I am glad we still celebrate Memorial Day in this country. Somehow it seems that as the political correctness of our culture takes over everything we end up loosing an understanding of what made this country great in the first place. It sickens me to see stories like the one of the Iraq veteran who displayed the American flag in his apartment window and was told to take it down or face eviction due to the fact that the flag is offensive to some of their residents.
Charlie Price of Wisconsin served 8 years for his country in Iraq and Kosovo to find that he isn’t even allowed to fly the flag he fought for in his own window. The couple is now fighting to amend the Freedom to Display the American Flag Act of 2005 to include renters, and I hope they are successful. Sometimes it seems that you are no longer aloud to hold an opinion in this country because it might offend someone. Who are these idiots who have now decided that we need to be a country of brown plain-jane, average, robots, who all believe in the same thing and can never disagree with anyone else?
There is no greatness in average, no conviction of ideals or principles in living a life of medium gray, and these types always seem to get the headlines. It gets tiring to hear the moaners, whiners, and complainers beat the drums of complacency and strive towards moving the country to be average, but sometimes they seems to be yelling the loudest. Now, instead of being the innovators and inventors, we are having to rely on Russia and Russian built rockets to take us into space, who would have thought that 20 years ago.
It is still the greatest country in the world, I just wish some of it’s residents would take a history lesson and see that America was not built on being average. The History Channel just finished an interesting series called America The Story of Us. Though some of it was a little subjective, it showed the overwhelming story of how much innovation, determination, and sacrifice people made because they believed in themselves and what this country stood for.
My family has had people who fought in the Civil War, WWI, both of my grandfathers served in WWI (see Son of a Son of a Photographer), one flew a B-24 Bomber in WWII in Europe, my dad served in the Air Force, and my cousin decided to go into the Navy after 9-11 and is currently serving in the Navy on a nuclear submarine. I am thankful for their service to this country. Because they served, my wife and I are able to enjoy living in this great country.
I hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day. It has been quite a stormy weekend with some crazy weather but I managed to get outside and take a few photos (and some of the dog of course). The heat is definitely on its way, the pasture, trees, and everything around has taken on the brilliant green of summer.
Posts Related to This Topic:
We have very few traditions in our house. We usually try to have special days throughout the year, but not necessarily on the day everyone else decides it should be done. One tradition we have maintained for the last five years is going to the annual National Polka Festival (their website needs a serious update) in Ennis Texas. This year through all kinds of different circumstances we were not able to make it, but today, for the last five years, we have been in Ennis enjoying some of Deborah’s Czech heritage with all the other Czech, German, and Texan people from around the country.
Each year Deborah has hand made an authentic Czech costume, and I usually get a vest and or shirt to go along with her costume. This past year her costume was red, white, and black. In order to enter into the Czech dance contest you must be in full costume, so Deborah has made a point to hand make hers each year.
Since we were not able to be there this year I thought I would post a few photos from last year. We are already making plans to be at the festival next year, but at least this year I saved about 10,000 calories from all the great Czech and German food that always accompanies the festival. I am sure everyone will have a wonderful time this year, we will be enjoying our Memorial Day weekend at home, watching all these thunderstorms rolling through.
Posts Related to This Topic:
Normally I would not just do a post to plug a specific company, unless they had done something really outstanding (or perhaps done something really poorly), which Bose has done now, at least twice. Way back on November 26th 2008 I bought a pair of Bose TriPort In-Ear Headphones from Best Buy for around $100 including tax. At the time, they were probably the most expensive ear-bud type headphones I had purchased but looking back, it was the best money ever spent for that type of thing.
Not only do these headphones have the best sound quality of any ear bud headphones (see my product review on CNET) but Bose backs them up with a total and complete one year warranty. Big deal right, well, except for when you wear them every day in all different conditions and they don’t make it that one year.
In July 2009 the wires fried and my nice expensive headphones had lasted about 8 months. I contacted Bose and they replaced the damaged pair, for free, and in about a week I had a brand new pair of headphones. Those Bose sent me in 2009 lasted until last week with photo below, about another 8-9 months. So I emailed Bose again, thinking this time I was out of luck, and once again they offered to replace them for free. Not only that, but they even offered to upgrade the set to the mobile version with the inline mic for $29.
It seems that once you pay for something from Bose, if you use them like I do, you have a perpetual warranty.
Bose told me again that this new pair, being shipped around June 1 2010 will carry the same full one year warranty. Wow, just love when a company stands by their products. Our culture is fully immersed in the generic, low quality, disposable, product lines that flood our discount box stores, but there are still a few companies that make a high quality product, and usually the higher price is well worth paying. Of course, they also get my business beyond these headphones.
