Here are links I found interesting on December 13, 2011:
Good Content Trumps SEO – "…if you're planning that 2012 site budget, you might want to think twice about hiring that SEO expert and find a content expert instead." Yeah!
GoPano micro – "The GoPano micro is a lens for the iPhone 4 and 4S that enables you to create 360° panoramic videos. Just snap the lens to your iPhone4 and tap record to make cool interactive 360° videos instantly." Very cool.
The Craven Mitt Romney – Mitt Romney tells a U.S. veteran, to his face, that he supports the repeal of New Hampshire's same-sex marriage law — while the man is sitting with his husband. Why can't republicans stay out of our personal lives?
Shoot first, focus later: Inside the Lytro camera – "SmartPlanet talks to Lytro founder Ren Ng about how the Silicon Valley startup is re-imagining the digital camera with its patented light-field photography technology. Ng also discusses his future plans, including the ability for users to capture images that are more three-dimensional." The next generation of photography.
Trillion-frame-per-second video – "Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, left, and Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar with the experimental setup they used to produce slow-motion video of light scattering through a plastic bottle." This is VERY cool.
Here are links I found interesting on November 17, 2011:
Nimmo Bay 360 Video 2 – Not much. Just the most incredible piece of interactive video work I've ever seen. Shot from a helicopter.
Report: Insider Trading Is Illegal Unless You’re A Congressman – "Thanks to a loophole in federal law, those elected to Congress are allowed to use inside information to buy and sell stock. Some allegedly take advantage of the information for personal gain." Read about it and then consider this: YOU have the power to vote these people out and change the law.
Why Occupy’s 15 minutes of fame are running out – "Every movement that wrought real political and societal change in America had leaders, an agenda, a painstaking strategy…you know, adult stuff." The Occupy movement doesn't. And because of this, it will fail.
Congress: Trading stock on inside information? – "Washington, D.C. is a town that runs on inside information – but should our elected officials be able to use that information to pad their own pockets? As Steve Kroft reports, members of Congress and their aides have regular access to powerful political intelligence, and many have made well-timed stock market trades in the very industries they regulate." How is this legal? Thanks to @BWJones for sharing this link.
DeKloutifying – John Scalzi's take on Klout. My favorite line: "At which point I decided that Klout was actually being run by dicks…" I dropped my Klout account a few weeks ago, sick of being nagged via email by them, despite turning off notifications a variety of ways. Seriously: do we really need this kind of crap? Popularity contests are for insecure idiots who are missing the point of life.
A behind-the-scenes look at a helicopter departure from a relatively busy class D airport in Arizona.
I went for a little pleasure flight on Tuesday, mostly to check out the capabilities of my new GoPro HD Hero2 camera. This GoPro has two features I’ve been wanting:
A narrower field of view. The HD Hero2 supports a 90° FOV in addition to 127° and 170°; the HD Hero supports only 127° and 170°. I like to show off low-level, high speed flight, but with a super wide angle lens, I had to almost be kicking up dust in flight for the picture to actually look low-level.
Audio in via a Mic port. Let’s face it; there’s nothing too interesting about the droning sound of a helicopter’s engine and rotor blades. I wanted to include cockpit sound.
So I rigged up the Hero2 with a skeleton housing as my helicopter nosecam and ran a 3.5mm stereo cable from the audio in port to an audio out port I’d had installed in my helicopter for use with my old POV.1 setup. And then I went flying.
And today I put together this little educational video that puts you on the helicopter’s nose with headsets on for a departure from Deer Valley Airport (DVT) in north Phoenix.
A few things about the video and setup.
The audio is clear but there’s an annoying buzz when no one is talking. I don’t know what that is but it annoys the hell out me. For serious production use, I’d have to duck the audio for each “silent” period. That means using Final Cut Pro instead of iMovie (which I used to throw this together).
As with the HD Hero, 1080p video capture (which is what this video was recorded at) introduces a waving motion in the bottom half of the frame. This motion goes away at 720p resolution on my HD Hero and HD Hero 960. I should note here that I purchased a 30MB/s Class 10 SD card to make sure the wiggle wasn’t caused by the camera’s inability to write quickly enough to the card.
The color looks terrible. I don’t know if it’s because I used my polarizing filter and didn’t really need it or if there’s something weird about the camera’s optics. Will try it next time without the polarizing filter.
By the way, there’s a nice comparison of the three currently available GoPro Hero models here. I’m embarrassed to admit that I now own one of each.
I’ll play with this some more at different settings to see if I can get the results I expect. So far, I’m not exactly happy with the video quality, although I’m very glad to be able to record a decent cockpit audio track.
My friend Jim called from Washington state today. He was driving through on his way to Chelan from where he lives in Coeur d’Alene, ID. He passed the town I spent three months in this summer, thought of me, and called.
Jim has some very definite political opinions, some of which I agree with, others of which I don’t. We can speak civilly about politics but I often pull the plug when I get bored with the discussion. After all, I’ll never change his mind and he’ll never change mine.
