A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

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.

I need a reminder.  Between A.D.D. and it’s associated effluvia, I get and stay off track very easily.

I thought about having some kind of interruptive reminder application that would beep or popup or something.  But that doesn’t make sense.

Then I thought that it might make sense to have a sign reminding me, when I looked up (or “noticeably though not disruptively close to my focal point”) to at least be mindful of what i was doing.

Being me I let the idea germinate a bit and I realized there were a couple/few things I need big bold reminders of.

Sparing you the rest of my fragmented internal dialog, here’s the deal strongly and simply stated:

I went to RiteAid and bought 4 8.5″x11″ frames (at $3.99 each) and I printed 4 signs, which I’ve posted.  They’re in time order.  You’ll see what I mean.

1. Let It Go This is the past.  It’s also things about what I’m working on that are bloody irrelevant meaning “everything that’s happened until now.” When you’ve got something to do the only two things you have are the situation or thing which needs work and it’s next state of completion.  Dwelling on the past is neither relevant nor productive.  The motives for doing so are at BEST suspect, frequently serving to keep something in stasis through procrastination or worse.
2. What Now? Now.  Right Now.  What are you doing?  Why? (rolls in to what.)   Know where you are, what you’re doing and what you expect from that action.  IF YOU DO NOT then your current action bloody well ought to be “Figure Out What Now.”  It’s simple really.  This was the first sign I wanted to put up.
3. What Next? So What Now is done, you lean back in your chair.  There’s only one question.  What next?  It’s the next What Now and nothing more.  It’s good to plan these in advance.  Other people are better at describing (and implementing) that process than I am.
4. What Then? Where are you going? Why are you doing what you’re doing?  I almost phrased this as “To What End?” and who knows, I may yet.  If you don’t have something you’re working towards then you’re dithering away your life on minutia.  Stop it.  Someone wiser than I said “Make No Small Plans.”  This is that.  Do that.

These scale well.

Here’s my desktop from 45 minutes ago (click to embiggen):

UPDATE: Hmmpf. Apparently while TwitPic has a “put this pic on your own site” feature, they only put the thumbnail. Fair enough. Click it for the big version.

One of the things that I think way too much about is the sort of disposable culture problem that’s grown out of advances in industrial and economic progress. We don’t make things any more. We don’t FIX things any more and it saddens me a bit.

So Friday night (that would be yesterday) I decided to try my hand at making butter. Not a big deal, just get some heavy cream, a smidge of salt, put it in the kitchen-aid and go for a bit, right?

Actually yeah. It’s the weirdest thing. I let it go for a bit (20 mintues?) and all of a sudden the sound the thing changed and it was making this weird sloshy noise.

I walked over to it and damned if there wasn’t a big wop of butter sitting in a pool of what turns out to be buttermilk (neat! who knew?)

You have to work the butter a bit to get the rest of the water out of it, but that was easily accomplished with a big zip-lock freezer bag. (Kneading butter’s not my idea of a good time. Though I have to say I could really see where it would be part of one. >;-)

So now, for two pints of organic heavy cream (I tend towards organic milk products. I’m not an environmentalist. I just think it tastes better enough to pay more.) I have about a pound of butter and two cups of buttermilk, which is rather more than I expected.

I did the math and realized that, not only do I have a better result than store bought. It’s an interesting novelty and, get this…

IT’S FUCKING CHEAPER TO MAKE BUTTER YOURSELF THAN IT IS TO BUY IT!

Yes. Even with the “organic” premium compared to plain old non-organic butter. Add in the price of buttermilk (which I use in baking ALL the damn time) and this is just win/win/win.

You’re welcome.

I’ll amend this post with more details if anyone’s interested.

I’m having weird DNS issues again, so I think I’m coming back to this site for a while.

I’m actually in the midst of writing a piece of blogging software. I can’t believe I’m actually going to do this after all this crap. But I’m so sick of NOTHING doing quite what I want.

When push comes to shove, the real feature set I’m interested in is almost entirely in the generation of the post html itself, which was a big “a ha!” for me. This means that what I’m really creating is a rich blog posting tool; but one that has deep knowledge of the full site itself and can do some interesting cross-referencing tricks.

Like Radio Userland but without the suck.

Stay tuned!