See larger resume image

It really doesn’t take long to whip something like this up, just a few online resources and tools.

I used Photoshop, but you could easily use GIMP or GIMPShop to do it without having to spend the cash on Photoshop. First, I needed a postit note to put on the document. For a couple of minutes I looked at tutorials to make them or to find an action/brush, etc. However, a quick pass through iStockPhoto gave me what I was looking for for $1, making the effort required to do it myself just not worth it.

With postit in hand, I trimmed out all but the closest couple of white pixels from the edges. Since resumes are usually printed on white paper, I didn’t bother trying to really clean it up neatly. To put something on the note, I decided to make it the word “Hire” with an exclamation point. While an exaggeration of what actually happens with postits on resumes, they are often used to mark resumes with “hire” or “no-hire” type messages without leaving a permenant paper trail. As we’re trying to give a suggestion, I figured it was quick, simple and to the point. But, I didn’t want to put it in a regular typewritten font. After all, it was supposed to look like a handwritten note.

So, off to Google I went, searching for “handwriting font”, and found a font called James Fajardo that matched the existing “To Do” on the note pretty well and since I found it within the first couple of pages, I grabbed it. I put the word on and rotated it to match the note. I matched the color of the existing text and made the layer a little bit transparent to pick up the texture of the paper just a bit.

Then, I grabbed a sample resume from a university site to show what it would look like. I put the note in the top right corner, where there wasn’t anything already taking up space. This is good because making a 1 page resume can be a challenge once you’ve got more than a couple of years experience, especially if you focus on accomplishments and skills. Net result is a conservative resume that still stands out.

Personally, I think it’s a good blend of the 2. Often, if you go too far with the avante-garde stuff on your resume (crazy fonts, hot pink paper, etc.), you’re just not going to be taken seriously. However, if you use just the template they gave you at the career counselor in college, yours will just sit in the stack with the 300 other resumes that have 3 years of web development experience. If you do move toward a more stylish layout, just make sure that the postit doesn’t blend in. To make the point it needs to look like it was just slapped on the document (while not obscuring your accomplishments).

lifehack, resume, employment, job, job search

The first of his articles covers the math behind the modulus, which is the formula often used to do alternating colored rows in HTML tables. So, if you’ve always just viewed that thing as a magic black box that does what you want, but want to understand it better, now’s your chance. Read Modular Arithmetic in Common Programming.

If you’re looking for more PHP/Math related topics, there’s a bit of stuff over at what used to be PHPMath.com, though is now rebranded as “Datavore” in one of the worst branding moves I’ve seen in a long time. It’s not like you can’t make the content multipurpose under your consulting and the more obvious branding at the same time. Oh well.

PHP, math, maths, modulus, programming, mathematics, PHPHound

Contrast that with the listening I’ve been doing to catch up with OpenSource, the radio program. On Saturday, I listened to a single 60 minute program, but it took me 5 seperate “sessions” to get through it. Each time I stopped the car, changed my context, etc. I just paused the audio and picked up where I left off when I came back. And, the 1-2 people who called in and couldn’t get to the point were promptly sped up by the little >> button. Just a year ago, all of my non-musical audio came via MPR. Now, i don’t have the patience for it (though I still support it as some of my podcasts come via their programming).

Then, on Sunday, it took me 1.5 hours to watch a 40 minute drama. Between the dogs returning their breakfast, laundry needing attention, deciding I needed my own breakfast and just needing to get something to drink, I just didn’t have the solid block of time. Besides that, the 20 minutes of commercials and the fact that the show actually aired on Friday night pretty much would have made watching it when CBS decided I should do so impossible.

And, finally, on Sunday afternoon, I came down into the theater and asked what was on. The response was “this movie” and it was only on because it was the only one starting at 3:00. When I suggested watching one of the Netflix DVD’s instead, satellite TV lost out. This despite having EVERY movie channel that DirecTV offers.

In short, we’ve finally been given some of the same options (there’s still quite a way to go) for audio and video content that we’ve had for text. You aren’t required to read the latest thriller in hardcover, but can wait to read it in paperback. You aren’t required to read this very article at 5:00am on a Monday (when I’m writing it). And, based on the Google referrals, that’s exactly the freedom people take advantage of. Beyond that, you’re not limited to the 200 most popular books or sites. You can read whatever you damn well please. Eventually, we’ll have the same options for video and content as well. If Yahoo and Napster, et al can offer unlimited on demand music for $5-10 a month and make a profit, why can’t I have access to all of the TV shows, documentaries, movie shorts, etc. for a flat monthly fee? I’m already paying $100/month to DirecTV for the closest thing I can get today. But, I’m required to coordinate and schedule the recordings myself to ensure that anything I might be interested in gets recorded and queued for later viewing. Yet, if I miss a week, say, because of an extended power outage or something, I face prosecution to seek out a copy of the show I missed.

