My personal thoughts/opinions, or commentary.
Good Friday. Heading south on Bryant Irvin under a clear, blue sky. An LCD readout on the rearview mirror tells me it’s 84 degrees, and a rolled down passenger window catches the breeze. After I cruise through the green light at Overton, I change lanes to the right and the iPod fades into the next song, ‘Ho Hey’, by The Lumineers. As I pass a red Nissan Xterra, my grey Chevy Silverado surpasses 50,000 miles.
Over the past week, the theme of posts in my RSS feeds revolved around learning, careers and personal growth. Some ranged from calls to action–we need to rethink our entire education system for todays world. Others spoke of self reliance, be aware and do your best to kick butt. A few were introspective, realizations of actions.
Seth Godin released an expansive manifesto, called Stop Stealing Dreams. Every group imaginable related to schooling, learning, employing, policy making receives commentary. Â Schools are holdovers from the industrial age. Parents and teachers are complicit in encouraging obedience instead of passion and imagination. Employers seek those who say yes. Policy makers make uninformed decisions that ignore real needs. Godin includes statistics when needed, references academic research and includes colorful anecdotes. One such anecdote recalls an email from a blog reader critiquing the use of bespoke, instead of custom.
My blog is hardly filled with words most educated citizens would have trouble understanding. And yet a cable TV–inoculated audience wants everything dumbed down to the Kardashian level. This relentless push for less (less intelli- gence, less culture, less effort) is one of the boogiemen facing anyone who would mess with the rote rigor of mass schooling.
It seems to recall[amazon_link id=”B000K7VHOG” target=”_blank” ]Idoiocracy[/amazon_link], where the future is a dystopian state of passive entertainment for the lowest common denominator.
Andrew Olsen, takes a less passive route, believing the best skill you can learn, and possibly the only skill you need is the ability to learn. From this principle, he lists a 100 ways to be successful without going to college.
In this world, the only skill you really need is the ability to learn new things. If you know how to read (really read) and absorb new information, your knowledge will be far deeper than the average college graduate who listened to lectures and filled in bubbles on tests.
I agree with his principle of being able to learn is the best skill to have. It goes along with being able to figure things out–take the most basic thing you know about what you’re working on and build from there. Granted, this can’t be applied to every aspect of your life (how many people can repair an engine?), but for most knowledge worker tasks, it can.
Where I disagree with him is the value of college. Â College is a safe environment to learn about life and how to manage it. How do you balance work (classes) and life (social gatherings) and coping with the stress it brings. That should be emphasized more than the degree one works towards. As Therese Schwenkler says, “your college degree will not get you the job you deserve“.
Her post led me to Charlie Hoehn’s Recession Proof Graduate. It provides interesting strategies to always be employable, the primary way, he suggests, is to work for free. Â It’s a gamble and a method that should not be the norm. It’s sad that for someone to gain experience, employers can essentially receive free labor. Perhaps, one should follow Jessica Hische’s Should I Work for Free flowchart.
Or, instead of a flowchart, how about Jesse Thorn’s Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success. It references his experiences and those mostly in the creative fields. The best takeaway:
I hear from so many people who have a great idea. The difference between the successful ones and the unsuccessful ones is that the successful ones do it, then do it again and again.
As we become successful, we’ll encounter others with ideas that are different than our own. Jason Freid suggests giving things 5 minutes.
His response changed my life. It was a simple thing. He said “Man, give it five minutes.†I asked him what he meant by that? He said, it’s fine to disagree, it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them. “Five minutes†represented “thinkâ€, not react. He was totally right. I came into the discussion looking to prove something, not learn something.
Similarly, Dustin Curtis thinks of 3 questions to asks the individual.
All this seems like a lot to take in. It is. Like driving a car, everything’s new and we’re hyperaware or don’t recognize patterns and habits. Over time, the things we learn, want to learn and apply to our daily lives, become innate habits we don’t even think about. This is true for bad habits, and with awareness, we can change them.
Like good habits, tt takes work to become awesome at kicking ass.
It seems too good to be true, a wireless, portable scanner that can send documents to your computer or iOS device. Perfect for one’s office within a Starbucks. Kind of.
