The Coburn Blog

Here is an interesting site a friend of mine sent to me.

theblindphotographer.com

I read this, and thought to myself.. “Do they have any classes on using photoshop too?” lol!

As funny as this is, I bet blind people would make good photographers though. I mean, they have driving for visually impaired people, why not photography too right? If I did anything like that, they’d have to teach me how to work in photoshop first, or fireworks or MS paint, or irfanview or any of those other graphical editors. Thats why I get discouraged from designing websites, because I can’t draw, or crop pictures, or do banner ads or buttons or bullets or anything of that sort. I wish I could, I really do, but noones ever taught me.

I asked Ivy Tech about it, and my faculty advisor was saying she’s trying to learn Flash and actionscript and is having a hard enough time with that. I told Lauran though I said, I can’t even draw a bullet or a little button that web designers need just to do simple things like wordpress and movable type javascript templates, much of less all the pretty graphics most websites have nowadays. She just doesn’t understand you can’t teach me how to draw, you either have a born talent to do it, or you don’t, but she says I can be just a coder. I’m like, nobody is going to hire me JUST to sit there and code all day, there going to want more then just that, least in this town anyway, there going to want buttons in various shapes and sizes drawn, bullets made in different colors, all that kind of stuff that I just can’t do. I mean, to give you an idea of what I’m trying to say, I don’t even know how to take an existing button and change its color. I’m sure its probably fairly easy, probably a one step process in photoshop I’m sure, but until someone sits down with me and teaches me how to do that, I won’t ever know how to do it.

I’m not saying I couldn’t, but I am saying, someone would have to sit down with me and SHOW me how, because I have read just about every photoshop tutorial there is online trying to figure out how to draw simple bullets and buttons for even my own navigational menu over there on the right of this blog, and I couldn’t figure it out, because all the tutorials on that subject are too advanced for me,  so how do they think I’m supposed to be able to do it for a living? My instructor just did not understand thats the main reason I had to quit that web development job at Vision it Now. Sure, of course I can put up with crappy bosses, weird employees, and all that,  actually the employees there were fairly nice people, I put up with much worse when I worked in factories for over 10 years, but what they don’t understand, is the job itself is what I couldn’t do, and if I can’t do my job then how am I supposed to stay employed there?  Sure if I was getting paid and I needed the pay to pay my rent sure I would have put more effort into the job, but since I was just doing it on a volunteer basis for a reference on my resume, who cares, thats what I figured.

Its like if a person didn’t know Access 2007, and couldn’t figure it out even after reading a tutorial, and the boss asked the person to design a database, and the employee couldn’t do it because that person didn’t know how to design a database. Well, the employee would have to quit or accept being fired right? because if the employee they hired couldn’t do the job they’d have to find someone else who could, thats just how it works in business.  Most people would just wait until their fired if they were being paid for it, but if you know you can’t do the job they expect of you, and your doing it for FREE anyway, why stick around, why even bother sticking with it? Exactally, well thats all that happened. I couldn’t learn what they wanted me to learn on my own, I didn’t have the experience. They of course knew that when they hired me,  but I didn’t know what all I was responsible for doing until I got on the job, and Ivy Tech doesn’t offer classes in that type of web development, so it was just a waste of my time being there if I couldn’t do the job they asked me to. I would have been fired after the second week if I hadn’t have quit after the first week anyway, and I figured quitting is alot better then being fired.

My point is, everybody has their own talents in this world, mine is computers yes, but see, there are alot of areas in technology I can learn and do well in. I can do Networking, Servers, Computer Assembly and maintenance, troubleshooting,  tech support, all that stuff. I can work with Office a little bit, not professionally but I know enough of it to get me by for home use, but my strongest area is still Networking and A+ related stuff. but see, thats why Ivy Tech has 9 different degree programs now in IT, because the field is just so large anymore that I don’t have to design websites to be good in IT, so personally I don’t see what the big deal is.

I understand back in the old days of MS-DOS, us IT guys had to know every area in Computers, because every area was MS-DOS or Linux thats all their was back in those days, which I originally thought myself, that I had to know everything to make it in IT, but that is no longer true because every Joe Schmo has a Computer today, so the field has grown very large over the years.

I mean, not all IT guys know how to design websites in the first place. I talk to my fellow nerds in tech forums everyday who don’t know how to draw either, so I don’t feel so bad for not knowing. Most of the web designers I talked to had no clue how to design websites in ColdFusion at all, most everybody I talked to in the web development field either use PHP, or ASP.NET,  which I wouldn’t be able to draw buttons or bullets in those languages either, or even xhtml and CSS for that matter. I think one guy told me he learned ColdFusion in college like 15 years ago, but has never used it once since. ColdFusion actually wasn’t that difficult to learn, its the graphics I had a problem with. I did find out why alot of  people don’t know ColdFusion though, because ColdFusion hosting is expensive. I even went looking for ColdFusion hosting over at webhostingtalk.com, a place I hang out at often, and everybody told me ColdFusion hosting is expensive because the ColdFusion product is so expensive, but no more expensive then Cpanel/WHM or Virtuozzo, so I’m not real sure why they don’t offer it. but nobody knows it except a handful of people who have been using it for over 15 years, so really I feel sorry for that Vision it Now place because I don’t think there going to find anybody who knows ColdFusion, but I am sure there are IT guys who are more efficient at web design then I am, they probably know photoshop and all that, so they would be a better fit then me, graphics is just not a strong area for me, and one of the reasons for that is just because there just isn’t enough training in it out there really. Most everybody I know who does graphics is self taught, but I just don’t have the talent in that area they do, I just don’t have it.

Anyway, I just think that phtography for blind people is so neat, now they just need classes in photoshop for blind people.  lol