Resume Crowdsourcing

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Fueled somewhat equally by the frustration of trying to ‘sell myself’ with my resume and curiosity about all this ultra-modern networking and interconnectedness that the intarwebz give us all, I decided to try a little bit of an experiment yesterday.

The only kind of resume I’d ever had was the old “throw everything on there in a big old list” style. Functional, accurate, but I knew it very likely wasn’t the best approach, especially for someone like me who has a bunch of skills, but hasn’t had jobs that obviously stressed those skills. Figuring that somewhere amidst all my various contacts who occasionally check up on me via this blog, its LiveJournal mirror, or my accounts on Facebook, Twitter, or a multitude of other sites, would be someone (or a few someones) with a few good pointers, I sent out a plaintive little cry for help. Once the resume was ready (though with my address and phone number redacted), I created three versions (one each for Apple’s Pages, Microsoft Word, and Adobe Acrobat), zipped them up into an archive, and tossed them on my webserver. Then, one little tweet:

Any kind souls want to view/critique/analyse/make suggestions for my resume? http://xrl.us/mdhresume (174KB .zip w/.pages, .doc and .pdf)

Within just a few minutes, I started to get responses. Over the course of the next few hours, I got some very welcome advice, samples, and edits from ccheney, Michelle, firemaplegirl, and ladybriggan, plus some entertaining stories from Ogre_Kev.

So, now, after far too many hours of banging my head against my keyboard (really, for all the number of years I’ve been told how well I write, resumes are a glaring exception — perhaps because it’s not so much writing as trying to distill all the eclectic bits of experience and tech knowledge into a series of bullet points: me as a PowerPoint presentation), a new tweet went out:

UPDATED: Any kind souls want to critique/make suggestions for my resume (again)? http://xrl.us/mdhresume (158KB .zip w/.pages, .doc and .pdf)

I’m pretty comfortable with the resume as it stands now, so as long as I don’t get a “DEAR GOD, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING‽” response, I think I’m ready to start sending it out to employers (and yes, I’ll be customizing it a bit for particular jobs where necessary).

Once again, thanks to everyone for the advice and words of encouragement!

Links for February 27th through March 4th

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Sometime between February 27th and March 4th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Skittles.com: Interweb the Rainbow. Taste the Rainbow.: Bizarre and really interesting — Skittles is crowdsourcing their website. Rather than building their own promotional site, they're pulling in their Facebook fan page, Twitter searches, Youtube videos, and Flickr photos. Nice little experiment!
  • What Were Arcades Like?: "I was reading about arcades and how you'd have to queue to play popular games as well as follow rules like no throwing in fighting game or the others wouldn't let you play. This seems rather strange. The money cost must have gotten expensive pretty quickly as well. I'm not old enough to have been to them when they were around so I'm curious about what they were like."
  • METAL MACHINE MUSIC: Nine Inch Nails and the Industrial Uprising: "This film traces fascinating and reviews the fascinating history of industrial music, via its 1970s origins, through its enormous rise to prominence in America in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s with NIN as the focal point, to culminate with the current activities of Trent Reznor as he uses marketing and promotional initiatives in a manner just as creative as the music he continues to compose. "
  • Thousands in Scramble for Free Books After Amazon Supplier Abandons Warehouse: "The warehouse, whose lease recently ran out, once contained as many as five million books destined to be sold online. After the lease expired, he firm running the secondhand book business moved out, leaving it full of books. Managers of the industrial estate invited people to help themselves so they can free up space at the site."
  • It’s ‘Potter’ vs. ‘Twilight’ at Great Literary Debate: "Be prepared for lightning bolts and bared fangs as teens square off to defend their literary faves March 21 in 'The Great Debate: Harry Potter vs. Twilight.' Co-sponsored by Seattle Public Library and TEAM READ, the free event is intended to settle (or not) the burning issue of which mega-selling fantasy series reigns supreme." It's a little disturbing how tempting I find it to show up to this, camera in hand, just to see the sparks fly. And not glittery-vampire or broken-wand sparks, either.

Gearing Up

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First off, thanks for all the commiseration and kind wishes I’ve received from everyone, whether it be via e-mail, blog/LiveJournal/Facebook comments, or Twitter. E-support is definitely still support, and it’s nice to have so much!

Yesterday, as may have been expected, was pretty much devoted to moping around. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good mope, anyway, so I suppose I was due, right?

