The original plan for today was to head north late morning, pre-ride the Bariani course, have dinner with a friend and her father in the Sacramento area, stay overnight in the area, then race Bariani tomorrow. But things change and the plan has changed. The major change is that the ride to honor Matt and Kristy will take place this afternoon, and The Wife and I feel it is important to attend, honor all the victims, and be with the community. We will see a few of you at Bariani tomorrow. Today is about more important things.
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Time for an off-topic (where topic = cycling) rant:
My father lived for a bit over 75 years and as far as I know he never had a credit card. He considered them unnecessary and a bit evil, a temptation to overspend. He was a bit livid one time when his second wife admitted that she had used her credit card to buy Christmas gifts for ‘the grandchildren’. To him credit was something not to be taken lightly, a necessity when making big ticket purchases but otherwise to be avoided. I understand my father’s sentiments, but it is virtually impossible in today’s world to get by without some sort of credit card.
One of the many areas my father and I did not agree on was the realm of executive compensation. My dad was a blue collar guy, probably never made over $40K/year in his life, yet he felt that top executives at corporations deserved whatever they were paid. I thought, and think, that executive compensation in this country is completely and totally out of touch with reality. The compensation committees throw money and perquisites at execs not so much because the execs earn or deserve it but more because the execs may serve on the compensation committee for them or some of their friends. It is a complete ’scratch your back and you had better scratch mine’ mentality.
Enter the current credit crisis in this country, a fiasco that was brought on by greed at many levels. Too many folks involved could have used a bit of my dad’s skepticism on credit. But let’s concentrate on the top of the food chain, the executives at the lending institutions that were raking in cash and dispensing without due diligence to almost anyone who wanted a home, then selling off the notes to investors around the world. Some of these execs are now raking in big payouts as they exit the companies which are left to write off Billions in bad loans. This morning the news outlets were carrying reports that one of these execs, Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Financial, has decided to forego roughly $38M in payouts as he leaves the company, a move that the first news reports said was due to his concern over shareholder discontent with the payout. A more likely reason he is trying to let go of a piece (a small piece, in the big picture, by the way) of this payout may be this letter from Rep. Henry Waxman inviting Mr. Mozilo to come Washington on Feb. 7th to ‘xplain to the House Committe on Oversight and Government Reform why he deserves to get that much money considering the mess he helped create. The former CEO’s of Citigroup and Merrill Lynch got similar invites. Since the original invites were sent to the execs, the heads of the respective compensation committees that approved these payouts have been invited to the little confab and asked to bring all documents related to the process of determining the compensation packages. Included in what is to be produced for the committee includes “All documents regarding the retention or dismissal of outside advisors retained to assist the compensation committee, the board of directors, or management” and “Documents sufficient to identify all outside advisors involved in determining any compensation (including severance terms)”.
That Feb. 7th meeting could be interesting. Sounds like Rep. Waxman and friends are looking to figure out the network of back scratchers in this little microcosm. Wonder if this will lead to any attempt at reform legislation? The cynic in me thinks not, just a few red faces but no real change. Sigh!
Caught off-guard
Yesterday evening there was a post to the NCNCA mailing list noting that the registration for a number of early season races was open and that the M35+ 4/5 field for the Snelling RR was filling quickly. I took a peak at the registration page for Snelling and at the time I first looked there were 37 registered with a field size of 50. Within less than an hour the field was full. I knew that our Engineering manager at work was intending to race in that field but his name was nowhere to be found on the registration list. I asked him this morning and he was a bit perturbed; no indication on the NCNCA site that registration was open, and he uses secondary sources of info (club e-mail) to get salient info from NCNCA. Ooops. Looks like he may be sitting this one out … unless he wants to race with the Cat 4 field.
I am sitting here musing on my own registration. The best field for me, the (open) M45+ field, has a 37 registrants at the moment, and a field size of 50 so a decision will need to be made soon. At this time I am thinking not; 5 weeks away, I am coming off a week of having mucous filled lungs, and it would mean that The Wife and I would be spending the whole day there (her race is at 8:20A, mine would be at 12:30P. Decisions, decisions.
Something right in the world
True confession time. Long ago I lived for a while in Texas. Mostly West Texas. During that time a lot was changing. Dallas Love Field was abandoned, for the most part, for Dallas Fort-Worth Regional. That was bad, for the most part though it did enable a young startup to get some cheap space at the most abandoned airfield and Southwest Airlines was born. The Dallas football team won the big super-duper extravaganza bowl, and all of us in the sticks got to see ads all day long of the prima-donna QB, Roger Stenchback, hyping posters of himself on the couple of cable channels available. And then the owners of the football team build a new stadium, closer to the new airport than the city, and showed how full of themselves they were by leaving a hole in the roof so that “God can look down on his Cowboys” (I kid you not, that is what they said, and say, about the opening in the roof of the almost dome). And so I became an ABD football fan, Any team But Dallas. And so something is right with the world when they lose and appear on the morning news all tearful and whining.
OK, I know some folks claim to ‘love’ their bicycles, but here is a story of someone taking it to an extreme. Now the questions arise:
- Was it safe sex?
- What constitutes safe sex with a bicycle?
- Was it consensual?
- Was the bicycle ‘of age’?
- .. and many, many more …
I started my current job on 13 December 2006, 53 weeks ago. On 14 December 2006 the co-founder of the company, and the man with the money, distributed 80Gb Video iPods to all employees as a holiday gift. Everyone joked that I had the starting day timed to perfection.
A new employee started on Monday, and today was the distribution of the yearly holiday gift. The man with the $$$ is a techno junkie, and the picture shows what we were all just handed for this year. Nice, almost certainly a better GPS unit than my aging Garmin eTrex Vista (original version with monochrome screen 24Mb of memory, and no expansion slots). But the Vista is small and light enough to mount well on my handlebars, and it has been a great tool while touring. Wonder what the Nüvi would garner in trade-in for an Edge 705?
A couple of months back I lamented that autumn seemed to have passed us by this year. I take that back, as the past two weekends I have experienced rides that my senses told me were autumnal, that fall had indeed made a visit this year. Part of that feeling comes from the visual cues, such as golden and red leaves falling off trees, persimmon trees heavy with fruit, surfaces littered with acorns and buckeyes being picked over by woodpeckers, deer, and squirrels. The weather, overcast and cool with a moistness indicating rain, is another clue. But for me, a lot of the fall experience is olfactory: fall has its smells, and those as much as anything have told me that fall is here. The damp, earthy smell of wet leaves decomposing, the sweet smell of the remnants of the apple crop being converted to alcohol by the forces of nature, the odors of fermenting grapes being coaxed into wine, the smell of wood fires lingering in the cool air all tell me that this is autumn.
Thinking of the smells of autumn has made me a bit homesick for the southwestern high country where I used to live. At times like this I miss waking up in the morning, walking out into frosty air, the surrounding hills golden with aspens still clinging to their leaves, the sweet odor of juniper smoke mixing with smell of the pepper harvest being roasted in propane fired roasters. That would be a fine day to start off with a plate of eggs smothered in freshly roasted green chili’s and sopped up with some fresh corn tortillas, all fueling a long ride along the rim, and a return to a lunch of steaming hot posole washed down with cold beer. Geez, I need to get back for a visit one of these years.
