Brian's World

New Year, Old Resume

I find working on my resume very boring and stupid. I understand its critical to help employers understand some basic facts about me and who I am, but I am very opposed to mindset that a resume must be updated before you apply to a job or something like that. I believe a resume should be updated when you do something or information changes that is displayed on your resume.

People have told me my resume is too long, because I believe in using both sides of the people. If you ask me, people who think differently are the dumb ones. If printing on the back of a sheet of paper involved anything more than flipping the paper over, I might not do it.. but it doesn’t. It seems stupid for me to take up any less than the allocated space when trying to explain to someone who you are and what you can do. I can do a lot, and I am difficult to describe. Nowhere on my resume does it say I enjoy wearing fancy clothes, but thats something a company may find interesting about me. Yes, I do understand that hiring managers may not like to flip the page over, or look to the other side. Thats fine, I see merit in presenting the most important information on the front. (Duh!). Quite honestly, if someone doesn’t want to turn a page over to read whatever few words I’ve placed there then they might just be too lazy of an employer to work for.

My dad feels it necessary to supervise my resume, as a manager hes certainly read more of them than me; but in that regard I would be he knows what he’s looking for. He doesn’t work in the computer field, and as an environmental/civil engineer I think its pretty safe to say that there is a moderately large divide between the two types of work. Regardless, I tend to make the changes he insists on, or else he will continue to harp on me every day forever.

I also dislike the “purpose” block lots of people use. I’ve heard people who say it should be tailored to the company they are applying for, or changed depending on the circumstance. I dunno about them, but my “purpose” when it comes to work doesn’t change that quickly. I’m not going to lie and say my purpose is to “Obtain an internship at a large financial group located in Springfield, MA converting reports from very old technology to new.” Thats just dumb. Right now I use an “Employment Interests” second to arrange keywords that I can’t fit into a sentence. I think there is value in including keywords on a resume. They give people a little idea of what you might know, and provide great points for elaborating on a topic during an interview.

In summary, I need to come up with a new resume design. Where projects serve as the main block. I need it to be flexible enough to present all the projects in a similiar fashion, but still specify that I did this project at school, and this one at company x. Another, secondary requirement, is the ability to generate it online. I think having a database of details about me would be helpful. I could choose some check boxes to opt to present certain data instead of others. I’d likely make this public so anyone could make a resume of me for them… who knows.

Today is also the 2nd of January, so I’d like to wish everyone a happy new year and everything associated with that. I have made no resolutions, so I shan’t be complaining about breaking them later, or bragging about completing them in 1 year.

I had more to talk about, but I’m feeling like I am no longer being productive.. time to find the Win XP cd and reformat the machine for my Aunt.

P.S You need to add my facebook application or else you may run out of air, or you will be skinned alive and then hung for dead in your closet. Don’t believe me? Just ask Jack. Don’t know Jack? Well then you clearly haven’t been on myspace lately… or he’s still in your closet/under your bed ready to get you. Stupid myspace bullitens.

First Life

Yesterday I was bored and hanging out thinking of things to do. Out of the blue, Second Life popped into my head. I had looked into Second Life last year, maybe around this time… and didn’t really get it. It provides a free alternative to WoW, kind of like the MMORPG setting, minus the quests and stuff like that. I struggled to find 3 machines that could play second life without crashing, it seems Second Life, or SL, has higher system requirements than WoW. Unfortunately none of my machines have awesome video cards, and my primary desktop just has the cheap onboard one. Even my T60 performed terrible running the game. Luckily my brothers beastly dual core athlon 64 laptop handled the game like a charm, as well as the new Vostro we bought to replace the old family PC.

I played around with the game, strugging with a terrible UI (at least in comparison to WoW) and poor physics. I guess SL doesn’t care too much about that, focusing much more on the social interactions. And are there plenty of social interactions in the game. While I won’t go as far as saying SL is for Sexual Predators and Deviants, it certainly has facilitated lots of interactions along those lines. I guess it kind of makes sense, the internet has a very strong red light district.. but through google and some common sense helps to steer us away from that. On Second Life they don’t have Google’s searching skill, and I lack the common sense to stay away. I’ve found just about every area I enter to be rated “Mature” and its difficult to rotate 360 degrees (graphics cards issues aside) without seeing something potentially explicit.

This is coming from the user who commonly feels MTV is a little to riskque for his own taste. I don’t have a problem with sexual images and associations (I was born once), but I strive to minimize my interactions with them. In Second Life, its difficult.. at least for me as a n00b, to do so. I search for popular areas and 90% of them have something explicit in the title.. I disable Mature listings… and now 80% have something explicit in the title.. and an additional 10% have clear implications to something I find inappropriate.