Measuring a foot long, two inches tall and about 3 inches deep, weighing in at less than a half a pound, the Doxie Go is definitely portable. It powers on to a default scan mode of 300 dpi and can be toggled to 600 dpi, if needed. The power button can easily be erroneously pushed, too. Paper (photos, too) get scanned face side up, and the scanner gently pulls the item through, saving the scanned item within its on board memory or an SD card that you can add. The scanner seems fickle when pulling the item through. Â If the item isn’t lined up perfectly, or you hold on to the paper a moment more, the Doxie Go doesn’t scan. Also, if the paper goes in angled or as it goes through and the paper catches on a random object on your desk, the resulting scan is a trippy blur of digital LSD. And don’t even bother with wrinkled or worn paper–vending machines take crumpled money better. Ideally, you’re scanning a relatively flat piece of paper and you either have a very clean desk or surface to scan on or you guide the paper through, catching it so it doesn’t get caught on any stray pens or keyboard.
The catch, for wireless scanning, is you have to add the wireless capability yourself with an [amazon_link id=”B004U5QR62″ target=”_blank” ]Eye-Fi wireless SD card[/amazon_link]. So in a sense, it is wireless, but to get the scans off it, out of the box, it’s not.
Oh. OK.
Otherwise, to get your scans off the device, you must connect the Doxie to your computer via a mini USB cable,use a thumb drive, or, in the case of non-Eye-Fi SD cards, a memory card reader. Then, to do anything with the scans, processing through the Doxie software is required.
The software is free and actually pleasant to use. Â Before your first use, the Doxie requires a setup procedure. To note, the Doxie Go I received needed a full charge before using. Setup is painless. To import the scans, select import, and the scans will be moved to your computer within a Doxie application directory.
The quality of the scans is quite good at 300 dpi, usable and the equivalent of a very good, clean fax machine. Scans can be saved to JPG, PNG, PDF, PDF with OCR (object character recognition) in black and white or color. Images scanned OK to good. Â Scan images that have a purpose, e.g. labels, clips from magazines, and don’t necessarily have to be reproduced.
Each scan can be tweaked for clarity and contrast via several sliders (see screen shot below). A neat feature, to group scans, like a 10 page legal form, you select the 10 related pages (make sure they’re in the order you want them). One lacking feature is the ability to zoom in on a document. Legal forms look the same, and distinguishing them was a challenge in Doxie’s software.
Battery life seemed to be less than I expected. Â I’d only get about two dozen scans out of it across several weeks. It comes with a mini USB cable, carrying case, which is a black bag, a calibration card, a guide in which to place 4″x6″ images and some random dongle that I have no clue as to what its purpose is. Â I never go the Eye-Fi to work properly with the Doxie Go, despite several attempts. If Eye-Fi can put a wireless transmitter in something the size of an SD card, why couldn’t the engineers at Apparent put a wifi transmitter on their device to begin with? Would it really raise the price more than the additional $80 it costs for the Eye-Fi?
If you’re regularly out of your office and need to scan a document or three, the Doxie Go will work. Pass on it, if your multifunction printer already has this capability or own a flatbed scanner.
Go to the grocery store. Grab your shopping cart, carefully choosing the one with four squeak less wheels. Liesurley browse for bananas, add the box of Cheerios, select the pepper jack cheese that’s on sale (bonus!). Now, browse to the frozen food section. Scan the frosty shel-.
“HEY THERE SHOPPER. BUY SOME O’ THIS GOOD FROZEN ICE CREAM.”
Shocked, you’re now either at best surprised, or at worst, angry, and if anything, annoyed at the unexpected interruption. For all the media encountered during the day, you think you’d be desensitized to these random bouts of advertorial extroversion.
Websites do this constantly. Videos auto play. Advertising attempts to do something clever. The granddaddy of them all, the pop up, still makes an appearance. These are all hostile interruptions to the user and moreover, disrespect the site’s content.
On YouTube or a music site, you expect something to automatically start. On news pages, where there’s only a video story, that’s expected as well. Â On a news page with video and a text story, the video should not auto play. If they do, why so damn loud?
The solution, which publishers are in an arms race with, are browser plugins that disable auto play and other forms of advertising. Users get fed up with the interruptions and unruly, distracting advertising and install the plugins, which then the publishers seek to find a different way to make money off the users accessing the content.
Stand in front of crowd. A few friends, a gathering of family, a room full of strangers. Â Speak a few words. Announce that you’d like to say something. Present a prepared pitch with or without a slide deck as your copilot. In those first, present moments, you have their attention. The group becomes an audience.
