Upon hearing of the http://www.savekaryn.com website I wanted to retch. Here is a woman under 30 making 100k a year who suddenly finds that she is out of work after having spent most of what she had on an expensive apartment and $500 purses. So what does she do begs for money the internet way. Surprise surprise people actually gave her money…. For what? She has done nothing to deserve anything. Oh the sheer humanity of seeing a rich young white girl faced with having to declare bankruptcy has turned people away from the needy, the Homeless, the deformed, the sightless into giving money to a twentysomething New Yorker who cannot pay her credit card bill.

Contrast this with http://www.oddtodd.com/ . Here is a laid off person who is being creative while at the same time asking for money. He is not conditioning whether you get to see his creativity on whether you give him money he is distilling the spirit of being laid off after the boom into biting cartoon snippets about money, love, boredom and the magic of doing nothing. He didn’t make alot of money before he was laid off, he will probable not make alot of money after he is working again.

Apparently someone thinks karyn is retarded too. [Link]

I hope they get these on the air. [Link]

Cool yoga place around the corner from us, that Alanna and I tried out tonight. 105 degree room. My body was like a faucet tap…. I was soaked. Now we’ll just see if I can walk tomorrow…

It seems all the weird little stories that I have been reading have something to do with Portland. Just got back from
a nice trip to see my friend Jon this weekend for his birthday and everytime I turn around now there is something to do
with Portland. The Philips Screwdriver was invented in Portland, Ray Dolby of Dolby labs is from Portland.

Just as I’m about to get on my plane to come back to SF I walk into the Portland airport and some lady almost grabs
me and asks if I live in Portland and then points to Mt Hood which is outside the city and ask what the hell it is. She said
it looked like a travel poster or a mirage from further away. In some ways she is right it looks strangely out of place around that city and I wonder what it would have looked like years back when, it’s twin, Mt. St. Helens still had it’s top half.

Well we are back from our xmas in Mammoth lakes. We had a great time and the weather held out it seemed just for us. You can check out some pictures on Alanna’s site.

We had alot of fun riding around taking the long way to Mammoth through Tahoe. We just missed having to put on chains the entire time. Although Alanna’s battery died after a couple of days in the hotel parking lot. We got a friendly jump from the local tow truck guy and we were on our way.

Snowboarding was great a little cold and windy on some days but overall it was great. On Christmas the power went out all over Mammoth and we went to Breakfast at a great place called “The Stove”. After that we went up to the moutain and found out that the power was out up there too. The great part was that they were running all the lifts on generators, but they decided to let everybody ski for free because all their computers were out. Sweeeeetttt…..

The food around Mammoth is kinda weird many places the food was kinda bland.. but lucky for us there was a great place right across the street from our hotel called “Angels” you can check out Alanna’s journal for a description of the food that we found.

Well here we are back to work and ready for a new year. Tomorrow I can to quiz everybody about the booty that they got for the holidays.

When I first read this article, I thought “How sad” but as I mulled it over more and more I started to think of all the people who I have met in the Tech industry that have no idea how any of this stuff works and could care less about learning. I think to this certain set of people their first reaction would be that if they are losing out to positions or jobs it must be because they are getting older, not that they have stopped learning.

I don’t think the tech industry cares what people look like. I have never run into that. What I have run into is people of all ages in the tech industry who are seat warmers. They are there for the paycheck. They do not want to learn new things, they do not even want to put the energy into understanding what their companies does NOW much less in helping it move into the future.

The tech industry is not Hollywood or the fashion industry or major sports but it is very darwinian just the same. If you do not want to be there someone will come and take your place. It may not be right away but after a while people will recognize that you don’t know what you are talking about or you don’t care or both and then it’s just a matter of time before the buzzards start circling.

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total – 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.

3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second.

This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload – not even counting the weight of the sleigh – to 353,430 tons.

Again, for comparison – this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

Merry Christmas

Went to my friends Chris and Andy’s new band “The Make Out Date” the other night. They were playing after this fashion show so it was kinda awkward. All these cell phone laden fashionistas were appalled by the rock music in front of them and not the drum and bass catwalk music they were used to.

They seemed to cut at the birthday cake of pretentiousness with chainsaws and firemans axes. Their CD does not do the band justice. God bless their rock and roll souls.

Spent a good week getting all my projects worked out so I could head up to Mammoth for a holiday weekend without thinking about anything.

All my Xmas presents are delivered or on their way and now all I have to do is get up super early so Alanna can stuff me in a car and we can have a great holiday snowboarding. We are staying at the SierraLodge up in Mammoth Lake and it’s going to be a crazy Christmas.

While it’s easy for firms to design ways to hand over financial ownership to employees, there isn’t a standard recipe for giving workers psychological ownership. But some things can help predict how well workers will take to their new role, experts say. One is the size of the company: Workers in a small company tend to have an easier time feeling as if they own the place than those in a large company. Most employee-owned companies are not publicly traded, says Rosen, and that helps as well. When workers feel as if the management is more responsive to labor than to a horde of anonymous shareholders, they’re bound to feel more loyalty to the firm.

But perhaps the most important factor is the historic relationship between labor and management at the firm. “I remember when I heard of the United plan,” says Rosen. “I said, Oh God, why do we have to have United as the company that everyone thinks of when they think of an employee-owned company?” That’s because United had a dismal record of labor relations. “We knew that the best environment for employee ownership is one in which — like Southwest — the company says employees come first, customers second, and shareholders third,” Rosen says.

Rosen adds: “Every company in America says that ‘people are our most important asset,’ but the tragedy that United illustrates is that that’s not true. What we’ve seen is that when you treat your employees with dignity and respect, you get thousands of people in a big company sharing ideas and information about how you can do things better. And there are only a handful of companies who realize that the people who work for you are the most important asset.”