Obscure Mania

I”m back out on the road again. Still taking classes online, finished the Network+ prep class with an A. Now I need to actually go take the test and get certified while I still remember stuff. The A+ certification looks like it’s in more demand if you go to sites like monster.com, but I had to take the class anyway and the college gives a discount voucher for taking the class, so might as well get the certification. Maybe I can stack my resume full of certifications with no experience? After I finish and get the A+ certification in December I may start seriously looking for computer work.

I might write everyday for several websites, but when it comes to writing a resume, forget it! I did find this great resource about writing resumes and it’s cheap! It explains the different formats for resumes, having the right format for the right job you’re applying for, plus several different examples of cover letters.

There’s a podcast I listen to that is more about Living in Las Vegas, but the wife of the couple used to work for Google as a recruiter and she now works in Vegas at one of the Gaming Industry recruiters. She was saying she only spends about 15 seconds scanning a resume, so the facts and the qualifications better stand out and better be easy to read or she will probably miss it.

She says she reads cover letters and they need to be straight to the point. Some recruiters don’t read cover letters, but they’re nice to have. If you include a cover letter, it needs to be done right.

If anyone else is in the job market scattering their resumes to jobs and online job sites, this is a great resource to have. Don’t be fooled by the low price, it’s packed full of tips and the correct way to do a resume from the beginning. For only $7 you can’t afford not to check this out, even if you think you already know how to write the best resume.

Go here for a great resume writing resource.

In-between the news about the bailout or not, the debate or not, I found this piece about Cindy McCain. It’s incredible the amount of charity work she has started and is very involved with. Not just on the boards but actually hands on in the trenches doing the work.

It also mentions how her father made his fortune after Cindy was born. So she wasn’t really brought up rich but grew into it.

Cindy McCain: Polished look to many, but her focus is on others
BY TINA LAM • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • September 21, 2008

As a volunteer for charities, she dresses in jeans, T-shirts and hiking boots and travels to the least-glamorous parts of the globe: Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Georgia this year alone.

Cindy McCain is a director of Operation Smile, which offers free surgery to kids in foreign countries with cleft palates and other deformities; a trustee of HALO Trust, which removes land mines, and a board member on leave from CARE, an international charity.

Until it closed in 1995, she led more than 55 missions overseas for American Medical Voluntary Team, a charity she started in 1988.

She led. She was there, stepping over bodies in Rwanda. Not in a corporate office. Not sitting in the boardroom of a Chicago private Hospital, in charge of sending the people without health insurance, the poor and needy people in search of health care to some other hospital. The hospital where the other potential first lady prospered, paid her $300k a year. But she was helping the community! She was helping herself and the corporation she worked for make money. There’s nothing wrong with that, but don’t lie about it and say your doing community work and helping the poor.

Cindy McCain has done all of her work on her own. Traveling the world without a press entourage and getting the job done of helping without the fanfare.

A message for Senator Obama from a soldier returned from Iraq. Be sure and wait for the end. Be sure to pass it on.

This is probably not interesting to anyone but me. Living in Las Vegas your surrounded by the ongoing history of the area. Everything from Hoover Dam to the constant building, demolition and rebuilding of the entire city.

In order to get a degree in Nevada, a class on the Nevada constitution or a class on Nevada history is a requirement. Cindy did her Nevada history class, I’ve always found the history of almost anything and anywhere really interesting.

This video is from 8mm film and taken from a 15 year old kid who is now 50 and does the narration of his trip with his parents to Las Vegas at Christmas time. You might recognize a few names, but many are long gone. Las Vegas has always been a spectacle. Check out the old cars!

Pronounced Recall. Remember Jott? I wrote about it awhile back and I’ve been using it to send myself reminders, especially when I’m driving. I use my recorder more, but it doesn’t have a reminder function. Jott is changing to a paid service, but they’re leaving a few basic options free and adding a small monthly price to some of the more advanced features. There’s nothing wrong with a company wanting to make money from subscriptions to their service, but it’s tough to compete when someone else is offering the same thing for free.

ReQall is still free. Does email and text message reminders and is very intuitive in putting your reminders in different categories. Such as if you say, “Buy milk”, anything with the word Buy goes automatically into your shopping list.

Just like Jott, you can share reminders and give reminders to your friends that are part of your ReQall list. “Tell Joe to buy beer”. Will send Joe an email reminding him to buy beer.

ReQall can’t update your Twitter, blog or Facebook, but it’s not meant for that. The problem with updating other programs from Jott is that if the transcribing is wrong, you can’t fix it until you get to a computer but if you sent an update to a program like Twitter that can’t changed, you’re out of luck. I tried a few blog posts (on another site) and it worked okay, but unless I wrote it down, read it, and could go back and edit, it may not look or read as well as it could. And if I go though all that trouble, I might as well log on and type it into a regular post.

Oh well. My favorite line from this story -

“Bigfoot” fails DNA test
Biscardi said the DNA samples may not have been taken correctly and may have been contaminated, and that he would proceed with an autopsy of the alleged Bigfoot remains, currently in a freezer at an undisclosed location.

Maybe next time.

Big Foot might be real. A couple Big Foot Hunters found a dead Big Foot body in the woods of north Georgia. They are having a press conference today to show pictures and DNA evidence. Why not have the body at the press conference? Something doesn’t seem quite right. A press conference for a Big Foot find with only pictures.  The Big Foot Hunters say there were other Big Foots close by and aren’t disclosing the exact location to protect the other Big Foots.

