Often times, union agreements baffle me, but the ongoing news on the writers’ strike nearly takes the cake.  While David Letterman’s production company has reached an interim agreement to bring writers back to his show, Jay Leno’s production is run by NBC, which has no such agreement in place.

Apparently, Leno is a member of the WGA in addition to whatever union he may be a part of as an on-screen performer.  Apparently in preparing to film his show without the usual writers, he had the audacity to write material for himself rather than just making things up as he goes along, and the WGA is up in arms over this.  If he weren’t a WGA member, would he be shunned as a scab?  Should he just go out there like an idiot rather than writing jokes for himself?  And what constitutes “writing”?  Does it have to be on paper or print?  What if he writes on his hand?  What if he makes something funny up in his head, memorizes and delivers it without ever “writing” it?

The WGA seems to be running in fear from a very simple fact – they are not needed – their members are in a market of skilled workers capable of being paid in a meritocracy.  Sure, there are members who would be paid less under a market-driven system, but this sorts itself out.  With the escalating costs of actors and special effects, talented writers are a small piece of the overall cost and thus good writers should be relatively well paid.  Bad writers (such as those involved in any plot line on “24” that involved Kim Bauer, especially also involving a mountain lion) shouldn’t be propped up by a contract.  They should find new careers.

I  truly hope that the rampant predictions of this strike and the impending actors’ strike leading to new models for TV-like entertainment production, but I am skeptical.  Watching TV is a passive activity, and most of America seems to watch whatever garbage is shoveled their way.  Many people don’t want to find what entertainment may be appealing to them – they are happy to be told what else to watch while snoozing through the glorified coin toss known as “Deal or No Deal”.

Or perhaps New Jersey is the MySpace of states? Any time I go to either MySpace or New Jersey, I find myself uncomfortable, disturbed, and wanting to leave.

Business travel recently had me flying into Newark. As we flew in, I saw the usual complement of ugly shipyards, depressing office buildings, and something new – fuel silos that appeared to have collapsed roofs. The last time I was in New Jersey, I had drove over from Philly, learned what a jughandle is, and then rushed back to PHILLY. And I don’t like Philly very much. But it was better than New Jersey.

Like MySpace’s obscenely noisy “You Must Be Logged-In to do That!” login screen (I swear that the first 20 times I saw this page, I didn’t even see the login box), so many things about both MySpace and NJ give me a visceral reaction of wanting to flee to anywhere else. Both places have so many major, highly-visible issues that I’m not sure how anybody can be proud to be associated with them. I mean, unless you’re Bon Jovi, Kevin Smith, or a stock-option millionaire, there’s not much to be proud of.

New Jersey left me with another great impression this last trip, a 45 minute wait after our plane left the gate before we took off. For some reason, Newark Liberty’s runway design (possibly designed by a UGA “graduate”) required us to wait in line to taxi across an active runway (how is this NOT a horrible idea?). It definitely helps me appreciate Atlanta’s runway design where, in a stroke of common sense, our FIVE runways all run parallel, and thus don’t intersect, and all have sensible means of using them that don’t involve the airline equivalent of walking across an interstate (or perhaps we just have air traffic controllers that don’t suck).

Sure it’s almost an impossibility, but wouldn’t it be entertaining? Both Gravel and Paul seem to have made waves in their respective debates.

Blog wisdom suggests that each one of them was the divergent, inspirational voice in their debate that didn’t simply toe the party line and avoid anything potentially offensive.

If these two candidates faced off in the general election, I imagine we’d see a true questioning of party lines on a national level.  Both trend toward social liberalism and diverge on fiscal policy.  Who knows where the votes would actually come down if fiscal and social conservatism were separated?

I hope that social media pressure and rising poll numbers can keep these guys in the debates, and prevent us from choosing among marginally different candidates.  Romney/Guiliani/McCain vs. Clinton/Obama/Edwards is nothing but US politics as usual.

It’s not a threat, but it’s probably a safe assumption. At least if we work togther, worked together, if you came in for a job interview, or if you interviewed me for a job, if we knew each other in college, if I met you at a conference or community activity, if you’re the new or old boss or employee of someone I worked with, if you’re a sibling, relative, or friend of any of these people, or maybe just if you live on this planet.

A while back, someone I know was shocked when a group of people started discussing several posts from their blog. Especially since that blog had been deleted a while ago, but was still showing up in web caches. They were a good sport about it, even while being ribbed about their personal elaborations on love and life. It was nothing personal – I think we’ve chatted about blog posts of virtually everyone in our office who has a blog at one time or another – this one just happened to be treated more like a diary than a blog.

I don’t read too many blogs of personal acquaintances with any regularity, but I regularly stumble upon the personal blog of people I know, some more often than others. It’s compelling to catch up on what they’re doing, what they’re interested in, and what they’re thinking. Most folks realize that blogged thoughts are not private thoughts. When discussing business and personal matters on my blog, I operate on the assumption that the person I’d least want to read the post is going to read it. That doesn’t mean we all have to blog boring, it just means to blog consciously, being intentional about the thoughts and details we share.

