The things you get in to…

Ever feel like you know just enough about something to really screw it up?  Yeah, thats me with just about everything, but tonights episode involved this site.  To make a long story short, I basically set up the database wrong and for a short time thought I lost all of the data for both this site and for Nat’s blog.  It seemed like my database probably went up in smoke with a website I allowed to lapse and it appeared that all was lost and that we would both have to start anew.

I didn’t expect much, but I thought I might try the tech support for my webhost, dreamhost.  First off, the nice thing is that they allow you to not only explain the problem but also your level of expertise and comfort level.  This allowed the tech to cut through the basics and get right to the issue and to explain it in a way that didn’t waste his time or make me feel stupid.  The coolest part is that his first reply came in under 5 minutes.  They advertise 24 hours, but that has to be some sort of record.  I responded with another question and the same person replied again a few minutes later with clarification.  I got my sites back up and running and was able to do it without feeling (too) stupid or getting frustrated waiting for support to contact me back a few days later with some generic response.  The responses I received were fast, catered to my knowledge level, funny, and effective.

Who else does that?  At about $100 a year, dreamhost isn’t the cheapest host out there, but I’ve been with them long enough to have unlimited storage and bandwidth, as well as enjoying their owner’s funny and perpetually late monthly updates.  I’m hooked.  For as long as I need a webhost, they will be it.

If you are interested in a new webhost, check them out here and save $50 if you sign up for a year or more.  (disclaimer: I make money if you do)

***Resume´***

As a hiring manager, I thought I would share some advice for those of you who are job-seeking.  That way, hopefully, I won’t ever get a incredibly shitty resume like the one I got today.  This thing is so bad I thought it was a joke until my boss confirmed someone dropped it off.  It all starts with the cover page.  No, not cover letter, cover page.  As if I needed a sheet of paper to tell me what the rest of this shit attached is.  It looks something like this:

*   *   *
RESUME
*   *   *

What the hell is that?  Pretty fucking fancy!  Flipping through it briefly brings me to my first question and also my first point.  What the hell position is this person applying for?  Its pretty obvious that this person has sent out resumes to anyone with an address and has no idea of what sort of position she might want to apply for.  Of course its written “To Whom It May Concern.”  Well, it doesn’t seem to concern me much so I guess I’ll just shred it.  If you want to get your resume more than a glance and a shred, address the cover letter to a real person.  Most advertised positions have a contact person listed.  If not, call and ask who you can send a resume to for the advertised position.  If all else fails, write Dear Hiring Manager or something similar.  If you are applying for a specific position, write the position you are applying for in the first damn paragraph of the cover letter! If you are sending out blind resumes for unadvertised positions, at least write what sort of position you are looking for, IE sales, support, management, etc.

Let’s look at the cover letter:

I have over 30 years in Sales and Marketing, which has consisted of management, customer service, telemarketing, retail not to mention general office duties.

What the fuck kind of run on bullshit sentence is that?  Why are sales and marketing capitalized?  Why should I keep reading?

A few achievements I have credited myself with are:

Did you do it or just credit yourself with it?

I do have an eye for design, interior and exterior[...]  I also have several entrepreneur projects in mind.

I could tell about your “eye for design” based on your fancy cover page.

But for now, I’m very eager to start a new career[...]

Did you just start a paragraph with “but for now?” Do yourself a favor and proof read your resume and cover letter for typos, grammatical mistakes, and to make sure you don’t look like a friggin’ idiot.  If you are an idiot, have someone else look at it to help you to not give it away in the first paragraph.

Ok, whatever.  Let’s just move on to the resume.  It looks fairly straight forward.  With Education and Experience.  Under education it gets a little confusing (some parts omitted to protect the innocent)

The Customer Program

Par Sales

Community College Animal Lab Technician Certified in 1976

Modeling Agency Graduated in 1973

What the hell are the customer program or par sales?  Modeling didn’t work out so you became a vet tech?  Under education on a resume, all I care about about schools attended and graduated from and personal certifications.  Don’t list all the random crap you’ve studied the past 30 years, especially if its not relevant.

Overall the work history section is the strongest, as it should be.  Although it is convoulted on this resume I can kind of tell what this person did.  Your resume should give a clear picture of what you did at your last jobs.  Don’t use the same resume for all applications.  Cater your resume to the type of work you are applying for.  If you are applying for a service position, highlight the service aspect of your previous jobs.  For management, focus more on your leadership roles, etc.  For any gaps in employment, provide some sort of explanation in the cover letter.

