Today's comic is a bit of insider baseball, so to speak. EA's got a pretty bad track record when it comes to treatment of average joe workers vs. treatment of upper management. But then again, so does every other company on the planet. Specifically though, since they're bleeding cash, they're worth less than normal and therefore at risk for a hostile takeover. As such, the executives created a plan that would ensure that if that happened and the new corporate overlords wanted to shake things up, the executives would be nicely compensated and have their benefits extend for 18 months past termination What got at me was the name: "Key Employee Continuity Plan." Apparently, EA thinks the "key" employees aren't the ones who actually make the games.
     Work is taking me into yet another new and unexplored territory. After fighting my way through COBOL (and as far as I can tell, coming out the victor), I'm on to Java. Not just Java, mind you, J2ME: the Java platform for cell phone application development. I'm looking to implement a campus map for my current employer like the one I helped create for my previous employer. But, since my current employer has a mandatory cell phone system I want to create a small Java app that will allow them to access this without all the overhead and clumsiness of a web page on a mobile browser. So far, I have the application loading, pulling map images from the server, and letting you pan around the map. (The map is 3800x1900, your average cell phone screen is about 240x320.) With any luck I'll get the interface put together for point-to-point directions and maybe even use the GPS module to give users a "you are here" dot.