photo credit: Liel Bomberg

I often push people who work as employees to view themselves as actually being self-employed. When you take a job, your little business just sold some of your time to a company for an agreed-upon amount of money per year. It's a business arrangement, so treating it like one makes sense.

When people make that shift, they often start to see their resume's more like potential "customers" of their services (employers) do. The resume and anything that accompany it are your marketing materials to land an interview. In that interview, you need to push the "deal" forward, but if your resume ends up in a stack with dozens or hundreds of others only to be tossed en masse, you don't even get that chance.

Sure, lots of places are pushing resumes into giant keyword databases. And, for that, you should make sure the text itself is optimized. However, there are still PLENTY of places where your carefully formatted resume gets viewed by a real person.

In those cases, having a resume that catches the eye makes a big difference in getting someone to actually read it and call you in for an interview.

If your resume is based on one of the 3-4 that come with Microsoft Word, consider something a little more unique. This great sample of really nice-looking resumes came through the feed reader this morning really shows what can be done to wake up a tired resume.

Some are more feasible than others if you aren't a graphic designer, but the ideas should certainly spark some changes in yours.

photo credit: tibbygirl

I was in the grocery store earlier today after a trip through Crystal. Along the road every restaurant that I passed seemed to have suddenly added corned beef and cabbage to their menus or managed to dig out the big ol' bottle of green food coloring and started dumping it into every water-soluble substance in their kitchen.

Once in the store, the same trend was magnified. Half of the end-caps were covered in shamrocks and a significant portion of the pastries found themselves coated in green goo.

The thing is. There's lots of really good Irish food that I'm seriously looking forward to taking part in from the source when we are in Ireland in July.

Wanting to get a taste in advance of that trip, I headed to my new favorite food/recipe site: Recipezaar. I've got quite a few food sites in the list I go to when it's time to whip something up. Recipezaar isn't exactly the Web 2.0 poster child. There are plenty of other recipe sites that "feel" better. I mean I really like the look of Open Source Food.

However, Open Source Food, despite the gorgeous photography and things like tagging, when it comes down to it, a site like Recipezaar delivers on the actual task at hand. See, I use a site like these to find food worth making. And, on those features that matter, Recipezaar delivers.

If you're looking to move beyond corned beef and cabbage or want some Irish food that is more than just a cliche, it's worth digging through some of the related recipe lists they've got. I usually sort everything by rating, which brings out some really good commentary on how good or bad the recipes actually are.

St. Patrick's Day Recipes

General Irish Recipes

Recipes Containing Guiness

Once you find some that you like (I'm thinking Irish Pub Stew and Soda Bread sound good to me or maybe some Irish Cod Pie), one of the features of Recipezaar really shines. Their printable format is really one of the best of all of the recipe sites out there. You need to register for a free account to hide the stuff that shows at the top of the page and then you get nice, clean layouts with nutrition information, original comments by the submitter and a quick URL for looking it up again at a later date. Nearly every recipe I've gotten from them fit on a single side of a single sheet of paper.

Combine these nice printer-friendly layouts with a default PDF printer and you've got an easy way to save recipes for later printing or review.

This morning, I ran out of my pomade, digging the last of it out of the jar. I headed to the closet to grab another, thus ensuring that my nasty cowlick in the back stays put tomorrow. Unfortunately, while the shelf proudly displayed my stash of extra shaving cream and an extra tube of toothpaste, there was no pomade.

Since I don't know when I'm going to get to the store to pick up some more, I made a quick check at Amazon to see if I might be able to just throw it into my next purchase.

That's when I discovered a feature of Amazon that I hadn't seen before. Apparently, you can subscribe to get stuff like pomade delivered on a regular basis. So, every month, 2, 3 or 6 months, if I subscribed, another couple of jars would show up. They discount it as well and I found myself reflecting on how well Amazon serves its customers.

