Lord Andrei's Blog

I read a stunningly good description of the entire MoveOn.org affair going on. If you haven’t hears about this the issue is quite simple… sort of.

MoveOn.org financed to air a commercial to support anti-Bush opinions during one of the highest rated programs of the year. The commercials are very expensive and viewed by a huge % of americans. The only problem is that the airing network has opted not to air these commercials.

Now, as I said there is an excellent description of the situation by wicked_wish I would hazard that before you read that post, or my comments that you understand that the post explains (and entirely to my agreement) that the network’s choice is not censorship. They are fully justified in what they did.

Now, wicked_wish agrees with most people that this is none-the-less a really bad thing. She feels they should have aired the commercial. I say most people, because I present the argument that CBS may have made the right decision. (Thus the flamebait)

My response behind the cut is a cross posting from my comment in her journal agreeing with her opinion but suggestion why it may have been better that CBS did make the decision that they did.

Here’s my opinion

I came to the realization that Womyn is a misspelling.

I came to this conclusion not because it opts to remove the ‘a/e‘ from man/men to make it less tied to the gender. My issue is the choice to use ‘y.’ It would seem if one is trying to sever all connections to the y chromosome. Than the proper spelling for the double x endowed would be:

womxn.

Another message from the coalition for the equality and partnership of the genders.

This weekend I made a tool to help me monitor some stuff I do at work. This is my first post about it. I have to be fairly vague because at this point I only have a verbal release from my manager that the company doesn’t have interest in it.

The problem with being a full-time engineer for a corporation is that they effectively own any code you write. This is a great way to gauge not only your value to the company, but the state of the company itself.

In 2001 I was working in my spare time on a Football Pool management system. I addressed my (now previous) company’s (then) President to release the code to me. He said he was unable to do that because the company needed to explore any possible revenue streams. At the time I didn’t know that this was code for, “Well, as we don’t have any revenue streams at the moment, a piece of commercial software would be nice.”

I promptly ceased all work on the code and have since thrown out the work I did. A few months later the president left the company, then the company laid off 70% of the staff (myself included)

So, I have spoken to my manager who seemed to realize that my ‘project’ while useful to my work in the office, is not related to the revenue interests of the company. Further, I have spoken to HR who referred me to legal. Legal said that I need to simply append my invention agreement with the necessary information. I will then make sure that the document I have on file includes this new information releasing my personal inventions.

Once that is done… Then I can talk about my little project which shouldn’t be worth this much trouble.

Everyday, you try to be at peace with yourself. At times, it is easy and sometimes, it isn’t! Today, Andrei, your efforts could be rewarded faster than you had anticipated. At work but also in your private life you will be glad that your efforts are finally going to pay off. Your emotions will be galvanized by the day’s events. Today, you will just feel radiant!

I have some wishful thought for what this means… We’ll see how this plays out.