I often find myself attempting to see the world from others eyes. I do this most often with my parents in a real attempt to see them as people and not just "mum" and "dad". To try to imagine what I would think if I were them. Do they think like me? Are they half me plus half different?
Reshaping my thoughts of my parents into that of a friend is easy now. It isn't hard to empathise with my parents thoughts now as I would any friend twice my age.
But what about "then"?
As part of this, I wonder what my parents were like when I was born. It's easy to lump this era into nothingness. The universe didn't exist before I was born. If it did, it's words on paper, photographs. Not thoughts or feelings.
As I thought about Dave's 30th, his parenthood and my 30th next year, it occurred to me that my parents were around 30 when they had me.
"Me" now, my thoughts, my mortgage, my relationships, my career challenges, the stuff I think about on the train... That's what my parents were going through when I was born.
We don't have a five year old (my sister) of course, but you get what I mean...
It's easier in this context to think of my parents then as well as now as not being some amazing superheroes or broad concept of history.
They were probably thinking a lot of what I'm thinking now.
It's not so strange.
Further... if I am to live at least as long as long again as I already have, my parents now are what I'll be when I'm 60.
Understanding life and other people is so much easier with a little empathy.
Interesting (to me) article on the challenges facing institutions sitting on piles of decaying history and their desire to digitise that history.
Of course the biggest issue is money. Cost. All that.
Digitizing anything is time consuming, dull and at times irritating work that can seem almost pointless. It's hard to stay motivated.
The article uses the US Library of Congress in it's examples, particularly the fact that out of one million plus photos only 5407 have been digitised. I would say that at least the Library of Congress still spends millions keeping the originals in viewable condition.
In Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill tells a brief story of how he went to the old newspaper where his parents used to work to view their photo archive. An archive he remembers being enormous. On returning he finds that that the archive has been reduced to almost nothing. On asking where the photos went he is told they've been sold to be used for the chemicals in them.
So much history lost.
What the headline means is that students are not enrolling in IT because the general consensus that there is no work and no future in it. And so universities are cutting their courses.
We've been trying to hire programmers/analysts at work for the past few months and we cannot find anyone even remotely qualified for the job. They're either already employed or inexperienced.
That, I suppose says that the job market IT is very strong, but that graduates will probably be fighting with very experienced people for work. I'm uncertain how many graduate jobs there are out there.
I've been cold-called four times this year (one last week) with job offers from previous work mates. They're all struggling.
I'm pretty happy where I am. Don't call me, I'll call you.
The lack of SQL skills is vaguely disturbing. I'd like to blame .NET and it's wacky do-it-yourself ready-made data access controls that I presume are being taught at university, but it seems (from interviewing people) to be that most are working on very simple applications that require little more than a SELECT and a few UPDATEs, all auto generated from a ready made form.
Half our application is written in T-SQL stored procedures.
Further on, a friend in the games industry is struggling to find graduates. They're not even looking for gurus, just people that enjoy games and programming. It seems these people no longer exist. At least, they're not prepared to do it for a job.
Perhaps those that used to program for a hobby now do so in their spare time and do something else for their "real job"?
And yet...
Half the people here at work still think HTML bold is too complicated. At times the industry looks like the ultimate cash cow, where one could get by with some HTML skills and a few days work a week, wowing the paying customers with flashing text and three column stylesheet layouts.
And other days I see interesting projects cancelled because no-one wants to pay for them.
And because it takes too long to train people.
I have serious doubts this story is any different in any industry the further into it you bury yourself.
When we were there in January it certainly was tempting to jump onto the lake and have a walk, but it looked like it was just asking to break you ankle.
With a new plan to pump recycled water into the lake it will "never be empty again" so this was the last chance for anyone to have a good look at it's dry floor.
Sorry I missed it.