Watching the TV show “Heroes” on my Wii. Yes, I got a Nintendo Wii, yes, it is fairly cool, but one shortcoming has been that the Flash player embedded in the Opera browser isn’t current enough to work with the ABC and NBC “view shows online” features of their web sites.

 
Searching for workarounds today, I discovered a number of web sites that will stream TV shows using an earlier version of Flash. I haven’t watched “Heroes”, because a) the previews reminded me too much of X-Men (which I lie, but don’t want to watch a rip-off), and b) I expected it to be cancelled before it got off the ground. I figured this would be a good candidate to try out streaming video to my big screen on the Wii.

 
It’s far from perfect, but still intriguing. The sites that are out there aren’t in the right resolution to fill the screen, and the Wii’s zoom settings don’t fit either. The resolution is garbage compared to an HD feed. The opera browser has a massive toolbar at the bottom (the white blur in the picture). With things like this, the new Apple TV product, and my new Treo’s ability to stream video over the wireless network, it’s clear that the internet is beginning to make its way into the living room.

 
Orb and Slingbox are coming at this from the other direction, bringing your TV to wherever you are, but this requires planning in advance WHAT you’ll want to watch. For a show like “Heroes” that I dismissed out of hand, these solutions don’t help. I fully expect these sites to be shut down in whack-a-mole fashion. I wouldn’t object to watching the ad-supported versions on the network sites, but until that’s possible, this approach isn’t so bad either.

 

I’m willing to move for the right price. Maybe you are too?

Zillow launched a free service where you can list a price that would “make” you move. In other words, what’s a price for your house that you couldn’t turn down? Here’s mine. I don’t expect an offer at that price, but if I did….

There’s much ado about Google Finance, which was launched yesterday. They’ve done the typical Google thing by adding some nice AJAX-ish UI integration (actually done in Flash).

I submit to you that an under-appreciated feature is the simple “Search” box. Yahoo Finance, CNN Money, and pretty much every other finance site out there have the obnoxious “Get Quotes” search box, which expects ticker symbols, and a “Symbol Lookup” link if you don’t know the symbol.

Google turns this on its head, with a single lookup box, and it’s amazingly accurate. Requiring 2 separate search approaches was always obtuse and unnecessary, yet it took Google to fix something that’s been broken on the web for a decade.

I wonder what other sacred cows are ripe for hamburger meat. Much like Seth Godin’s mention of the tradition of black lens caps being dethroned by a transparent lens cap with a helpful message, it’s amazing how many things could be improved by considering if there’s any good reason for the tradition.

We had a great opportunity to attend Georgia Tech’s Spring career fair today. We were looking to fill several full-time positions as well as Summer and Fall co-op students. (If you think you’re qualified and interested, drop me a comment.)

Overall, we received 54 resumes over the course of the day. As we finished speaking to each person, we’d decide whether or not we should pursue them further, creating 2 piles of resumes.

33 resumes made the “good” pile, 21 made the “not so good” pile.

The interesting part came in a lull at the end of the day – we started looking at the resumes we received that were printed on premium paper, not just standard printer paper. Of the 13 “premium” resumes, 11 of them made the “good” pile. Both of the other two weren’t printed to align the watermark with the direction of the printing. 6 of the 11 “good” resumes were properly aligned.

The point is not that I’m some sort of resume snob. The interesting point is the correlation between quality candidates and the attention they put into their job search. Standard resume paper doesn’t indicate a bad candidate, but good paper seems to point strongly to a good candidate.

Of course since it’s possible that more bad candidates will start using good paper, we’ll stick with actually evaluating their skills, personality, and experience. I will keep monitoring this trend at future career fairs.

Good times at work – our development manager has shifted into a Chief Architect role, and I’m now the Development Manager. I still get to keep my hands in the code, but I also get the privilege of leading a fine team of developers in developing some darn cool software. One main push will be on continued improvement of our code quality and decreasing the frequency of production problems. We’ll also look for ways to improve our development process. I’ll still have thoughts to share on software development, but will also have musings on the development process. I’m quite excited.

It is a tremendous blessing to find myself in this place in my career, attaining a goal I’ve been pursuing for some time, and looking to set new goals. I can look at each career move and each non-move in my career and point to how it served a distinct purpose in bringing me to this point. From time to time, I had opportunities to leave this current job, but opted not to for a variety of reasons. Had I left, it seems unlikely I’d have been promoted to such a role so soon. With the importance of faith in my life, I give the credit to God, as I see the amazing plan of each career move up to this point playing a key role in preparing me for this time. Now I look to glorify Him by conducting my job with excellence and integrity. The boss on my desk calendar has pointy hair growing out on each side of his head. Is that a prerequisite I need to fulfill now?