IT Training, Bears and Wolves...

IT Training...

As I mentioned last I have never seen specific IT training for the print/VDP/transpromo industry.

Virtually everyone I know with an IT background in these industries currently came there through some round-about way, i.e., did not specifically say "this is what I want to do".

So let's open our net a bit wider and look at programmers involved in more generic print-related areas.  Specifically PDF and AFP.  For me a good measure of IT programmer interest in a topic is a website called Code Project.  This is a good "go to"site if you need some direction on coding a specific application - if you need code for something its likely here if someone somewhere in the world coded it already.

(As an aside, most or all of the code posted at Code Project is "free for reuse" in one form or another.  This means that if you follow the rules an author lists you can use their exact code in your project.  Personally I do not find this useful and mostly use it as a guide to develop my own code.)

So let's take a look here for PDF and AFP proejcts.  For AFP we find nothing (putting "AFP" in the search box).

So let's try PDF.  This is more interesting.  Lots of projects but, on closer inspection, they mostly fall into a few paradigms: forms, merge, text extraction, creation, manipulation, and many more esoteric things like Silverlight.

Unfortunately in my quick scan I did not find one project related specifically to dealing with PDF for printing (excluding any sort of Windows print driver).

While this is not scientific its certainly makes my point about PDF and print.  There isn't any direct IT interest outside those professionals already in the business.

Wolves...

On a side note I ran into my first "Lone Wolf" tattoo in the wild at the Walmart checkout last night.  Though I didn't snap a picture (even though I had my camera phone) it was along these lines.

Bears...

Yesterday while jogging along a fairly isolated road near my house I crossed paths with a big black bear.  I was coming down a small hill.  On the right is a creek-bed behind a guard rail probably 4-5 feet below the road.  On the right is woods.

As I came down the hill a large black bear jumped guard rail and lumbered across the road.  Probably about twenty yards in front of me.  He didn't look my way and just went straight across rather quickly.  Not knowing what else to do I just kept running toward him.  My thinking being that A) he wasn't stupid and knew I was there and B) there was no reason to attract attention to myself by suddenly doing something new or different.