Muskblog: Homesteading the Internet since 1995

…movies, miniature painting, and sleeping in. I play my guitar too.
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Actually I’m trying to do even more looking for a new job, but sometimes there just aren’t any new jobs to apply to. I looked at well over a hundred yesterday and applied to one. Today there wasn’t near as many piled up in my inbox or my RSS reader. So I had time to read some other RSS feeds.

I’ve subscribed to a variety of RSS feeds over the years, every now and then I’ll prune one either when it gets too voluminous or when the quality drops. Some ‘experts’ may tell you otherwise but it is better to publish nothing than dribble as you risk alienating your subscribers and they along with frequent commenters (who are usually one and the same) are your most important readers.

I’ve actually written a lot about blogging and social networks, before it became a career and something to put on your resume. Recently I found a great job on LinkedIn, Indeed.com actually found it, but the fact it was posted to LinkedIn and undoubtably the employer looked at my profile along with my resume and cover letter, shows the importance of having your profile up to date and well written.

I also let LinkedIn have a look at my personal address book for the first time in the six years I’ve been using LinkedIn. I had something like 2000 addresses in my address book that are valid, approximately a third are in LinkedIn maybe and I added less than two dozen to my network. I’m still a big believer in being selective who you add to your network. Speaking of which, I think I was going to make sure my friend Kim and I were connected. Sometimes on LinkedIn I forget to Link in with my friends focusing instead on people I do business with. Some of my friends are pretty well connected.

I’ve never let Facebook see my address book either. I think it is less useful to me. Facebook is very useful if you are promoting an event or a brand or a product, but it also can be a huge time sync, one which after a couple weeks of novelty wore off for me years ago. I mainly check it on my iPhone while on the bus or waiting for the bus, that is about the priority it has in my life. LinkedIn on the other hand you’re promoting yourself.

Here are a few links I found while cleaning up my RSS reader:

• What recruiters think about LinkedIn
• I still don’t tweet for myself, but if I did, I might take Guy Kawasaki’s advice and use Twitbird
• Why LinkedIn profiles matter
• Nothing revolutionary, but four tips for using LinkedIn to get hired

I remember seeing ads and possibly a trailer for this film, but had forgotten it until it made the new release wall at Happy Bats. It was quite good and surprisingly long. It is superior to “Sukiyaki Western Django” despite lack of participation by Quentin Tarrantino.

The film opens basically with a battle on a moving train, this has more in common with “Once upon a time in the West” than it does “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. The train battle introduces the three title characters and finalizes the premise that everyone wants this map, which the Weird guy stole before the Bad guy could steal it, while the Good guy is trying to hunt him down. There are at least two other gangs in the film with some interest in the map, the gang that overlooks the carnage around the train and tries to make sense and the Ghost Market gang. Later the Japanese/Manchurian army goes after the map.

There are many gun fight scenes as well as some knife fighting. The Good guy catches the Weird guy and is going to turn him in for the ransom but they become partners after the treasure and of course the ransom for the Bad guy. It is a good Asian action flick. There are some crazy stunts, but also it is a little hard to believe the Good guy doesn’t get shot and killed or at least wounded at one point.

The movie takes place during the 1920s in Manchuria. Parts of China and all of Korea are under Japanese rule. A wide variety of weapons are used from revolvers, to clip loading pistols, to automatic machine guns, even artillery. Also used are spears, knifes, axes, morning stars, and one notable war hammer. The gangs are half wild west, half steppes nomads, half mad max biker gang. The movie is very visually different with familiar Western and kung fu touch points.

Like I said it pulls it off better than Sukiyaki Western Django and has the quintessential Korean quality. It features dialog in Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, even some French and a little English. I watched it with subtitles, I don’t know if you can get it dubbed or not. I believe it is filmed mostly on location in Northern China and there is at least one really elaborate set (Ghost Market) where several running gun fights take place.

Although the Weird guy tries to avoid it, the film ends in a three way shoot out. Before that it even echoes the Sergio Leone original as the Good guy holds a gun on the Weird guy while he digs. This three way shoot out involves a lot more bullets than the original, with the possibility of no or maybe two survivors. I don’t know if there will be a sequel.

The final shoot out in the Korean version has the famous extreme eye close ups, but not the quality of the character actors. It also doesn’t hot it for near as long as Leone did in his Westerns. This is a more modern and faster paced movie, with lots of explosions and bullets and nameless bad guys dying.

I actually have an interview tomorrow, the company in question got my application and the next day contacted me and the day after we’re sitting down to talk. I wish more companies could be like that. Even if I don’t get the job, just knowing I was considered seriously and not just filed in some database somewhere…

I’m still waiting to hear back from another firm that was excited to have me in for an interview, but now things may have changed. I was talking to the manager of Bean Around the World at Main and Broadway where I do a lot of my late night and early morning job searching. I told him I’d found a job I thought I was a good fit for, but that another posting which I found around the same time, closed on October 27th. The posting closes on October 27th, then they could take another month to make a decision at least. I don’t want to be unemployed for three more months!

