FEEC 2006

Well FEC was now 2 weeks ago so I thought I'd post the photos, get some fire in your belly again!


Hah, and that's just in money paid out for incentives...the bonus money would have been a loottttttttt more than that. I'll have some of that thanks! ;)



Bert Gulick & Co. Bert is the one in the bright red shirt. I guess when you make as much money as he does, you really can wear whatever you want!! (just kidding Bert! :)



Pat Mesiti - Back to talk to us again Pat?? This guy moves fast, but then he is pretty small hehe :)



Watch'a doin' with all those girls Jordan - pick one and settle already! :)



As above, but on the other side of the stage is the rest of the guys -- time to migrate perhaps fellas ? :)



Did I forget to mention that we had a catwalk show while we were there? Well we did, and it was good, and we cheered lots, although I think those models would make better cheerleaders than us!


Craig & Anna Deane. He's thinner than I thought he would be. With Bert being sort of larger-than-life, I thought the more money you make, the bigger man you are - now we know anyone can build this business. Lets do it, and get some of that bonus money!

Corporate Uni?

I was thinking yesterday, about how if you learn a skill and don't use it, you lose (forget) it. I think this has been one of the major benefits that an apprenticeship has over a university degree. For some reason though, many employers still favour university graduates. I understand that completing a university degree demonstrates commitment to a task, but would 3-5 years not be better spent learning skills that we remember?

For hard-diciplines, such as Law and Medecine, this is exactly what happens. You are taught the knowledge that you are required to know in order to legal matters (for example), and much of the course is demonstrating that you have a grasp of the principles and are capable of justifying a point of view legally.

Lets contrast that to a BA or BCom. In my BA, I've touched on everything from Accounting, to Strategising; From Finance to Law. Now a BA is designed to be generic. But people who do a BCom specialize in one field - this is where most of our Accountants, Financial Officers etc come from. In this case, why is there so much time spent on erroneous information they do not directly use? If you wanted your Finance department to have a "reasonable" knowledge of accounting, send them to a seminar at your own expense! That way, they will learn information they use straight away. By learning it at the 1st year uni level, by the time we graduate, we've forgotten it anyway, and have to relearn it at your expense again!

Perhaps university would benefit from being more generic, shorter courses (i.e. just the 1 year), and when you choose a "major" or dicipline (depending on what course you are studying, same thing though), you actually work with a company in that industry who trains you for that field. Civil Engineers would do generic maths and physics in the first year, then spend 3 years honing that theory in the field with people who know what is going to be used and what is not!

One day, I'll start a corporation that does this :)

Ideas Man!

Wow, read enough books that encourage the mind, and you come up with random ideas. At work today, and just thought: it would be cool if when you search for something on google.com , if it had the ability to summarize the page...intelligently, not like MS Word Autosummarize (where the summary is non-sensical). There are just too many words on the internet, and no one has time to sift through them all! An automated tool would fit right into Google's toolbase.

I went to tell Google about this, only to find they don't have a way to submit ideas to them! So I thought I'd blog it instead, maybe someone out there will feel inspired to write some software that does it anyway :)