My wife has a pair of these headphones, and I also own a pair of their QuietComfort 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones (probably the best pair of headphones on the market for the price, see my CNET review), and their Bose On-Ear Headphones (an in-between model). Some audiophile will argue my point on sound quality, but for the price, and some are far far more expensive, Bose has found a great medium between price and quality
In this case, my high price of $100 for a pair of high quality in-ear headphones from Bose cost me about $0.08 per day if I include the new pair that are on their way. There are a couple of caveats with this of course. If your headphones last longer than a year, you are pretty much out of luck. I am probably not the most typical user of these headphones. I wear them, and have worn them, on a tractor cutting 40 acres of grass through the entire summer, in the woods, on a bike, a motorcycle, in the car, in the rain, snow, and every other imaginable condition.
Of course the negative you can take from this is that obviously, under heavy and daily use, these headphones lack a bit of durability, but as long as Bose continues to stand behind them, I’m ok with that at this point. Products today, even high quality products, anything that is mass produced, are really made for the “averages”. If you are an under-average user, you pay more and get less, and if you are an over-average user, you pay less and get more, simple as that.
Good customer service and high quality products are a hard combination to find today so I like to point it out when it comes across path. I can think of only a handful, like Apple, maybe Honda? What are some of the companies and products you have found today that have similar customer service?
Posts Related to This Topic:
This is a followup, and part 2 of a 4 part series, on the work at home factory job of today (read part 1, The Work at Home Job Scam, the New Factory. This post deals with the freelance job market, the upcoming posts will deal with the call center jobs and Internet evaluator or website annotator jobs. Keep in mind the term “freelance” encompasses a huge genre of work from photography to writing to virtual assistant to anything you can find on Craigslist in the job area. The scope of this post is really just dealing with Elance and the Elance alternatives.
Elance is the biggest player in the Internet freelance job area. After paying for their premium service for 2-3 years, and trying over and over for years to find a good flow of freelance jobs, I found exactly one decent hard working person who hired me to do some ‘Internet research” for $10/hr, which over a period of 6 months has earned me $85. I still do work for him, he is trying to build his business, and he pays higher than most at $10/hr, but after almost three years, I have found nothing legitimate and it cost me $14.99/month ($450) for revenues totalling $80.
I am not here to say Elance or the others are scams (although there are posting scams all over the place), I am just trying to point out the value of your time and what it is worth.
There are plenty of alternatives to Elance like oDesk, Guru, Rentacoder, Scriptlance, Mturk, Freelancer, Getacoder, and some of my observations from sites like these are:
- there are always tons of jobs available
- Elance at least has it down to a science as far as pay and project organization
- you are competing with an endless supply of workers from India who charge $1/hr (yes, on average your competition will charge $1-2 PER HOUR)
- you have to work literally for nothing to get started by taking projects that will pay $50 for 30 hours of work
- you are competing with noobs and people who have no idea how to run a legitamate business who will do anything for nothing, though their work is often very low quality, something you can easily overcome
- quality is not valued as a whole… I have found the large majority of listings on these sites are looking for the cheapest possible outcome, with no regards for quality work
- and of course, there are tons of scams everywhere you look, offers for work that will have your ISP ban your service, have eBay shut down your account, or worse… some offers might reward you with a federal search warrant and your computer equipment confiscated
Of course not all freelance work is like this, but I know of many people, who live and work within the U.S. and have to pay expenses associated with living in this country, not India. You can only work for nothing for so long, eventually you have to either cut all expenses (not realistic) or have some revenue.
I have basically worked freelance as a photographer for more than 15 years and the key is to slowly build a client base that will recommend your work to others. It is slow, tedious, and doesn’t pay well, but it’s far better in the long run than the results from these sites listed above.
Do yourself a favor in the long run. If you are interested in doing freelance work, treat your business like you would any other entrepreneurial endeavor by looking at some of the basics. For what it’s worth, my list also includes ::
- Don’t quit your revenue stream (job) until you are established
- Determine what unique skill or art you are going to freelance (what’s your market)
- Be prepared not to make any money early on, but even so, stay away from the sites above
- Pursue your passion, not a position
- Know that trying to monetizing your passion may destroy it or at least significantly change it
- Seeking alternative “positions” in that industry may also destroy your passion
- Seek out others who are doing the same thing and try to learn as much as you can from them
- Working more hours will not always equal better results
- Trying to integrate your passion into #1 above (results may vary)
- If you can mentally live without a steady paycheck, a 401(k), a retirement package, and stability, forget about #1 and pursue your passion instead of the culturally accepted “American Dream” but when you struggle to find your way, re-read #3, then, as Buffett would say, breathe in, breathe out, and move on. My wife and I went over 15 years without a single paycheck (the W-2 type) and I still managed to eat.