I don’t remember what firm or position it was, doesn’t matter. I definitely prefer smaller more nimble operations where they post jobs, find people they are interested in, interview them, and actually hire someone. Not just repost the job a month later. Hiring immediately apparently means different things to different people.

Late last night I updated my LinkedIn Network. I got a little disgusted with how I was treated by some people I trusted and had added to my network, they just don’t get how important it is to treat people well and going around badmouthing them and lying to their face will come back to haunt you eventually… After all you’re always writing for your future boss. Anyway LinkedIn has a “people you may know” function which works pretty good, so I added a few contacts I worked with at my most recent job. Then I broke down and after being a member of LinkedIn since 2004 I finally let it have a look at my personal address book. I have something like 2000 plus emails in it, some of them are no good anymore, but a bunch of them were people in LinkedIn.

For a while you could only invite about five people at a time, but that restriction seems to have been relaxed at least for my membership type. I invited a dozen or so people, most seem to have said yes. I probably should have done this sooner in my job search.

This is my personal blog, sometimes way too personal, but hobbies are important, I’ve made good friendships through hobbies and last weekend’s Astronomi-con was sponsored by among others Relic Entertainment and knowing people like Malcolm or Kevin may soon be a lot more important…

I’m preparing for my interview, but I’ll also probably rent a film and just take it easy this evening. I’m still painting miniatures, after all it is just a hobby.

So I’ve been thinking of upgrading to WordPress 3.something now that the initial 3.0 release has had bug fixes. A wise sysop waits until the point something release after a major revision. Remember all the troubles I had when I upgraded from where I had everything working to the same code base we had installed at BOB? It was hellacious fixing it, all to save the few words and comments that are in Chinese or Japanese. I tried all sorts of plugins and SQL fixes but in the end the best I could do is roll back into the mess of code I’m running now. Officially it is 2.7.1 but I think it is some sort of custom hybrid.

Hmm Firefox thinks I spelled ‘hellacious’ wrong, shows how smart Firefox is. I wish I could make the spell checker learn to spell things like WordPress, plugins, or SQL all of which Firefox/WordPress thinks are spelled wrong in the previous paragraph. I know it isn’t using the built in dictionary on my Mac as that is where I double checked I was spelling hellacious correctly.

The purpose of this post isn’t to complain about spellchecking, whatever words it gets wrong, it still prevents me from making some dumb mistakes so it is a valued feature. What this post is about is jazzing up Muskblog. No I’m not changing the theme. This theme was custom made by me, to fit inside my static site, which is also heavily customized HTML using a trick I got off of someone years ago. I modified it heavily including making it validate correctly, not necessarily the blog version though. Plugins and WordPress itself are totally under my control, but Muschamp.ca and nurgle.muschamp.ca both validate perfectly or they did prior to my interview with Opera software. I think my stubborn hand coding impressed them, as well as Google. I think I had to make it validate XHTML strict too. My hResume template validate perfectly or did last I checked. Valid HTML is more than just some holy grail, it helps people read your website, including those that are visibly impaired, it also helps search engines index your site.

Some of the recent changes I’ve made were adding plugins recommend by Yaost.com in their SEO for WordPress article. My blog has entirely too many posts on entirely too many topics, if you want to do well in Google or other search engines you have to focus. That is why I finally did a dedicated hobby blog, plus contribute to a few other more focused blogs. I was doing a lot of blogging and painting for a while, but now after getting some more advice I’ve been tweaking my resume and re-evaluating my web presence.

WordPress has changed a lot over the years. A lot of things are now handled by plugins. Before you used to have to craft custom templates and write various snippets of PHP do do stuff. Now I seem to cut code out of my template and delegate things to WordPress plugins. This can’t always be done but with UI’s on the admin side of WordPress or plugins that are wigit-sized it is easier to use them. Some still get abandoned and when you upgrade either break your theme or force you do some theme surgery to get your blog up and running. Either that or you have to roll back to your previous installation. Remember to backup, try backing up multiple ways both with a database dump and with an XML version of your site which WordPress can produce for you.

I had so many problems with WordPress and Asian language content that I went to a very minimal install as far as plugins are concerned, but I’ve been slowly adding them. They are not always visible as some of them do their work behind the scenes. For instance the search engine optimization ones, we’ll see if this results in more traffic I have to pay the bandwidth for. I’m also using Google’s Webmasters Tools a bit more. I’ve had site analytics forever, I even used Urchin on one of my co-op workterms, but as both a search engine and a provider of analytic software, Google is in a position to give unique insights which probably pisses off some of the previous click tracking software manufacturers.

