27 Nov 2005
I was driving home from the gym and noticed the roadside thermometer read 0° celsius, signalling a time of year I refer to as winter hibernate time.
It’s the time of year when it’s too cold to do a lot of cardio outside, and thus you tend to end up sitting inside watching hockey and drinking someone else’s beer. The time of year where your lungs freeze if you’re foolish enough (and I am) to go for a run at 8:00pm.
For me, I usually try to double up my daily workouts (one at lunch, one after work) while incorporating some form of indoor cardio. I must say I’m pretty much addicted to sugar and the Christmas season is a particularily bad time for that.
On another workout-related note, the property management guys at work finally followed through on their threat to clean out the gym lockers (I work in a technology park and one of the perks is an on-site gym). Evidently they don’t want people to actually use the lockers because they’ve posted notices saying that anything left after a workout will get tossed. There are about 150 lockers with at most 7 people using the gym at any one time. I never did understand the logic so me and a buddy (who has since moved to London but left all his gear in the locker) have been using the same locker for the past 2 years. There have been cleanout threats made previously but the closest we ever came to obeying was removing the lock from our locker.
Last week I walked into the change room and to my surprise there were 5 or 6 large garbage backs strewn on the floor full of everyone’s clothes, shoes, shower supplies, etc. Nice eh!
Glenn: Yes, it’s true, I couldn’t save your stuff so you’re going to have to live without those old insoles and shorts, but I think I may have rescued an old uvic shirt. ’tis life.
27 Nov 2005
Interesting article over on BusinessWeek that talks about the google phenomenon, it’s implicit impact in the overall m&a marketplace, and the terse relationship it shares with traditional bankers and VCs.
After their workouts, Googlers can snack in a stocked pantry or enjoy an on-site massage. Young Googlers’ preoccupation with these perks tend to drive mature VCs to distraction. “If I hear one more [punk] complain about his omelet, or tell me he’s bored with the smoothie selection, I’m gonna, I don’t know,” splutters one.
Yet many [VCs] feel that Google accords them roughly the same respect as it does vendors bidding on the groundskeeping contract.
and the best quote of all….
The suits inside Google don’t fare much better than the outside pros. Several current and former insiders say there’s a caste system, in which business types are second-class citizens to Google’s valued code jockeys. They argue that it could prove to be a big challenge in the future as Google seeks to maintain its growth. They deem the corporate development team as underpowered in the company, with engineers and product managers tending to carry more clout than salesmen and dealmakers.
Poor VC’s, they don’t like to see Brin & Page deal directly with the founders of potential acquisitions. To make matters worse, these companies are being acquired when they’re still in a core technology phase and not actively selling or seeking outside investments.
Om Malik has also commented on this topic in Google vs. the Venture Capitalists
20 Nov 2005
59% of companies say they won’t be giving out holiday bonuses in any form 2005. And of those that will, only 13% said they will be giving out bonuses in cash, Hewitt Associates told CNN. Among the companies that said they would be giving cash, the average holiday bonus planned is $683, but the cash bonuses slated range between $25 and $2,500.
Interesting…. I don’t know if that’s a good percentage (41% sounds like a good number to me).
I wonder what the numbers are like here in Canada. In my brief working career most of the bonuses I’ve seen have come in the way of a few extra days off between Christmas and New Years. Cash is always nice, but time off is nothing to shake a fist at.