A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

Haven’t felt much like writing anything.

I’m over on twitter most of the time anyway lately.

We’ll see.

I made the mistake of thinking a job prospect was a “Sure Thing” and as a result, during the 3 week process, I relaxed my efforts on the search process. I’ll get in to why this was bad later on.

In the meantime I thought it might be useful to pen some advice and what insight I have into the process in a series of daily(ish) pieces. I may end up posting multiple a day, but I’m going to try and resist the temptation. My hope is that other people will at least gain some utility out of this.

Over time I will probably add formatting and updates directly to these posts.

Feel free to drop a comment if you found something useful or inaccurate.

Jumping right in…

This being the first day back at it, today I went through my resume, looking for edits, imperfections and other tweaks. I found a bunch.

A couple words about resumes:

Your resume is the top priority. It needs to be in shape, solid, accurate and compelling. I’m not going to talk about content here. People have that covered elsewhere. Plus, I’m not all that confident I’ve nailed it well enough to be telling other people how to do it.

What I AM going to talk about here is formatting.

First, create it in Microsoft Word. This will save you an incredible amount of headache. It’s the format people want, almost exclusively. You can use something like OpenOffice, which will save as MSWord. But be SURE to view it in Word to make sure all the formatting translates exactly as you expect. You don’t want people to enthusiastically pull up your resume then wince as the bulleting is wonky.

Yes aesthetics matters. It should be neat, clean, and consistent. BUT it should not WOW people with watermark images, clever (or ‘cute’) bullet icons, horizontal rule section delimiters, borders, or multiple fonts. None of it. Unless you’re a graphic designer, the design isn’t something that should even be seen. People should look at your resume and see what it says, not what color it is.

Now that you have your Microsoft Word resume… Create a “plain text” one. In Word, use “save as” to save your resume as “TextResume.txt” using the “plain text” format. (A word of advice here, if you’re original word resume filename is “resume.doc” do NOT save the plain text version as just “resume.txt.” I promise you WILL get them confused and send the wrong one. Just add “Text” to the beginning of the filename and you’ll never have to wonder. While the Word version will always be the definitive edition, you’re going to need the plain text version.

Reload the text version and clean it up. Put blank lines in where other formatting tricks were being used in word. Align the dates and headings. It’s monkeywork, but it’s easy. Blur your eyes a bit and see what looks out of place then fix it. Rince, repeat.

Now you’re ready to go.

As I see it the first task is to become available.

You’re going to have to slog through job recs, recruiters and help wanted ads. But it’s imperative that you are as visible as you can be while you do this. Don’t forget that your future employer is actively looking for you as well. Make it as easy for him to find you as you can.

So my first order of business is posting my resume on various online job sites. It’s the fastest way to get the massive employee search machines of the world working for you.

As a programmer I’ve started off with: monster.com, hotjobs.com, dice.com and a couple others. There are great reviews of these sites that are pretty easy to find. Google is your friend. A simple search for “job search sites” will turn up a gold mine.

Aside: I don’t like recruiters having my real email address, so I don’t give it out. Fortunately services like gmail allow you to create more email addresses than you can shake a stick at. So I’ve created one just for job searching. It’s innocuously named and used only for that purpose. This is important, you don’t want prospective employers responding to “furryleatherlovemuffin@xtreemfetish.com”

So you have your pair of resumes and your email account. Time to start filling out a mind-numbing number of web forms.

Which is where I’ll pick up next time.

This is exceptional:

Weirich manages the bizarre distinction of leaving me wishing he’d have kept talking for another couple hours on this.

UPDATE: Wow, that wonked up the front page. Uhm… Don’t care. It’s good enough to keep it there.

How can the lefty goon squad justify going after Miss California for having the exact same position on Gay Marriage that the President has?

Now i appreciate that to have a leftist view point you’ve really got to have an incredible ability to ignore your own cognative dissonance (or at least avoid facts with a passion.)

But this is outrageous even for them.

The irony is compounded when you think of the cardinal sin to the leftist:  Hypocracy.

I have what Bryon and I refer to as Self Improvement Psychosis, SIP for short. It’s this bizarre obsession with products and services in vaguely bordered realms of self-help and personal effectiveness.

