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November 12, 2006

High school summer jobs

Paul Graham has an interesting essay about creating wealth. In it he mentioned something I told the students at Delphi High School but said it much better than I did.

Will technology increase the gap between rich and poor? It will certainly increase the gap between the productive and the unproductive. That's the whole point of technology. With a tractor an energetic farmer could plow six times as much land in a day as he could with a team of horses. But only if he mastered a new kind of farming.

I've seen the lever of technology grow visibly in my own time. In high school I made money by mowing lawns and scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. This was the only kind of work available at the time. Now high school kids could write software or design web sites. But only some of them will; the rest will still be scooping ice cream.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html

Posted by mikel at 12:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 03, 2006

Delphi High School career day

I got to speak at career day at Delphi High School in Mrs. Kinzie's class today. I talked about IT careers in general and more specifically about software development and starting a small business.

If any of the kids are googling me and find this page, here are some links to things I talked about.

Purdue Computer and Information Technology

Alice - good for creating 3D games and movies

Visual Studio Express - free versions of the software development tool I use a lot in my work.

Nvu - Free HTML editor

I've turned off comments because of all the comment spam. I'll turn it back on once I upgrade the blog software. But until then, email me if you have any questions.

Posted by mikel at 03:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack