Where content is king...

I promised something about the current election campaign.
This is something, but only a brief something. I'll have more at a later date I'm sure (probably as pollies from all sides sink to new levels of shamelessness and stupidity).

Anyway, news today is that the debate between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott has been moved forward one hour from Sunday 19:30 to Sunday 18:30.
The reason? Sunday 19:30 is the finale of Masterchef season 2. And no one in their right mind wants to go up against that juggernaut.

Much has been made of the fact that a debate between two people who could potentially lead our country has been upstaged by a TV show, and what this might suggest about our society.
My thoughts were: what idiots in the campaigns didn't look at a TV schedule before agreeing on a date for the debate?!

Given how important TV has been in election campaigns around the world since it's invention 60-odd years ago, and the fact that you want to maximise your audience (thus maximise your opportunity to influence the electorate), you'd pay attention to what might take away from that.

One look at a TV schedule and all this could have been avoided. That's all I'm saying...

Walking, talking and chewing gum...

Disclaimer: this post is going to be (vaguely) about my work.
I say this because, I don't intend for this blog for me to pontificate or bitch and whine about my work life. This isn't an industry-related blog (although if you want to read one of those, my cousin writes an excellent one). Also, unlike many people, I don't have the delusion that the average person finds the minutae of what I do that interesting. Although (as consumers), they tend to like the end result.

But I digress.

I had a pretty disappointing day at work today. The nature of my job is such that each engineer works on many projects at once (anywhere between 15 and 25 generally, in various stages of development). Today, in my weekly meeting with our project management team, I found that 6 of my projects are running late, and moreover, some key points had been missed on some of them.

One could suggest that I have some time-management issues. One would not be the first to do so. But, after some reflection, I think my issue isn't so much with time management, as with multitasking management. The problem I find is, having to do 15 things at once on a multitude of projects, I'm not able to concentrate on one thing at a time long enough to effectively complete the task.

Obviously this is something I need to work on - when I find a good solution I'll let you know.

Bitter and unfulfilling

Just got home from the footy.
I don't know how it happened, but at some time in the last 6 weeks, Carlton has forgotten how to actually play football.

Here are some tips for my Carlton brethren:
a) Go hard at the ball, but also be mindful of where it's going; make sure you are where the ball is going to be
b) Lay tackles
c) Back yourselves to run and carry the football, and run in numbers (watch the St Kilda game from earlier in the year to remind yourselves how to do this)

If I was Brett Ratten, this week I'd put the Aussie Rules balls away, and get the boys playing basketball and rugby. I realise this sounds counter-intuitive, but basketball will help them with skills such as reading the play, and covering their man in defence, and rugby will obviously help with tackling. What Brett actually does remains to be seen, but whatever it is, I hope it works!

Also, it seems we're now in an election campaign. More on that later...