Yes, the demands and schedule of my job as Sith Lord at Microsoft have kept me quite busy, but it doesn’t matter because I live in the “Hooray!” zone, as shown in the Venn diagram below:
For more information, see the LifeHacker article titled The Road to Happiness in Your Work Lies in the Hooray! Zone.
My article from a couple of weeks ago, Fast Food Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck, got a lot of reactions from both the “You’re right!” and “You’re dead wrong!” camps (the article on Global Nerdy got a fair number of comments, but the same article on the Accordion Guy blog got a hundred comments).
There’s some evidence to back my theory that netbooks are like Burger King apple pies – that is, they look like laptops, but don’t offer the same capabilities, leading to disappointment, and it’s covered in my article in Global Nerdy titled Like I Said, Netbooks Suck.
This article also appears in Global Nerdy.
Here’s an interesting bit of information for those of you who are reviewing prospective hires: people are more honest on their LinkedIn profiles than they are on their resumes. That’s what LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman said at the Social Recruiting Summit held last week at Google.
It’s understood that people “pad” their resumes. A sizeable portion of the interview process seems to be devoted to determining if the candidate is as good as his or her resume says he or she is. I’ve been in interviews where a prospective employer had a member of the development team to sit in and act as a “bullshit detector”; I’ve also done the same duty when working at companies that were interviewing prospective developers.
I think that Kris “The HR Capitalist” Dunn’s theory about why LinkedIn profiles are more honest is spot-on:
…if you’re truly looking for "what’s up" with a candidate, you need to rely on the LinkedIn profile. Why is that true? Because there’s a community of co-workers, friends and past colleagues that always have access to the LinkedIn profile, and there’s no such community with constant visibility to a random resume the candidate sends in, and you have no means to circulate the resume to that type of community to fact check.
Simply put: it’s harder to lie when you’re in front of a group of colleagues who might call you on it.
Kris also talks about how many candidates don’t include the “5 – 6 bullet points that you;re usually used to seeing on the resume” on their LinkedIn profiles. This isn’t the case with me: when I got laid off from my last job back in September, I rewrote my resume completely, starting with my LinkedIn profile, after which I simply pasted the LinkedIn information into a Word document and gave it a little formatting. This approach killed two birds with one stone, affording me more time to concentrate on my (thankfully short – 17 days from my last official day at b5media to my first official day at Microsoft) job search.
I don’t know if it applies in other fields, but in the tech sector, I think that LinkedIn profiles are resumes and that you should based your resume off your LinkedIn profile rather than the other way around. Yes, the social networking aspect of LinkedIn means that you can’t pad your resume as much, but it also means that prospective employers can trust that your credentials are genuine.
This photo from Passive-Aggressive Notes made me laugh out loud:
When it comes to vegans and vegetarians, while I get along with them just fine, I’ve got to side with chef Anthony Bourdain:
Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.
If it’s Tuesday, it must be time for Guelph Coffee and Code! See the Coffee and Code blog for details.
Update (Monday, June 22, 12:21 p.m.): If you’re planning on taking your trash to the transfer stations, please note that picketers have been blocking the entrances to the trash transfer depots. I would recommend checking the news before you head out to a transfer station.
It’s on: Locals 79 and 416 of CUPE (Canadian Union of Public Employees) has called for a strike after the city and the union were unable to come to an agreement on their collective agreements.
Here’s what services are affected:
If you need to get rid of garbage, the following locations will take it:
Click the table below to get a closer look at the table that tells you when it’s time to throw out those condiments. And yes, Hollandaise sauce doesn’t last terribly long.
