The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

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:

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!”