Life Tips: Updating Your Resume

Just about everybody knows someone who is looking for a job, and a resume is an important part of the job search. Here are some pages with advice for your next resume update.

6 Words That Make Your Resume Suck is a good set of advice for anybody writing a resume. In the past, I have used many of these. Luckily, the site also has suggestions for replacement words and phrases.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Resume Design is mostly geared toward people who would do crazy crap with their resumes, but one sin that hit me was a font: "Times New Roman." Oops. I've probably used it for resumes before. Time to go font shopping....

How to Write a Resume That Will Land an Interview is a good list of tips that starts with remembering that the idea of a resume is to get you an interview. One other tip that struck me: Omit your mailing address.

I am not planning a job hunt, but I should still re-write my resume now while I have these tips and ideas in mind.

Music Monday: Interesting Music from B-Sizzle

When I was in college and grad school, I had friends who introduced me to music I had never heard before. Mad Dog, Chris, and Ian were far more musically cool than I could ever be. After grad school, I didn't keep up with great music like I did when I was in school.

Now I'm lucky to work with several really cool people. One thing I like about my co-workers is that they have incredibly diverse, interesting taste in music. Over the past few years, a few co-workers have shared new music with me, so it's like a personal musical renaissance.

Here is the first in an occasional series of posts highlighting interesting music that friends have turned me on to. Today's entries are from a co-worker I will call B-Sizzle ("B" for Baltimore and Brooklyn). He's a print designer and an artist.

Animal Collective
These guys are from Baltimore and they really make good stuff. If you like Cloud Cult, I think you'll like Animal Collective.

• From Strawberry Jam: Peacebone
• From Feels: Did You See the Words?
  

Girl Talk
This guy is a DJ who does mash-ups. I love mash-ups. The problem with providing links to his songs is that I try to keep the content on this blog clean and much of the music he samples has some raunchy lyrics. Actually, some of the lyrics are downright obscene and absolutely rated X. Still, I like the music because he makes interesting mixes and segues.

• From Feed the Animals: Don't Stop

Web Stuff Friday: Best-of-Craigslist Favorites, Volume 5

Here is another installment of some Craigslist postings I found amusing. I post these so you don't have to wade through all the obscene, sexually explicit, or otherwise tasteless postings to look for the good, clean stuff. Note: some of the funniest posts at CL are obscene, sexually exlicit, or otherwise tasteless, so if you want to find that stuff, go looking at Best-of-Craigslist for yourself.

• To The Six-Foot Four Transvestite made me laugh out loud.
• Cat Found! The first photo did it for me.
• The loudest vacuum cleaner on the face of the Earth Too bad it's gone.
• FreeBSD Server I'm pretty sure you have to be a supreme geek to get most of the references, but it reminds me of the machine (with many replaced parts and a very loud fan) I have running Ubuntu right here in my basement.
• Dear Mr Scammer, I am sorry Nice move. When I'm retired, I want to do stuff like that all the time.
  

Note: this only gets me caught up through December of last year. Next up: January.

These Guys Aren't Idiots, but They Are Greedy

As I have said, corporate executive pay is out of hand. Eugene Robinson's article Idiots of the Universe is pretty on target. Here he quotes Sen. Claire McCaskill:

...I don't think any of us thought these guys were this stupid. I don't think any of us believed that they would take billions of dollars in bonuses while their institutions were literally days from being wiped out. But they did. And we've learned our lesson.

How did they not know this would happen? "These guys" aren't stupid. They are greedy. Some people (such as John McCain and Reston Kid) knew back in September that limits on executive compensation should have been part of the bailout.

I have always been skeptical about the argument that individuals acting in their own selfish interest makes the free market system work. People are greedy and that isn't always what's best for the system. I'd be interested in hearing the argument that defends the huge bonuses for people who run companies that just got bailed out.

Bailout Lingo

When listening to some congressional hearings on C-SPAN radio, I heard some lingo for which I wanted good definitions. Here are the two biggies:

Moral Hazard: If we bail out people who took bad risks, then they won't learn from the losses. They will continue to take stupid risks. This is basically my original problem with the bailout.

Cram-Down: A court-ordered reduction of the secured balance due on a home mortgage loan. Basically, a judge "crams" a reduced loan balance "down" the throats of the mortgage company. Before I heard the term, I wondered about this idea. Why should the home buyers take the whole hit for bad mortgages? It seems to me that the companies that wrote (and benefited from) the bad mortgages should bear some of the cost of writing down the values. Jim Gogek has an interesting take on cram-downs that is pretty consistent with my thinking.

C-SPAN rocks.

Sea Kittens

PETA has a new campaign called Save the Sea Kittens. When I mentioned it to some folks at work, they thought I was kidding, but it's for real. It even played a part on the comics page.

then

As I've said before, I am not a vegetarian and I have no problem with hunting for food, but sport hunting (yes, even fishing) seems cruel to me.

Still, calling fish "Sea Kittens" and hoping that will get people to stop eating fish is a bit over the edge. If it gets people to think of fish as other animals and makes them think again about the idea of catch-and-release fishing (which I call maim and release), then that's fine, but I'm afraid that the impact will do more to bring ridicule to PETA's efforts.

Music Monday: Kind of Blue 50th Anniversary

Last week was the 50th anniversary of the release of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. Why a post about the 50th anniversary of a jazz album? Because it is one of the great and important albums of all time. Don't believe me? Listen to these people who know much more about music than I:

The album is absolutely sublime.

So What
Freddie Freeloader
Blue in Green
All Blues
Flamenco Sketches

And here is a Mixtube Playlist: Kind of Blue.