So, I’m a software engineer. I work for a large-ish company that is a major player in the digital TV arena, and I think I’m considered pretty good at my job. I think I’m paid slightly shy of average for a developer of my age and experience, but I like my job and my co-workers enough to let that slide. I have a reasonably good income and no dependants, and if I wasn’t paying out a staggeringly huge amount in debt repayments each month, I’d be very comfortable (rather than just pretty comfortable.)
So far, so average. So can someone tell me how the hell I earn more than Wil fucking Wheaton? This guy was in Star Trek for crying out loud! And on top of that (or, depending on your opinion of Wes, despite it,) he’s grown into one of the best, most natural writers of the blogging generation. Oh, and he’s a great spokesman for unashamed geeks everywhere too; I mean, did you hear his PAX keynote?
Honestly, it’s a sign of his talent that it’s been years since I’ve thought of him as “that kid who played the annoying one in TNG.”
So how come he writes entertaining, uplifting, even self-validating blog posts every day1, produces books that are truly a joy to read, is capable of whipping a conference full of high income geeks into a frenzy, and yet is still worried about how to provide for his kids, while I show up to an office every day, write code designed to make rich people richer, which may or may not ever be released, and somehow earn enough that my biggest worry is whether I can afford that new monitor this month without curtailing my pizza habit?
Is that fair?
Hell no. So here’s my plan. I bought “Just a Geek” ages ago, but have lost my copy somewhere along the way. I borrowed “Dancing Barefoot” once, and to my shame have neither bought nor Read “Happiest Days of Our Lives” yet. So I’m going to buy all three of them. This month. I’m not doing this as a charity thing; I genuinely love his writing, and want to own his books; I’ve just not got around to to buying them. So I want the books, I’m sure he’d like the money. It’s a win/win situation.
Because I know he’d hate the thought of people buying his writing out of charity, I’m not going to suggest everyone goes out and does the same, but I will point you all at his blog. Add it to your blog-roll (if you haven’t already.) Read it for a while. I’m pretty sure that, if you’re a geek or a gamer or just love good writing, you’ll end up buying his books for reasons he won’t hate.
Go. Now. Read.
- I smile to myself, genuinely cheered, when he writes about his kids—who I’ve obviously never met—getting into roleplaying, or Monty Python, or the right computer games, or any of the other things I love. [↩]
This hasn’t had much news coverage here, but the Georgian government is in the process of violently cracking down on anti-government protests. The president, Mikhail Saakashvili, has declared a state of emergency and issued a declaration banning demonstrations and protests of all kinds. Riot police have been deployed and used tear-gas, water cannons and rubber bullets to disperse demonstrations, leaving at least a hundred hospitalised.
The independent TV station, Imedi, broadcast images of the crackdown, prompting riot police to storm the building and take the channel off the air. The station’s final minutes are available on YouTube, although the clip is (obviously) in Georgian.
My employer has just launched the open beta of a new website called locatetv. It’s not something I’ve worked on, but I sit next to (and regularly drink with) some of the guys that do. I think it’s a pretty cool site, and encourage anyone with an interesting TV to check it out.
The general idea is that you type in the name of a TV-Show (either the series name, or a specific episode title,) movie or cast member, and the site searches TV listings local to you and shows you a list of the next few times you’ll be able to see what you searched for on TV. That’s pretty cool in itself; it’s a bit more targeted than the numerous TV-guide style websites out there, and the site itself is lightweight and fast to use, so it’s a lot less painful than (say) the Radio Times site.
The really neat feature, though, is the embeds. Designed pretty much specifically for bloggers these allow you to embed a small applet in your own site that links to a specific show or movie or actor. That means that, for example, if I want to talk about a specific episode of Heroes (let’s say Godsend), I can stick this on the site:
That box is generated every time this page is viewed, so it always has up to date (and local to the reader) schedule information in it. In a TV themed blog that would be an extremely useful tool. It means that users who didn’t watch a show, but have their interest piqued by the post find out automatically when they can next catch it (rather than just being told when it was on — maybe in another country,) which in turn increases the chances that they’ll be back to comment on the post, and be more likely to revisit that blog in future since it provides useful information. It makes the reader’s life easier, and generates more traffic and comments for the blog: Everyone’s a winner.
Of course, I don’t often blog about TV, so it’s probably not the most useful tool in the world to me, but there are a lot of sites that would really benefit from this sort of thing and I’d love to see it succeed.