I've been a customer of Amazon's for so long I had to actually go an look at when my first Amazon order was (1998). In that 10 years, I've gone from buying the occasional book to Amazon being my default choice for buying something. I often only bother looking for a local store that carries the item if Amazon can't get it to me in time or doesn't offer it. I've even become a member of Amazon's "Prime" program, giving me free 2-day shipping on everything from their warehouses.

Over that time, I've consistently been impressed with how they've smoothed out the road in front of me as a customer. Between setting up easy wish lists, carts that don't flush out when I close my browser, one click shopping, Prime shipping, making customer reviews central to purchasing, finally getting me DRM-free MP3s for purchase, etc. it's clear that they're focused on customer satisfaction.

This Christmas, they even went WAY above my expectations on a package mixup.

I had ordered a bunch of stuff as gifts and nearly all of the items had been delivered. However, one shipment was listed as "delivered" that I hadn't ever seen. I fully expected to be handed off to UPS to file a claim of some sort, to wait for a followup call from them, etc. After all, that's what every other vendor I've ever worked with has done when something goes wrong with the shipment.

However, with no questions asked, they just sent me another shipment, totaling something like $90 as a replacement. When I found the package, in the back yard, between the garbage cans, buried in snow, I felt terrible. But, you've got to be impressed with a company that just keeps looking for ways to keep customers coming back.

And, now, apparently, I don't have to ever run out of pomade again.

A while back, I sent an email to Dave Slusher about making money in "new media".  He asked if he could publish it and a few emails went back and forth, including some extra bits that he wanted to include in his posting about the conversation. I sent a quick message via Twitter that if it was worth saying, it was worth saying in public and he could do whatever he wanted with what I emailed him.

Dave's response to me really hit me when he commented on that stance. See, that quick summary of being open and transparent really is an oversimplification. That Dave called the stance hardcore really made me want to clarify my actual policy and describe it as it actually is for me.

When I was young, I constantly heard my parents and other adults say, "if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all". You probably did too. As I grew up, I developed a more sophisticated understanding of the underlying principle of that statement. Sometimes the "not nice" thing is, in fact, the right thing to say.

However, at its heart, I believe that that old adage points to the importance of being responsible for what you say. That principle has always stuck with me.

Another principle that I integrated pretty deeply is a belief in transparency as a check on integrity. When your words and actions are out there, you think about what you say and do in a different and, I believe, more critical way.

Those principles have always been at the fore of my mind when writing for this site. On every single post, I ask myself a question:

1. Is there anyone that I'm nervous about reading what I'm about to write?

I then *assume* that, sitting out there, ready to read it is that very person. And, I write as though I am 100% certain that the person in question *will* read it. When that filter stops me from writing, it's usually a sign that I probably shouldn't be saying it in person to anyone either because it's not worth saying.

The thing is that I actually have a filter that's earlier in the process. That filter is the one that wasn't mentioned in my discussion with Dave.

I look at my writing on this site as well as conversations that I have in person as my way of sharing my experiences, knowledge, opinions, etc. with others. I value the exchange of ideas highly.

However, the absolute first thing I ask myself before even sitting down to write or sharing a story at a gathering is: "Is it mine to share?".

Lots of things that make up portions of my day aren't mine to share. The details of my work for clients belong to them by contract. Most of the things that go on in the lives of my friends and family, despite me often being involved, aren't exclusively mine to share. Sometimes, anonymizing the incident can work to make something mine to share, but often that's not the case.

Incidentally, that whole policy tends to lead one to spend more time focused on ideas and opinions than on people and incidents. It keeps gossip out of your conversation and guards against ad hominem attacks.

That question has actually been the source of a fairly deep online silence the last few weeks. On a normal day or week, there are things that are: mine to share, worth sharing (at least by my measure) and something I want to write about. The more frivolous of those things go out over Twitter. Those things that are a bit more involved go here on this site.

The last few weeks have seen very little make it past both filters. There's a lot of stuff going on and the vast majority of my days lately haven't been mine to share. On several fronts, it looks like that might be changing in the next few weeks. Only time will tell.