Here’s a secret: 99.98% of the time, when you have an audience, they want to hear what you have to say. They want you to succeed. Know this secret to conquer the fear of speaking to an audience.
Underwear, and envisioning people in their’s, should remain a secret.
I picked up my mother’s copy of Women’s Day. Â Thumbing through a few pages I read about dinner (and cookie) recipes, household tips, clever pop culture items, quick style blurbs and general interest items.
Scrolling Pinterest’s front page, I spy a recipe for a sugary confection, photos of style “looks”, make up tips, pictorial witticisms, photos of cool things to make or do around the house.
Women’s Day, the paper magazine, is social to the extent of giving the magazine to someone or clipping out an article and physically sharing it. Â Pinterest is social as simple as finding something you like and pinning it for anyone one to view.
Yes, the college career services should offer the following stock services:
I’d expand with the following:
What links the four individuals? An emphasis on active actions (monster.com, sending out resumes are passive), where we’re self aware of what the hell we’re doing.
Sethi details psychology of actions and their perceived impacts. He may come across as arrogant in his style, however, fine tune his advice to the point of self  confidence. Formatting and whitespace on a resume ain’t gonna do that.
Trunk hails as the veteran, the insider, the one who’s been there and still doing it. Â She seeks out information to gleam insights into trends or to justify why a common approach really doesn’t work. She emphasizes doing something and learning about what your learning–random jobs can teach you something.
Schwenkler brings the “life balance” dialogue to the career center. Â If you’re not happy, aren’t aware of your attitudes, all your relationships will be a challenge. She’s that cool, slightly quirky advisor that can actually relate to people.
Godin is a marketer of life. Â His writing belies an understanding that puts everything into perspective–career and life and all that we want to do with it. So long as we’re honest, working to do the right thing and not be afraid of our self doubts, we’ll be successful.
Petite, blonde hair always in a pony tail, blue-eyed, she occupied the same corner of the campus cafeteria. Whenever I saw her, her face peered down, lips pursed and eyes intently engaged in the day’s crossword puzzle. Her books and backpack would be either piled at her feet or on the table next to her, depending on the crowd of students flowing through the room.
During my attendance at TCU, the campus’s main dining hall, called The Main, served three meals a day, opening and closing for each meal. At times, it became confusing as to what the hours actually were, especially when students would camp for hours at a time, at the behest of the cafeteria’s staff. The Main’s interior looked like a Luby’s stuck in the 90s—grey walls, tables and floors, bold geometric, airbrushed artwork and booths lined with red vinyl.
This girl, whom I silently named Crossword Puzzle Girl, was a staple. She always went for the back corner and folded the campus paper, The Skiff, to reveal the crossword puzzle. Before Sudoku became the distraction of choice, the crossword puzzle had a place in the back of classrooms, communally shared in the lounges or those sitting solo, etching out the answers to the day’s clue’s.
I never asked of her name, so she never answered. The only other thing I knew about her, seems amusing. She was a baton twirler. Dressed in purple polyester, skin-tone sheer and sparkly, sparkly sequins, she would dance amongst the band during halftime shows, as her partner—the baton—twirled, swirled and curled through the air. While she worked on the puzzle, her pen would roll and somersault between her fingers.
I saw Crossword Puzzle Girl a few months ago. She’s one of those people you’d never expect to see again, and would notice them immediately if paths crossed, however distant. Instead of a 90s era cafeteria, a contemporary Starbuck’s cafe was the setting. She sat in the corner, flanked by windows, light shining off her blonde hair, pulled back into a pony tail. Instead of a bag of books by her side, a stroller stood. Instead of a bustling crowd of undergraduates moving around her, her daughter, equally blonde and blue-eyed, moved amongst the tables and chairs.
Crossword Puzzle Girl sat with a pen in her hand and looked relaxed as she appeared to answer one of the day’s clues.
Art begets art.  One creative act should be free to inspire another creative act.  To say that one creation, once delivered to the world, remains tethered to its creator, unable to inspire, evolve or grow into something new, restricts the life of the original creation.  As much as one may try to control the perception of the work they created, it’s impossible.  Once you let the light, the art, the work, whatever, out—it’s no longer yours.  Maybe for a time it’s your’s.  But at some point it belongs to someone else. And that person may be inspired by your work to let loose another creative work.