On the one hand we hear that it is increasingly difficult to find a job working on a 20-year-old system. But we also hear that companies are looking to modernize their legacy systems and move away from RPG in favor of a programming language that the new college graduates are comfortable with. To me, there seems to be confusion out there, or at least a limited ability for job seekers and employers to connect. I have personally received emails from both head-hunters looking for AS/400 programmers and email from job hunters looking for leads on a new position.

So this week as I was browsing the feeds and blogs and I ran across Get AS400 Jobs.  A site dedicated to all of you, dear readers — I just had to share.
My initial impression is that the jobs listed are current and real — not some random marketing gimmick leading to a dead-end. From Boston, Mass. to East Wenatchee, Wa., AS/400 insiders are desired. So if you’re looking for a change of scenery or want to escape from your boss, you might want to take a look. If not, you may want to bookmark it for future reference. At the very least, it’s good fun to see what skills are desired — I don’t know about you, but there’s a certain joy in reading a job listing and being able to say “Oh, I could so do that.”

Ken Jack, a software engineer at trucking software company TMW Systems, has created the T-shirt you see to the right. He has it on his personal CafePress website called iWhatever.

Jack reflects the anguish of many System i users — er, users running i on Power Systems — who have a hard time figuring out what to call the server platform on which they run all their business applications. In a recent story on feedback of the System i/p merger, one user told me that he spent a long time trying to convince everyone in his organization that the server and platform should be called System i and i5/OS, not AS/400, iSeries, or OS/400.

Now that IBM has renamed it again to Power Systems and just “i,” expect some folks to just say forget it and start calling it AS/400 again.

That’s how Jack feels, as is apparent by this T-shirt he’s selling. He’s been selling a similar shirt for a while now, just adding on whenever IBM decides to rename the platform again.

“It’s honestly to the point where if IBM changes the name one more time, I’m going to have to put ‘continued on other side…’ on the front of the T-shirts,” Jack wrote in an email to me. “Just last month somebody bought a shirt that stopped at ‘System i.’ I bet he’s pissed.”

What are they calling it at TMW Systems? Jack said that “everybody at our shop still calls it ‘The 400.’ ‘Power System running i’ is just too much of a mouthful.”

By the way, in addition to buying the T-shirt, you can also buy other merchandise with the logo on it: mousepad, coffee mug, baseball cap, etc.

Looking for a way to read up on System i resources without slogging through pages upon pages of Google results? Welcome to del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site. This is a good way to see what your peers are looking at and bookmarking. Check it out.

There are good results under both the AS400 and iSeries tags, although I couldn’t find anything under a “System i” tag. I guess del.icio.us hasn’t caught up with IBM’s name change yet.

A couple decent sites include JTOpen, midrange.com of course, and Code400.com.

Update: Thanks to a few readers, I found the “System i” tags, so I must apologize. They are under del.icio.us/tag/systemi and del.icio.us/tag/system_i. Oops. Thanks guys.

There will be another iSociety “fireside chat” tomorrow, this time with Jim Herring and Ian Jarman. Herring, the IBM System i products and business operations director, and Jarman, a System i product manager, will likely be talking about the new System i servers that IBM announced yesterday.

The last “fireside chat” three weeks ago was with Susan Gantner, Skip Marchesani, Paul Tuohy and Jon Paris, the people who run System i Developer. The iSociety started last year with its goal being a sort of MySpace for System i users.

The iSociety, a sort-of MySpace for iFolk (my word), is hosting another fireside chat this Thursday. This time up: the people who run System i Developer, a group of experts on the platform. Past events like these at iSociety, which started last year and is run by the COMMON user group, have included Mark Shearer, IBM’s System i general manager; and Elaine Lennox, IBM’s VP of System i marketing.

This time around, Susan Gantner, Skip Marchesani, Paul Tuohy and Jon Paris will be doing the honors from their RPG and DB2 summit happening in Las Vegas. The chat is at 3:30 p.m. ET at the iSociety Web site. Make sure you have a login name and password if you want to watch.