Things on my mind. George Drapeau's Weblog

In the last few months, there have been a couple of stories in the news related to business ethics that got me wondering if Sun is behaving ethically. One story has involved the apparently widespread practice of backdating stock optinos. The other is the recent HP scandal involving them hiring people to get phone records of private citizens under false pretenses. This HP thing is getting nastier the more I learn about its details. Not to defend HP, but I could easily believe that HP is not unique here. Still, it's bad business ethics, and I suspect HP will be penalized for this incident somehow, whether by the SEC or the market.

But on the stock options backdating issue, I saw some nice news about Sun. I had been watching the news to see if Sun has ever been mentioned as one of the companies that practiced backdating, and hadn't seen anything. Then I saw this news story today, entitled Sun Microsystems Shines With Stock Options Disclosure. It pretty much says that Sun has been completely above board about how it handles options pricing. The quote at the end of the article says it all: any additional disclosure — particularly from a company that hasn’t been caught — is welcome and is certainly worthy of a rare footnoted.org gold star.

My belief (and hope) is that, over the long run, doing the right thing gets rewarded. I feel pretty good working for a company that doesn't have these pesky legal issues to worry about. I don't have to be ashamed of the company for which I work, and in my book, that's a pretty big deal.

I promised myself that I'd try to avoid writing about things in this blog unrelated to technology, management, teamwork, or my job and its experiences. But something is about to happen that has got me so excited, I just gotta share it here.

It's Television.

Call me pathetic, but I love a good TV show, and Aaron Sorkin's new TV show is set to premiere next Monday (the 18th, 10PM, NBC). I think that Aaron Sorkin's writing (if you don't know who Aaron Sorkin is, you might know some of his work: The West Wing, Sports Night, The American President, A Few Good Men) is some of the best writing that television has ever had.

Anyway, Sorkin's new show, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip", premieres on Monday night. I think it's going to be a treat, and in reminiscing about some of Sorkin's previous stuff I came across a question that I'm going to have fun thinking about during long runs and my commute to and from work.

The question is this: who is the greatest Aaron Sorkin character?

I'm having a tough time with this one because I think there are a bunch of great Sorkin characters, whether regular characters or recurring guest characters (Lord John Marbury for one, Ted McGinley's "Gordon" character from "Sports Night" for another).

Man, it's tough. I don't think I can pick just one. But if I could pick a couple of Sorkin's best characters, I might pick from amongst these:

• Dan Rydell, Sports Night (Josh Charles, actor)
• Dana Whitaker, Sports Night (Felicity Huffman)
• Josh Lyman, TWW (Bradley Whitford)
• Jeremy Goodwin, SN (Joshua Malina; his character Will Bailey started out well until Sorkin left the show, then the Bailey character just got ugly)

So, what do you think are Sorkin's best characters? I'm not sure what my *favorite* characters are, but the ones I named here are some of his best, I think.

P.S.

...and I'm having trouble deciding who's the better patriarch: Leo McGarry or Isaac Jaffe (SN, Robert Guillaume). Whaddya think?

There's a nice editorial about Sun on infoworld.com that talks about how and why Sun is gaining market share in the server space and not having to do it with Linux.

I just thought I'd share. I'm all about the sharing. Plus, it's nice to see positive press about Sun after a long run of not-so-great press.