Brandon Wirtz's Digital Mix

I listened to an interesting debate about 4 year University educations compared to going to a technical school where you would learn your trade in 6 months to 2 years.

As someone who has been in college for 8 years off and on, I think I have a unique view.

I found at MSU that the value of college was dorm life. We learned more about engineering and computer networking living in a dorm of geeks than I did in classes.

At Lourdes College I learned the most from the varying perspective that students many of whom were non-traditional, brought to the table from working in the education field as most of those in my education classes were already working in the industry to some extent.

At University of Pheonix I don't think I learned anything. The teachers were little more than unsucessful business people looking to pad their income, and the students were unsucessful business people looking to pad their resume.

All in all I think my philosophy of education is the best. Get the College experience go to a big univeristy find what is out there for a year. Meet lots of people and take a varied set of classes to find out what you are interested in. Transfer to a smaller college and either finish your degree or get the classes you need to round out your vocational knowledge of the career you are interested in. I for example took accounting because I needed it for my business. I took writing for business for the same reason. I took Logic and Reasoning because I wanted to be better at presenting arguments and finding holes in the arguments of others. These weren't required classes but were easily the most valuable I have taken.

The problem with curriculum based solely on your industry is that it doesn't teach you to see the big picture, and it doesn't teach you how to interact with management, or clients. The problem with a curriculum based on teaching you to be well rounded is that you often don't have a deep enough set of experience to really shine in your first position.

So much of todays job hunting is that you are only as good as your last job. If you don't end up getting a good break out of college people assume there is something wrong with you. This is why a school like Kettering where internships are so highly valued as part of the curriculum are in my opinion the best path for a student that has direction. The hard part of a school like Kettering is that if you change your mind you will find it hard to find another good internship, and can expect that you will lose most of the progress you have made, so it is easy to turn a 5 year course study in to 8.

In a lot of ways I think apprentiship is overlooked. It used to be that if you wanted to learn a trade you worked for a menial amount apprenticing under someone with the role you would like. This makes a lot of sense to me, and seems that it would work well for many students who go to school and never get a taste for what the job is really like. Most computer progamming students think that they are going to be the next John Romero, but most end up being a dungeon dwelling code jocky creating database applications.

The problem with all educational paths are that they train you to be something, not anything. I think that having a background in education I can learn to do anything quickly, because I know how I learn. This allows me to step in to roles quickly. Others I know have difficulty switching gears from Engineer to Presenter, Manager to Laborer, and the like. This creates problems when an industry busts, or injury creates a need to switch roles. What does a balerina do after a car crash, or what does a Web programmer do after the Dot Com Bust?

Tramatized by the over reaction from the media.

I tried to buy a copy of GTA:San Andreas at Target, but they wouldn't sell me the copy that I found on their shelves. So I went down to EB where they were happy to sell me a copy. I downloaded the Hack, drove over to my girlfriend in the hood's place, picked her up on my BMX bike, rode down the street to the bar, came back, got invited in and then... well to say it was pornographic would be a stretch... "Playboy the Mansion" was a helluva lot racier. And is only an M. Basically my "Ken Doll" in boxers gets it on with a barbie with a few features painted on. I apparently have no rythm because the minigame ends about 10 seconds after it starts. Then I'm back on the street, alone with my BMX bike.

When it all comes down to it... Your 12 year old is more likely to see something worse on TMC, Sho, Cinemax, or HBO. In fact the "PG" rating that was on the 1968 Rome and Juliet (one of my favorite movies) would slip past a v-chip and features a topless Juliet.

I would let a 10 year old play GTA before I would let them watch American History X or American Pie.

I'm not buying that you can learn to do car jackings from GTA as is stated by Thompson.

"These are murder simulators. Manhunt has been called the video game equivalent of a snuff film," Thompson argued. "I am working with an Oakland, CA prosecutor in a murder trial in which the older gang members used GTA 3 to train teens to do carjackings and murders. The Army uses these games to break down the inhibition to kill of new recruits."

You want to have kids that are well adjusted? Make them bail hay, or some other "real" job. I play a lot of violent video games and I'm well balanced, except for the occasional urge to knock off a 7 Eleven with my hooker girl friend in a stolen tank.

And apparently carjacking in video games will turn me into a thief, but Power Rangers won't turn me in to a Ninja. Let me tell you how you let your kid play GTA he will play "cops and robbers in the back yard" you let him watch Power Rangers he will play "boot to the head" in the back yard. Pretend bullets don't lead to stitches, Pretend kicks often do.

Ed Sims definitely gets that if you teach a man to fish he doesn't need you any more. As a VC you want to find drug dealers to invest in. There might be a more politically correct way to say it but you want something people can't live with out, and that they will pay you over and over for.

But what I think Ed is missing about the value of .Net is code portability from Standalone application to Web application. Realistically most programmers can write a monolithic standalone application, that uses installers, and has a massive UI for doing everything you ever wanted it to, but porting that to a web application is generally hard. But with .Net it is easy to convert your code from monolithic standalone application to a web application with either a similar interface, or a dumbed down interface.

