Pinging the Blogosphere … The Online Job Market

Now here is a post about the online job market being broken. The author gives various reasons why the online job market is not working, but I think he or she has missed a curcial point. The economy has been expanding for the past couple of years. The supply for the technology talent has not kept up with demand. As a result, it has become hard to recruit top talent at an affordable price, because the likes of Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have a voracious appetite for talent, pushing prices up, and making talent scarce. This is not evidence that the market is broken. This is evidence that the market is working.

They dont have to worry. There is already talk that there will be a market correction by the end of the year, and the economy might slip into recession. I have a prediction that someone is going to write a post about how there is a glut of talent, but not enough vacancies. \

BTW, Really smart talented people will always be scarce. The author did get this part right. These people are not and will not be looking for jobs. They already have jobs they like, or they have lined up jobs they want to work on next.

Pinging the Blogosphere…. Resume Writing

All th blogging that I had done for the past two months seemed a excessive, so I decided that I was going to take a little breather, and let my thoughts gather. Unfortunately, any ideas for blogging topics that I have, are either incoherent or a victim of my procrastination.

So instead, I decided that I would simply write a bunch random notes, on things I saw today. just to let everybody, I’m still alive. I’m not kicking, but I am alive.

This is a blog post by a software engineering manager, about resume writing tips to getting past that 30 second look-over. I’ve read a lot of these resume tips over the past couple of years. The last time I updated my resume was about five months ago. In about a month or so, I’ll be updating my resume (something I do every six months or so). I’m not currently looking for a new job, but updating a resume every six months or so has allowed me to take an honest appraisal of where my career has been going.

My first cut of my resume is brutally honest. It’s so brutal, that I would call it resume self-flaggellation. This would not be a resume that I would send out, but a resume that would allow me to do a very honest self-appraisal of where my career is going. Depending on how I come out of that experience, I make a decision on what I need to do. My last experience, left me somewhat ambivalent about my career. I had some mixed feelings on where I wanted to be.I could’nt make up my mind whether I was happy or not. So I re-editted my resume into something that was more likely to get a second look and I looked around half-heartedly to see what was out there. Nothing came out of it. Landed a phone screen interview, but could’nt get past it. Dissappointed, I stopped trying.

Lesson learnt? In my opinion, that ambivalence really set me up for failure from the get go. Because, I had some mixed feelings, I was’nt really aggressive enough to go after what I wanted. I was’nt even sure what I wanted. Resume tips are all right, but if you really don’t have that drive for that something different, you’re job hunt is DOA.

End of March, I’m going to update my resume again in the same way. Let’s see where how that excercise ends.

…..

The Way it was on a Starbucks Cup

Improvisers don’t look at change as an obstacle; we look at it as fuel. We know that the next great idea lies just on the other side of the change. We are constantly asking ourselves, “What can I do to incite change?” Well?”

–John Sweeny, Speaker, trainer and author of Innovation at the Speed of Laughter.

In case you’re wondering, Starbucks Cups are not the only things I read.

ANSI Common Lisp Chapter 2 and 3 solutions

ANSI Common Lisp Chapter 2 solution
ANSI Common Lisp Chapter 3 solution

At some point in the future, I’ll be consoldiating my solutions to one page.

On to chapter 4.

Blog Posts to Note today

Coding Horror has an interesting post on how users are still stuck using JPEG (a standard that dates back to ’80s) and how we should start moving towards JPEG2000 that uses more modern algorithms and achieves better compression and image quality.

On an another note, Programming Musings has done a survey of programming languages for quantum computing. Interest in quantum computing has gone up dramatically since a Candian company called D-Wave recently announced that they had successfully built a quantum computer with a viable design.

Learning Lisp

I just “partially” finished my way through Chapter 3 of Paul Graham’s book “ANSI Common Lisp”. I’m going to post my solutions of Chapter 2 and 3 (partial solutions). I could’nt solve question 7 and question 9. I’m going to skip those questions and come back to them later.
I’ll be posting solution PDFs tommorrow. On to Chapter 4.

"Lady in the Water"

This has to be one of the most narcissistic production I’ve ever seen. Should have listened. Everyone told me to to stay away. Dont even go near this one.

Illustrations of Why You Invert FPS Controls (and how the Wii solves this)

An illustrated answer to the age old debate of why some of us just have to use inverted controls when playing Halo, Half-life or even Red Steel. Learn how your consciousness affects you decision to turn this option on/off.
This has been on Digg before, but didn’t get picked up. I thought it was worth another outing.

Interesting post why people like me always invert their xBox controllers.

read more | digg story

Now this is interesting…

A dual screen tablet PC that allows the user to run two apps side by side made by a company called Estari. Note the the hefty $4350.⁰⁰ price tag.

Kind of reminds me the book computer in those Inspector Gadget Cartoons used by his side-kick/niece Penny.

A Tech Witchhunt??

First, Norway went after Apple for not allowing songs downloaded from iTunes, to be playable on the iPod only. Now, Belgium has decided that Goolge’s caching of information (that incidently is free) on the web is a violation of Belgian copyright. This is beginning to sound like a straightforward European governmental witch-hunt because they just can’t seem to make an alternative service. I used to think that the continuing European monopoly action against Microsoft was because Microsoft was guilty of monopolisitic practices, but now I suspect it was just because some beauracrat decided that lame legalism will constrain the competition.