First experience with Haskell and the kindness of strangers on IRC

I am working this summer on a project with Haskell, the quasi-fabulous functional language. I haven't actually got to working with the language itself yet as I stumbled getting the right version built. The project I am working on requires an unreleased version of Haskell and I must have goofed in building it.

Fortunately there is the #haskell IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. The folks there steered me in the right direction (my build was hosed and I am starting again from scratch). And I found out about ERC, an excellent Emacs IRC client that I wish I'd known about before!

Modern Job hunting hacks

Here are my hard-earned job hunting tips I've accumulated from 20 years of searching for jobs:

(1) CUSTOMIZE EACH RESUME TO THE POSITION! Unfortunately MS Word is usually required so after years of resistance I finally converted my resume to that system. I use a table on the front page (email me for an example) with "Your Requirements" / "My Experience" giving phrases from the ad along with what I can do to address the stated requirements. This format does two things for you:

• gets past resume scanners looking for words that appeared in the ad, which you will have put all of iin your resume's page
• is psychologically compelling for the hiring people ("well, everything we said we wanted is right here ...")

(2) Be flexible especially in "bonus points" ... If you know nothing about Perl, you obviously don't want to spin yourself as a super Perl hacker for a job that requires that. But if Perl i is listed under bonus points, study Perl for a bit, write a few simple Perl scripts and put "brief experience with Perl" in your "my experience" box opposite the Perl requirement!

(3) Put a resume up with all relevant experience on both dice.com and monster.com. Set both of these to 'private', meaning email will come from dice/monster and not from recruiters directly, making it much easier to keep overzealous spam filters from screening out your job offers.

(4) MAKE SOME CHANGE TO EACH RESUME ONCE PER WEEK! This blasts the resume out to a bunch of recruiters whenever the change is made. I discovered this by accident when making substantive changes, but the change does not have to be anything significant.

(5) remove all references to the date you graduated from college and any other clue to your age from your resume. If you're not 50, you will be at some point and you can nip age discrimination by not leaking your age more than absolutely required. Also don't put more than the last 15 years (maximum 20 if you have something especially relevant 19 years ago) of experience on your resume.

(6) Network like crazy! Go especially to local users groups for the technology you're interested in; if you want to get a job programming Python, hit the local Python users group every month and get to know the people there.

(7) Get business cards from Vistaprint or some other online business card purveyor. Get one for every subspecialty you have; if you're both a systems admin and a programmer, get a different card for each that makes you look like that specialty.

(8) Surf http://www.indeed.com, which searches all of Dice, Monster, local jobs boards, and several others. Also scan your local Craigslist tech

jobs section regularly, which indeed.com does not cover.

That's about the size of it ... questions? Don't hesitate. And good luck!

Stupid street crime in Fremont leads to fabulous auto glass company

I stopped on Thursday night in front of our office in Fremont to take care of a quick errand in the office; I was in there no more that 15 minutes.

When I got back down to the street, I noticed this fabric grocery bag I'd left lying on the front seat of the car now sitting next to the sidewalk. "Huh ... did I get distracted and drop the thing?"

Nope, some miscreant(s) had broken the driver's side front window of the old (1999 Ford Escort) and more significantly alarmless car I was driving just to get this bag. When seeing what was in it (a pair of old shoes, a towel, and two bottles of iced tea), he/they tossed it aside.

I couldn't believe it! I regularly remove my iPod, cell phone, and anything else that looks "valuable" from a visible spot in the car, but after this incident I will have to look at "value" with new eyes.

I expected a day without this car while it was fixed and probably a $500 or $600 bill (as our insurance is $1000 deductible), but I was pointed toward All Star Auto Glass.

They quoted me $198.12 and said "we can have a guy there between 1 and 5 today." Well, OK! The guy showed up at 2 saying "this will take about 30 minutes" and got the (beautiful) job done in about that time.

I'm not planning any more broken windows anytime soon, but these guys certainly get my next call when I do need that service! Disclaimer: just a satisfied customer ... I have no other affiliation with them although I would be tempted to buy their stock!

Ooma phone: ditch phone bills!

My wife and I tried Vonage when service was first available so were skittish about internet telephony. But this Ooma phone looked too good to pass up: no phone bills after you buy the equipment!

We tried it for about 4 months and then cancelled our Qwest line, transferringour number to the Ooma phone ... and then started having what seemed like the same trouble we'd had with Vonage before cancelling them: intermittent cut-outs of voice traffic, it seemed.

But ... even though the main phone user in our house, lovely Kate, was complaining about Ooma, I began to notice that I could still send a fax now and then without much trouble, that callers could leave messages ...

It turned out that the problem wasn't Ooma at all, but the extremely well used cordless phone that lovely Kate had used until its microphone died. ("I can hear them but they can't hear me.") We changed out that phone for its barely-used twin Uniden, and voila! Ooma is back and working fine!

We do pay them $10/month for an extra service that gives us a second line (not that we ever need that) and some other call manipulation stuff that we do like, like block lists and the ability to simultaneously ring a cell phone, etc.

Overall: highly recommended. And I have no relation to Ooma other than a satisfied customer.

A stake through the heart of peak oil?

I subscribe to Technology Review in which appeared the most interesting

article on energy I've seen in a recent issue. They're calling it Solar Fuel, and it looks to me to be the best medium-term candidate for getting us out of our oil trap.

As I write this, the gulf is awash in oil and even if we're not running out of it

wouldn't we rather have a solar-fueled desert installation making our diesel fuel?

Steakhouse update

Since my last posting, we've tried both steakhouses mentioned in the
previous post and one not mentioned.

John Howie Steakhouse was excellent and worth the $162 (dinner/dessert/
wine for 2 including tax & tip).

We had a Groupon coupon for 21 Central, which reduced its price ... but
we weren't very impressed anyhow. It was OK, just not up to Daniel's and
John Howie.

One other excellent steak I've had the past few months was at The Hunt
Club in the Sorrento Hotel in Seattle. For a dine around Seattle promotion they were on the list of 3-course $30 meals, and one of the meals included an 8-ounce tenderloin. Delicious!

Our next outing: back to Daniel's to cash a $50 coupon they send for your birthday every year. Sign up the next time you're
in there! (Disclaimer: I'm just a satisfied customer; no interest in Daniel's or any other of Schwartz Brother's properties.