The final (fourth) page of the resume is a list of “special interests.”  Its mostly a collection of one run-on sentence paragraphs that often start with “and” and “but” and describe a bunch of shit that doesn’t pertain to me, my business, and only proves to me even more that this person is an idiot.  Don’t tell your potential employer about your hobbies.  We don’t give a shit.  Instead, you should be using this section to highlight some of the recognition or organizations you have been associated with in the past.  Things like honor societies, scholarships, fraternities, community organizations and the like help to show how involved and committed you are.  Most importantly, KEEP IT TO ONE PAGE!  A complete application should include one page for the cover letter and one for the resume.  The only reason that a resume should go over a page is if you have enough education and work experience that relates DIRECTLY to the position you are applying for.  99.9% of all people can fit it to one page with some proper formatting.

This may seem a bit harsh, but my intention isn’t to be mean.  I’ve left out most everything that could link this back to the writer, but if she did find this, I would hope that she realized that she needed to give her applications some work before sending them off.  If you would like some help writing your resume, google for some other great resources on the web.  Alternatively, you could also brave the storm and ask for help here.  Good luck finding a job in this tough economy.  I really mean it.

Two months later

Wow, I thought maybe waiting for something good to say would be a better idea than posting useless shit, but I didn’t think it would be two months and I still wouldn’t have anything to say…

I checked out Examiner.com.  It seemed like a good idea: blog about something I know something about (bars and nightlife in Omaha) and make money off the ad revenue.  I figured that doing the minimum 4 posts or so a week would be easy enough, and that it wouldn’t take up much time.  I might even see some cash from it!  I can’t say that I really gave it an honest try.  I only posted 2 articles as the Omaha Nightlife Examiner and during that time, I wasn’t yet “activated” so I wasn’t getting my updates shared and I got now traffic because I wasn’t findable by just browsing the site.  I think in and of itself, its not a bad idea for a site.  However, no one has heard of the Examiner and no one wants to read some shitty blogs that contain mostly links to other, more easily findable information on the web, or to other Examiner blogs.  I made about 4 cents and quickly discovered that my time, despite how little the site took to maintain, was worth more as free time than what I could make off the site.

I found a new Barber.  His name is Ron Moderow and his shop is called Viking Barber.  It is definitely old school and I heartily reccomend it.  Call 572-0525 because his appointment book is seriously full.  I went Tuesday and was turned away because he had appointments every 15 minutes from 8am to 5pm.  No lunch!  I got in Wednesday (due to a cancellation) and got a good cut for $12.  At the end he told me, “With hair this good, you better watch out.  Your wife is going to jump you bones when she sees it.”  I plan on being a regular.

Lastly, I am hoping to update a little more regularly.  Nat has been doing a better job than I over at her site.  I took out the weekly Twitter updates because that shit was annoying.  Mostly because that was the only content on the site for a while…  I also added a widget for my google reader shared items.  I recommend subscribing to that feed and promise the stuff I share is A+ awesome.  I think thats all for now.  Going to be a busy summer but way more fun than last year with me not being in class.

Going Mobile

So now that I am blogging again, thinking back to the old blog, I spent a significant amount of my website time tweaking the look and coming up with new designs occasionally.  This time around, I’m spending nearly 0% of my time on design, instead utilizing the canned themes that come with wordpress.  Probably the main reason why I decidedto go this route is due to how most people read blogs.

I don’t have any statistics, but I can tell you personally, that I read absolutely none of blogs I read regularly on their website.  Google reader is just way too handy.  So I feel like spending a lot of time on design is fun and visually satisfying, but I think a lot of people never see it.

When I starting picking through the themes for this blog, I had very few requirements: simple, mostly white, as few columns as possible, degrades to a mobile browser nicely.  The last part was the trickiest for me.  I like to use a lot of images in web design, but they don’t always play nice on the screen of some random non-smart phone.  It also makes your site slightly less accessible.

This theme was ok for what I wanted, but I wasn’t sure about the whole mobile browser part.  Well, I’m proud to say that I now have Wordpress Mobile Edition running, which serves a mobile friendly theme for this site when you visit on a mobile device.  It also has a touch version which works awesome on my iPhone.

Add to that the release of Wordpress for iPhone and you got yourself a pretty damn mobile-friendly site.  Now while I can update the site from my phone now, I doubt I’ll be pecking out too many essays on the iPhone’s keyboard.  I will continue to use twitter for quick, up to the minute type updates, but if we are on vacation or somewhere without our trusty iMac or MacBook, than you can be sure that we will be blogging from our phones instead.