I’ve been hearing about Big Foot since the famous blurred picture of a giant BIg Foot walking away looking back at the camera. The Big Foot hunters found this body in North Georgia woods. Wouldn’t you think there would be a better chance of finding a Big Foot in the remote areas of Wyoming, Colorado or Northern California? And there were other Big Foots right there, but they don’t have (or haven’t published yet) pictures of a group or a family of Big Foots.

There is a lot of anticipation for today’s press conference, sorry, but I’m one of the skeptics for several reasons. No body, only pictures. What is the DNA evidence going to prove without a body? Big Foot hunters just happened to find this body? If it was someone just hiking in the woods, it would be more believable. It sounds more like a publicity stunt.

By the time everyone figures out this is a hoax, the publicity will have died down and the story that it was a hoax won’t even be a headline. I may watch at 12n PDT just to see what evidence they are actually going to show. If it’s just one picture, it’s a hoax. Big Foot Hunters going out in the woods hunting for Big Foot with no camera? Sounds a little fishy already.

CNN Story

August 12th, 2008
Day 79: All In The Mind
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven.” (John Milton)
A lot of people were mystified why, having survived but not enjoyed one ocean crossing, I would want to do another.

Starts the 79th day of Roz Savage’s attempt to become the first woman to row across the Pacific. This is the first of three stages that will last three years and finish in Australia. She’s already rowed across the Atlantic and is currently between San Francisco and Hawaii. She is rowing by herself with no actual chase boat, but there is a distant boat that is going to meet up with her for supplies. She has a ton of technology onboard and connects via satellite to update her site and her blog and has an interview with Leo Laporte every week via satellite phone.

She updates her site with pictures, video and podcasts at Roz Savage.com Leo’s interviews at twit.tv and follow her progress at twitter.com/rozsavage as she attempts to become the first woman to row across the Pacific.

I hesitated buying one of these things for a long time. My cellphone allows recording, so I tried that for awhile, I tried Jott.com which you call a number to dictate notes or reminders to yourself. They all kind of worked. Cindy bought this for her Nevada history class when she had to visit some museums around Las Vegas. She gave it to me when she was done with her museum notes.

This little thing is really cool. It does so much, you actually have to read the manual to get all of the features. I use it to record the mileage when I cross a state border (used for fuel taxes), and now I’m using it a lot to remind me of things while I’m driving, things I remember while I’m driving, but will forget when I stop five hours later. Things like what I need the next time I stop for a grocery run, things I would like to post about, websites or subjects I hear on the radio I want to look up later. It’s quick and easy and seems to do well on its AAA batteries. I only short quick notes and haven’t tried it for something long like a class lecture or something where it’s on and recording constantly.

This will also hook up to a computer and allow you to download your notes to your computer and keep or organize them. Theoretically, I could dictate something, download to my laptop, then upload it to Adventures in Trucking and you could listen to what I had to say. Except for the fact I would want to edit out all of the pauses and rearrange everything so it makes sense to everyone else, it could be used for that. Maybe someday.

Here are the features of this little thing:

• 256MB of built in flash memory, allowing you to use up to 1 hour and 44 minutes of recording.
• digital display screen that shows the time, low battery indicator and recording countdown.
• Unit has a USB port allowing for file download to a PC, helping you listen, share, save and organize with ease.
• Automatic Voice-Activated Record (AVR) mode which will sense sound and start recording automatically once sound begins.
• Multiple playback speeds so you can listen to your recorded files at your own pace.
• Date and time a recording was made with the date/time stamp.
• By using the date/time stamp along with intro scan, which gives you a preview of message content, you can quickly find specific recordings without the hassle of listening to complete recordings.
• Editing functions to cut and paste recordings, erase partial or complete recordings
• built-in speaker, built-in microphone,
• recording quality selector
• Headphone and Microphone jacks.
• Selectable folders and bookmarks for easy organization.

RCA RP5120 at Amazon

Pronounced Cool, Cuil.com is a new search engine started by some ex-Google employees. Cuil indexes three times more of the web than google and search results are presented differently than what everyone is used to. Google needs some competition. What about Yahoo and MSN Live? Google needs some competition. The reason google dominates the search engine war is the frequency and the amount of updates it goes after compared to Yahoo and MSN. Google sends tons more web indexing robots all over the internet than Yahoo or MSN and is the main reason it dominates because their search results are the most relevant and timely The buyout of Yahoo by Microsoft might help make Yahoo and MSN more competitive by allowing them to combine forces and resources.

For now Cuil indexes 120 billion pages which is three times more than google has indexed. Google’s response is that the web it doesn’t index is either irrelevant or spam. The Google ex-employees were the ones that developed TeraGoogle which is a system developed to index a large number of documents and the other major employee that moved to Cuil worked on web ranking and spam detection. A search engine with more information and the ability to rank it and weed out spam sites, that could be real competition for google.

At the moment, they are having the normal start up problems and I’m sure they are busy tweaking their algorithms, because some of the search results being reported, let’s just say, need a little tweaking in order to be competitive.

I may not completely switch but I’m trying it out and it does need some adjusting to get what I think are more relevant results. You get a lot more information about a site without actually going to it. Definitely worth checking out. Cuil.com