Today I’m starting to get the gears turning to see where to go from here. I still need to haul out the resume and get it updated, but that shouldn’t take too terribly long once I manage to dig up my motivation from wherever it crawled off to. I spoke to my contact at the employment office that had contracted me to the job that just ended, and while the good news is that I was only let go because of economic cutbacks, got good reviews from my supervisors, and have sufficiently high keyboarding and data entry scores to put me at or near the top of the heap when new positions open up…the bad news is that there just aren’t open positions at the moment. Apparently, I’m not the only one out there trying to find a job right now. Huh. Who’da thunk it?

Still and all, hopefully something will turn up. I’m going to keep in contact with them, and start trolling Craigslist and the various job sites out there. Something’s bound to turn up at some point — I just hope it ends up on the “sooner” end of the “sooner or later” scale.

Back to the Breadline

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I suppose I should take a moment to expand a bit on today’s happenings, though there’s really not a whole lot more to say than what I tweeted earlier: the company needs to cut back, and as I was a temp employee, I was easily expendable. Apparently I should have been notified over the weekend, but for some reason all my temp agency had was my cell phone number, which I never bother checking. Still, everyone at my job was quite nice, and the manager has said that he’ll e-mail me a letter of recommendation.

I took today off to rest, process things, and generally mope around the house. Watched the most recent Battlestar Galactica episode, imported another old vinyl album, napped, and just aimlessly dinked around on the ‘net. The plan for the next few days is to take Prairie to work so that I can have the car, and then start seeing what I can find. First stop will be my temp agency to see if they have any positions open, and then…well, I’ll just have to see what I can find.

Wish me luck! The way the job market is these days, I may need it.

Dollhouse

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As evidenced by my recent tweet, I’ve now given Joss two chances to win me over to Dollhouse, and he’s 0 for 2. It just doesn’t work for me, and there’s a number of smaller reasons that add up to one big fail.

There’s a lot of elements to why it’s not working — from the creepy premise (normally I’m all about creepy, but when the basic idea for a show is essentially repeated, technologically-enabled date rape, that’s a kind of creepy that doesn’t do it for me) to the predictable “twists” (there wasn’t a single situation in episode two that was a real surprise) — but I think one of the biggest reasons that I can’t get into it is simply that I don’t care about the characters…and, more importantly, I can’t see why I ever would.

Echo is, by definition, a “tabula rasa,” or blank slate, even to the point of being described as such by the head of the Dollhouse. How can I even begin to care about who she is when the whole point of the show is that she isn’t? She has no personality of her own. The only time she exists as a person is when she’s been imprinted for an assignment, but that person disappears as soon as she returns to the Dollhouse. I can’t invest myself emotionally in a character that’s nothing but an empty shell.

When we look back at early episodes of long-running shows, it’s often funny to see how “unformed” the characters were at that point. The actors were still discovering their roles, taking the rough character sketches given to them and beginning to flesh them out into fully developed people that we can care about. With Dollhouse, that doesn’t seem to be an option — perhaps for some of the secondary and tertiary cast — but certainly not for the lead.

At least, not if they play by the rules that they’ve set up. And this is where the Whedon acolytes cry out, telling me to wait! Hold on! Because — as was widely reported before Dollhouse first aired — part of the compromise Whedon had to make with FOX was to set up the first seven episodes as primarily standalone episodes, without major ties into the planned arc of the show. So, you see, these first seven are like “seven pilots,” and if we just keep watching, we’ll get to the really good stuff! Where Echo starts breaking through her programming, and the mysteries start to unravel, and then, and then, and then….

Sorry, no. That doesn’t work for me — no show should need seven pilots just to get people interested. No, I don’t expect every TV show to have some huge story arc to follow — some of my favorite shows (Star Trek TOS and TNG) were entirely or almost entirely standalone episodes, and I enjoyed the “monster of the week” X-Files episodes as much as I did the “conspiracy” episodes. Guilty pleasure shows like CSI and NCIS do a great job of being entertaining and interesting, allowing you to get to know the characters as they grow over time, while still generally staying within the bounds of standalone shows. There does need to be some amount of advancement possible, however, otherwise you might as well just be “rebooting” every week.

