If you visited this blog anytime within the last twelve hours or so, you'll now notice that I pulled my last entry.

This is not because I am trying to censor myself and/or my thoughts. It's simply to protect the innocent from any lasting professional repercussions.

I can see from my sitemeter that my earlier post drew quite a bit of attention from the wrong people and/or organizations, and I have no desire to get anyone in trouble.

Thanks for reading.

Labels: bad news, opinions, technology, work

After receiving an onslaught of sub-par resumes and cover letters for our administrative assistant job opening, I now know exactly how the judges of American Idol must feel during auditions. Today, I’m feeling a little more Simon Cowell-ish than I am den-mother Paula. These resumes have been absolutely dreadful.

I am a complete grammar/punctuation snob and I’m not afraid to admit it. Or shout it. Or bellow it from the mountaintops. And I am here to tell you that, sad but true, many people do judge you on your writing abilities, especially if that’s the only impression that is available to them.

Here are my basic suggestions on how to make a good first impression when sending correspondence to apply for a job:

-Use spell-check. This is a given. There’s just no excuse for sending professional correspondence without using it.

-Beyond spell-check, try to remember the difference between “it’s” and “its,” “there” and “their,” etc. If you don’t trust yourself to differentiate between these and similar homonyms, maybe you should ask someone who has more than a third-grade education to review your correspondence for you prior to sending it.

-Punctuation! I received an email this morning with a cover letter that read:

Hi My name is Illiterate Schmuck and I am interested in this position I am sending you my resume the best way to reach me is by cell phone 610-xxx-xxxx

Keep in mind that we posted an ad for an administrative assistant, and one of the main functions of the job is to send correspondence to our existing and prospective clients. Why would we want to entrust that task to someone who seems to have no idea when to use the most basic punctuation mark?!?!

-Lastly, what exactly does your email address tell the world about you? If it’s something like Hotmonkeylove69, thuglife4eva, or KKKnUSA, perhaps you should take a moment to create another free email account through Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail that is a little less...errr, loaded.

Speaking from personal experience, when I receive a resume from an email address of Windowlicker22470, it goes straight into my Trash folder. Don’t let this happen to your C.V. Instead, create a secondary email account that simply contains some combination of your initials and numbers, which you can use exclusively for professional correspondence.

How to improve your writing if you feel it’s lacking? Very simple!

1. Go to your local public library.
2. Find these two books: The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, and Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss.
3. Absorb the information from these books and start applying it to your daily correspondence.

You’re welcome!

Labels: bitching, books, education, opinions, sheer idiocy, technology, work

Our firm has begun a search for an administrative assistant, and I am the lucky soul who gets to screen the resumes that are emailed to us. I posted the job listing on Craigslist not even twenty-four hours ago, and already I’ve been cured of any latent desire I might have had for HR as a possible career option.

Do people actually think about what they’re saying before they send these emails?

Do they actually proofread what they've written and not just rely on spell-check to ensure their messages make sense?

My favorite response thus far came to me just before noon today. In the posting, I had clearly spelled out my full name, first and last, and my email address listed in the posting also contains my full last name. This latest reply chopped half of my last name right off in the salutation!

The kicker was that, in the cover message, this candidate bragged about her "close attention to detail.”

Delete.

Labels: bitching, sheer idiocy, technology, work

Tonight while doing some photo cleanup on my laptop, I came across this picture I took while walking through Savannah's Lafayette Square. If I were better already in Photoshop, I'd be able to get rid of the cars in the background, which I think are distracting.

Maybe after I get better at PS, I'll refine the picture and repost it here.

Labels: hobbies, pictures, technology, travel

1. I had a two-hour long interview today at Company X, where I met with four people, including two very high-up people. I think it went well. I'll get feedback from the recruiter I'm working with next week.

