%, it was quite refreshing to have a decent ale that day
I will try and arrange a quick tour next time I am down as there is a proper micro brewery around the back of the pub.

Incidently there are two boutique beers I do wish to try, both with very Australian names; Piss Beer and Feral Beer. Just for the record, the former is NOT Fosters.

As I have some free time I thought I would raid the blog and post some more, this time being a Sony Ericsson rant and some cat related fun and if Co-Brewer-In-Chief Nick turns up later, more beer related antics!

Lets start with one cute cat, that is Eskimo!

Eskimo in sunny Brisbane soaking up the sun.

So whats this about Sony Ericsson? I currently use a P990i (along with another phone, again SE – W800i) and the history of the handset is quite confused. It was originally announced in 1963 as a whizzbang top notch PDA-cum-Phone that will do everything. Eventually when it was released on networks around Christmas 2006 it did none of the above however it was top of the class in crashing. Not to worry says Sony Ericsson, download updates via our impressive sounding ZEUS system and we will fix up all the bugs and make the phone better and better. Fair enough, it is worth a punt as there is nothing on the market (at the time) that was doing similar. In June 2007 Sony Ericsson announced they would not be doing more software updates, rather focus on the new P1i handset as that has the hardware to cope with their crap code.

Sony Ericsson have since backtracked and said they will continue to offer updates until all bugs are resolved, however with the speed of the releases it seems it is just releasing the P1i firware (as all based off the same core firmware) due to the media pressure. This customer respect verges on nil.

If anyone wants to buy one unlocked P990i drop me an email, or a locked one to Orange (as they are idiotic enough not to reclaim upgrades in under 6 months) let me know. It pains me to say it, but it seems Nokia is the way forward and Sony Ericsson are losing the plot quicker than Arfur Fowler did.

Anyway – onwards with the cats! Or should I say “Oh My Dog, Oh Long John, Oh Long Johnson, Oh Don Piano, Why Eyes Ya!” ? Pure gold.

Wordpress embedding is up the creek so here is the link.