Category: Uncategorized (Page 6 of 26)

Interesting quote at the bottom of this article about Jorge Posada’s retirement:

“Swinging with pine tar on his hands, and without batting gloves, he was a five-time All-Star, caught David Wells’ perfect game in 1998, and played in 125 games in October. He is a borderline Hall of Fame candidate, but his legacy as a Yankee probably means more to him.”

There’s no question that we are in some ridiculously bad economic times. And when you look at the system as a whole, the problem certainly seems unfixable. Now there is a lot of rhetoric on each side of the political aisle but here are the few humble thoughts from a small business owner.

1) There are actually jobs out there – This may seem like an inflammatory comment to my unemployed readers. But when we spun off our new company, Relaborate, a little while ago, one of the first things we needed was a developer to help us flesh out the prototype. And let me tell you – that developer was really hard to find. You may not want to code. But if you want a job, learn to code. You won’t be the best coder in the world but the economy needs more coders.

2) The Unemployment system is horrendous – I’d like to hire more people to full-time, full benefit roles. However, our clients aren’t always signing 12 month deals. So often that means contract/project work. And too many times, I hear the following positively ridiculous statement: “How long is the gig? I’m not sure I can do any work or get paid for doing project work, because it will mess up my unemployment benefits.” That’s insane. The entitlement system provides incentive to not do part time projects, which could lead to a full time role. The system actually discourages productivity. Sure, someone could argue that I should just give the person a full-time job. But that’s not always an option. If I have a specific time-bounded project that I need someone with a specialized skill set to help me with, I’d like to pay a fair market wage to someone to help me with it. The system shouldn’t be stopping that person from being able to say yes. Someone should be able to fix this.

3) The labor “Supply and Demand” Curve is out of whack – This goes back to the point about developers. The Universities need to do a better job of controlling how many degrees are given out in each field of study. If the country only has jobs for 10,000 Art History majors, the Universities shouldn’t pump out 20,000 new Art History majors a year, paying $40k a year in college tuition. I know it would take a little foresight and research to make these projections, but I kind of assume the Universities should have the collective intellect to pull this off.

4) It takes a little effort – A friend of mine recently offered to help someone with some connections. The job seeker sent a Facebook Wall post asking for those connections. No resume, no personal email, no phone call…just a Facebook Wall post. The entitlement generation needs to figure out a few things about professional behavior.

Now the point of this post is not to be a rant. It’s actually optimistic. Every day I work with people who are hungry to work more. I see entrepreneurs trying to build companies that will enable them to hire people. I see people who are under-employed wanting to work. But I call upon the high schools and universities to push students towards careers where there is demand, I urge the politicians to fix the arcane unemployment rules that make it hard for people to take short-term project work, and I strongly encourage the under-employed to think about what kind of roles people are desperate to hire. I want to be Commissioner of Baseball. But there’s already a line of people more qualified than me for that role, so I’ll have to keep doing these Marketing jobs. It’s just the way it is.

In a lot of ways, we are all our own small businesses, and we are all selling a set of services to someone. We all need to have something that people are willing to pay for.

Clever.  Way to take a potential negative, and use it to your advantage.

Sure, I know we all equate July 4th with a nice 3 day weekend in the middle of the summer.  But I want to take 2 minutes to reflect on exactly what we are celebrating.  Now, I don’t know what really happened 200-300 years ago, but I’ll try to remember what my history teachers told me.  

Sometime in the 1600’s, we were all living in England.  And then some of our friends and neighbors decided they had had enough of religious oppression.  So they hopped on boats like the Mayflower and headed to the new “colonies” in America.  

Eventually, enough of us moved over here that we developed some sort of free market up and down the Eastern seaboard.  And we must have been doing pretty well developing new products, exporting new crops and creating a nice sustainable economy that didn’t require subsidies or loans.  Because the guys back in England said, “You guys are really showing success.  We need to raise taxes on you so we can spread that money around over here.”

Eventually, we got tired of a bunch of professional politicians and lifelong royalty-types telling us what to do.  We were sick of a government that reached out too far, who taxed us too much, and who got involved with things they had no expertise or knowledge about, passing arcane laws that made no sense.

So, as one big group we denounced our relationship with the oppressors.  We announced independence, and developed a loose government in which the colonies – now called states – would govern themselves.  The national government would pretty much be in charge of monitoring interstate commerce and running a national defense made up of all the state militias.  But at the core of the idea, was that we would govern ourselves in a manageable, state by state way.  We’d be responsible for our own welfare, and only rely on the federal government to arbitrate disputes and manage a defense – where if you attacked one of us, you attacked all of us.

Obviously times have changed and we’re in a more complex world now.  But every Independence Day, I like to reflect back and remember what our whole country was based on.  I wonder how many ways we’ve deviated from the original plan, and whether that’s a good or bad thing.

Lazy Friday?  Great video to watch over coffee. Thanks New Yorker.

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

This is not meant to be a definitive review of iPhone Photo Apps.  I’m not anywhere near qualified for that kind of analysis.  But, I’ve downloaded quite a few, and here are a few I use pretty regularly to post photos up to my TumbleBlog at AndyBoyer.Tumblr.com.

Also, I’m going to assume you already have tried, or regularly use Instagram and Hipstamatic.  

Photosynth

1) Photosynth: It’s not the easiest tool to use super effectively, and tends to be pretty buggy, but when it works it’s a pretty cool way to take a panoramic shot.  Great for the top of moutnains, stadiums, or places where you just want to capture a 30,000 foot of your surroundings. The issue is that it is hard to line up the string of photos in a way that creates the perfect stitch.  But, I’m sure with a little more diligence, you can pull it off better than I do.  (Also, make sure you are standing next to someone who isn’t going to move around a lot and get their head in the shot.)

2) Diptic: Easy way to quickly stitch a few photos together into one “frame.”  Do the edits right on your phone, and choose from about 10-20 layout options.  Then, upload that picture to your Facebook pge or what not.

3) Comic Touch Lite: Fun little free version of an app that simply ads comic bubbles to the pic.  Nothing revolutionary here, but super simple to use and fun at bbq’s and such.

4) Camera Plus: I like playing with this, and I think it provides slightly better photos.  Not 100% sold though.  (No example)

5) 100 Cameras in One: Basically it’s Hipstamiatic with a different style interface.  Take pics, run them through a filter, see the result.

Things I’m playing with and haven’t decided upon yet.  (ie, saving them for a future blog post.)

 PicPlz, SlowShutter, ToonPaint, MillColour, Phototreats, Retro Camera, Labelbox, LiveFX

Also:

I’ve already written about publishing tools like Zapd and Color, so I left them out of this post.

Let me know if you have any photo editing tools that you are using every day.