Have Politics Always Been This Poor?

News broke late last week about FOX News chair Roger Ailes' joke about Barack Obama. As far as I'm concerned, it was a pretty tasteless joke, given that Republicans can easily pass it off as a 'Bush is dumb' joke while skipping over the subconscious connection it makes between Obama and Bin Laden. The real crime in that joke isn't that it was made, but that it was made into a microphone, and thus can easily be played by every media outlet, nevermind YouTube and other emerging media sources. These kinds of comments are made every day within groups of friends. A similar situation occurred at USC last week. Anyway, given the source of the joke, I wouldn't make a big deal out of it. But apparently the Dems think it is a big deal, and decided to throw a hissy fit and cancel a debate in Nevada that would have been hosted by FOX News. As much as I despise this current administration and tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the Democrats, I have to call out the Democrats for hypocrisy. Remember John Kerry's poorly timed joke? I might even consider Kerry's to be worse than Ailes', simply because Kerry had to know that his comment was going to be all over the news. Anyway, Republicans and Democrats are responding to Ailes' comment in exactly the same way as the other did to Kerry's comment. It's completely bogus politics, and both parties come off looking poor.

What I'm wondering is this: Have politics always been played in such a way, or has this extreme been reached due to years of the Bush Administration (and Republicans toeing the party line) successfully employing such tactics?

NFL Free Agency

Did I mention this blog was going to contain sports commentary as well? Well, that should come as no surprise.

The first week of NFL free agency is probably the best week of the NFL off-season. The NFL Draft is a close second, but it doesn't quite match up to free agency in two ways:

1. Most of the players taken in the draft are unknown to casual fans, whereas free agency is dominated by marquee players trying to cash in on their most recent season. It's much easier to get excited about players you know.
2. The draft adds to every team, while free agency can both add players to and take players from teams.

The second part is what can make following free agency fun. As a Seahawks fan, I took plenty of pleasure in the Thomas Jones story and the Lance Briggs story, both of which broke today. Oh baby. I just love watching those Bears fall apart. I watched the Bears play at least five times last season, and from what I saw (and read) they got rid of the wrong running back. I know Benson is younger, but he simply just doesn't look like as good of a running back, never mind that he's been injury prone all through his NFL career. Also, trading Jones for a better draft pick this year doesn't make the Bears better in the short term, so that's a plus. The Briggs was a pleasant surprise. Add this in with letting Ron Rivera go and the semi-bungled Lovie Smith contract negotiations and I'm starting to wonder if that organization may not be all that well run.

Has it really been nine months?

Yikes. For me, there's one fundamental problem with keeping a blog: It takes too god-damn long to write an entry. I'm not really a one-paragraph kind of guy. I would guess more than half of my posts have taken over an hour to write. I remember a response to a post I wrote last year that chewed up damn near four hours (and that was right in the middle of my massive crunch to release NE's product, so that time was uber-valuable). Ugh. Anyway, I guess I'll start this up again and see where it goes.

The pressing issue of the day (and actually, of the last half-year or so) is that I'm starting to feel like I'm slipping behind the curve as far as my proficiency with Software Engineering tools goes. Here's what I would feel comfortable listing on my resume at this moment: 3 years programming experience, all with C++, in a Win32/MFC environment. 2 years OpenGL and general 3D graphics experience. That's pretty much it. I could pad the resume a little bit more with 'experience working with XML', 'experience working with multiple threads', etc, but that's about it. So why is this bothering me? Take a look at the current LA software job listings
on Craigslist. There is not a single 'we need a C++ developer' listing there. Everybody wants Java, .Net, web, and database programmers. Damn, whatever happened to C++ client development?

Back in May of 2005, I was asked by my company to become our OpenGL developer and create a graphics engine to display 3D data for our application. I couldn't have been happier with the position. Now... I'm not so sure if I like having OpenGL as a skillset. The grass is always greener, but I can't help thinking that two years of C# and general .NET experience, or JavaScript+PHP+SQL would be more valuable in the coming years.

Of course, that assumes that I'm going to be a programmer in the coming years. This is the real question that I need to answer, and will probably be revisited often in my blog. In my current situation, I can realistically see another two years at my current job. That is basically our window to capitalize on our market opportunity and monetize (we're currently focusing on being acquired). Two years is also (roughly) how much longer I am going to have to wait for my stock options to fully vest. Put those two together and you get early 2009 as the time to move on to something new, regardless of whether my company succeeds or fails. Obviously I will have a bit more freedom if my options make me money, but I'm trying to approach my 2009 road fork without considering my potential stock options. Here's a quick list of potential paths to follow: MBA, risky software startup, risky non-software startup, corporate programmer.

Yeah, that took about an hour to write.