Watch this space.

Someone just got inspired.

I hate chauvinistic preachy marketers. (it was early morning – give me a break)

Well, it took forever, but I finally flipped the last page of Seth Godin’s, All Marketers Are Liars.

I will save you all the trouble of reading this guy’s rant on how marketing should and shouldn’t be used. Essentially, his main driving point is: “Tell a story that is authentic and benefits a consumer’s life. The consumer will then create the buzz for you, all you have to do is continue to live the ‘lie’.” A valid point, but honestly, if you are in marketing and don’t know these fundamentals already – you have some serious problems.

In all of his glorious 173 pages he repeatedly bashes in to the reader the ground-breaking idea that consumers have contrasting ‘worldviews’ and you need to tell the right story that matches a specific ‘worldview’. I am sorry, last time I checked this was called ‘market segmentation’ – communicating to each segment of the market with a different message/offering. But Godin slaps a label on it and claims it as his own. He then goes on to shamelessly self promote his book The Purple Cow several times and ends with what he started with. Next time Godin – don’t write for the sake of writing – we get it – consumer, worldviews, stories – got it. Geez.

Thats a memo not a freaking book.

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

So its already June! Where did half of ’07 go? Surely I’m not enjoying it that much!

The past few weeks have been a little quiet over here in Singapore. Lately it just seems as though the weekends are getting closer and closer together… Do you ever get that feeling? I tried Googling for some philosophical explanation, but all I could find was some babble about ‘traveling down a spiritual spiral toward enlightenment’ – and unless that means I am about to uncover why almost every zipper in the world has the letters ‘YKK’ on it – I don’t think its a valid explanation. There are some freaky bloggers in this world, let me tell you!

Click that pink link below to check out what’s been going down in the life of the Rob since the last post……

So I have been a bit slack…. wanna fight about it?

Well, its time once again for me to put finger to keyboard and write another post to my blog; to keep you abreast of the latest news from the centre of the world. I’m tired, its been a long day and tomorrow I fly to ‘Nam, so this post is going to be short and sweet 🙂

Since my last post….

Work life has been interesting – I think its safe to say I’ve successfully popped out the otherside of the new job blues – you know, when you’re still green and no one really knows what to do with you? Like when the Internet first came out and no-one really knew what to do with it, sure it was great, but until people found out that you could use the Internet for porn, it was kind of a sleeping giant – well I hope that’s what it will be like for me, except with less porn……

As for the working hours, I have finally setlled into the whole 9am till 7pm routine. Sounds bad at first, but I guess during the day its a pretty flexible work day. No boss breathing down your neck – unless you need to deliver something – and you can pretty much wander off for a coffee/burger/BreadTalk snack/Coffee/Muffin/Smoko (none for me thanks) whenever you want – its very grown up 😉

…good things take time

I have been meaning to revamp the bubble since moving to Sing but I just haven’t had the time… I guess half the battle was trying to sit myself down to finally write an entry of any substance. With so many people asking me about my experience thus far, I figured I would bite the bullet and finally give the site a new look along with a few new posts (and potentially, a promise of a few more in the coming months).

Where am I you ask? Well, to give you a rough idea, you can take a look at my suburb through Google Maps. I live in the illustrious Birmingham Mansions, a lo-rise apartment block with a swimming pool out the back. Don’t be fooled by the name, I mean it is a great place to live, but like everything else in Singapore it’s all over-promise and under-deliver here ;).

I live with two flatmates Steve and Caddie, who are also from Oz. We have three decent sized bedrooms, 2 broken down air conditioners (!) and a brand new kitchen, but we love it here. It’s close to work (300 metres close! you feelin’ it??) and close to the MRT (train stations for non-Singaporeans) which is very very handy in a land of EXPENSIVE cars.

What else can I say? Its been a bumpy ride settling in, but I think that I have made the last of my expensive trips to Ikea (pronounced ‘eek-e-ya in Singlish) – for now – so I guess its safe to say I have now adjusted to my new lifestyle… (more)

The wait is over.

Where have I been? I’ve been around… So I put on a couple of kilos… I’m a little older and none-the wiser.. What’s it to you?

Well as you probably already know, the words on this screen have been freshly exported from the wonderful land of humid-as-hell weather, slow moving human traffic and lots of MSG – Singapore BABY!  If you love kitten heels, socks with thongs and public nose picking, then you will love what Robs Bubble has to offer this time round.

Welcome back friends 🙂 I hope you like it.

Burn Him! He Might Take on Other Forms!

Okay. Five, maybe six words “Sheikh Taj El-din Al Hilaly”.

How many times have you been in a church/temple/mosque/battlefield earthscientology convention and heard something which you thought was a tad far-fetched; but let it slide because you know that to be a leader in these types of communities, one must be an extremist (to some degree).

So a leader of the muslim faith, says (in arabic) women should cover up or would otherwise be attracting male attention. Wow, groundbreaking news here. I am shocked. Someone of the muslim faith – where women who obey Allah (see Qu’ran) are covered from head to toe – thinks that women who wear revealing clothes attract attention.

“Queensland Liberal shit-stirrerMP Warren Entsch has called for the sheik to be stripped of permanent residency and kicked out of the country.”

Now thats a bit rash dont you think? He doesn’t speak English! Kick him out! He doesn’t belong! Great work Warren (great name too) you’ve just sent Australian multiculturalism back about 20 years.

Debnam must be wetting himself with glee at this opportunity. It’s your time to shine Deb-meister, whatever Iemma says about this, make sure you grab your pocket thesaurus and reverse-translate everything he says (these are called Antonyms) and make that your statement!

Slow news week? No problems, sit in on any religious preaching and I’m almost certain opportunity will strike. Keysar Trad was right.

“Again, this is pandering to the lynch mob rather than exercising natural justice.”

Global Warming. Sit Back & Enjoy the Ride

With all the hype about Global Warming of late, it’s great to see that the world is really doing something about it. But hey, even if we go the way of the Amish, we’d still be in the shit.

“What the Stern report will emphasise is that even if the world stopped all pollution tomorrow, the long-term effects of carbon already in the atmosphere would mean continued climate change for another 30 years, with sea levels rising for a century.”

It’s great to see right-wing authoritarian capitalists at the helm when the world is staring down the barrel of real mass destruction. Maybe it really is an ‘Inconvenient Truth’ because even though you know it is a problem, I know it is a problem and the rest of the world may know it is a problem, nothing is going to happen for at least another 15 years. The sad truth is fixing this mess will cost money, and we can’t waste our money on things like that! After all, interest rates just went up again.

Don’t you just love greed success?

It Is Nice.

So I haven’t posted in a while and I needed something to keep my millions of fans happy.

Just Smile! Please?

Lately I have been counseling/advising a couple of friends about certain issues which are getting them down… Although these problems superficially seem so disparate, when you really dig down to the cause of their grief, in its simplest form, you’ll always find the same culprit – a loss.

It’s become so clear to me that all of life’s problems are essentially the result of a loss of some sort. Every depression of your life, every negative emotional experience you have ever felt was a result of a loss. Its not an extremely profound impression of the world, but it is something that has definitely captured my own interest. If we know what worsens the human predicament, then why can’t we predict it? Why aren’t we better prepared? Haven’t we experienced a loss before? Why should this time be any different?

But you don’t understand, you don’t know what is like!

The answer is the degree of the loss – it is almost always different. The greater the loss, the greater the hurt. Even so, why do different people react differently to almost identical losses? My theory is that the probable return of what once was greatly effects the feeling and the severity of the loss. If you know something will never return, it becomes more black and white and our defence mechanisms kick in to help deal with the certain loss – at least in the short term.