Wow, I just watched two videos on You Tube of Paul Potts in ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ doing opera (Nessun Dorma and then Time To Say Goodbye).

What an incredible voice.

Worth watching: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDB9zwlXrB8 and the earlier one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA.

Like he says, singing is what he feels he was born to do… and I can’t wait for his first CD!

(Update: Yes, he won the final with another brilliant performance of Nessun Dorma: www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_5W4t_CBzg)

Whatever association you want to wrap around ‘The Secret’ as a presentation of the Law of Attraction — or how much you understand or believe it — all I can take is my own experience of specific times in my life when my thoughts have manifested an outcome that can hardly be explained by logic or reasoning.

• The big example for me is the time when camping with family, we became “rained in” and I decided to walk into town to look for help. Town was about 58km away. To break it down, we had 6km of waterlogged paddocks to cross, a 21km stock route to finally meet the main road to town (Moulamein NSW). For about a dozen years we’d been camping in the area, and, although I didn’t go into town all that much, I know that the stock route was very little travelled — no wonder it was full of potholes and just a single lane country route.

  To jump to what happened, my cousin Peter came with me and the paddocks took quite some time to get through, as footing was pretty slippery. We finally got to the stock route, it had been raining all the time and we were glad for a firm surface. But here’s the key. We’d been on the stock route for no longer than about 5 minutes when I heard a car coming along. It was a ute with two young guys in it, been out the night before and were using the stock route as a shortcut home. Not only could they give us a lift (and I got to sit in the back tray of the ute, under the tarp with a farm dog and her pups) — but they actually gave us a lift all the way into town — more than 50km.

  Had we come along 10 minutes later, the car would have been gone before we got to the stock route. Whatever you want to call it, the law of attraction came true on that day. We got to town, and less than 24 hours later we were all on the way home.

• There are 4 specific times I can easily recall where I have driven my car to a town, suburb or place I’d never been to before, and found exactly the place I needed, without extra time driving around, without looking at a map or without planning in advance.

  The first time I ever drove to Sunbury, I needed to go to the printers to pick up some business cards. Not only did I drive into the right street, but I parked, and then looked around to find where the printer might be. The shop was right in front of my car, without consciously planning it!

  The same thing happened driving from Sunbury (where I ended up living for six years) to Dandenong. If you know Melbourne, you know they’re a long way from each other. I drove to a computer store, found the right street and parked right out the front without deliberately thinking about it. It also happened in Geelong when looking for a particular store (first time driving through, finding the street and getting a park literally out the front — right in the middle of Geelong’s CBD). And it also happened once when I needed to drive to Station Pier — it was like I was nearly driving on auto pilot — without ever having driven to that place before (or having been a passenger for any of these examples).

The example that David Schirmer uses in The Secret presentation is right — not just about car parking — and these are specific times I know when the law of attraction worked for me.

Whether it’s psychology, creative visualisation, deliberate NLP techniques, creative processes like what is explained in the Secret — however you describe it, the law of attraction abounds.

What a great feeling for the “regular” golfers of the world… watching more than a third of the world’s best golfers on the US PGA Tour dunk their ball into the water at the short-but-treacherous 120m 17th at THE PLAYERS Championship last week.

94 balls were hit in the water on 17 for the tournament, shattering the former record of 67 in 2005 — and 50 of those were in the first round. By the end of Friday, that record from 2005 had already been broken. See all of the stats for the 17th.

So it’s not only us amateurs that can come apart when the terrain is tough.

The TPC is known as the unofficial “fifth major” and in 2007 had a $9 million prize purse, so it definitely attracts the top players on the US PGA Tour.

But as the stats for the 17th show, even the world’s best can be intimidated. It’s no wonder the TPC at Sawgrass Stadium Course’s 17th is rated one of the most difficult holes in golf. Forget the path leading to the green from the rear of the hole… you could probably walk across water on top of the golf balls in their watery grave.

It doesn’t matter what your golf skill, holes like this one prove just how much of your golf is played “between the ears”.

Mind you, during the tournament, two players managed to make an albatross (double eagle) “2″ on a par 5 — Hunter Mahan and Aussie Peter Lonard, the first two in the history of the TPC — let alone the bevvy of eagles and chip ins making the tournament a spectator’s delight. So the pros aren’t about to give up their status as the best in the world!

One word sums up this picture, for every golfer… intimidating! It’s fascinating to watch even the world’s best tackle this kind of challenge.

PS: Must get to this course one day! And another interesting stat — the clubhouse is apparently nearly twice as big as the US White House.

… receive!

I feel particularly impressed today with the wonderful, open source nature of the internet (or at least its open source good bits).

For many reasons, Eudora is my preferred email software, and has been since… the mid-1990s. Having steered away from other offerings, and then avoiding Microsoft’s Outlook and Outlook Express (to help safeguard my computer, especially in earlier days)… I’ve always kept with Eudora. Two of the main reasons are the ability to have quite smart ‘multiple personalities’ and also, the ability to edit the subject line displayed for incoming messages (without actually changing the message’s subject line!). That’s a great feature for storing/sorting messages, especially artwork approvals (good to add “OK TO PRINT” to a subject line, so I can easily track emailed approvals).

Anyway.. Qualcomm, Eudora’s maker, announced last year it was discontinuing development of Eudora. I guess in the end, sadly, the more popular programs like those from Microsoft make it hard for alternatives to compete. Not to say Microsoft makes better software (want to spend 20 minutes while I tell you how dumb some of their software really is??)… just more popular.

Thankfully, Mozilla has picked up future development, with Qualcomm’s support and blessing, to make the code open source, and create a new email program called Penelope. This will sit alongside Mozilla’s existing Thunderbird (which I nearly switched to last year, as Eudora has a couple of nagging things that annoy me, such as it’s inability to display good html formatted emails, or forward them to other people. However, that’s probably why it hasn’t been exploited by hackers like other popular programs!).

Well, with the development of Penelope, there was an online “wishlist” of features that users would like — and last year I contributed to that list. I’m most happy that not only could I make suggestions, but many of them have been picked up (some obviously not just suggested by me), including a couple of specific ones I made — I asked, and I will receive when Penelope is launched!

Open source… what a fantastic integration of human intelligence. That’s one reason we love Firefox, other than it’s so much smarter than IE!