Charlie O'Donnell Charlie O'Donnell

More Block Island Highlights


26030025, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Last Saturday, we found a guy renting vintage Mustangs... I made a package deal with him to rent bikes for a few hours and then to come back and get the car. It was a lot of fun, and it makes me really anxious to get my new car. The Mustang is a beautiful car, but it definitely drove like a 38 year old car... no power steerings, drum breaks, etc. Still, it was a blast.

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Venture Capital & Technology Charlie O'Donnell Venture Capital & Technology Charlie O'Donnell

Umair becomes the competition

Ugh...  I'll just start cleaning up my spot in reception now and get that Indeed job search up and running.  I concede.

No, but seriously...    Someone should hire this guy.

Link: Bubblegeneration - Evil Corporations Only.

"Hi everyone, just a quick note to let you know those of you I don't know personally that I've decided against continuing towards a PhD and am looking for a new full-time position.

Ideally, I'm thinking an Associate spot at a fund, or a strategy role in www/media/tech, but I'm open to interesting ideas."

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My 50 Favorite Movies Charlie O'Donnell My 50 Favorite Movies Charlie O'Donnell

My 50 Favorite Movies -- The Hudsucker Proxy

The Hudsucker ProxySorry for the late movie again... another busy week.

"When is a sidewalk fully dressed? When its Waring Hudsucker!"

"..when the president, chairman of the board and owner of 87% of the company stock drops 44 floors... ...then the company too has a problem. "


When I was a senior at Fordham, I worked with my friend MaryAnn and a Jesuit scholastic, Andrew Wawrzyn, to come up with a spiritual retreat for business students. I was on the spiritual retreat team that year, and very few of the business majors were taking advantage of the program. However, there was certainly a need for a little "refill" after recruiting was done in the fall. Many of our classmates complained that they found recruiting--figuring out who they needed to be to get hired--emotionally and spiritually draining. Therefore we targeted a weekend program specificially to them, but modeled on the Emmaus retreat format.

It turned out to be a great program. Our activities generated a lot of great reflection and conversation. However, we didn't want to make it too intense, so we needed something to do at the end of the overnight to relax, but something that tied into the theme.

We watched the Hudsucker Proxy.

The Hudsucker Proxy is a movie with a nice little message about dreams, perseverence and the pitfalls of greed in business. Tim Robbins is a bright eyed young man with a big idea (you know, for kids) and a lot of ambition. He stumbles into a scheme led by a perfectly cast (sure, sure) Paul Newman that puts him right at the top of a pubic company. The movie is very styled... very 50's, boomtown and big... hats, rotating job boards, fast talkers and a little bit of innocence. Jennifer Jason Leigh is entertaining as the undercover reporter trying to get the scoop on why an imbicile is now running a company.

In the end, Robbins gets the best of them all by turning his big idea into a big success, but not without learning what happens when you let money and greed go to your head. Its a charming story with a solid cast, amusing charactors and a nice pace.

The Hudsucker Proxy



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Venture Capital & Technology Charlie O'Donnell Venture Capital & Technology Charlie O'Donnell

Creepy: Google Secure Access Installer

Remember when your mom told you not to take candy from strangers?  She knew that candy was what strangers used to lure kids into their cars and drive away with them... and she also knew how our stupid candy seeking minds worked.  We'd do anything for candy.  We didn't care about the consequences.

Well, security is the new stranger candy. 

Jack everything I see and do on the net in exchange for "security."  No thanks. 

You can keep your Snickers Bar, Google.

Link: Google Secure Access Installer.

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Charlie O'Donnell Charlie O'Donnell

Scoring Pass


Scoring Pass, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Manning to Barber...6 pts.

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Charlie O'Donnell Charlie O'Donnell

Breakfast and a Brand New Sunny Day


Photo 631, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Free breakfast at the 1661 Inn and a surprise sunny day. The weather forecast put us right in the path of Ophelia, so we were excited to see blue skies and sunshine. It was perfect.

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Charlie O'Donnell Charlie O'Donnell

"He's kind of bottom heavy."

Obviously, Adrianna is rather discerning about her exotic petting zoo animals. She had a lot of commentary on the emu.

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Charlie O'Donnell Charlie O'Donnell

Our hilarious emu discussion

Ok, so there are three of these emu & other animal videos. Frankly, I found the off camera discussion to be pretty funny. If you didn't find the first one to be amusing, you probably won't be amused by the next two either... just a warning. If I see a big drop in my Feedburner number, you might read about an emu disappearence on Block Island.

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Charlie O'Donnell Charlie O'Donnell

Emu, Adrianna, and Charlie on Block Island


Photo 608, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Somehow, we got him to look at the camera. By the way, Adrianna is the one in the middle, if you weren't sure. I'm the bald guy.

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Charlie O'Donnell Charlie O'Donnell

It rained on Friday on Block Island...


Photo 609, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Saturday was much better, but as you can see, I'm not particularly thrilled about the weather situation upon our arrival.

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Charlie O'Donnell Charlie O'Donnell

Goating to Block Island


Goating to Block Island, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

We're on our way to Block Island, RI...(thanks to Greg, Christie for tagging links and emailing suggestions)... We met this guy Billy on our way...

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Venture Capital & Technology Charlie O'Donnell Venture Capital & Technology Charlie O'Donnell

Corporate E-mail Stupidity

My softball team got caught up in a "reply all" fest over the past week and we kept getting "system administrator" bouncebacks from this guy who worked at Goldman Sachs.  We figured he gave Zog the wrong e-mail or something.

Nope...  we went on vacation and his mailbox was full. 

