They were both right, of course.

It is easy to discard anything you are good at as nothing special. You make something and when someone praises you it sounds unfair. You reply “Well, I don’t deserve credit for that. It didn’t take any effort. I just happen to know how to do that”

If you are talented (and everybody is) the things you ‘know’ don’t seem that special. You just know things and they seem to come natural. Why brag about it?

Please do brag about it. Make a list of things you can do. Brag all you want.

You might think “everybody knows how to do that”. Chances are you are wrong. What you know (and the combination of things you know) is special and extraordinary. Often we say “As we both know…”. In most cases, we DON’T both know. Even when it seems logical to you that what you know is common knowledge, it probably isn’t.

The girlfriend in the story above knows her boyfriend very well. One of his talents is that he knows how to prepare a good dinner. Didn’t seem to take much effort. Doing what you like doing never feels like work. Although she was dividing what had to be done by input (the chores that take effort) he was diving by output (the result of all the chores put together).

What are your talents, skills and what unique knowledge do you possess?

My parents….

You can imagine how extremely jealous I am of my best friend Daniel J. Ashes who traveled to the US a few weeks ago with a few friends (Joey Elgersma, Achmed Akkabi, Jim Aasgier and Nasrdin Dchar)  to meet with Obama. I begged him to take me with him but that just wasn’t possible. The only thing left for me to do is watch these photos and dream:

All the photos:

This frame shows Tessa leading the interviewer to our bathroom…

My grandfather was a doctor in a small village. He had one of the 20 phones. His phonenumber was 9. When my father grew up the phone was still regarded as a serious tool which you would only use for urgent matters. My father made one phonecall a year and his father had him sit down and make a list of things he wanted to ask – a script – which he had to show for approval before he made the call.

I remember when I had to explain – defend even – to people why I had a mobile phone. Recently I met someone who didn’t own a mobile phone. This was a fact that led to a lot of amusement at the party where I was at. It was noteworthy enough to keep everybody talking about it for about a hour.

One day telephone calls will be free. They might be always on. Probably it will use some technology that confuses me. I will not understand it and resist. My daughters will come over to have a chat about my phone use. They will say something like this:

“Why do you hang up daddy? What is the use? Why do you need to be disconnected? It is so inconvenient to have to reconnect every time we want to hear how you are doing. Last week you hung up the phone for 3 hours! We only found out after 2 hours and then we spent almost a full hour to reconnect! You know it is free, right? No need to keep it short. From now on just keep your communicator switched on at all times so we can hear you, see your heart rate and check your temperature…

This weekend Loïs (my daughter) visited Paris together with my parents. They visited the Centre Pompidou, the Eiffel Tower and went to a church to attend the first communion of my nephew.

I stayed in bed most of the weekend and even yesterday with an upset stomach. But I feel much better today!

The first was that Apple sales of Leopard exceeded sales of Vista in Japan in October. Apple has been a niche player for decades but this might be a turning point:

In the six days after Leopard’s 26 October launch, combined single-user licence (46 per cent) and family pack (7.9 per cent) sales accounted for 53.9 per cent of the total OS-only market in Japan.

However, at Microsoft, Windows sales fell from 75.3 per cent to 28.7 per cent

The second announcement that made a huge impression was the launch of Amazon’s eBook reader titled AmazonKindle. The gadget allows you to read digital books on digital paper. It costs $399 and you can choose from a library of 88.000 books.

The really impressive things about the Kindle however is the fact that is comes with an always-on wireless internet connection. At no extra cost. Without a subscription. It is just there.

This is incredible to me. A few years ago we still had to dial in. Then came DSL and Cable which meant we were always online. Then came wireless in the form of GPRS, later UMTS, and Wi-Fi. And now we are making the leap to standard, always-on, wireless and free internet.

In the future you will just be connected, always and everywhere and the whole notion of being on- or offline will be gone.

And with the Kindle the future just happened.

Besides that Loïs turned 6 on Friday and we celebrated her birthday, with 9 of her friends, on Saturday. That not only impressed me even more but also turned out to be pretty exhausting.

They thought she was representative for hip Dutch girls and asked if they could make a photo of her.

Cool!