Paul Towlson

If you missed this first time round, its well worth catching on iPlayer this week. Evan Davis manages to sustain an upbeat, and I have to say convincing tone, on a subject many of us would assume best not thought about: British manufacturing.

He has some really encouraging things to say in a time when it is too easy to succumb to despondency about the UK.

There is also a worthwhile challenge to our thinking, but more of that later.

I have been setting up a new website at www.rhemahousing.co.uk and hit a small memory problem with the server. The solution is here

I came across this video about motivation ( click here )

It is not only a very inspiring take on motivation, but in as a bonus its well worth seeing for the fabulous and entertaining animation throughout the presentation.

Of course I also appreciate the complimentary things the presenter says about Linux and Open Source software and the huge community effort that has made it the technical achievement it is today.

Is this really bad news for property owners and investors......?

The property market in the US is still in a dreadful state. Sales figures for last month are expected to show a 20% drop since last year. According to some experts cited in a NY Times article investors should stop expecting property to be the vehicle for creating wealth that it was in the years up to 2007.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates that the $6 trillion in property values lost since 2005 will take 20 years to recover, and that's without taking into account inflation. You can see the NY Times article here.

Surely this is bad news? Well, for speculators and those that wish a return to the dramatic growth in property prices in the decade up to 2007 the answer is yes.

There is another perspective however....

This is just a brief comment on the Platinum Property Meet last night in Brighton. Although I've been a property investor for 5 years, I still have plenty to learn. Hearing Steve Bolton speak on property investment strategies is always worthwhile.

As an update on this weeks assault:

Despite being arrested and charged, the neighbour from hell continues to express himself. This time it was coming down while I was at the property with one of the builders and banging the wheelie bins around in the front garden, slamming the main entrance door, and stomping on the floor above.

I was assaulted yesterday! Quite unexpectedly, although not altogether out of the blue.

Since I got involved in property development this blog has been somewhat neglected, partly because I was no longer directly involved in education which stimulated a lot of the ideas, and partly because I was occupied with prosaic matters such as where to buy magnolia paint and how to make sure my flat conversions passed their acoustic tests.

<i>We know too much and are convinced of too little</i>, T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays 1928.

One of the pressures I try to resist is the feeling that I ought to keep up with the streams of thought and knowledge concerning my areas of interest. Apart from the fact that it would be a futile attempt, I am convinced that in these days of knowledge economy the way of wisdom may be, on occasions, to close the door and find time to reflect. Knowing as much as possible is no guarantee to right action.

With so much material being generated on the web, how do we find those ideas that represent real quality? And how do we go about promoting content of our own that is worthy of the attention of others? I have experimented over the last year and a half with web-logging or "blogging". My motivation has been twofold.

Firstly, I have wanted to use a weblog as a tool for personal knowledge management. It has worked up to a point. I have noticed that I have not blogged as often as I have had ideas that needed to be jotted down. Instead I have waited until I had time to craft something I was happy to publish to the web. This has meant that I have not noted down some potentially useful ideas, meaning they don't get developed, and so some of the benefits of a weblog as a personal knowledge tool have been missed.