Have you had any experience with Elance or any of the other sites listed above? In my experience most, if not all, of these sites way over promise and way under-deliver for those with quality, experience, and education in their field. I would love to hear if you have had any success with any of them in your freelance pursuits.
Posts Related to This Topic:
I recently purchased a copy of John Shaw’s eBook called John Shaw’s Digital Processing, A Personal Workflow using Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4 (a great book if you are a photographer looking for some insight into post-processing and the digital workflow process, well worth he $25) hoping I would be able to convert it to an ePub file and read it in iBooks on my iPad. I was able to convert his previous eBook, John Shaw’s Photoshop Field Guide, but have just about given up on his new one, the structure of the PDF looks to be just too complicated to convert, but I am going to use his two eBooks as the example since one will convert and one won’t.
I have searched long and hard for a how-to on converting PDF files to ePub files so you can read them in iBooks or a variety of eBook readers, and have found almost no consolidated information, so here it is. There are several reasons why converting PDF files to an ePub file is not the easiest thing to do, and they often seem to error out or format improperly. This how-to guide is written for the intention of taking a PDF eBook (or any PDF file) for loading it into iBooks in iTunes for use on your iPad, but the same process can be used for most all eBook readers.
Some Basic PDF Info
All PDF’s are not made the same. They all have different formatting, some have images, some are just plain text, some are print screen save-as files, you can basically take anything you can see or print on the Internet and turn it into a PDF. The reason is most everyone everywhere can read a PDF, and most have the free version Adobe PDF reader (at this writing the current version is Adobe Reader 9.3.2).
Because these files can be created by almost any means, often they do not make the greatest, prettiest looking, eBooks, and it is not an exact science to get a PDF to an ePub file, even harder to get it to look nice on your eBook reader. Your final outcome is going to depend on how the file was created in the first place, not something you have control over most of the time. Some PDF files because of their structure will never be able to be converted to an ePub file and you will have to look at alternatives like a good PDF reader like Goodreader on the iPad.
Ways to Convert PDF’s to ePub Using ePub2Go or Stanza
Once you have your PDF file you want to convert, you can try the quickest and easiest PDF to ePub converter first, and if that doesn’t work, then move on to the next alternative. First thing to try is a site called ePub2Go. This is basically the ONLY online PDF to ePub conversion tool you can access for free and without downloading another stand alone app or program.
Step 1 :: ePub2Go The process is pretty simple, just click the link the pdf is on my computer then let them convert the file. Once it’s finished just click on view or save it on my computer and your done.
If you get finished with the conversion and you get an error message you pretty much have to move on at this point. You can get a variety of errors like the screen shot below. That is just one of the error message you could get, but once you get that, you won’t be able to convert the file using ePub2Go.
Step 2 :: Stanza The next thing to try would be to download a free copy of Stanza by Lexcycle (download available for Windows or Mac), a great generic type eBook reader, and convert the file using the desktop app or program. Stanza has moved their main product line to the mobile eBook reader but they have a great conversion tool in the desktop app.
After you download and install the program it will prompt you to open a file. Just open your preferred PDF file. You will probably need to adjust the number of columns and on larger screens, depending on how the PDF is created, it may or may not look formatted properly, but this will be similar to your final ePub output file.
Next just go to the file menu and choose –> file –> export book as –> ePub. You can also see there are a host of options available to convert the PDF to a Kindle file and many others. If that works, great, if it doesn’t, you are quickly running out of options. Stanza also has a tutorial on how to convert files as well that is very helpful.
Step 3 :: Adobe Acrobat / HTML / Word / Plain Text If step 1 or 2 doesn’t work then you are left with trying to manipulate the file into behaving properly enough to do a conversion, but even that may not work at this point, this is the last ditch effort before you have to just stick with reading the PDF.
If you have Adobe Acrobat (not the free reader but the full version of Acrobat) you can export the PDF as a variety of file types (but not an ePub). Many times you can export a file as an HTML file and fix the issues the PDF had that caused the conversion to ePub error and then try step 1 or step 2 above after you have corrected the problem. Explaining how to correct the file in HTML is beyond the scope of this article but it’s often easy to see where the conversion is getting hung.
In the case of my above issues with Shaw’s newest eBook, I tried to export it as a Word Doc, RTF, HTML, and Plain Text and due to the complexity of the PDF it just wasn’t feasible to convert the file in a readable format. In that case, I am going to just pull it over to my iPad using Goodreader and read it as a PDF.
