Here’s a home reno I’d love to have: for a base price of US$250,000, RiRa Pubs will build a fully-functional Guinness-themed Irish-style pub in your house, complete with “historic Irish architectural elements and authentic Guinness artifacts” and a year’s supply of Guinness’ lovely Stout. To add to the pub’s authenticity, the package includes a first-class airfare trip for two to Dublin, where you can conduct research at Guinness’ St. James Gate brewery.
Since getting laid off, I’ve been getting a little less exercise. My bike commute to work, a 14-kilometre (8.7 mile) round trip, is gone. I also haven’t been going to the gym as often, even with the extra free time. I’ve lost five pounds since getting called into my layoff meeting two weeks and two days ago, in spite of the reduced exercise and some pretty big meals, including an anniversary dinner, Wendy’s birthday dinner and the farewell dinner b5 threw earlier this week. I needed to shed that weight anyway; I should make sure not to gain it back once I land a job.
Should you lose your job, your mileage may vary depending on how you respond to stress. I’ve been waking up about an hour earlier than normal to work on my career plans, research the companies who’ve shown an interest in me, and to do a little extra work on some blog entries. I also haven’t felt like eating as much, which comes from feeling twitchy about the situation. If your response to stress is to eat more or drink lots of beer (a.k.a. “liquid bread”), the change in your weight is likely to be the opposite of mine.
In the hope of triggering some “it always rains just after you wash your car” mojo, I thought I’d post the resume I’m handing out when applying for technical evangelist positions. Enjoy!
“Hey, dude!” said my pal on the phone yesterday. “I’m one of you!”
That was his way of telling me that along with about 1,000 other full-time employees of the well-known auction website for which he worked, he’d been laid off. But rather than calling to have a shoulder to cry on, he’d called to tell me about a plan he’d been working on and to ask me for my opinion. That’s one thing I have to say about a lot of high-tech people: the moment they lose a job, they start hustling.
It’s ironic: I’ve actually been busier unemployed than during the last couple of weeks of my employment. As a project manager in charge of projects that were either cancelled, on hiatus or managed by other people, I had precious little to do. As an unemployed job-seeker with a blog of some repute and reach, I’ve been very lucky: potential employers have been calling me, rather than the other way around. My days are pretty full doing legwork, research or interviews.
That doesn’t mean I still don’t enjoy the “loafing” gallows humour about the unemployed, such as this to-do list I found the other day:
One of the first things I did when I emerged from “the meeting” at b5 was to load up Odd Todd’s Laid Off: A Day in the Life, a classic from the last time I was last laid off by a dot-com. It’s still funny after all this time:
Click the image to see Laid Off: A Day in the Life.
And finally, if you have a lot of time to kill, here’s another classic from the era of the dot-com bubble burst: Leisuretown’s Q.A. Confidential, a comic made of ninety pages like the one shown below:
Page 2 from Q.A. Confidential.
Click the image to read the whole comic.
I love this: it’s the video for A-ha’s 1985 hit single, Take on Me, but with lyrics that match what happens in the song’s video to high-larious effect.
This isn’t the first time the video’s been parodied — Family Guy took a crack at it (click the picture below to see the animation):
And for nostalgia’s sake — I was seventeen and selling snow cones on Yonge Street the summer this song was a hit — here’s the original:
While riding the subway yesterday, I saw this ad for “Colossal University”:
The text of the ad reads:
“STUDENT NUMBER 237, YOUR TEACHER WILL SEE YOU NOW.”
Student by number — just one of the many benefits you’ll experience at Colossal U. For more, visit us at www.colossalu.com.
If this ad gives you a sense of deja vu, it’s probably because you remember the viral “fake ad” campaign for Obay, which looked like ads for obedience drugs but was actually a campaign for Ontario’s community colleges:
I assumed it was another campaign for Ontario community colleges, and when I went to colossalu.com, it appeared to be that way until the “fake-out” faded and the real site appeared: it’s a campaign to promote Algoma University, a liberal arts and sciences school in Sault Ste. Marie affiliated with Laurentian University in Sudbury.
It’s an interesting approach, and hey, it worked on me — I’d never even heard of Algoma before seeing that ad.
Here are two “still life” shots I just pulled off my camera.
The first was taken two Thursdays ago. It’s a photo of the stuff that I brought to the office over time and took home that night:
I know it’s unusual to bring in your own office chair, but ones at the office were sub-par, and I ahd a decent one just sitting in my apartment’s storage room. The desktop computer is one that I haven’t been using much; at the office, I treated it as a big backup hard drive and iTunes machine.