On top of all that, though, the characters and situations need to be interesting, and that’s a major failure of Dollhouse. To date, the most interesting characters I’ve seen have been the FBI agent and the doctor (and I’m not even sure if that’s because the character is that interesting or because I loved Amy Acker’s character “Fred” on Angel). Echo, her handler, the geeky guy who does the programming, the boss? None of them interest me as much as one secondary and one tertiary character do, and that’s a bad sign. The situations have only been slightly better — the first week’s hostage situation and negotiation was a little interesting, but was only the latter half of the episode, and last week’s “hunting the human” schtick has been done so many times that it completely failed to grab my interest. Really, how much suspense could there be when the main character is in mortal peril in the second episode of the series? Spoiler alert, folks…she ain’t gonna die.

So no, no Dollhouse for me. Maybe Joss still has some good stuff rattling around in his brain, and maybe all he needs to do is to get away from FOX to do it. However, I have my doubts.

Links for February 25th through February 27th

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Sometime between February 25th and February 27th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • The Whedonite’s Dilemma: "Dollhouse is not an enjoyable television program. … Being truly granular about what makes the show an affront would require the use of holographic data storage, but in general terms the show (as delivered) doesn't work. … It's a science fiction retelling of MTV's The Real World, and it works about as well as you would expect."
  • New Frontiers Sweepstakes: Win a trip to the Red Carpet premiere of the new Star Trek film, or a trip on the "Vomit Comit" Zero-G space plane. Disclaimer: using this link to enter also helps my chances of winning. ;) Be a buddy, help me out, and maybe you'll win instead!
  • Young ‘Slumdog’ Stars Back in Mumbai Slums: "On Sunday night, Azharuddin Ismail and Rubina Ali were in Hollywood, California, getting celebrity treatment as eight Oscars were awarded to the movie they starred in, 'Slumdog Millionaire.' ¶ Thursday night, the two children were sleeping at home in Mumbai, India. Azharuddin sleeps under a plastic sheet in a shantytown beside a railway track, where the smell of urine and cow dung lingers in the air. Rubina sleeps with her parents and siblings in a tiny shack beside an open drain."
  • Yoda Is a Muppet: "Not until Yoda dies do things go right for the rebellion against the Empire. Yoda's rise is the rise of the Empire. Dude is a muppet through and through."
  • Mermaid Dream Comes True Thanks to Weta: "Nadya Vessey lost her legs as a child but now she swims like a mermaid. Ms Vessey's mermaid tail was created by Wellington-based film industry wizards Weta Workshop after the Auckland woman wrote to them two years ago asking if they could make her a prosthetic tail. She was astounded when they agreed."

On the Neverending Story

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As I’m sure most people have noticed, there’s a huge trend right now for movie studios to forego the troublesome process of actually having to come up with new ideas, and just dig back into the past to resurrect formerly successful properties. That way, nobody actually has to think too terribly hard, and they can hope to gain a few ticket sales by cashing in on misplaced nostalgia. The success of these ventures has been uneven (to say the least), and every time word leaks out of another ill-conceived attempt to recreate something from our childhood, my question is always, “Why can’t they try to remake the bad films into something good, instead of ruining films that were good in the first place?”

This morning, I woke up (early, for some reason), and saw this tweet:

seattlegeekly: RT @GeekTyrant: NEVERENDING STORY: Another Childhood Film Classic Gets Jacked http://bit.ly/19nlmr – WHY do they feel they have to do this?

I expected my usual reaction of, “oh, geez, why?”…and didn’t get it. You see, yes, there’s a chance that they’re taking a film that’s loved by many who were kids when it came out and “updating” it to be bigger, louder, and — as is typical for today’s reimaginings — stupider (see trailers for the upcoming recreation of Disney’s “Witch Mountain” franchise for a prime example of what I’m talking about). However — and this is where I risk lynching by those only familiar with the film — if we’re lucky, this could turn out to be one of those cases where they just might improve on the original.

Some background: I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. Now, Alaska in the 1980’s was still far enough removed from the Lower 48 that more often than not, we tended to run a few weeks behind the rest of the U.S. I must have been around nine or ten years old when I saw a trailer for the original “Neverending Story” on TV, and I was immediately entranced. A kid not much older than me getting literally sucked into a fantasy book, with fantastic creatures, flying dragons, and beautiful princesses? Awesome! And so I eagerly waited for the movie to come out.

And waited.

And waited. I have no idea how long I actually waited, but it was long enough in kid years that it turned into “forever.” This was before the modern technique of releasing trailers six months to a year in advance of a film to build excitement, so I’ve always assumed that Alaska just got the movie a month or two after it opened in the rest of the U.S. Whatever the reason, I was annoyed and anxious…I wanted to see that movie! And then, while wandering through a bookstore, I saw it: the book of the movie! It had pictures on the front cover of the kids from the trailer, the dragon…that was it! Now it didn’t matter that we hadn’t gotten the movie…I had the book! I got it, went home, and dove in.