Sure you can do that with Perl, but perl makes for sucky standalone applications. Same with Java. .Net lets you write once and modify slightly for repurposing your application.

People might argue that other languages are more powerful, or support more OS's but when it comes to how fast you can write an application .Net easily allows for the fastest developement time, and that is like having an assembly line for your Meth Lab.

I was listening to the radio on the way home from work yesterday and this lady is talking about being a localvore. She claimed she only eats food grown with in 100 miles of her home. And that the fuel this saves, is good for the environment and that it is good for the economy.

Maybe if you did all your shopping at a farmers market you could not die from scurvy, or boredom shopping from all local growers, but where are you going to get bananas? or Sugar? Flour? You might live somewhere that you could get some of these items, but not all. And if there were a large adoption of this practice you'd suffer the same fate as the pilgrims that come winter you'd be eating mostly beef jerky. Especially if you live in Minnesota or somewhere else that doesn't have year round crops.

I grew up in a farming community, but I'm not so ignorant to think that locally grown is best. We thrive on interstate commerce. Sugar cane is grown where it thrives, and wheat is grown where it thrives. Cows don't do well in jungle, and Bananas don't do well in the snow.

In an economy where we are talking about outsourcing labor to rural communities, and are recognizing that technology companies benefit by getting resources where resources are abundant, are we thinking that agriculture should have the reverse model?

I had an interesting discussion the other day about what the price for admission to a community production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat" cost.

Part of me thinks in terms of Movies where the sucky low budget ones cost $8.50 to go see and the really awesome ones cost the same $8.50. And part of me thinks in terms of DVD's where the really good ones cost $26 and the really sucky ones cost $3.

Chad who did the lighting for the show, commented that "No less effort goes into a community production than a broadway production." Which I can agree with, but I didn't have the heart to counter that the talent in the Broadway production would be better, but I did mention to him that the hard part is that Broadway can amertize their investment in the show over years, not 5 weeks, that a community run is.

So should we be paying for what a show costs to produce? Should we pay what the entertainment it brings us is worth? Or is it a flat hourly rate?

It seems strange that while Cars, and Computers, and Lawyers all cost different amounts based on quality, we don't translate that to entertainment for the most part. Sure Actors and Set Designers all get different rates based on their skill, but the ticket buyer doesn't pay differently based on the quality of the show, only the quality of the seat.

I'm reminded of my thread on Public Domain software. Theatre is often done for the love of it, and the admission only covers the cost of the venue. Andy who is staying with me this week is doing a show in Scottland for the love of it and taking a loss.

My thought that Open Source software done "For the love" was not viable long term because the type of people interested in doing that work were not likely to procreate, but I don't think Theatre suffers that since it has a good deal of women, who seem ok with their geeky theatre boyfriends. And it doesn't appear to have changed from the "Starving Artist" days of Shakespeare.

So go see some community theatre. Donate to it, so that the artists only need starve figuratively.

Higher Resolution isn't always better. Especially in a world of Digital Displays. In a perfect world upscalers would do an amazing job and could devine from adjacent frames and motion vectors what the image would look like at a higher resolution, but most upscalars do little more than a bilinear upconversion. The nice ones do a bicubic, but both of these methods result in either a softer image than a display running in its native resolution, or some jaggies around the edges.

Because I use DirecTV I run in 720p on my DLP. If you use ATSC in an area where most of your content is 1080i then I'd recommend a large CRT, but right now there is no compelling reason to get a 1080p display unless you work with Digital Dailies or anticipate the majority of your home theatre viewing to be from HD-DVD.

Many people wonder why I didn't get a projector for my home entertainment, and the light goes on when I say that I don't really want to watch the news in the dark.

If you have a dedicated space for movie viewing a 1080p display or a DLP projector can be an amazing experience. But if you have to use the same tv for watching digital cable or standard definition sattelite be prepared for being able to see every artifact and realizing how ugly your signal is.

Lately there is a lot of talk about how PS3 is better than Xbox 360 because of the 1080p support on PS3. While I might hold the lack of HDMI or DVI out against the Xbox360, 1080p is not going to improve framerates, just reduce jaggies. When a Game developer is writing a game one of the things they have to way is Polygon count against Framerate. If you have to support a higher resolution you have to make the lower resolutions look suckier, because unlike when you write for a PC where you can write a game that no one could play day one, but with a console you have to assume that the console will not gain any additional capacity and so you have to make certain that the video modes you support are playable out of the box.

I love Univerals HD, and Hate it at the same time. I love that they have all these great shows inHD and commercial free. But It is also really frustrating to watch re-runs of Battle Star Galactica Six months after they are on SciFi... You realize how sucky they look on Standard Definition.

If I had patience I would just wait for them to be on UHD and not watch them in SD. Same with some of the TNT shows. But Alas I need my fix.

Seeing the King Kong and Serenity trailer on UHD rocked.

Now that I'm back to having a work week less than 50 hours long, I'm going to force myself to start blogging again. So be aware. My thoughts on HD, and IPTV are soon coming.