In Good Company

There's not many movies which speak of company politics as well as In Good Company. I was reading about a week ago a Harvard Business Review article written in 1994 about the shift in loyalties away from the employing company. How topics such as downsizing, globalisation, "progress" effect the employee and change the focus from a traditional view of "employment" to "employability". Maybe it sounds old-hat now in 2005 after the dot-com bubble burst but career resilience is as important as ever.

In Good Company is about the old school versus the new school. (Guess who wins). The industry here is advertising. Advertising some might say is a crock to begin with and arguably most of it is. I don't know, a lot of everything about progress and 'old school' thinking is about fear of change. They say people are inherantly creatures of habit and that makes sense. How is a 51 year old man expected to work in a harsh changing environment?

Which leads to people saying things like "it's a young man's industry." Maybe I'm thinking too much of IT.

But if it's a "young man's industry" then why are people living longer with their parents and taking longer to graduate?

I guess it's also an economical thing where the cost of living is increasing. People have the view that when they graduate they need to start off on a high base wage rather that in their parents generation where it was all about getting out in the workforce and getting your foot in the door. (Thank you today's episode of The View)

I've always thought differently to the norm. I mean, aren't we all biologically still the same as our parents. They probably got married in their early 20's and had us in their mid to late 20's. Yet the example we have is Carter Duryea, 27 and divorced.

Don't get me wrong. It's a very fun movie and has a lot to say. Highly recommended :P

Bloglines is down?!

Normally, I just hit the Bloglines web site and I'm already logged in (they must use a cookie which never expires).

Anyway, I tried maybe half an hour ago after coming home and it doesn't work! I can't log in! My username/email address is not recognised.

I depend on Bloglines. Bloglines is my bloodline!

This is one downfall to centralised servers.

The problem is, they have no status page on their web page to tell me what's going on. Also, there's no such thing as an "up to the minute" search on the internet (other than Technorati) so I don't know if other people are having the same problem yet.

GENERAL: South Park character icon

Ann found a link where you can create a South Park character from a Flash application.

It was quite fun to do and I'm a fairly big South Park fan. So now I have a profile icon :P

GENERAL: We're running out of oil... and some facts about plastic bags

One thing that has caused some mental grievance with me lately (defined as: has made me think about the long term future of the world at large) has been the fact that we will run out of oil in the near future. A 99% chance that this will happen in my lifetime.

I guess it was that unfathomable figure I heard that OPEC had increased production of crude oil to an extra half a million barrels a day. Just then I read that the world consumes about 82 million barrels a day.

One thing that Australia has done is put in force a scheme (I think with the threat of laws/fines) to encourage re-usable plastic bags. This has nothing to do with oil but then I thought I'd mention it anyway. As Australia is a relatively small nation in terms of population, it's simpler to put in and trial these types of schemes. It's only really happened in the past year but it became mainstream very fast. I'm sure you'll see more of this globally very shortly.

According to an end of year report, Australia produces 6.9 billion plastic bags, 53% of which are from supermarket outlets. That's 3.657 billion bags from them alone. Last year (annualised rate for 2nd half of year) they achieved a reduction of 26.9%. That's a total saving of 984 million bags a year!

LINKS:
The Age: Out of petrol
Clean Up Australia: Plastic bag facts
The Green Bag Company
EPHC Priority Projects - Plastic Shopping Bags:

Bloc Party - Silent Alarm

I've been listening to Bloc Party's debut album for the past 2 weeks or so in my car.

I can only remember the first song I heard of their's was Helicopter but then this was on the radio. But then on a cruise (literally) I heard the first track Like Eating Glass and it was like I was back in my teenage years having heard something like Massive Attack's Blue Lines for the first time. It's like I knew and could feel that this was an album I would come to love. There was that immediacy but that feeling and urgency to want to get to know this album better to the point where I was singing along to the chorus 'Like drinking poison, like eating glass.'

What struck me was the drumming and tightness of the sounds but then also the lyrics.

Some of the songs like Banquet just grow on you and then there's that build up in Positive Tension... Yeah, you'll know which one I mean when you hear it. It's strange that they'll name a song after the way they construct the song and that also ties in with the context with the song.

This is a real album of the times. It's strange to feel like we're in 2005. It's that sense that we have such a short time to make it big in our lives. Most of us are taught to live suburban lives of comfort. We're here in such a fast life where everything's supposedly been done and thought of and there really was that big tech bubble burst.

A sense of purpose and a sense of skill, a sense of function but a disregard
We will not be the first, we won't
You said you were going to conquer new frontiers,
Go stick your bloody head in the jaws of the beast