So, basically, Goldman Sachs limits the mailbox size of this guy who works in Risk Management to something like 75 or 100 MB, and decides that anything above that should get bounced back.  GM used to limit my mailbox size as well.

Why?   To save server space... i.e. money.   

GM did the same thing on our file server.  They'd send out notices to everyone to clean out their folders on the common drives to conserve space.  For e-mail, they taught everyone how to "archive" by putting their old e-mails on their local drives.  Archiving was long and slow.

Up until yesterday, it never occurred to me how UFR (Utterly Fucking Ridiculous) a practice this was.  How is it possible that Google can offer 2+ gigs of storage and Goldman Sachs only gives its employees 100MB? 

First off, let's estimate the costs of e-mail limits.   Let's say that, in GM's case, everyone managing the pension fund spend just twenty minutes every two weeks cleaning out their inbox.  If the average person there makes 75K, which is probably right given that it was a buyside, mostly Post-MBA shop, it works like this.

75k/52weeks/45 hours a week = $32.05 an hour.

$32.05 an hour x 26 weeks x .33 hours a week= $277.78 a person in time lost managing e-mail storage.

$277.78 x 150 people = $41,666 a year in wasted e-mail storage management time.

I think you can buy storage servers cheaper than this, no?   :)

PLUS, what about the other costs?

Like, what if someone e-mails you with a major deal with lots of revenue for your firm and gets a bounceback because your mailbox is full?   Is that what you really want to have happen?

What about important notifications that you miss?

How unprofessional will your firm look when it can't match its server capacity with its storage demands?

There are lots of technologies out there that de-dupe corporate mass e-mails, attachments, etc. and save lots of storage space, if its that much of an issue.  But seriously, its 2005... I make spreadsheets that are 50MB.  Let's stop playing e-mail storage tiddlywinks, suck it up, and buy another server.  Your best people should spend ZERO time worrying about staying under 100MB.

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My 50 Favorite Movies Charlie O'Donnell My 50 Favorite Movies Charlie O'Donnell

My 50 Favorite Movies -- Beverly Hills Cop

Its Wednesday, so you know what that means...    my movie selection two days late.  Sorry.

So last night, I went out with my new Zog Sports softball team.  I signed up as an individual, so now I have a whole new set of people I'm getting to know.  I asked someone what their top five movies would be to take to a desert island.  This is a little bit different than saying favorites.  I love Shawshank, but I couldn't watch it over and over and over again on my desert island.

One selection she had was pure brilliance:  Beverly Hills Cop.  And you know, it doesn't even matter which one.  Frankly, I don't even know which one was which.  There's one with Wallyworld and another with Bridgitte Nielson...  They're all kind of the same.  Same plot.  Crime gets committed.  Eddie Murphy is on vacation or accidently around or follows up a lead from across the country and isn't supposed to be there.    He pokes his nose where he doesn't belong.  The local cops haven't a clue and he's just nosey enough to figure it out.  He laughs a lot, flashes that big smile, and impersonates a lot of wacky charactors to get by underpaid rent a cops or receptionists or hostesses.  Judge Reinhold has a gun fetish... and his partner has an ulcer.  hmm.. did I forget anything?

But, the one thing they have in common...   no matter what time it is, or how many times I've seen them before, I'll stop to watch Beverly Hills Cop if I'm flipping through the channels.  That's what makes a desert island movie.  I seriously think I could wake up every morning on my desert island, watch a little Axel Foley, and not get tired of it.  Its not even that its that entertaining...   its just entertaining enough, simple enough...   Its kind of like the movie equivilent of Livan Hernandez.  The guy goes out and throws seven or eight innings every time and gives up three or four runs.   If you knew you had a pitcher who could throw eight and give up four runs, you'd take that every time.  Same with Beverly Hills Cop.  Solid, but unspectacular entertainment every time. 

Plus, how cool is that theme song?  Go ahead... hum it.  You know how it goes. 

So what's your desert island movie?

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Venture Capital & Technology Charlie O'Donnell Venture Capital & Technology Charlie O'Donnell

Umair looks at Web 2.0 from an economics POV

Link: Bubblegeneration - Evil Corporations Only.

More simply, Web 2.0 is about the shift from network search economies, which realize mild exponential gains - your utility is bounded by the number of things (people, etc) you can find on the network - to network coordination economies, which realize combinatorial gains: your utility is bounded by the number of things (transactions, etc) you can do on the network.

The point is that this shift is combinatorial - each person can do X activities in a combinatorial network, and it's combinations of these activities that make value explode. Contrast with a exponential network, where it's the number of people on a network that create value. That is, a relationship between any two people is 1:1 in an exponential network, but many to many in a combinatorial network. It should be intuitive to you that the former kind of network has more potential for value creation.

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Venture Capital & Technology Charlie O'Donnell Venture Capital & Technology Charlie O'Donnell

IM spam getting more clever

[10:28] [Spambot]: hey wats up
[10:28] Ceo21: hi...   Who am I speaking with?
[10:28] [Spambot]: we met at your place a couple of weeks ago
[10:29] Ceo21: That's a bit vague...   can you be more specific?
[10:29] [Spambot]: sean
[10:30] [Spambot]: mixed blk and wht we had oral sex
[10:30] Ceo21: riiiight...  Yeah,  you have the wrong IM.
[10:30] [Spambot]: just kidding i know
[10:30] [Spambot]: this is amanda
[10:30] [Spambot]: we meet at the club the other night
[10:31] Ceo21: ah... IM spam... nice
[10:32] Ceo21: So what else do you have to say for yourself?
[10:32] [Spambot]: we met at the club
[10:33] Ceo21: I think your IM spam engine needs a little work.
[10:33] [Spambot]: ok srry to bother u

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