FlishFun.com

A follow-up to this article:

Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Number 1 in the Hood, G…

It now seems that after shelling out $2,000,000 to the city of Boston, the president of Cartoon Network is submitting his resignation over this marketing stunt gone bad.

The head of Cartoon Network resigned Friday after the network’s guerilla marketing scheme for one of its shows went bad last week and led to a bomb scare in Boston - a fiasco that cost its parent company $2 million.

In a letter to employees, Jim Samples, the general manager and executive vice president of the network, wrote: “I deeply regret the negative publicity and expense caused to our company as a result of this campaign. As general manager of Cartoon Network, I feel compelled to step down, effective immediately, in recognition of the gravity of the situation that occurred under my watch.”

[...]

Samples had been with Atlanta-based Cartoon Network for 13 years.

Cartoon Network boss quits over bomb scare @ Cnn.com

Can you believe this guy has to step down after a career of 13 years? A career that saw Cartoon Network and Adult Swim become forces to reckon with… it’s amazing.

Good luck, and Godspeed Mr. Samples… the sane people of the world are behind you.

I saw this on Slashdot and thought I’d spread the word… it seems just by using a BitTorrent client, the Media Companies have decided you’re guilty of something. Check it out below:

“For my investigation, I wrote a very simple BitTorrent client. My client sent a request to the tracker, and generally acted like a normal Bittorrent client up to sharing files. The client refused to accept downloads of, or upload copyrighted content. It obeyed the law… With just this, completely legal, BitTorrent client, I was able to get notices from BayTSP. To put this in to perspective, if BayTSP were trying to bust me for doing drugs, it’d be like getting arrested because I was hanging out with some dealers, but they never saw me using, buying, or selling any drugs.”

Full Article: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Imagine, if you will, that you worked in a company without an IT staff… and the people who help you when you’re having issue have to drive an hour or so to get to you. Ouch, right? Now what if you have a few power outages/surges right in a row and no one at your place of business had bought a UPS for any PC? Add in the fact that suddenly after two of these outages a PC that handles important orders goes down (BSOD’s) and that no management is there that day (vacation) and you have yourself a problem, right?

Well, this situation happened to Jess just days ago. Now, as you all know, I’m in IT, so the first thing she thought to do is call me. She told me the BSOD, and we determined that there was a 99% chance it was a memory error. She then talks to the lady who’s having the issue and they agree they’d like me to come down and check it. Now, I’m a nice guy, so I use my lunch break to come test their system. I burn a copy of MemTest86+ and I go down there. Just seconds into the first test the system starts kicking out errors left and right, beautiful. She had two sticks of RAM in there so I take one out, run the full test, it’s good… I then swap it into the other mem slot to make sure it’s not the Mother Board… nope, still fine. I run one last test with the “bad” stick and it starts tossing errors. Great, she blew a stick of RAM.

I explain the results, tell her she needs to buy another, give her advice, etc. She’s happy, she can work, everyone’s happy. Wonderful. Fast forward to yesterday… the management is back and they’ve decided that it’s impossible for a power outage/surge to blow out RAM… I’m obviously trying to screw them over! One of the big wigs there decides that she will test the memory herself by putting it in a system and booting Windows a few times. Awesome test! I have no idea what they think I was trying to do:

Step 1. Lie about RAM.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!!

Seriously… there’s just no pleasing some people!

So, it seems I found work (temporarily) as a “Programmer/Analyst”… which is odd, as I don’t code. At all. I know pretty much just HTML and BASIC, that’s it. So why are they paying me? Well, I think they were convinced to hire me on by my old bosses.

It seems my old manager and the current president of what is left of my old job are bestest friends with one of the owners at a company here in town. They were looking for some VB .Net and SQL coders. From what I can tell, my bosses went to lunch with the owner, and told him that he needs to hire me.

That day I got an interview, so I went out with my resume to find out what they needed (I had no idea at the time). I sat down with the owner who told me about the company and what they do… the standard stuff. He also mentioned that they’re looking for coders, which I told him I wasn’t. Then he got his IT Manager to come talk with me. He sat down, looked at my resume and asked me about my experience with coding. I told him I had no real coding experience. He sat for a minute, then asked me if I could write If / Then Statements… and I said I could. Well, that was all he needed to hear. He told me all coding is simple and if you know things like If / Then and what a Variable is, you can code in any language. He then pulled out an already prepared job offer that had my old salary on it and told me they were offering me the job. He said not to worry, I could handle it… no real coding.

Cut to Monday… I show up and am told my title is “Programmer/Analyst”, and he sends over another coder to show me around. After our little tour, he starts talking about all the programs he has made in VB6 and in .Net, etc. He then tells me I can feel free to convert all of the VB6 proggys to .Net, etc. I’m then told to install VB6, VB .Net 2003 and VB .Net 2005. I was in shock… I told the Owner and the Manager that I have no experience in coding… why am I here, and why am I being told to code??

I schedule a meeting with the IT Manager and once again explain I’m not a coder and tell him he’d be better off hiring someone else for this project (it’s a 3 month long project, hence it’s a temp job). He looks at me and tells me I’ll be fine, etc etc. For some reason they all want me here to do a job I keep telling them I can’t do. Don’t get me wrong… I’d love to learn how to code, but they’re paying me to help the team make a new backend software with reports to replace what they currently use. Yeah… can’t really do that.

Oh well… I guess if they don’t want to listen, I can’t make them listen. I’m convinced (since I’ve heard from both of my old bosses) that I’m only here because they’re probably worried they’ll be upsetting my old bosses if they let me go. I guess I’ll just let them continue to pay me until they finally listen to me. :s