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.
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We're looking at buying some land to put up a new cabin and the U of M Extension is always a good place to start.
Utility with the key phrase being: "Supports both DirectX capture and OpenGL capture!"
After installing an implementation of Expose for Vista, I found I really missed it on the XP boxes I work on, so I'm going to give this a shot and see if my needs are met.
I like their choice of "Handshake" and "Handshake Plus" to describe their product, which is a way to manage a loan to a friend or relative, etc. with a bit more behind it than just a verbal agreement.
After seeing some of the research on venting and "anger management", I started being really careful about letting myself vent. This article explains why that was a good idea.
MANAGEMENT AND BUSINESS COURSES FROM MIT OPENCOURSEWARE.
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The commandline for encoding video for Zune manually. I hate "magical" conversions in things like the iTunes or Zune software because it often eats disk space where you don't have the space via "cache" directories, etc. I'd rather just batch encode the files when I want them.

I've actually got one of these CueCat's laying around. Stumbled across the article when looking for how to use the Amazon REST services and got a bonus use as well.
If you're dealing with XML, embracing XPath makes your life much easier than other methods of ferretting out data. However, you have to have some way to write those queries outside of your application to get them right.
We have an uncertain database schema on a project that will likely change several times before it settles down. MyGeneration provides a handy way to re-generate the CRUD code/stored procs whenever the schema changes.
Find an empty frequency for that FM transmitter you bought for your MP3 player. No more of some random talk radio station butting in to the middle of your music.
It's always bothered me that Windows essentially has 2 states for an application to start up: at boot or manually. I often want something to be up an running, but if I started 15 minutes after booting, that'd be good enough.
I seriously want a decent trivia game for my home theater as a party game. Maybe this is a decent starting point.
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Quote: " We know that stress impairs some cognitive functions. The loss of those functions can precisely explain why programming is hard, and show us many other opportunities to improve the ways we organize things. The consequences roll out to touch language, logic and cultural norms. Click here for the Introduction…"
This nails the reason why constant interruption absolutely kills programmer productivity.
If it's alternative energy, it's on this wiki.
NodeBox is a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie. NodeBox is free and well-documented.
Very cool little web app for building CSS grids.
Contribute to test results of how embedded figure tests are tied to juxtopositional thinking.
I'm sorry, but chocolate, peanut butter AND cream cheese is just more than my willpower can withstand.
I'm constantly looking for better ways to get a peek at the contents of objects in C#. Maybe this will help.

They may not make them like they used to, but that doesn't mean you can't.
Letterpress that uses a 6 ton bottle jack and bungee cords to make prints.
The guide takes you on your new speech-enabled adventure, as you'll learn to mix text with speech into a simple program that synthesizes XHTML transitional blog posts into the Wave format - for your iPod - using SAPI 5.3 and encodes them into the Windows
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While things have been busy enough to make the week fly by without any new posts, I still run across stuff I find interesting throughout the week. I save those up and drop them here on the weekend.
All glory to the hypnotoad, all glory to the hypnotoad, all glory to the hypnotoad
Saw a representative from this group on Wired Science on PBS and headed right on over to check it out.
Quote from site: "The Society for Amateur Scientists promotes science literacy by helping ordinary people become engaged in real-life science adventures. - The Society for Amateur Scientists - Science Education Organizations, Science Literacy"
I've been slowly going back to drinking coffee, with no ill effects on my stomach. Of course, now I'd like to roast my own.
The Json.NET library makes working with JSON formatted data in .NET simple. Quickly read and write JSON using the JsonReader and JsonWriter or serialize your .NET objects with a single method call using the JsonSerializer. Json.NET's features include:
- Lightning fast JsonReader and JsonWriter
- The JsonSerializer for quickly converting your .NET objects to JSON and back again
- Json.NET can optionally produce well formatted, indented JSON for debugging or display
- Attributes like JsonIgnore and JsonProperty can be added to a class to customize how a class is serialized
- Ability to convert JSON to and from XML
Very good Q&A with a guy I have huge respect for done by the author of Freakonomics (someone else I respect).
This site was mentioned in the extras of the Futurama DVD and how much there is in the series about math and how many math jokes there are.
If you've been looking at getting a Kindle, but cringe at $400 (as you should) for an ebook reader, take a look at these old, proven devices.
Nice collection of older technical books from a bygone era when DIY meant doing things like build your own bandsaw instead of assembling IKEA furniture.
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