I took the second at the Spadina and Richmond Starbucks just a couple of minutes ago. I thought it might give you an idea of what a high-tech job search looks like:
If you’re in my situation — that is, looking for work — make sure that you read Robert Scoble’s article titled So, you need a job? Man, do resumes suck. In the article, he provides two lists:
Scoble makes a very important point in his “Don’t” list that I’m going to restate because a lot of people make this mistake: Don’t send your resume in .docx format!
The .docx format is the default file format for Word 2007, and prior versions of Word can’t read it unless they have the add-in that can import those files. Since the last really useful new feature in Word — the red lines beneath suspected misspellings and green lines beneath suspected grammatical errors — appeared in Word a couple of versions ago, most people don’t feel the need to keep up with the absolute latest version. If you send out your resume in .docx format, there’s a good chance that the people receiving it can’t read it. If you use Word 2007 to write your resume, use “Save As…” to create the version that you’ll send out and save it as a “Word 97-2003″ document, a.k.a. a .doc file.
Here’s a quick guide to the differences between the file icons:
The folks who said that Sarah Palin’s performance at last Thursday’s vice presidential debate didn’t leave Tina Fey any material were wrong — she killed in the opening skit, turning Palin’s perky but content-free non-answers into pure comedy gold. If you missed Saturday Night Live this weekend, you can enjoy the skit by clicking on the image below:
Click the picture to see the video.
Tonight is Nuit Blanche — literally “white night” in French — a night of public art projects ranging from installations to performance art and taking place all over Accordion City’s core. Here’s a blurb from the Live With Culture site:
I’ve got a date this Saturday night and it’s with ART, ART, ART. Nuit Blanche takes over the Toronto night with public art projects by local, national and international artists in museums, alleys, train stations, warehouses, parks, arenas and more. City Hall as a massive interactive screen, an immense corridor of screams, a waterfall spouting building, slacking mascots and gruesome zombies — this will be a date to remember. So ditch the gallery chic, put on your walking shoes and tell mama NOT to wait up.
To find out more about Nuit Blanche, check out their site. The fun starts tonight at 6:52 p.m. (sunset) and goes on until sunrise.
Robin Senior sent me an email telling me about Stereoscope, one of tonight’s installations. Created by Project Blinkenlights — they’re the people who have turned building windows into giant pixel displays in Berlin and Paris — tonight’s project turns the curved towers of Toronto’s City Hall into twin pixel canvases. Better still, people can create graphics and submit them for display on City Hall tonight!
For more details about this project, see Project Blinkenlights’ Stereoscope site.
This one’s for my lovely wife, whose birthday it is today. Happy birthday, sweetie, we’re goin’ to Denny’s!
David “Chiamattt” Matte pointed me to this classified ad in the Los Angeles Craigslist:
NEED SARAH PALIN LOOKALIKE ASAP FOR ADULT FILM (LA)
Looking for a Sarah Palin lookalike for an adult film to be shot in next 10 days.
Major adult studio.
Please send pix, stats etc. ASAP
Pay: $2000-3000
No anal required
I would love to see Tina Fey take that role. Rrrrrrrowr!
“Drill here, drill now!”
In the previous post, I announced that I was giving away my old 12″ 867 MHz PowerBook G4 and said that I’d give it to the person who emailed me with the most compelling reason to give it to him or her. The most compelling one came from Sue from CARD — that’s Community Association for Riding for the Disabled — who requested it for her organization.
CARD’s mission is to improve the lives of children and adults with disabilities through therapeutic horse riding programs, which helps with their mobility, communication and social skills, and self-esteem. All riders are assessed to ensure the program will benefit them, and to ensure they are placed appropriately in a hippotherapy, psycho-education, therapeutic riding or horsemanship class. Some of their riders who have progressed through the ranks and competed internationally at the Paralympic games and in other ParaEquestrian events.
CARD is 100% self-funded. They rely on grants, donations, sponsorship and fundraising efforts and don’t get any government support. They need to update their office equipment and are looking for donors and donations; they’re currently running on 8 year old iMacs. Of all the people who emailed me, CARD sounded like the people who needed the PowerBook the most, so it’s theirs.
I’ve got another machine to give away, so watch this space!
Update: The PowerBook has been given away.
Last time, I gave away a Mac clone from the ’90s. This time, I’m giving away this machine: a 2003-era 12″ PowerBook G4:
Some specs:
Here’s a peek at the ports on its left side:
The right side has just the CD/DVD slot:
And yes, it can be yours…FREE!
Alas, you can’t anymore; it’s been given away.