I shouldn’t be raising my gripes with Second Life itself, at least I think I shouldn’t be. I see SL as a platform; a platform a game like WoW or any multitude of MMO-immersive worlds could be built. Maybe one of them is the Red Light district, but I would also like to see some forests to explore or something cool like that. Who knows. If I had the time and energy I would look into building a forest or something neat… but there are like 80 things I need to do first. Everyone has been talking about SL as being one of the next big things in technology, and idk. Right now it seems to me SL has a very strong focus on an mature audience, something that people usually don’t wander into as they first enter the internet. I would be interested in seeing that condensed… not removed.. and other content areas expanded so people actually want to be there. For example tonight while playing I attempted to ride a see-saw. Of course I was the only person in the park so that didn’t work well. There are people playing the game, and lots of them. Tons of people are exchanging Linden money on a daily basis.

But idk, this blog is half finished.. just like everything I’ve got going on right now. You all should add my facebook application, which does a decent job of expanding your Quotes offerings. Its technical name is “QuotesForAll“, but I call it “Quotes“. You can join the other 14 users, very few of whom have actually added a quote to their wall. Alas, it seems I am terrible at coming up with good ideas. I spent several months (since Octoberish) working on it and learning FBML and the Facebook API and everything, but my implementation was probably poor and overly optimistic.

Good night moon.

Its snowing hard out there.

Post Christmas

Whew, the bulk of the holidays are over with. Christmas is done, my brothers birthday is done, all thats left is New Years and Katie’s Birthday.. which I just forgot about… hrm, I guess I can’t say whew then.. disregard.

So yea, I’m not uber pleased with my gifts this year. I’m never super-satisfied.. but this year I think I was more disappointed then most. I didn’t even get some of the “usual” gifts I get every year that I was counting on… like gloves. I typically get 1 pair of gloves for Christmas.. this year, the year I’ve lost one of my gloves.. would be the year I don’t get any. I got a few gift cards. I don’t like getting multiple gift cards to the same place for the same amount. Instead of getting me 2 $5 gift cards to KFC.. I would like 1 $10 one [KFC is expensive for fast food around here at least.. so $10 won’t cut it for 2 ppl, they average more like $7 per person I find]. I got a vest, some slippers [I refuse to wear slippers], 2 pairs of new fancy socks [I bought ~10 this summer so I had enough], a box of cookies, and a new necktie. I do like the necktie, nothing fancy.. just red and blue diagonal stripes. I would have liked to get a gift or 2 that took batteries or plugs or something that requires assembly.. Katie pulled through in that category with an iFish.. I’ll explain later.

I feel like I need to make up for this by buying myself something. I know that this is likely a waste of my money and guilt induced shopping, but I spent a lot of time picking out gifts mom, dad, and kevin might enjoy and the fact that they did little to return that effort frustrates me. So here are my choices:

1. LCD Monitor – Right now I have a 17 inch LCD for my desktop thing but since I have more computers and more stuff going on I could justify getting another one, possibly larger. This would require a new graphics card for my desktop, which only has the built in one for now
2. Xbox 360 – If one more person gets Halo 3 besides me I am going to.. idk what. My 8 year old cousin got it for Xmas for Pete’s sake! He probably hasn’t even played Halo 1 or Halo 2. I played those games through high school, used Xbconnect to play Halo 1 online and Xbox Live for Halo 2. No one can understand my thoughts to the Xbox 360 but its sufficient to say I spent several months doing work regarding it… and I don’t have one. Yes, my time for gaming is limited and I rarely do play games, but idk.
3. GPS – I wouldn’t get one of those car ones or one of those computer only ones, I would likely get a handheld one that can work while hiking. It would have to interface to a computer to serve as a computer one, for directions and stuff. My idea is that a computer one is great if you have a computer.. which you can while driving and stuff.. but its more difficult when hiking. So I would get one to satisfy the base case that can extrapolate from there.
4. eeePC or something like that – While I’m not a Vista hater, I do dislike waiting several minutes for my laptop to boot. I honestly don’t need the processing power packed inside for most of what I do on a computer.. like check email, calendar, etc. I’m not so sure because I know there might be some neat phones out when my contract comes up [Aprilish] and I wouldn’t want to get anything that will get replaced quickly. Idk

I do not know what to do. I make sufficient funds over the summer, and I will likely be making a few dollars this break so who knows. I am a huge supporter of saving money and all that stuff, but its always hard for me to judge when I should stop saving for a moment. The stupid tux place was closed on Wednesdays so I have to go tomorrow to rent a tux for Cotillion.

My facebook application is very near release, I’m complete with the major features for now.. I think I have one more checkbox to add.. maybe. It will require a slightly different implementation for scalability reasons but it shouldn’t be terribly hard. I will most certainly blog so you all know to add it as an awsome app.