Google used to hate SEO types and never addressed them, now they’ve grown so numerous Google has blogs and spokesmen and goes to their conferences. WebmasterWorld used to be where a lot of SEO talk was, then they added a pay per use private section and a bunch more have cropped up, there is still a lot of good solid information about search engine optimization available online. In fact consultants often write such articles to try and rank higher for SEO or ’search engine optimization’. I even wrote a couple of articles to see just how tough those keywords really are. Maybe I should revise the best of them as a blog posting…

Back in they day, the forum I liked was Builders Buzz, but then News.com who bought it made some decisions which drove people away in droves… There used to be this one adult webmaster whose handle was NineNine he was a sharp cat. Adult websites is one of the more competitive and underhanded areas of search engine optimization, travel and insurance are two other hyper competitive ones.

I detailed the plugins I used when I set up the Building Opportunities with Business blog, I doubt it has changed much in the last three months. I didn’t create the theme but specified a few things while building it such as a dynamic sidebar. My blog has a custom hand coded sidebar and a portion of my sidebar is dynamic. I’ll probably list all the plugins I have installed on this blog once I’m done tweaking it.

Yes I’m still unemployed and for the first time in my life collecting EI as it is now known. Some folks have stumbled by here and others seem still in the dark that I am unemployed and looking for work. I updated my Facebook profile and LinkedIn profile right away, but I never emailed every single person I know… I’d get marked as a spammer for sure if I did that.

Today I took the second step in enrolling in the FutureWorks run Targeted Wage Subsidy program. There are a few stipulations but basically once in your lifetime, the government will pay a portion of your salary back to your new employer if you are elligiable for EI. You have to work in Science & Tech or certain other fields to qualify. They have a website, even a blog which I best subscribe to.

After the info session you have a brief 1-to-1 chat with one of their staff, my guy is Michael. He was quite frank and echoed what that last professional recruiter said when he contacted me about a Business Analyst position, I’m going to have to tailor my resume more, highlight certain skills, mention more the six co-op workterms I did with companies like Shell, General Dynamics Canada, and both the provincial and federal governments. I mention that stuff briefly at the top of my resume. However I need to revise that further it seems and come up with a more specific summary to give them for their newsletter.

The other jobs I’ve been applying for and getting the odd inquiry about are Online Marketing positions. I have over a decade of experience working with Internet technologies and I’m quite knowledgeable about search engine optimization and social networks. That is on my resume too, but I’ve added some specific bullet point examples from my time at BOB.

I’ve applied to the odd Financial Analyst position but despite having an MBA, good grades, and working towards my CFA it is tough to break into that field with basically little experience. I’m quite good at NPV, cashflow projections, market size estimates, and costing things in general. It helps being a pessimist sometimes, studies have shown we are much more accurate estimators than optimists. I also worked really hard after finishing my MBA becoming a bit of an Excel guru. I even made a bunch of Excel spreadsheets available online as proof of competency, of course someone stole one of them, but I’m in the process of having them kicked off the site where they plagiarized me. I think I blogged about that too.

Cheaters appear to prosper more than hardworking honest people these days, well until they finally get arrested, but by then they’ve ruined many people’s lives…

I also apply to unique jobs and Michael seems to think I can talk someone into creating a job just for me and my skill set, I’m not so sure about that. Here is a take at a new brief summary for FutureWorks:

An MBA graduate with a strong background working with technology. Experience with business plan development, market & industry research, market entry strategies, pro forma accounting, NPV & ROI analysis, project management, Gantt charts, UML, database development, case studies, software test plans, content management systems, customer relationship management systems, website development, search engine strategies, online marketing, and social media.

I also went to Metrotown today and saw an old friend. He wants me to come back tomorrow and to enter a Warhammer Fantasy Battle painting competition. Despite doing a lot of painting recently, I don’t really paint for competitions. I’ve painted a lot of Plaguebearers and Night Goblins recently, but they are just rank and file common models. The only hero I’ve done is one Night Goblin shaman back in 2006 and over ten years ago I painted Slim my Demon Prince of Nurgle. The model I should really enter if I’m serious about winning is Leperous, he has the Kharne backpack on, but other than that he looks straight out of Warhammer Fantasy. I don’t think he’s ever been entered into a painting competition.

I also thought about just painting one of the models primed and on my desk as best I can in under 24 hours and going with that. It was hot when I got home, but now that I changed out of the pants I wore to the interview and into shorts and a t-shirt I could get some painting done. I do need to buy a light bulb though… I best use my day bus pass and go get one of those special halogen bulbs I need.

Money seems to go faster and faster these days and it is doubly noticeable when you are unemployed.