I dove in much like Bastian did. Here was a kid much like me, for whom books weren’t merely printed words on paper, but entire worlds that would flow out of the pages, wrap around us and envelop us, drawing us in to the story as if we were really there. I was with Bastian on his adventures just as he was with Atreyu, Artax, Falcor, and all the rest. I fell in love with that book.

Not too long after I finished reading, word came out that the movie was finally opening in Anchorage! Finally! All the adventures I’d just lived, I’d get to see — the creatures, the battles, everything! I’m not sure I’ve ever been quite so excited to see a movie…this was it. This was exactly what I’d been waiting for since that first trailer.

And then, over that next hour and a half, my ten-year-old self became suddenly, bitterly, painfully schooled in the realities of translating a novel to the screen. Roger Ebert’s review of “North” had nothing on the vitriol that spewed out of my young mouth when I “reviewed” the film to my family and friends. It was horrid! A tragedy! A disaster!

For years now, I’ve described the major differences between the book and the movie thusly: “Take your favorite childhood novel. Now, tear it in half, and throw the latter half away. Now, start randomly tearing pages out of the first half, until it’s about half the size it was when you started. Now, take what’s left, and shuffle it around until it loses nearly all resemblance to the original story. There’s your script!”

There were so many moments in the book that I’d played over and over in my head, that I’d been dying to see on the screen, that simply didn’t exist. One of the key scenes that I felt cheated on was when Atreyu and Falcor meet. In the book, Atreyu has lost Artax, spoken to Morla, and left the Swamps of Sadness on his own. Travelling through a canyon, he witnesses a battle between two great monsters: a luckdragon, and a shape-changer named Ygramul the Many…

The battle between the two giants was fearsome. The luckdragon was still defending himself, spewing blue fire that singed the cloud-monster’s bristles. Smoke came whirling through the crevices in the rock, so foul-smelling that Atreyu could hardly breathe. Once the luckdragon managed to bite off one of the monster’s long legs. but instead of falling into the chasm, the severed leg hovered for a time in mid-air, then returned to its old place in the black cloud-body. And several times the dragon seemed to seize one of the monster’s limbs between its teeth, but bit into the void.

Only then did Atreyu noticed that the monster was not a single, solid body, but was made up of innumerable small steel-blue insects which buzzed like angry hornets. It was their compact swarm that kept taking different shapes.

This was Ygramul, and now Atreyu knew why she was called ‘the Many’.

To have this scene played over and over in my head for weeks, seen from every angle, imagined from every possible vantage point, and then to watch in disbelief in the film as Falcor simply appears for no particular reason — a deus ex machina that bothered me at ten, even if I didn’t know the term — to pull Atreyu out of the swamp? Oh, this was just not right!

I didn’t watch that movie for years afterwards.

Eventually, as I got older, I started to wonder if it was really as bad as I remembered, and rented it. Of course, no, it wasn’t that bad. A little older, a little wiser, and a little more cognizant of the sacrifices that must be made when adapting a 377-page fantasy novel to a 90-minute movie, I came to realize that it’s really not that bad of a movie at all, and even had a lot of fun on one trip to Germany when I got to see some of the sets. However, it’s definitely one of those films where I need to keep it in a compartment entirely separate from that of the book. Two creations that share a name and many characters, but in most respects, are two entirely separate things.

So now comes word that there may be a new take on the film. Admittedly, it’s still in the very early stages of planning, but one key quote stood out to me: “The new pic…will examine the more nuanced details of the book that were glossed over in the first pic.” Now, who knows just what details they’re looking at (though they certainly have a lot to choose from), and this could be nothing but marketingspeak aimed directly at people like me who are more attached to the book than the movie, but I’d like to hold out at least a little hope that we may get something closer to what Michael Ende originally created.

Pixar and Gender

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Long-time readers will recognize this particular soapbox, but it’s good to know I’m not the only one standing on it: Pixar’s Gender Problem:

Whenever a new Pixar movie comes out, I wrestle with the same frustration: Pixar’s gender problem. While Disney’s long history of antipathy toward mothers and the problematic popularity of the Disney Princess line are well-traveled territory for feminist critiques, Pixar’s gender problem often slips under the radar.