It means that if I go to levengers.com I start drooling with all the notebooks, pens, 3×5 card systems, circa notebooks, desk organizers, instantpocketcardwalletpad things. I love it. I love it all. Stationary, pens, notebooks, folders, file cards, whiteboards and markers. More more more more more.

It means that if Tony Robbins comes out with another book, I’ll buy it (on the kindle if possible so I can read it in public without baiting someone to ask me about it) and eyerollingly, I’ll read it. After hundreds of these things I can wade through the patronizing tone of a lot of it (Tony’s less bad than most actually) and sift through the “Meet Grady, a 29 year old construction worker…” bullshit to find the actual juice in the book. I even have a little routine where I read the thing full through once, then go back and extract the “do this” bits.

It turns out that I have a limited threshold for the rah rah “You’re a great you!” nonsense. It’s just so bloody insincere and frankly, if “being a great me” was the goal why would I be picking up the fucking self help book there squeevis? Frankly being a better me would mean living my life in a strangely hollow stagnation for my second 40 years or so. But I digress ;-) (relax, this isn’t going to be one of THOSE posts.)

I got a recommendation for a book by Sean Stephenson called ‘Get Off your “But”‘ from… damned if I know where. The Amazon page has a half dozen 5-star reviews and I recall that they seemed to indicate it was “different.”

I glompfed it a couple nights ago for the first time through in a little less than two hours. I’ve got to say, while it fits the template of self-help book a little too well (massive proliferation of “Meet Jenny, she was stuck on her ‘but’ until she learned…”, numbered list of “steps”, big type & narrow columns for maximizing page count, etc.) In fact there really was a lot of fluff in here.

If you’re someone who hasn’t spent TOO much time in this genre (or frankly, if you’re insufficiently metacognitive) than these may all be useful devices to help get someone in the right headspace, associate with the problem that this or that technique is addressing. So I can’t ride it down too much. It does get a bit hackneyed though.

This coming week I’m going to go through and tear out the meat of it, digest it and then pick what I find useful and nonthreatening about it (which if you’ve been paying attention is why I still feel compelled to consume these things, SOME progress is fun but let’s not get crazy now.)

The actual meat in here is solid. It’s different than a lot of what I’ve read and while very little of it is news, the telling of it is quite well done.

The 6 “Lesson” chapters are:

1. Start Connecting
2. Watch What You Say To Yourself
3. Master Your Physical Confidence
4. Focus Your Focus
5. Choose Your Friends Wisely
6. Take Full Responsibility

Far better than most in this category.  Simple, practical, sometimes tough to hear advice on how to deal with self sabotage.  Yes, it’s peppered in cliche’ and deep-fried in schlock.  But the good of it is accessible and exceptionally insightful.

Yep.  4/5.  Highly recommended.

It’ll take ya 10 minutes to read it.  Good stuff.

But congratulations are NOT in order.

I STILL haven’t heard anything.

Shamelessly pilfered from Leeann

Created by Recipe Star

(Hat Tip to the inimitable Misty)

Ya know, there’s such an incredible burst of sneering and eye rolling about twitter, which I happen to be a big fan of, that I thought it best if I at least explain myself a bit. To wit, here, in the same form as those snarky posts by people with too much time on their hands and energy for disliking things are 25 things I love about twitter.

1. Random conversations with really cool people about a bizarre variety of topics leading to wonderful cross-pollination of ideas which almost always results in laugh out loud comments involving bacon.
2. …
3. cute girl avatars (I’m a straight single man. Get over it. That said, NObody is cute enough to follow if they’re not interesting. But nice to look at as well is nice to look at as well ;)
4. uhm…
5. …hmmm…
6. ..well there’s… no, that’s pretty annoying…
7. …
8. well, when someone… no that’s stupid.
9. …
10. I’m sure I’ve got…
11. … but it’s fun wh… gah, yeah that’s not right either.
12. …
13. yeah this isn’t going well.
14. …

ALRIGHT ALRIGHT!  25 things I hate about Twitter!