We talked about a bunch of things and then our conversation turned to the Occupy Wall Street movement. He described a video he’d seen that showed two men at an Occupy camp with a table set up to help connect protesters to employers. What struck him was one of the protesters saying “I can’t do that” for many of the jobs listed. She seemed to imply that those jobs were beneath her.
I tracked down the video and watched it. Watch it for yourself:
Now I’m not naive enough to think that creative editing wasn’t involved here. Maybe they edited out a lot of the more positive responses from protesters. And yes, the whole thing could be fake.
But although I do think that creative editing might have emphasized a certain message, I don’t think it’s fake. And I do think there are a lot of unemployed young people out there — possibly many camped out as Occupy protesters — who think that the jobs available to them are beneath them.
And that’s the subject of this post: the feeling of entitlement among recent college graduates.
My Ancient History
I graduated college nearly thirty years ago. I had a degree with “highest honors” (I wrote an honors paper) in Accounting and was a member of the Accounting Honor’s Society at Hofstra University, which was then one of the big private universities for business. You’d think I’d have no trouble getting a job. But like everyone else, I went through the stressful process of interviewing on campus. I had six interviews and got one offer.
I took it.
It didn’t matter to me that I was making $14,097 — 25% less than a lot of my friends who had the same degree from the same college. It didn’t matter to me that I wasn’t working at one of the (then) Big Eight accounting firms. The only thing that mattered was that I had a job that would pay my rent and keep me fed. I assumed (rightly, it turned out) that if I worked hard and did my job the best I could, I’d get raises and promotions and work my way up.
Two years later, at age 22, I became a supervisor. Everyone who worked under me was older than me.
My raises averaged 10% to 15% a year.
After five years, I realized that the only way to move up was either for someone to die or retire or for me to move out. So I went to another company. And I worked my way up in that company, too.
At 28, I was earning more annually than my father had ever earned annually in his life.
Then I decided I didn’t want to be a number cruncher. I wanted to be a writer. So at age 29, I engineered a career change. After two rough years, my income recovered; after five years, I was doing very well. But I worked my ass off to get there.
At age 40, I engineered another career change — this time to be the owner of a helicopter charter business. But because of the cost and financial risk involved, I didn’t let go of that second career. Instead, I juggled two jobs — and I continue to do so to this very day.
Point: When I was a kid, I was taught that to get ahead in life, you had to work hard. I also later learned that you had to work smart. And guess what? It works.
Entitlement
It seems to me — not just from this video, but from the bits and pieces of what I hear young people say — that they think that just because they spent 4 or 5 years and countless thousands of dollars to go to college, they’re entitled to get a job when they graduate.
Entitled.
As if the world will step back and open up thousands of job opportunities a year just for them.
But its not just any job that they want. They want a cushy job — something that pays more than enough to cover the rent and feed a family. They don’t want to be a “wage slave” — whatever the hell that is. They want to use what they learned in school, that superior knowledge that sets them apart from people who actually work for a living.
I guess you can read the anger in my words. It’s hard to control it sometimes.
I think about my first job, at age 13: a paper route delivering 54 papers a day on foot. I think about my next job, a year later, spent scraping rust off a chain link fence with a wire brush, accompanied by three other underprivileged girls whose families were poor enough to qualify for summer work.
I think about the three part-time jobs I held down while I was carrying an 18-credit load in college just to make sure I graduated within four years. I think about how my weight dropped down to a ridiculous 105 pounds because I simply couldn’t eat enough to meet my energy needs.
I think about my first apartment, a studio four blocks away from a bus station where shootings had become routine. I think about learning how to float checks two days before payday, when the money ran out. I think about buying “no frills” pot pies for dinner at 33¢ each. I think about taking the subway to bad neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx because that’s where the audit I had to do happened to be. I think about the day a bum near Times Square — the old Times Square — grabbed my butt as I walked by during my lunch break and how I swung around and hit him.
And yes, I think about writing a monthly check to pay my school loans for ten straight years.
The hard times didn’t last long. I worked my way through them. I showed my bosses that I was a step above the others, not by waving a diploma and whining that I deserved a raise but by working harder, better, and faster than any of them. I got the promotions and pay raises I needed to move forward.
Why can’t today’s young people do the same?
No one is entitled to a job. You have to earn it. Earn it by being smart, by being a team player, by knowing what the hell you’re doing, by doing it right. Get off the fucking cellphone, stop texting your friends, and stop whining about “the man.”
This is real life, not a television show. You’re no better than the other thousands of young graduates looking for work — until you prove you are. What the hell are you waiting for?
Go Ahead, Make Your Excuse
I cannot support this entitlement attitude in any way, shape, or form. If you have no job, then no job is beneath you.
Comments are open. I’m sure this post will soon be inundated with excuses. Sound off. This is your chance. Just don’t expect me to accept excuses.