Between DirecTV, Netflix, MPR membership, podcast donations, buying CD’s and DVD’s from Amazon and buying downloadable music from iTunes, I spend a significant amount of money every month on audio-visual content. The first company that can offer me freely available flat-fee access to all of it: at high resolution as well as portable formats without added restrictions will get it all.

Of the 3000, literally 2700 of them were bounced spams that had been originally spoofed to appear to be coming from this domain. This means that some spammer put the “From” and “Reply-To” headers as being from faked addresses on this domain. When the recipients of the spam got these spoofed emails, their mail servers, spam filters, etc. either replied with a note informing the “sender” that the message was considered spam or just outright bouncing them.

Clearly spam is a problem. The 300 other messages were, indeed, regular spam, meaning there were no real messages out of 3000. 100% spam is a serious problem. However, the fact that 10 times as many were actually themselves spam/wasted email, but from people who are themselves against spam is an irony that is probably too much for me to process today.

spam, bounced email, rant

The happiest retired people I know are also the busiest. But, they’re doing what they want. Lots of them garden, take care of the lawn, do woodworking, etc. All of these are things that can be careers as well, so we’re not talking about purely “recreational” activities.

I think this is also why vacations that are scheduled to the last minute are exhausting and, why today, despite the fact I’m writing code for my own RSS reading needs is a breath of relaxing fresh air. I am refusing ALL obligations for the day and doing what I want and that’s the most liberating and relaxing thing there is.

Of course, my coworkers at home being pretty much univerally accepting helps too .

Over the last couple of days, however, I’ve been using FreeMind, a mind mapping tool (and as semantically correct naming would indicate, it’s free) that’s a great alternative to paying the $100-200 that Mindjet wants for MindManager.

So, you may be thinking, “This man is a liar, a hypocrite and a heretic according to his own teachings”. First, if you thought that, you may want to dial the religious rhetoric back a few notches. Second, just bear with me because this isn’t in conflict with what I’ve said in the past.

My biggest beef with tree structures isn’t that they don’t work as a view. They do. They actually work very well as a view of information. They help greatly in places where you want to see data hierarchically. I use outlines for lots of things: presentation organization, book and article outlines, etc.

Unfortunately, if you *store* the data this way, then the classifications and categories you used are effectively permanent. Moving them around might break inbound references and leave you unable to recreate the original structure and copying them to 2 places leaves you with sychronization issues.

If, on the other hand, you stored the information as unsorted nodes and built the tree as an overlaid view, you can easily construct other views without doing anything to the one you already have. This opens things up to complete flexibility when needed, but still giving you the rigid presentation possibilities if the userbase needs that or should be restricted for some reason. In other words, this should all be transparent to the users of the data. They still *use* an outline, it’s just not tightly coupled with the data contained in it.

So, what’s FreeMind do anyway? It builds “mindmaps“, which are an easy way to brainstorm and organize little snippets of information. The software lays them out neatly and moves them around, collapsing and expanding different portions as you work. As you can see from some mindmap screenshots, icons, colors and different font sizes for levels are all possible. (More screenshots if you search for “mindmaps” on Google).

Why I was looking at these tools in the first place is their popularity with lifehacking folks, writers and other bloggers as a method of organizing their writing. In addition to my novel for next month, I’m working on a couple of short ebooks based on some of the things I’ve talked about on this site, including handling information overload.

I’ve always hated traditional outlining on paper because I often completely need to reorganize and moving things around is a pain. The word processor versions are a little better, but still cumbersome. Mindmaps, on the other hand, have proven useful for the past few days. I’ve churned out several and am really liking them for article and book outlines.

Now, where it gets interesting (WTF, you waited until *now* for “interesting”) is that the file format is XML and nodes are uniquely identified. What this means is that the file can be easily parsed and restored in a non-tree-like structure if I’d like for other uses down the road, with the outline structure overlaid. In short, this little tool allows me to work with data however I’d like, lets me use trees where they make sense and gives me a plenary indulgance within my anti-tree religion. Plus, with PDF, SVG, HTML and more as export formats, you’ll likely be seeing outlines for my novel pretty much by the end of the first day on this site.

mindmap, mind map, freemind, outlines, tree structures, data views

If you’ve got RSS feeds on your site and don’t have autodiscovery turned on, it’s really not difficult. There’s really only one CSS-like tag to put in your headers (if you only have RSS 2.0 feeds) or several if you support Atom and RSS 1.0 as well. Here is the code for WordPress templates to turn it on.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />


After that, if you visit in Firefox, you’ll notice that your Live Bookmark icon is live (it is in the toolbar as the orange icon on the right of the address in the current stable version, but it moves in 1.5). At that point, anything that supports autodiscovery needs only be told about your site’s regular URL and it can find the RSS feeds on its own.