The Pixar M.O. is (somewhat) subtler than the old your-stepmom-is-a-witch tropes of Disney past. Instead, Pixar’s continued failure to posit female characters as the central protagonists in their stories contributes to the idea that male is neutral and female is particular. This is not to say that Pixar does not write female characters. What I am taking issue with is the ad-nauseam repetition of female characters as helpers, love interests, and moral compasses to the male characters whose problems, feelings, and desires drive the narratives.

Much of the post covers much the same ground that I have in the past (first asking if Pixar is a ‘boys only’ club, then investigating Wall•E’s Misogyn•E, and then in response to an interviewer’s question). There is some word of an upcoming film that I hadn’t heard about yet that does appear to have a female lead. All may not be rosy just yet, though…

The Bear and the Bow: OOOOOH! Somebody told Pixar that they needed to make a movie with a girl as the main character! So, duh, it’s going to be “Pixar’s first fairy tale”!!! The main character will be, get this, a PRINCESS! But, since the Pixar people are probably good Bay Area liberals, I’m sure the princess will want to defy her parents’/society’s expectations. Where have we seen that before, I wonder? No cookies for rehashing the same old shit. If we’re super lucky, she won’t marry the prince, which will allow us to cover the same ground that Robert Munsch and Free to Be You and Me covered in the goddamn ’70s. Maybe it will be good, but no matter how good it is, it still PISSES ME OFF that girls get to be main characters only when they are princess (or marrying up the social ladder a la Belle and Mulan) in fairy tale worlds. Boys can be main characters anywhere, but if a girl is the main character, you can bet your ass it’s a fantasy world.

So it may be a step forward. If we’re lucky, it’ll be a big step forward, and it may even be enough to get Prairie and I back in the theater for a Pixar film. Noone can really argue that Pixar is bad at storytelling (well, aside from Cars, that is), but in the end…

…It’s not just the stories they choose to tell, it’s how they choose to tell them: in a way that always relegates female characters to the periphery, where they can serve and encourage male characters, but are never, ever important enough to carry a whole movie on their own shoulders. Unless they’re, you know, princesses.

(via Kottke)

Links for February 24th through February 25th

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Sometime between February 24th and February 25th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • ‘Trek’ Cast to Reunite on ‘Family Guy’: "'Stewie blows a fuse when he doesn't get a chance to ask his favorite 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' cast members any questions,' reads the logline. 'He devises a plan, builds a transporter and beams the entire cast to his bedroom so they can spend a fun-filled day together in Quahog.'"
  • "Dear President Obama": The President Reads 10 Letters a Day From the Public, With Policy Ramifications: "Every day President Barack Obama is handed a special purple folder. The folder contains ten letters, and every day President Obama takes time to read them. ¶ Are they from world leaders? From members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Members of the intelligence community? ¶ No, these letters have been culled from the thousands the White House Correspondence Office receives each day from Americans who have taken the time to sit down and write to their president. ¶ 'They help him focus on the real problems people are facing,' says Axelrod. 'He really a absorbs these letters, and often shares then with us.'"
  • FIRST PHOTOS: Weird Fish With Transparent Head: "With a head like a fighter-plane cockpit, a Pacific barreleye fish shows off its highly sensitive, barrel-like eyes–topped by green, orblike lenses–in a picture released today but taken in 2004." Freakin' bizarre fish. The eyes are entirely enclosed inside its transparent head.
  • EMI Music Debuts First iTunes Pass With Depeche Mode: "EMI Music today announced the debut of the first iTunes Pass with groundbreaking electro legends Depeche Mode. With iTunes Pass, music fans can get new and exclusive singles, remixes, video and other content from their favorite artists over a set period of time, delivered to their libraries as soon as they're available." Sounds like a music version of the iTunes "season pass" for TV shows: pre-pay a certain amount for whatever is released by an artist for a set period of time. Interesting idea…especially if the value of the merchandise exceeds what you'd pay if you bought it all piecemeal. According to Apple via MacRumors, "the price of the pass will not exceed the value of the contents offered." So you'd at least break even. Let's hope that it's a better deal than that.
  • doubleTwist: Promising looking multi-device multimedia manager. Mac/Intel-only…which means I can't play. More and more software (including, apparently, the upcoming Snow Leopard revision to Mac OS X) is coming out as Intel-only. As good as my Dual G5 is — and it is — I need to start planning to replace it and turn it into a home backup/fileserver.