1. Oh my GOD the spammers have GOT to go.
2. “Internet Marketing Guru/Specialist/Master”s.  They’re a plague.  These are the people who destroyed ryze.com utterly.
3. People who care whether you follow them or not.  Shove.  Someone called me pretentious for not following them back.  Look squeegy, I’m pretentious for lots of reasons and you’re not fucking important enough to be one of ‘em.
4. People who follow you just for their numbers.
5. Twitter DJ wannabes.  (people who do nothing but pollute the stream with blip.fm and grooveshark tweets.  Sure, a couple are ok.  But you’re not a DJ.  You’re sitting at a computer picking songs that don’t mix particularly well and assuming everybody wants to hear them.  Stop it.)
6. People who try to have an in-depth argument in 140 character slices.  Stop it.  Send emails.  The rest of us lost the thread after 2 rounds anyway.  Yes.  I know.  I have been this person.  Nobody else cares.
7. “tweeple”
8. “twerps”
9. “twits”
10. My newfound bizarre compulsion to  write in bite sized thoughts of exactly 140 characters rather than explain myself thoroughly and clearly.
11. Chronic RTers. PPL… if you’re not saying anything new… what are ya doin?
12. The time suck of it all.  Worse than MMOs. (At least in games you get the fake killing and blowing things upness.)
13. People who follow you to try and get you to follow them, then unfollow you and REfollow you so you get the “someone is now following you” email again.  No no sparky, I saw it the first time and determined that you aren’t worth the space in front of my eyeballs.  Then they get indignant about it, which is almost entertaining enough to put in the “love about twitter” list.  But that would totally break the whole joke thing about this post at all.  This is LIKE #3 but the people with the bizarre obsession with it deserve their own item.
14. ashton kutcher.  He’s a funny dude on screen in impressively small doses.  But in this universe he can’t come up with much other than “ha ha I’m married to demi moore.”  Hate to brake it to you knobster, we were over her 10 years ago.  She’s now “that ex-actress who’s really hot…for her age.”  We were over YOU half way through 70s show. Go have a drink with guy ritchie and keven federline. No I’m not just bitter. Really. Stop. Why are you laughing.
15. How I sound like a gibbering idiot when trying to describe twitter to people who don’t use it. “no no really it’s good…and stuff.”
16. Having just alienated a twitter buddy with a poorly formed joke.  I tried explaining it without explaining it but didn’t get across that it was a one-liner.  Sent a message explaining it flat out, haven’t heard back.  See… this is the type of crap that happens with internet communication on the BEST of days.  Restrict someone to 140 character sound-bites… potential for misunderstanding is epic.
17. “Success Coaches”  Guys?  I’ve never heard of ANY of you.  #fail.
18. 30-45 minute search lag.
19. FailWhale
20. Weird disturbances.
21. It’s buckling under the performance load, having been written in some geek’s favorite toy programming language. #geekegofail
22. Then there’s…. hmm….

Yeah, that ain’t working either.

Whatever.

Twitter.

…and stuff.

Last week there was a phone interview.

Wednesday was almost six hours of tag-team interviewing.

third round of interviews was today. It’s a goddamn endurance trial I tell you, an endurance trial. 5 1/2 hours of pair programming with four of the six that interviewed me on Wednesday.

And…

I’m going back on Monday for more.

*flump*

I’m more worn out than a Hanoi hooker the morning the last Copter left.

Your results:
You are Apocalypse

Apocalypse 78% Lex Luthor 77% Dr. Doom 77% Mr. Freeze 75% The Joker 72% Magneto 71% Green Goblin 62% Dark Phoenix 60% Venom 59% Riddler 58% Catwoman 57% Two-Face 54% Juggernaut 50% Kingpin 48% Mystique 46% Poison Ivy 38%

You believe in survival of the fittest and you believe that you are the fittest.

Click here to take the Supervillain Personality Quiz

Why does the muse strike when I’m posting a comment on someone ELSE’S blog.

*waves hands in the air.. signifying nothing.*

harrumpf harrumpf

Still nothin’

I’ve been thinking a lot about that post from yesterday.

And…

I haven’t come up with anything yet.

Watch the whole thing.

No I can’t say why.

And no fast-fowarding! Jeez.

Just got a hit from that google search. Weird.

Not sure if I wanna know or not.