I was surprised how few PDF to ePub file converters were really available. I did leave off several paid for programs that convert these file types but most of them just use the same process as step 1 and 2 above and I really wouldn’t pay for the programs myself. You can get a PDF to ePub Converter trial from CNET, PDFtoEPUB from DNAML Software, or PDF to ePub from DONGSOFT, but all are pricy alternatives after the trial runs out.
Coming up I will finish this article with taking the new ePub file you have created (or the PDF that you couldn’t get converted) and showing how to load it into iBooks using iTunes. How do you convert your PDF’s?
Posts Related to This Topic:
This is a followup from my previous post, Are You a Linchpin, Assignment, see also Linchpin and the Art of Photography. The easy answer to this question is, yes, of course I am a Linchpin. It’s about like asking someone if they think they have any value in this world at all. Well if they didn’t think so, they probably wouldn’t be here. The hard part about the answer is not the yes or no, but the why.
Explaining to someone why you have value is not as easy to quantify. I have value to my family because I cut the grass and hopefully bring joy to their lives, I have value to God for a variety of reasons, but can you quantify your value at work? The value we have at work is the value we create. It isn’t given to us by our boss, or written in a manual, or presented to us on a nice easy to follow map. Value is what we make of it, and how we use this creativity of ours to add value above what we are paid, because we want to, not because we are paid to do so.
I add a created value to my team, not for the tasks that are easily documented, but for the unique perspective I bring that only I have because only I have lived my life. I am a technology troubleshooter, teacher, trainer, arbitrator, writer, photographer, problem solver, and all around idea negotiator, who generally doesn’t like hard and fast rules but concepts and ideas to work with. If it can be easily explained and easily written down, anyone could do it, anyone could easily replace my value. It is the unquantifiable that makes me a Linchpin.
To me being a good editor is an art, the art of a Linchpin. I know how to edit content and copy, but I am lousy at it. No matter how many times I read something I still miss obvious grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors that leap out to a good editor, or even a fair one. We have a great editor on our team (@farrowj on Twitter) but even if you could write down exactly what she does, and if I tried to follow it, I would still be a lousy editor. I doubt she has ever written it down either.
Being a Linchpin or not is more about choice than destiny or fate. You aren’t just born a Linchpin and you are made one by your boss or customers. You are a Linchpin if you choose to become one, choose to share your unique art with others beyond what is written in a manual.
Are you a Linchpin, and if so, why?
Posts Related to This Topic:
This is the final followup from my previous posts, Are You a Linchpin, Assignment and an upcoming post Are You a Linchpin, Answer. I took the above photo of Seth Godin back in 2009, see Tribes, We Need You To Lead Us by Seth Godin // Review, and shortly after I took that photo shoot, I gave up my art for dead. I had spent the better part of 15-17 years chiseling away at my art of photography and had felt like I was rarely valued for that art (monetarily speaking). In fact, in over 15 years of actively shooting, I probably made less than $1,200 total ($1,000 of that coming within the last 6 months of that 15 years), on an investment of probably close to $30,000 or more in equipment. With a degree in Accounting, schooled in the ways of business, that didn’t compute. Expenses always have to be less than revenue, but I was looking at it totally wrong.
Rarely does a book motivate me to make an actual change. Many books motivate me, but not enough to do anything about it. Linchpin on the other hand was one of those that just happen to light a fire under my feet and get me to look at my art in another way. Mainly, that an art is done for the sake of the artist, and those who receive his gift. I knew this from the moment I picked up a camera, but over time and many other circumstances, I had forgotten that.
Profit, something which I was always taught was a simple mathematical formula; “revenue minus expenses equals profit”, was totally rearranged in Linchpin. Godin explains profit, from the business side, as the value you, the artist, add or contribute minus the amount you are paid. Same thing really as the MBA version, but when you look at the work, as “value” it adds something more than just money, it changes everything.
A fast food worker at McDonald’s can add a wide range of value to the company, yet they are pretty much all paid the same thing, minimum wage, so there is no reason to create or add value above a certain level, but that doesn’t mean some don’t create and add value where it is not needed or appreciated. Brother Lawrence was one such person. A 17th century monk, and someone who had enormous value to add to all of society in his book of letters, spent much of his life doing dishes, as a cook. His conversations with God and letters to his friends make an incredible book, and it is free, you can read it right now, doesn’t cost you a dime.
My art of photography had created value for years. I gave it away to the wrong people, businesses and companies, and tried to charge those in my close circle. So thanks Seth, I am going to get back to the business of creating my own unique art. I don’t know how I am going to accomplish that, I have no equipment, no resources to buy any equipment, and at the moment, no clients to shoot for, but those are just details. I have going on 2 decades of knowledge in my own art, the equipment is just a tool.
