The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

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:

1. A list of surefire ways to guarantee that your resume will quickly be put into the “crap” pile. This list includes incredibly basic mistakes such letting misspellings slip by, sending only the resume as an email attachment without actually writing anything in the body of the email and applying for positions for which you are clearly either over- or underqualified.
2. A list of surefire ways to stand out from the crowd. This includes having a blog, doing some homework on the person or organization to whom you’re sending the resume and writing not only for humans but for resume-scanning software as well.

Watch Out if You Use Word 2007

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:

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.

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!”

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

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:

• 867 Mhz PowerPC G4 processor
• 640K RAM (the maximum)
• 1024 * 768 screen resolution
• 40 GB hard drive
• “Combodrive” (Reads and burns CD-ROMs, reads DVDs)
• AirPort Extreme card

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!

How Can You Get This Machine?

Alas, you can’t anymore; it’s been given away.