Joe Flood

Month: September 2009

  • Funky Prairie Boy – My Favorite Film of DC Shorts

    Go see the best of DC Shorts on Thursday night at E Street Cinema.

    It was a great festival again. I’ve volunteered with DC Shorts for more than four years now and each year it gets better and better.

    My personal favorite film in the festival was Funky Prairie Boy. It won the Diversity Award (presented by Verizon). This short Canadian film is about:

    A young boy living in a small prairie town during the early 1980s, befriends the only black kid at his school and soon discovers the prejudice that exists within his friends, his family and even in himself.

    It’s got the most well-developed story of all the films I saw at DC Shorts. The characters seem real, all of them a mix of good and bad impulses. The short film captures the awkwardness of children dealing with adult issues of race and prejudice. Yet, it’s not an afterschool special, where the plot is driven by social points to be made. Instead, it’s a messy and funny look at kids trying to be kids. While they’re trapped in a rigid world that they didn’t create, they just want to dance and hangout.

    Funky Prairie Boy
    Funky Prairie Boy

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  • Behind the Scenes at a Screenplay Reading

    Now in it’s sixth year, DC Shorts has been named by MovieMaker Magazine as “one of the nation’s leading short film festivals.” The festival features 100 films from across the country and around the world. What’s unique about DC Shorts is its focus on the filmmaker, many of whom will be in attendance this year.

    I’ve been involved in DC Shorts almost since the beginning. I volunteered with Jon Gann, founder of the festival, and  was a film judge for a couple years. Me and other volunteers watched and rated the hundreds of submissions that came in. We used a clever online system to do so. One key trait about DC Shorts is how professional and well organized it is, from top to bottom. (more…)

  • USAJOBS vs CBO Job Site

    Too much exposure to USAJOBS has really turned me cynical. Despite news reports on the need to recruit thousands of new employees, the main federal jobs site is a usability nightmare, unfathomable to even people who work on web sites, like me. While the site has few defenders, some have argued that it has to be that way, because it’s the government. Federal requirements dictate its complexity and difficulty.

    There’s got to be another way! And there is. It’s the job site for the Congressional Budget Office. The site is a model of simplicity and common sense, where you can apply for a job in minutes, rather than hours. Let me spell out the differences between the CBO site and USAJOBS:

    • It’s all one site.You’re not bounced to a separate organizational site to complete a whole other application, like you would if you applied for a job with Agriculture from USAJOBS.
    • An easy password. You don’t need a complicated ten character password with upper and lower case letters plus numbers.
    • Upload or copy and paste your documents. Choose which is easier for you – either upload a Word doc or copy and paste your resume. You don’t have to enter information job by job. Supporting docs can also be uploaded.
    • No KSAs.
    • Job descriptions less than a page long, in plain language.
    • No confusing instructions to fax or snail mail in additional information. It’s 100% online.
    • It’s well-designed. The site makes excellent use of white space and provides strong visual cues for users, such as making the “Submit Application” button blue and placing it at the bottom of the right-hand menu.

    Why can’t the rest of government do this? The site is not complicated, in fact it looks like it was designed in the late 1990s. But it’s simple and easy for visitors. It’s oriented around their top tasks, as good government sites are supposed to.

    Looking at this site, USAJOBS makes even less sense to me.