Living Without TV
For the past six months, we’ve lived without television, at least in the conventional sense. There are two TVs in the house, but neither is connected to a TV service, either free-to-air, or cable. You can’t just turn the TV and watch “something” or “channel surf.” Why Have A TV? It’s a pretty bold countercultural [...]
Do You Code
One of the reasons I dislike going to networking events and conferences is my aversion to answering the “so, what do you do” question. I know it must seem odd for a blogger to say that they hate talking about themselves. But, answering the “so, what do you do” question in a concise (i.e., non-boring) [...]
Merry Christmas
Christmas begins tonight in our household. We share a Christmas dinner, say some prayers, open presents, tell stories, and go to bed way too late. Tomorrow we’ll laze around playing with the new toys, take a swim, write thank you notes, go for a long walk and end the day watching a few Christmas films. [...]
What Christmas Means To Me
I love Christmas – I love the serious, spiritual symbolism and the cheesy, crassly commercial chintz. I’ll take it all, secular and profane, theological and nonsensical. Perhaps most of all, I love that, as the Beach Boys so blatantly put it, “Christmas comes this time each year.” With such an open ended love of the [...]
Resist And Reboot
It’s now more than a month since I left Hong Kong and the process of adjusting to life in Singapore has begun. People in the local stores are starting to greet me with a smile of recognition and I’m getting to know the neighbours. It’s not hard to imagine this place soon feeling like home. [...]
On Writing A Newspaper Column
Our local city broadsheet, The South China Morning Post has been going through a series of substantial changes. They’ve revamped their look and brought in many fresh new writers to spruce up their culture and lifestyle sections. One new feature is the Family Post, a weekend lift-out section aimed at parents. I like that the [...]
Hong Kong Favourites (5-1)
Here’s the final instalment of my top twenty five things about living in Hong Kong. I started this list back in late January and always intended to take my time writing it. After all, this is meant to be a very personal and personally biased collection. Few of my choices would make it onto a [...]
Are You Ready For Your Treatment?
If you haven’t caught it already, Dollhouse is an excellent new(ish) TV show from Joss Whedon (Buffy/Angel, Firefly/Serenity, Dr Horrible’s sing-along-blog). I like the show for a lot of reasons, not least the great cast (including Eliza Dushku and Harry Lennix). But, there’s one line that always catches my attention, “Are you ready for your [...]
When Positive Parenting Can be Negative
A while back, I posted some comments on parenting styles, after hearing Lousie Porter speak. I was hoping to hear her again this week, but schedule changes brought on my the latest Typhoon, scuppered those plans. So, it was interesting to read Alfie Kohn’s New York Times piece, When a Parent’s ‘I Love You’ Means [...]
Parenting Technologies
OK, we’ve been struggling with the internet for eight year olds. Don’t really have a lot of answers there. The challenge is not so much the whole “internet nasty” thing, rather, social networking for kids. So many websites aimed at this age have a social networking component and that’s, well, creepy. I don’t say that [...]
The Cyclist
Australia030 Originally uploaded by fernandogros. There’s an interesting thing that a number of my favourite bloggers have in common. They ride bikes. I’ve never set out to find cyclists who blog. But reading some of my favourite bloggers recount their cycling experiences has been compelling. I’m reflecting on that now because, during my recent break [...]
Holiday Photos
Australia045 Originally uploaded by fernandogros. I’ve added some holiday snaps to my Australia set of Photos on Flickr. I’m particularly happy with this boat photo, although there’s some others that also turned out OK. right now I’m really wishing I was a lot better and sorting, editing and processing my photos (as well as taking [...]
OK, So I Didn’t Blog While On Holidays
Put simply, I spent too much time in my dad’s workshop, my mum’s kitchen and bike riding with my daughter to do any blogging. I did manage a lot of reading (seven books), a fair bit of writing and an aweful lot of photography, during that time, so it was far from being unproductive. Some [...]
Touch Everything
Hong Kong is my first experience of living in an apartment. Sure, I’ve done my fair share of serviced apartments on holidays and some longish stints in hotel rooms, but never before have I lived in an apartment – and to be blunt, although we do well, most Hong Kong apartments are small. As I [...]
This Week Is Flying By
Oh dear, it’s Wednesday already. I feel really busy, but I’m not sure I’m accomplished much so far this week. Sometimes you have just to stop, take a look around and get some perspective. I’ve been working on the next stage of the old song idea I blogged about here and http://fernandogros.com/?p=1442. The song is [...]
What Exactly Were You Looking For?
Blog stats are a funny thing. Some people obsess over them, others avoid them and the clueless (like me) wonder what to do with them. I used to like to highlight the blogs that drove traffic to this site, the top referrers, because they played an essential role in blogreading – back when trackbacks were [...]
What Does One Blog About These Days?
I’m convinced that fewer people are reading blogs, that most people who read blogs are reading fewer of them (or skimming them more selectively) and that neither trend means the death of blogging as a form of communication. Blogging is simply one of an increasing number of options for personal publication and it doesn’t (and [...]
Parenting: Guidance Or Control?
This week I had the chance to heard Dr Louise Porter speak on “Guiding Children’s Behaviour.” Porter is an educationalist and child psychologist who has written a number of influential books on early education, child behaviour and educational needs (special and gifted). The talk was hosted by the parent’s association of C’s school and whilst [...]
When Low Self-Esteem Is Not What It Seems
Self-esteem issues are a common complaint for my generation and used as an excuse for all sorts of relational and occupational problems. It’s one of those subjects we all encounter and, to be frank, one that I understand less and less well as the years pass. Part of the problem, for me, is that some [...]
The First Day Of The Rest Of Another Life
I’ve spent most of the past four weeks either packing, unpacking, or travelling. Perhaps it was no surprise that we were so ken to unpack quickly this time round. Arriving home at dinnertime on Saturday, we had suitcases in storage just after breakfast on Sunday and now at mid-morning on Monday, the apartment is clean [...]
Holiday Time
The bags are packed and checked, the CDs mixed, the iPods charged and the reading sorted out. Yes, it’s holiday time. A bit of normal Saturday pottering around town and flying out later tonight. I’m looking forward to trees, walking, a few days on the beach and sleeping at ground level. Not everything is rosy [...]
Hong Kong Arts Festival – Alice In Wonderland
The English National Ballet’s staging of Alice in Wonderland was a pure delight. Winsome, captivating and inventive, this adaptation took all the strengths of the story and combined them with some really sharp and clever staging and costume design. In fact, the costumes were one of the consistent joys of the night. Each character’s main [...]
The Church Thing
Last week I mentioned that we are, at least in the short term, not attending church. Like a lot of people who find themselves in this situation, ours is not a conscious or active decision. We haven’t “lost our faith,” succumb to any major conflict, or radically changed our outlook on church life. In a [...]
Link Love Or Loving Linkage
In the past couple of months some excellent bloggers have linked to this site. Here’s a selection, Dress-Down Friday: Bolt, Naomi Klein and Coffee – Wess is one of my favourite bloggers and it was great to see him pick up on the review of Bolt. I believe it’s really important for parents to critically [...]
Fernando Gros is a musician, photographer & writer based in Singapore. Born in Santiago de Chile, Fernando grew up in Sydney and has also lived in London, Delhi and Hong Kong.