my clover lawn is doing great
… especially with all this rain we’re getting. I’ll post a photo soon, but in the meantime, read this comic and share my smug.
Posted: April 28th, 2008 under house.
Comments: none
it is solved by walking
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Apr | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
… especially with all this rain we’re getting. I’ll post a photo soon, but in the meantime, read this comic and share my smug.
Posted: April 28th, 2008 under house.
Comments: none
This is a repeat of a post I wrote on the beTech Blog
Special note for code4libbers: If you’re anywhere in driving distance of Charlottesville and you like technology, beer, and FUN, please consider yourself invited to beCamp. We’re going to have a pretty healthy code4lib contingent already, so chances are good that you will know someone else here. Please come!
Mark your calendars for beCamp! beCamp May 2nd-3rd 2008 @ Charlottesville Business Innovation Council (CBIC), 501 E. Main Street, Charlottesville, VA (on Downtown Mall)
We have 68 registered attendees so far. If you’re planning to come but haven’t yet registered, do it soon so you can get a t-shirt! You can register at http://barcamp.org/beCamp2008.
Last year this event was a huge success, with a huge range of topics from ruby, smalltalk, and solr (which you might expect) to 3D modeling, robotics, and reputation management (which you might not expect, which makes them even cooler). beCamp is whatever YOU want it to be, so bring your ideas for a session.
Event Details
When
Where
Bring
Posted: April 23rd, 2008 under code4lib, libraries.
Comments: none
Shameless self-promotion warning!
Blacklight has been nominated[1] for a Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration. You can read the nomination here: http://matc.mellon.org/nominate/university-of-virginia/project-blacklight. I feel a little abashed about some of the language, but I guess no one ever won an award by being modest.
If you think Blacklight is a worthwhile project, would you please go show us some love? I think it might help our nomination to have some supportive comments on there.
Thank you!
[1] Don’t you love the passive voice? It “has been nominated…” Don’t worry about by whom.
Posted: April 11th, 2008 under blacklight.
Comments: 1
Update: Image of letter removed. I’m feeling paranoid.
Folks, I kid you not, this was an actual cover letter I just read, applying for a full-time professional librarian position. I don’t feel safe posting it here since you’ll notice in spite of the fact that it has no identifying information about it at all. It isn’t even signed.
Let me just echo the thoughts of the always eloquent Dorothea. People on search committees are busy, some of us are serving on committees outside our area of expertise, and we are almost always constrained by fair hiring practices (and rightly so) to consider only how closely your cover letter and your CV match the job ad. That means that I cannot say, “Oh, this person mentions open source software, I bet that means they know how to run apache even though they haven’t mentioned apache explicitly.” No, if the job ad says apache, I need to see the literal string “apache” before I can check the box off on my little mandated spreadsheet. Same with “project management,” “interest in continuing education,” “supervisory experience”, and everything else in the job ad. A close second, if you can’t honestly say those things in your CV, is to use your polished and well-written (and signed! Do I even need to say that?) cover letter to explain why “Although I do not have significant experience in X, I do have extensive experience with Y, which is similar, and I have taken Z steps to learn skill X.” Then I can give you partial credit, or maybe even full marks, depending on how well you’ve made your case.
When applying for a job anywhere in academia, please also disregard the terrible advice that someone somewhere keeps spouting, to keep your letter and CV under one page. There’s no need to run on un-necessarily, but I would much rather see a coherent discussion of your skills and experience that needs a paperclip than a truncated bulleted list that can’t possibly address what you’re actually capable of doing.
Please, recent graduates of the world, it is breaking my heart to read CVs of people who are probably talented, and have to give them big fat zeros all the way down that stupid little spreadsheet, for lack of the right buzzwords.
Posted: April 4th, 2008 under random.
Comments: 6
I sort of have this thing for Louis Riel. I didn’t know who he was before I moved to Canada, but then I worked on this big Manitoba archives project, and the Rheostatics have that song, and my friend Brendan has a Louis Riel tattoo over his heart, and then Chester Brown wrote a graphic novel about the guy, and the next thing you know I sort of have a crush on a revolutionary leader who’s been dead for over a century.
All of that is preamble to saying this cartoon about Louis Riel is damn funny. Kate Beaton has a lot of other funny cartoons about history, too. Go see. Oh! And more here.
Posted: March 25th, 2008 under comics.
Comments: 1