In the recent CBS News article titled U.S. Working To Sabotage Iran Nuke Program, the author notes the following:

Sources familiar with the U.S. effort against Iran tell CBS News that U.S. intelligence agencies have run several programs in recent years, employing different techniques, including modifying components in hard-to-detect ways and making subtle changes to technical documents and drawings, rendering them useless.

as well as:

It’s impossible to say the extent to which Iran has discovered any industrial espionage. Any technical problems that Iran experiences in its program, some of which were the result of its own speed-up effort, Iran may attribute to foreign espionage.

Well, I guess it’s a good thing that Iranian Intelligence personnel don’t read CBS News or else, gosh, I guess they’d know what’s up. I am somewhat dumbfounded by the strange sense of — for lack of a better term — “observer disconnect” represented here, when in fact the observer is not disconnected. Does anyone else share my bewilderment at the paradox of an American news source saying point blank “America is sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program, but Iran doesn’t really know that yet.”?? It’s things like this that make me say, “dude, wtf?”

After giving it some thought I believe I would be misreading the video resume publicity success to think that I should start some business akin to a service aimed at helping people create better video resumes of their own. No, no, no. I believe said success is based on other things, besides fortunate timing, like apparently I did a decent job at acting on film. Evidently I have decent skills at creating a video that people find attractive. A movie star? Hardly. But, hey, maybe it would be fun and worthwhile to do some film acting on the side while I build my software empire. Mom has been suggesting for years that I should do it, and Mom has an uncanny track record for being right. Perhaps I should do commercial shoots that pay real, actual, non-Monopoly money… if anyone has any information (read: tips, advice, thumbs up, thumbs down) that would assist me in looking further into being America’s next top probably-not-quite-top model, please leave comments or send me an email.

…for every time my resume video was viewed, I’d be a millionaire! Okay, maybe not. But I do find a certain amount of comedy in how many people seem interested in it — simply because I never intended for the public to find it. I get a couple messages a week from people all over the world interested in posting it on their blog or featuring it on a website. Here’s an example of a very nice fellow from Australia who kindly asked to feature it on his site the other day. You would think that my entrepreneurial alarms would be going off, telling me to take this minor success and turn it into cashflow. I wonder what the success here is really attributed to.

The conversation was about pizza. It was a couple weeks ago that I was talking with my Grandpa Marty on the phone, and asking him if the pizza my parents brought to him at the hospital had pepperoni on it. After a long pause it was apparent to me that one of the most intelligent people I’ve known did not understand the word “pepperoni”. It was sobering. And it was at that point I knew this would likely be my last conversation with him. The lymphoma that he had miraculously beaten into remission so many times before had finally—— I told him how much I loved him… and said goodbye. It is a very strange and unique set of feelings when you say goodbye to someone, knowing the likelihood that it will be the last time—— he turned ninety-two on April 18th, the day before I turned thirty. I should only be so fortunate as to live to see myself in the mirror at ninety-two, and live a life as full and wonderful and upstanding and altruistic as his. He was a role model through and though. I’ll never forget how at age eighty-six he wanted to learn how to use a computer, so he purchased an old PC and taught himself how to use it from the ground up, starting with the MS-DOS command prompt. I’ve never known a person at that age to be so mentally sharp, and curious, as to pick up something so complex and difficult and foreign with such a determination and a want to understand it. That was just the man he was: curious, intelligent, loving, honest, kind, altruistic, peaceful, and humble. Grandpa Marty passed away yesterday morning, May 5th, 2007. God rest his soul. I love you, Grandpa.

Evidently video resumes are suddenly all the rage in the press, and they keep finding the one I posted last year and calling me for interviews. No complaints here. Francesca Di Meglio, a reporter for BusinessWeek magazine, is the latest to call and was even kind enough plug Real Nice Software. Here is a link to the online article for your reading pleasure, and an excerpt from the part where she mentions me:

One of the résumés on YouTube belongs to Allen Ulbricht, a 2003 graduate of Georgia Tech’s undergraduate management program, whose video has him dressed in business casual attire and responding—as naturally as possible—to likely questions for a Web 2.0 gig to which he was applying in December, 2006.

Now the owner of Real Nice Software, which creates custom software for small businesses, Ulbricht says he pulled himself out of the running for the job but is sure his video, an adjunct to his traditional online résumé, would have given him a leg up on the competition. Video will become an expected part of the job application, says Ulbricht, even if it will never replace traditional, written résumés.