The other great embedded data that I use a lot is the Creative Commons stuff. If you go to CreativeCommons.org and choose a license, you’ll get a snippet of HTML to put in your page (like the one at the bottom of this one). In that snippet is an RDF segment that puts the terms of your license in machine readable format. When this becomes useful is if you’ve installed the MozCC extension. With that installed, you’ll see the license terms for the current page in the bottom right of Firefox using the icons that they’ve standardized on. You can then click and get the details if you need more explanation.

If you have the extension installed and visit this site, you’ll see that you’re free to use pretty much all of my content as long as you attribute it to me.

I’m using the extension heavily as I work on building up OpenFiction.org, one of my new blogs for Creative Commons and other open licensed novels, short stories and non-traditional forms of fiction. It makes verifying the license claims of some of the directories of content much easier.

P.S. Yes, OpenFiction supports autodiscovery

openfiction, creative commons, metadata, discoverability, rss, atom, feeds

If you’d like to force the issue, you can take advantage of a little DNS hack you may or may not have heard of: the HOSTS file. Lots of folks use this file to block ads, but I tend to use them a lot to fake domain locations for development purposes. This week I’ve been using this to point sites to the new server and make sure that critical functionality is working.

Here’s a quick DNS lesson for those of you who have no idea what DNS is. If you an BIND are friends on an intimate level, you can skip to the HOSTS line you need to add to forward this site over.

On the internet, every unique public destination has an IP address. Given that it’s a set of 4, 3 digit numbers, much like a phone number, they’re not terribly easy to remember. Sure, you can remember 3-4 easily and probably a few more if you think about it, but hundreds of sites (most people have quite a few bookmarks, etc.) as well as marketing really don’t work when you advertise your new business as 84.40.22.116. Beyond that, many sites are sharing a public IP address, so how do you tell which one of the many sites at 84.40.22.116, you are looking for.

Well, much like physical street addresses and phone numbers, there’s an alias system with easier to remember names, the .com, .org and .net names we all know and love. So, when you register a .com domain name, you tell it where you intend to put it in terms of the destination IP address. This can be a dedicated IP address, like a house or a dedicated phone number listed in the phone book (only 1 person lives in the house) or more like a commune or apartment building where the IP address is home to lots of sites. The site that people are looking for is asked for “Hey, does wynia.org live here in the hippie commune? Where is it?” and the guy in front or whomever answered the phone says, “Yeah, he’s out back by the barbeque.”.

So, the domain is registered and pointed to an IP address. On the server itself, the individual apartments are labeled and routed by name. What happens overall is that you type in an address or click on a link. Your machine tries to look up the name to IP connection via the global DNS system, starting at your PC and working out to your ISP and further until “someone” knows where the site is. It then asks the appropriate IP address for whatever content your browser is looking for. If the IP address knows about the site, it dishes it up.

When you move a site like we’re doing with all of ours recently, there are actually 2 IP addresses which, when asked for wynia.org, will respond with a site. As I write this, everyone but me is seeing the older IP address’ version. When I flip the switch, the change will start to ripple through the system. Unfortunately, because this is all a distributed system, it can take up to 72 hours for everyone’s lookup table to point to the new server. In most cases, it’s not a huge deal that some people see the older version and people just wait.

However, because the first place your computer looks for the connection is on your own computer, you can short circuit the whole process and give it an answer immediately. This is the HOSTS file. It contains manually linked sites and IP addresses. Lots of people use it to block ads by saying, “If you’re looking for that stupid ‘punch the monkey’ ad, don’t look for it where the phone book says, just look on my own server, which won’t give you the ad”, which results in the ad never showing. However, if you add the new Glass Too Big server’s location to that file, you’ll see the new site, whether your ISP is on the early or late portion of the update curve.

Your HOSTS file is in a different location depending on what operating system you use. More info on where yours is over at Wikipedia. To manually force your computer to see the new server, in your HOSTS file, put the following line:

84.40.22.116 www.wynia.org

You’ll likely need to restart your system to ensure that it’s picked up. However, on many systems, it works after a few minutes on its own.

See you on the other side.