Alex Polson's Personal Blog

Sunday night, as usual, Sari and I sat down to watch our favorite show, American Dreams. We were especially excited about it this week, not only because of what was going to happen on the show but the fact that "commercial interruption" was to be limited because of a sponsorship from Ford. What I didn't realize was that no commercials came at a cost.\nThroughout the show there were pictures of old Mustangs with the Ford logo near them; on trucks, the back of magazines, on TVs that were on, everywhere. It was actually kind of fun to notice all the blatent advertising that was barfed all over the show. One character even asked, "Hey Jack, have you seen that new Ford Mustang?"\nThe grand conclusion of the show was J.J. Pryer being given a brand new Mustang as his reward for coming home from Vietnam unscathed. Cheesy but he deserved it.\nThe only commercial that was played was when the show was finally over. Ford had apparently been given about five minutes worth of air time to advertise their new Mustang (imagine that). The story was essentially the same as American Dreams. A young man finally comes home from war and as a result gets a new Mustang. It was like watching the American Dreams episode over again but during present day America.\nDon't get me wrong the message that was being communicated was very noble; so noble in fact that I agree with it (support our troops, stay safe, etc) it just amazed me how far a company will go to advertise their product.

There's a great discussion going on over at Slash dot about the demise (yes/no) of the single person software company. What gets me about this is that the U.S. patent office provides very little protection for small software businesses like this.\nIf you happen to write some sort of ground-breaking new software product and you are able to get a patent on it you are responsible for defending that patent if somebody is infringing upon it. In other words the small company is left to hire lawyers (which is an expensive venture) to take on possibly large companies which have (and can afford) their own legal team. Inevitably the original idea will be "stolen" and there really isn't a whole lot a single person can do about it.\nAs a single developer why innovate if your great idea has such a good chance of being stolen eventually?

Java Server Pages are a technology that attempts to separate server-side Java code and HTML markup. Personally I love it but the guy who wrote this article makes some very good points about the flaws in JSP.\n

The people in my family all seem to be gardeners so when I saw this t-shirt I thought it would be worth the investment for them.\n\nYou can find this and many other great shirts at T-Shirt Humor.\nWARNING: Many of them are not for the faint of heart. :)\n

This reads like an episode of ABC's Alias. "Is his mysterious three-wheeled cart a proto automobile? A remote-controlled robot? A rolling Renaissance computer? The quest to rebuild Leonardo's 'impossible machine.'" by Tom Vanderbilt

Okay, so the premeir of the OC wasn't as funny or charming as some previous episodes have been, and Marissa's infamous lounge-chair-into-pool-freak-out was anticlimactic at best, but there's intrigue and hope in Theresa's tricky maneuver on Ryan, who can now skip happily into the life of privilege and frolic among the rich and tan.

Since King George was reelected, I've decided to go ostrich for awhile and listen to happy music, watch happy movies (okay, Saved was only kind of happy, but really good, and Eternal Sunshine was sweet and happy and good too) and eat happy food--potato skins, salmon, apple crisp. Happy Monday.

You'll have to excuse the number of times that I've posted the last couple of days. I've been wanting to do this for a while but just haven't made the time. With any luck it will slow down in a couple more days.

I just found out today that the internship that I've been doing since July at Attachmate in Bellingham has been extended through the end of the year. This news is definitely a relief as I thought I might be out of a job for a month or more while finishing my degree.

Hopefully this will make the transition from intern to full-time employee a little less stressful. With any luck I'll even get one of the full-time jobs I applied for at Attachmate in Bellevue. It would definitely be nice not to have to start at yet another company.

Come on! You knew this was coming....

According to Tom Pain Kerry actually won the election. Somebody file a lawsuit! Isn't that the new American way?

I found this interesting graphic that was generated from the election results based on county. As usual the democratic color is blue and the republican color is red. Each county is mixed with a percentage of each color to give you an idea of how spread the vote was. I didn't explain it very well but once you see it you'll understand what I mean.