With so much hype surrounding airbnb.com I was eager to try em out and see for myself, how easy would it be to ditch hotel uber-expensivness and stay in Boston on a budget with 4 people in my party. The task was simple – coming to Boston on Saturday I needed a place for two nights. I started my search about three weeks before the planned trip dates. Hotel rooms were at least $350 a night, and we needed two of them, which would total $1500 with taxes. Adding train tickets at $49.00 each way (oh, remind me to write another post about Amtrak pricing / service too) would make this one a hell-of-a-tour in this economy with $1900 spent in just 3 days for transportation and lodging.

I also did not know, that if you cancel your reservation no matter how many days/hours prior the arrival date, greedy airbnb.com refunds you everything, except their fees.

Eventually I was able to find a place to stay, which was almost last minute. But after learning about their policy of not refunding the 10% service fee they charge on top of the rental, I doubt I will use em again. With sites like VRBO.COM and Homeaway.COM it’s almost the same properties, except the nice interface and iPhone app.

Anyways, with airbnb.com searches returning apartments from $185 a night, the deal sounded great, but wait until it goes down to business – and see what came out of all this.

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I am lucky I work out with a personal trainer, having Complete Body & Spa as one of my clients. At first, I simply wanted to loose weight. This took 2 years of extreme sweat. While most of the workouts back then I was suffering, things got better with time and I definitely got stronger, built some muscle and lost weight. As time went by, I realized that working out on a regular basis gives you productivity boost, ability “to get through” and this incredible drive for self-development.

Another thing I have noticed was increased concentration and ability to solve problems which I would not even try to take on before. I have never dealt with Linux before, but somehow I started using Linode and got pretty good in installing stuff onto VPS box and tuning it. On my road to easier and more sophisticated frameworks I learned Grails and wrote my first serious project.

My usual routine now is gym 3x a week and cardio every day for 30 minutes. On a good day running outside with your iPod listening to the right podcast track can be quite uplifting.

I will not go in explaining here what should startups do for their employees, but look – we all work seated and rarely move. So making gym classes mandatory for everyone capable in the team is a great idea. Not paying for the gym membership, but forcing people to attend different sorts of classes and checking their attendance!

If I were to run a company, this for sure would be my first executive order.