2. I found this kid courtesy of my friend's Myspace page. He is AMAZING.



3. Finally, we've been having quite a few dramatic thunderstorms around here lately. I've been trying so hard for a long time to capture lightning with my camera, but it's really tough. The other night, I finally succeeded, though the quality of the picture isn't great. To give you an idea of how hard it is to get, I took nearly 800 shots and captured only three pictures of lightning.



What's new with you guys?

Labels: goals, hobbies, music, Philly burbs, pictures, technology, work

Well, I finally broke down and bought a Dummies guide to using Photoshop Elements. I've had the software for about three months and it still mystifies me. It's so powerful but I don't think it's necessarily user-friendly.

I was playing around with this cameraphone picture I took of myself today. Here's a shot of me rendered in colored pencil. Pretty cool, huh???

Labels: hobbies, pictures, technology

Here's a slideshow of my pictures from the wedding of our friends Matt and Jill. They were married Friday evening on the beach on Marco Island, Florida. It was such a beautiful, intimate ceremony.

Congratulations to you both, and thank you for letting us share your special day with you!

PS - I'm a little disappointed by the quality of these pictures as they appear in the video, but the original JPEGs came out crystal-clear. I don't know why the pictures don't show up that well here, though. Sorry!

Labels: friends, marriage, music, pictures, technology, travel

Here is the trailer for The Happening, which is being released in June.

I just watched this for the first time from my desk at work, and I inadvertently let out a loud howl when, about halfway through it, there are a couple quick scenes from the G-Lodge Restaurant on the outskirts of Phoenixville, known in the movie as The Filbert Restaurant, in which everyone looks to be running for their lives out of the restaurant and into the street. It's just after the scene in which Mark's character is talking to the train conductors.

Just from the quick shots of it here, it's almost impossible to imagine that just beyond the camera's scope, several hundred crew members and gawkers were gathered in the street to watch the filming.





By the way, I just realized that in the picture just above this paragraph, you can see part of John Leguizamo's face. He's sitting in a chair, just to the left of the guy in the black t-shirt and baseball cap who's standing right near Mark Wahlberg in the center of the picture. See him? I'd been thinking that was JL at the time, but some crazy woman standing next to me kept insisting that it couldn't possibly be John Leguizamo, that the guy in question looked too young. Well, now that I've seen the trailer, I can confirm that it was definitely him, without a doubt.

Apparently the critics are already bashing the film, but I don't care, I'm still going to see it in the theater anyway. It looks like a totally different role for Mark Wahlberg, and I'm very interested in seeing how he does.

Labels: celebrities, Mark Wahlberg, movies, Philly burbs, technology, The Happening

Tonight is a night of firsts for me.

I have created a slideshow with music in Adobe Photoshop (which I just bought last week and have never used before now).

I have uploaded said slideshow on YouTube.

Now, I'm posting my maiden presentation here on my blog for your enjoyment. It's a compilation of some of the many (398!) pictures I took at the Foo Fighters' show last month, along with one of their songs.

Hope it works!

Labels: accomplishments, concerts, Foo Fighters, music, Philadelphia, pictures, technology

Am I the only person around here who is endlessly amused by video footage of people falling down?

Comic gold!

Labels: funny stuff, sheer idiocy, technology

Despite my considerable stagefright, I am responding to the meme challenge that Rob (Angry Buttons) has issued.

He stated the rules more clearly and succinctly than I ever could, so read up on them to see what it's all about.

Taking it one step further, I've chosen a theme for this meme. It is "Myspace icons that I've Found But Never Posted." Off we go!

Bad grammar, cute picture

One of my many "Hi" icons, never used


Tell us something we DON'T already know...


I love retro animation with funny captions


This made me howl loud and long.

And I'm now tagging:

1. Teri

2. Cayman

3. Fraulein N

4. N in Phila

5. Kate

Labels: funny stuff, Memes, pictures, technology

Accents absolutely fascinate me. I've been trawling YouTube for videos that contain examples of different American accents lately. Some of them really crack me up.

