Steve Balmer was the speaker at a Microsoft breakfast I attended on Tuesday. An audience member asked if the next Bill Gates could come out of India or China, particularly given their culture of copying.

Personally, I felt this question reflected the usual lack of comprehension for the sheer amount of talent and skill coming out of these countries. Each year they are the world's leading producers of Bachelor degree trained people. Steve Balmer also pointed this out.

But, what he went on to say was more interesting. He believes that an Indian or Chinese person may well be the next Bill Gates, but that they will do it from inside the US. His three reasons were:

1. IP protection
2. The legal system
3. Access to the world's largest domestic market

Unfortunately, this provides further evidence for my growing scepticism that Australia will not produce the next Bill Gates or Google. While we have the IP protection, legal system and talent our domestic market is just too small to support a sizable pool of early adopting customers and rapid growth. Our inherently conservative investment and customer market further decreases the presence of early stage customers.

As a result, Australian companies must start exporting before they are ready. Their products are still weak and the processes incomplete, which is brutal when you add distance into the equation. A local customer can be courted, worked on and built as a partnership to iron out the early adoption kinks.

While sceptical, I haven't yet descended into complete pessimism. But the odds are certainly stacked against an Australian Bill Gates or Google.

A quick tour of the Synop Sydney office in Artarmon, where we worked from November 2000 to July 2005. The background music reflects both our attitude and the fact that we'd have loud singalong tracks playing in the development lab much of the time.

The "horrible smoking accountant" would sit in the office next door sucking on cigarettes. Unfortunately, the smoke would filter over through the roof and into the office, making the air fairly stale some days.

Video: Synop Sydney office tour.wmv (2.5MB) | Synop Sydney office tour (small).wmv (1MB)

White shirt + Red coathanger = Pink stripes.

Video: Red coathangers are evil.wmv (1.4MB) | Red coathangers are evil (small).wmv (0.5MB)

Apparently it's a video blogger right of passage to make a cooking video. Here's mine.

Video: Shower caps and sausages.wmv (1.6MB) | Shower caps and sausages (small).wmv (0.5MB)

Inspired by Richard, I've decided to try my hand at videoblogging. I can't be bothered doing huge editing and only have an old digital camera for shooting videos, so they will be 15 seconds or less, single scene and largely unedited. Remember, one of the great things about short films is that even if it is crap, you know it will be over quickly.

Video: 15s of fame.wmv (1.6MB) | 15s of fame (small).wmv (0.5MB)

Tax receipts must be kept, but the chances of ever needing to access them again are very low. This suggests a storage system that prioritises the speed of adding receipts over the speed of finding them. It should be simple and reliable in the long term tax receipt time frame. We currently track all expenditure in Quicken, so it will mostly be a process of cross-checking for the physical paper record when required.

When keeping tax receipts be sure to discard any non-tax receipts. One of the rules I was taught by NSW State Records was to keep only important information, otherwise it gets lost in the sea of unneeded archive data.

I've decided to use an expandable folder and place all receipts in there by date. Each slot will be for about 6 months worth of receipts, with one folder holding about 10 years. After that time, they are no longer required for tax purposes and we can remove older receipts and cycle through the folder slots again. The folder is quick to reference, easy to store receipts in, and the enclosed nature means it's very unlikely to spill receipts out.

At Synop, we used a lever arch folder with a section for each person. Expense receipts were stuck onto loose leaf pages in your section. Stored in a public place, this made expenditure transparent and was a simple system for both staff and our book keeper. This system is a little slower for adding receipts, but that's justified by the book keeper reading and the transparency benefits.

I'm undecided at this stage as to whether Bianca and I should have different yearly slots. We are already dividing the expenditure by person in Quicken, so it wouldn't add new information to the system but might make access faster. I'm going to combine them for now, but will separate if we seem to be keeping a lot of receipts.

When out with friends, we often refer to being in a "cone of silence". The implication is that you seem to have found a noisy spot at the table which means you cannot hear a word of the conversation going on around you.

Turns out that the term originates from the Get Smart TV series, here are some pictures.

PS: Made my first contribution to Wikipedia today, adding a link to images from the Cone of Silence entry.

Email is the most important aspect of my personal IT infrastructure. It's also particularly hard to achieve since I've been spoilt with the Exchange, Outlook 2003 and Outlook Web Access setup at Synop. Here are my personal requirements for email:

• Email address that can last a lifetime. It must be suitable for many different ventures and circumstances.
• Top rate spam filtering.
• Web based email for access from anywhere.
• Minimal effort to maintain and improve.
• Minimal cost.
• Large level of storage. A lifetime of email creates a lot of data.
• Personal copy of data for offline work and backups.
• Virus checking. Standard requirement, but hasn't been a problem for me so far.

I looked at a number of alternatives for providing this, including Gmail, paid email hosting and running my own server. All of them had limitations against the above criteria. In the end I've adopted a hybrid model that more than meets all the above criteria:

1. Create an email address associated with a domain, you@yourdomain.com.
2. A Gmail account acts as the primary email server, store and web access interface for you@yourdomain.com.
3. Outlook (or your preferred client) provides POP access to Gmail for a local store and email program.

This setup is straight forward, except for the problem of having sent messages appear to come from you@yourdomain.com while still being automatically archived in Gmail. Mail sent through the Gmail SMTP server is automatically archived, but appears in the From header to have come from your Gmail account. Mail sent through your ISP SMTP server is not added to the Gmail sent mail archive. To resolve this problem, I decided to send email through the ISP SMTP server while configuring Outlook to automatically BCC all messages to my Gmail account. In both Gmail and Outlook I then setup a filter to label these received messages as sent items and archive them automatically. Now, all sent messages appear to come from you@yourdomain.com while a copy is permanently archived on the Gmail servers for later access.

For those that are interested, here is the basic setup:

• Domain settings
• Forward all received email to the appropriate Gmail account(s).
• Gmail
• Enable POP access.
• Set POP to archive messages when they are downloaded.
• Setup a filter labelling BCC'ed email from you@yourdomain.com as "Sent Items".
• Set the reply address to you@yourdomain.com.
• Outlook
• Setup for POP access to the Gmail account.
• Send messages using the SMTP server of your ISP.
• Automatically BCC all sent messages to your Gmail account using HiddenBCC or similar.

Reading my negotiation textbook, I couldn't help but think of the guests on Jerry Springer:

Often, it is the mere presence of an audience that can make "saving face" of paramount importance for the negotiator. When a person's face is threatened in a negotiation, it can tip the balance of his or her behaviour away from cooperation toward competition, resulting in impasses and lose-lose outcomes.

Still, with episodes like "Daddy, will you marry me?" I guess lose-lose is inevitable.