Two months ago I blogged about four signs I put up over my computer. They were there to keep me focused when working on a task. They’re simple and iconic and in my field of vision for nigh on 18 hours a day.

And they don’t really work.

But that’s ok frankly. The problem is really that if I was working on something with any kind of focus at all anyway, I wouldn’t need them.

But something happens when you stare at these things every time you lean back in your chair, having a thought.

One of the four draws my attention sharply.

“Let it go”

It’s almost subconscious, but not quite. I can feel that telltale nagging pull at my mind as I look around. The increasing sense that my apartment is a mausoleum of my past more than a dwelling for my present.

I sit amidst hundreds upon hundreds of books that I don’t even pretend I’ll ever pick up. There are boxes of full (though mostly 1/3 full) journals. Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of pages of mental effluvia, transcribed when the pen and page was the best of all available ears.

There are souvenirs and rememberances from previous lifetimes; times I’d be free to relate and others too private for me to even whisper whilst alone.

And increasingly I think that at the very least, I am the summation of all of this. It is the efficient market theory of life. And I wonder what purpose these artifacts really serve. Because they clearly bind my head to the past they represent.

I can’t look at that red “neo native american” woven blanket over the back of my couch or my Djembe, sitting with a torn head next to it, without thinking of all the times I sat on it on the grass at pagan weekends, experimenting with all manner of things. Not the least of which were my morals. My stomach turns at the hordes of self obsessed whiners looking for validation without rules, respect without temperance.

Or the guitar I bought during my one year in college. An old Mexican fender squire, strung upside down so that it loses tuning if you look at it sternly. I never really played it. But I thought at the time it would bring some legitimacy to my total recklessness of not even bothering to attend classes.

But every time I look at that poorly carved “old sea salt” bank I think of my grandfather and how he used to send me at five and six years old down to the corner store in Watervliet with a buck for a pack of Luckys. I remember the unfinished plank floor in the shop (which might well be better described as a “shoppe”) and having to cross the train tracks which weren’t fenced in or gated. The bins of nickle candy.

Or the wooden knife carved out of a stick that my aunt’s first husband, Paul, made me at our summer place when I was about the same age. I watched the wizardry as he took a simple knife to a piece of wood and breathed life into it. The perfect rounding of the top and sides of the blade. They were divorced soon after and he largely disappeared from the family mythology.

So as I go through boxes of trinkets I wonder… how do I know what to keep? What matters enough to pass forward, should my life surprise me by not turning fast off that all too delicate course? Assuming it hasn’t already.

Some of it is obvious, truly. But do I really rid myself of the ransom note for my monkeys? Or the letters back and forth to Warsaw? Are they memories of people who cared whose talismans I ought keep for dark times? Or are they chains around my heart, however pleasant?

What about all that writing? All those hundreds of thousands of words accumulated over almost thirty years? Are they of no value going forward? I wince upon reading most any of them as they are so often naught but therapeutic remains of emotional times too dark for me to have contained (or perhaps from before I was able to contain them.) Surely those must go. (Ironically as I write this I realize those are the easy bits.) Some of it deserves to be kept and that ought be transcribed. But most of it needs to be burned.

But is it honest to toss the bad and keep the good? I don’t know. Maybe it is. It feels deceitful.

This culling process will probably take a very long time once I decide to stop just looking around the room, thinking about it.

And actually start letting it go.

So that’s what I’ve done to the number of feeds I was following in bloglines.

Over 20,000 articles tagged “for later”… gone.

I’ve nuked every single feed or site that isn’t someone I’ve had more than one or two exchanges with.

I don’t imagine I’ll miss a damn thing.

Don’t worry. If “what about me?” occurred to you then you’re still there. ;-)

So I just got out of Wolverine.

I THINK it seriously screws with canon. But frankly I wouldn’t know because aside from reading a couple dozen issues of X-Men in as many years, I don’t know anything about all that.

There are some world class bush league “you should be aSHAMED of yourself” scenes and eye rollers of the highest order.

If you can totally detach thought from the movie watching process (one of my questionably useful superpowers) then watch it. But it was even tough for me to sit through at times.

I did enjoy it a bit.

But if you have some kind of emotional attachment to it “being done right” then you really just need to not see it.

Happy May o/

Godspeed Greg.