To wit:

Boston accent (obviously)



Baltimore accent (a little less well-known, perhaps, but definitely familiar to me after listening to this)



The elusive but highly confusing Pennsylvania Dutch accent:



And this one of two British girls have a grand old time attempting a "standard" American accent. This one's pretty funny, I actually laughed out loud a few times. Especially during the last thirty or so seconds during the "chips" vs. "crisps" vs "fries" part.

Labels: funny stuff, hobbies, technology

Someone asked me to post my iPod workout playlist, and I'm more than happy to oblige.

Here's what's currently in rotation in my ears (loudly) as I assume the launch position for Week 2 of C25k. How loud? Loud enough so I can't hear myself panting!

Face to Face by Daft Punk
Stranger/Aude vs. Vission Radio Mix by Hilary Duff (I knooooow...but the remix is bangin, yo!)
Feel It by The Tamperer (which inspired the title of this post)
Cry for You by September
Calabria 2007 by Enur
Again by Kim Leoni
The Creeps/Fedde le Grande Mix by Camille Jones
I Want Your Soul by Armand Van Helden
Put 'Em Up/Extended Mix by Edun
Apologize/Remix by Timbaland featuring OneRepublic (good cool-down song)

These songs make me want to MOVE!

Labels: fitness, music, technology

Technology continues to amaze me. I don't know why.

Take, for instance, the incredible information you can get from a sitemeter. You can see all kinds of details on your visitors. I'm still tickled when I see people not just across the country, but AROUND THE WORLD, stopping by to check out my site.

I currently use several different kinds of meters: Sitemeter, Statcounter, and OneStatFree. They're all different and useful in their own way, although I think that Sitemeter and Statcounter are best. I can tell from the stats when my regular readers have been here, and in fact have labeled most of the active participants for ease of recognition. Like right now, Teri, I can see that you're here. Hee!

Lately, my curiosity has definitely been piqued. There's someone who's been Googling my name plus the name of this blog and visiting here intermittently over the past month. This visitor has been spending quite a bit of time checking out both this blog and my previous one. I suspect (s)he is in either Delco or Montco, lives near or on the Main Line, uses Comcast as their ISP, and uses Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7.0.

I do have a few ideas of who my mystery reader might be, but it would be waaaay cool if (s)he said hello...or even just shot me a prvivate email.

Labels: opinions, technology

I was all ready to buy the presale Foo Fighters tickets this morning on Comcasttix.com. I had all my credit card information and the presale password ready on my desk and my finger on the trigger at 9:59 a.m.

As soon as the clock moved to 10 a.m., the servers went kaput!

I tried and tried and tried to get through, but the only thing that kept appearing on my Internet browser was "The page you're trying to view is currently unavailable right now." I even had The Huz trying from his T1 connection at work, and no go!

I finally got through around 12:30 p.m., and the only tickets that were left were for very crappy 300-level seats, which I wouldn't even bother with for this show. Not for my favorite band in the world.

So then I did some comparison shopping (eBay, TicketLiquidator.com, etc.). Some of the prices were so inflated that I almost choked! But I finally found two General Admission/Floor Seats on StubHub for a very reasonable $100 each. Of course, you have to then tack on the 10% commission that StubHub charges, plus the FedEx 2-day shipping cost, which brought the total to $230. Yes, it's costly, but in a city this large, I guess it's expected.

Just for giggles, I'd gone on Ticketmaster earlier today and checked out the presale for Nashville's Foo concert in January, and had absolutely no problems at all logging in and ordering two tickets at $45 each. I guess the fan base in Nashville just isn't the same as it is here.

I told The Huz to consider this my Christmas gift.

Edited to add: Wow. I just read that the floor tickets during the presale sold out in FOUR MINUTES.

Labels: bitching, concerts, Foo Fighters, good news, holidays, Illadelph, music, technology

Nothing earth-shattering going on here. Same links, same layout.

Just a new URL.

Thanks for reading!

Labels: good news, technology, writing