Now not everyone lies on their resume but they do embellish a little bit.  I try not to embellish at all since I am afraid I would be called out on it.  Some people their resume is a large pack of lies.

There are a few things you have to do to get a good looking resume.

• choose your diction/prose properly.  Have a friend edit it.  Take their edits and yours and meld them together.  Then try another friend. etc.  You want to polish it off as best as you can.
• spellcheck.  bad spelling will kill your resume.
• standard document formats only.  I strongly suggest word format (not the new .docx format but standard .doc format).  Or pdf is an acceptable format most of the time.  Dont do excel, powerpoint, pagemaker, text, webpage, etc.  I would offer my resume in the .doc format and mention to the recruiter that you have it in other formats if that works best for them.  Flexible is good.  But try to work with the standards.
• find a good format/layout that is clean and neat.  Most recruiters will only spend like 15 second (maybe more) looking at your resume the first time.  They need to be able to scan it and see the right information.  if it is not well laid out then things will get missed or it will be painful for the recruiter to read.  Either way, you wont get the job.
• dont put info on the resume that doesnt need to be there.  Objective?  your object is to get a job.  Anything else you put down is part of the “bag if lies” I referred to earlier.  All it is is filler.  Also references?  skip that info.  All those people are going to be very biased for you and say you walk on water.  That might have been important twenty years ago but today it is just a waste of space.  Hobbies?  they dont care about you hobbies.  The more you have the less likely you will work extra hours when needed to.  marriage and kids?  never ever put this down.  They have no need to know about it.  All these things that are filler, are distracting to the resume reviewer (recruiter).  As someone that used to go through twenty to well over a hundred resumes a week, every week to review them for possibility of putting them in the interview cycle, I could not stand those filler blocks.  Those blocks distracted me from the meat of the resume and people could get dropped because of it.

What I used to do every quarter is have my quarterly fight with my father.  Now my father is a brilliant brilliant man.  He is not a geek in the modern day definition.  He is an Aerospace Engineer building advanced military aircraft.  So these “fights” were arguments over the diction/prose in my resume.  At the time I was a consultant and I had to keep it up to date.  He and I would argue over the smallest little change of wording or which word to use.  Yeah it put a strain on our relationship for a few days and we didnt want to talk to the other.  But what it did was give me one of the best resumes out there for someone with my experience/knowledge.  My father and I havent had that argument in a while.  although I am not looking for a new job or plan on looking for a new job, I think I should dig up the resume and start the right again with him.  the more often you update the resume, the more likely you wont forget things and there is less to do each time so it is less painful.

Well I went to my parents house to see my dog (aka cancer dog) and to try these things. Well none of them worked. Good tries and good effort. Just no dice. So registered to go back today and see Justin (well you can not register for a particular person but I put a note to see Justin in the reservation).

Day two of the apple store. I went in a little early and hung out. Boy was it packed. Sorta like their neighbor when they have the 2 for 1 panty sale. So I was glad I had a reservation. I talked to Justin for a second when he informed me that Kirk would be taking care of me since he was working on the iPod queue. He said that he talked to Kirk about the situation so he was up to speed. Great! that is good customer service. I dont have to repeat the whole story for every person I talk to. Way to go! So Kirk and I talked about the problem and what I tried and what didnt work. He asked some new/different questions about things to do. All but one I had tried before and didnt work. He looked at my mom’s powerbook and the airport express. Then he agreed that it was the Extreme base station. He did ALL the paperwork and did all the work to get me a replacement part. All I have to do is bring paperwork & the old unit back in when they call us when the part comes in. Very easy.

They could have told me to go away about a dozen times or so since it wasnt my stuff. I didnt live at the address where it was registered or anything. But instead of finding reasons to say no. They kept looking for the positive outcome for the customer. All within the bounds of their jobs/policy. Service like that will keep people coming back in over and over again.

So in Germany, there is PackStations.  This allows the postal service or DHL (others soon) to put the package in the station, and tag it for you.  The station SMS’s (cell phone text message) that you have a new package.  Then you come down at your convenience to get it.  So if you have to work late or run errands, no biggie.  Pick it up on your way home.  Several large companies are having them put on their campuses not for business packages but for the personal packages the employees receive at work (which lots of companies put policies against it in place but it doesnt stop it, just might slow it down a little).

Now we just need them in the USA.  If they would put one of these stations at each “club house/community center” in each subdivision/apartment complex.  And other centralized areas.  This could be a big hit for US package companies.  It would make me feel better about getting packages.  If FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL drops off a package at 8am at my house, and I dont get home until 8pm that night, that is 12 hours that someone could steal the package.

For all of use that use PERL a lot (which is me!), then any tidbit of help we can get is great!. From this article, we get the tidbit below.

If you’re primarily a Perl hacker and don’t use C much, you might find it annoying when you hit ‘K’ in command mode. That’s because VIM runs something like this:

    nmap K :Map 

I’ve just added the following to my .vimrc:

    noremap K :!perldoc   perldoc -f 

Now when you type ‘K’ in command mode, it will call up the appropriate perldoc, if possible.

MacVIM is it. I am using it now, and WOW! I am soo glad it is here.

here is the screenshot from the homepage (and NO it is not mine!)

There is a ton of articles out there discussing this case. This one discusses why the RIAA won. This one discusses the case. This one discusses it from a more technical side. This one talks about the defendants attack on the RIAA. This one talks about how the judge bars the president from testifying. And here is abc’s response/article.

EDIT: added’ abc’s article.