Choose Your Color

Scanning through facebook tonight, one of the ads on the right caught my eye: I knew there was probably a catch that involved paying for it in the end, but it was enough to peek my curiosity, so I clicked through and was greeted by a form to sign up. The sponsorship bit at the bottom clued me in that this was probably one of those free-whatever sites where you sign yourself for lots of programs where you end up with several new credit cards, credit reports and a new Netflix and/or Blockbuster online account. You usually ave to pay S/H but if you are quick with the cancel, you can limit your expenses quite a bit. Most of those deals also require you to get a few other people to sign up. That is always the most difficult part.

Scanning the fine print showed the following:

THE FOLLOWING IS A SUMMARY OF PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS. SEE TERMS FOR COMPLETE DETAILS. Members are being accepted subject to the following Program Requirements: 1) Must be a legal US resident; 2) must be at least 18 years old or older; 3) must have a valid email and shipping address; 4) Eligible members can receive the incentive gift package by completing two reward offers from each of the Top, Prime and Premium reward offer page options. Various types of reward offers are available. Completion of reward offers most often requires a purchase or filing a credit application and being accepted for a financial product such as a credit card or consumer loan. The following link illustrates a Representative Sample of reward offers by group along with monetary and non-monetary obligations. Failure to submit accurate registration information will result in loss of eligibility. This promotion is administered solely by this website. The manufacturers and retailers of the gift items offered through our programs have not endorsed this promotion and are not affiliated with the promotion in anyway. All trademarks, service marks, logos, and/or domain names (including the names of products and retailers) are property of their respective owners. This promotion is not valid to residents of Washington state and is void where prohibited by law. Please read the Terms and Conditions for complete program details. Your information will be shared with our marketing partners. Please read the Privacy Policy for more details.

The paragraph shown actually had a link to a page with the different offers for each level. The top and prime offers were all the usual suspects: Blockbuster, Experian, Netflix, Discover, and a slew of online language, weight loss, movie and other random subscription-based sites. That’s all fine and dandy and what you would expect in this situation. They aren’t always the greatest ways to blow some money, but most are free or fairly inexpensive and easily canceled and given the amount (roughly 20 or so for each section, so 40 total) there might even be some that you are remotely interested in. I was a bit shocked at the final premium offers, however:

PREMIUM OFFERS

• Angel Beds: Make a purchase that is a minimum of $1500.00 before taxes and shipping costs. Keep beyond trial period of 90 days from receipt of item(s).
• Club Furniture: Make a purchase that is a minimum of $1500.00 before taxes and shipping costs. Keep beyond 30 days of receipt of item(s).
• Rail Europe: Requires purchase of a travel package for two with a minimum value of $899.00 per person.
• Round Square Hosting: Requires purchase of a one-year platinum hosting package for $840.00.

Holy shit! So you have your choice of 2 of 4 offers when 2 cost $1500 each (before shipping and taxes) and the others are $899 and $840. That a lot to ask from someone who is too cheap to buy their own computer and is willing to subject themselves to all the advertising and other bullshit that goes with offer like this. I’m convinced that this final section is in there to ensure that no one ever completes the offer.

Looking at the cheapest choice in the group, the “platinum” hosting plan for the year, is simply your average run of the mill hosting plan with arbitrarily high limits. A plan like this from any reputable hosting firm will cost you an average of 8-15 bucks a month. If you don’t think that the limits are arbitrarily high, I’ll tell you that the average Joe’s web page requires much less space and bandwidth to operate.  But in the spirit of competition, I’ll offer this:

I’ll host your (non-porn, non-personal backup) website with 1000% the storage and bandwidth limits advertised on any other hosting companies website, all for 10 bucks a month with no need to prepay!

Hell, I’ll even through in a free domain registration and let you go month to month.  I could offer unlimited storage and bandwidth, but somehow that doesn’t seem as cool as saying, “They’re giving you a Gigabyte of storage?  I’ll give you a God damn terabyte!”

So to recap, the ad on facebook is a rip off and scam.  At least they were up front and honest about what you had to do to get the “free” computer, although they certainly didn’t advertise that aspect very much.  If you only read the ad and headlines, it would appear that you are signing up to test different colors of macbook airs.  I’ll take mine in bullshit brown…

Hello world!

Welcome to my new blog. Follow me on Twitter @Resce for more timely updates. To find out what other interesting blogs I’m reading, check out my Google Reader feed. Lastly, if you want to get in touch, feel free to leave a comment. Otherwise, if you don’t already know my email, you can friend me up on facebook and send me a message there.

Thanks for reading and I hope to hear from you soon!