Taken tonight at about 8:30, at the corner of Halsted and Jackson, in Greektown. Not the friendliest street festival I’ve ever seen, but summer is wrapping up.

Taken today in downtown Chicago,  using retrocamera for android. A beautiful day.

Stacks of resumes, CC-licensed image by woodley wonderworks, via Flickr

As I’ve posted below, I’ve left my position as IT Specialist/Web Developer at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers to start my new gig with the American Bar Association Journal.

I made it clear to my outgoing employers that I wanted to do everything I could to make the transition to the next person as seamless and pain-free as possible.  Since they needed to hire a replacement, and I’m the only one with lots of knowledge about technical work, and insight into the brain of techs, I was charged with sifting through the résumés and determining who might be a good fit, and who we didn’t need to bother talking with.

So I’ve been looking at a lot of résumés, and I’ve been assisting in the interview process, and I’ve learned a few things about job hunting.  Most of these are common knowledge, but some might be non-obvious, so take it for what it’s worth to you.

Your résumé is important.  Don’t skimp on the time you spend on it. A no-brainer, right?  But you’d be surprised about how many résumés don’t seem to have had even one proofreading.  Your résumé is the first and most important document the person doing the hiring is going to be looking for.  At least, it was for me.  Make sure your current address and phone number are there, at the top.  Are you applying for a web job?  Include a URL for your personal site, and your facebook/twitter if you use them.  If I’m interested in you, I’m going to google you and find that stuff anyhow.  Don’t have a personal web site?  Then you have no business applying for a web job.  Seriously.

Don’t use one of the built-in templates in Microsoft Word to make your résumé. They don’t look good, and everyone else uses them.  It says, “Hey, I know how to use wizards, but I don’t care enough about this to really spend the time to make it myself, so I’ll be content to look like everyone else.”

On cover letters: Really, shouldn’t we be calling them “cover emails” these days?  Does anyone send a resume in by mail anymore?  First rule: Don’t copy and paste the same cover letter for every job you apply for. Second rule:  CHECK YOUR SPELLING AND GRAMMAR.  Third rule: A bad cover letter won’t keep me from calling you if your résumé is good, but a really good cover letter might get you an interview, even if your résumé isn’t so good.

Guess what?  I don’t need to know every model of Cisco switch you’ve ever worked with.  Familiarity with Cisco hardware is sufficient.

If your educational background includes a school which advertises during re-runs of Judge Judy, and your current job is working at a deli counter at a supermarket, I’m probably not going to believe you have the technical skills I’m looking for.

During the interview, I know you’re nervous, and you’re trying to make a good impression. But if you’re relaxed and conversational, I’m going to like you more. Check out the company’s website before you go in.  Learn a little bit about them.  Have a couple of questions to ask.  Be personable. Let’s have a conversation, not an interrogation. And, while it’s not really necessary, if you send a follow-up email after the interview, it’s going to make me think you care enough to put in a little extra effort.

You’ve had six jobs in the last two years?  Thanks, but no thanks.  Next.

And finally, headhunters are useless. Seriously.  I’ve tried going through headhunters while seeking employment, and it always turns out to be a waste of my time.  Now, I’ve been on the other side of the equation, and I can say that they’re pretty useless for finding good help as well.  They cost too much, they do too little.  Avoid them.

After almost six months of working as IT Specialist for Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, it’s time for me to move along to a new job.

I’m happy to say I’ve accepted a position as Web Producer for the ABA Journal, the trade publication of the American Bar Association here in Chicago.

I think this new job will allow me to take more advantage of the time I spent at Medill and the lessons I learned there, and I’m happy to get back into the media industry.  It’s satisfying to me to be able to go home at the end of the day and reflect that I might have helped make the world a little bit smarter by my contributions to the mediasphere, and I think that working with the ABA Journal will make that possible.

Which is not to say that my time at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers was wasted — quite the contrary.  I found it extremely interesting to work in a place where I was surrounded by fine art and rarities from around the world.  Anyone that knows me knows I’m fascinated by unusual objects of art, and I’ll certainly miss having access to those sorts of treasures on a daily basis.

And of course, the folks who worked here with me were certainly an eclectic bunch, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to meet and work with them.

So, onwards and upwards, as they say!

P.S. — anyone interested in applying for my job here at LHA should send along their resume.  I’ll be happy to make sure it ends up in the right hands.

Here we see maps hung in the preview room before our rare books and manuscripts auction. Nice display, eh?

Image courtesy of UCF Today

The University of Central Florida (my undergrad alma mater) has some kind words about my little sister, Arden, who’s about to graduate from their nursing program.

She’s a real contender in the friendly, familial competition for  who can spend the most time in school, especially since she’s going back in the fall.

Monroe-Obermeit’s eight years of performing more than 3,000 autopsies and 500 death scene investigations, as well as a life-changing experience with a nurse practitioner, drove her to enroll in UCF’s College of Nursing.

“I saw too many deaths caused by people ignoring their diabetes or their heart conditions,” said Monroe-Obermeit. “In nursing, I absolutely love teaching patients how to avoid becoming a case at the morgue.”

Excellent work, sis!

Here’s a great series of articles about how to structure and present information on news websites.

The link will take you to the first of a series of seven posts outlining some pretty advanced thinking about content management, the semantic web, and what makes sense for consumers of web content in terms of navigation, metadata, tagging, and how we generally treat information online.

“Each of the four parts (and two addenda) will look at the current state of things, criticize what’s wrong with our websites and what should change, but I’ll also provide a first stab at a solution. We’ve had enough “journalism is in crisis but I don’t know how to get us out either”-type blogposts lately, so I’m not looking to add any verbiage to that pile.”

This link came my way via Brian Boyer, the guy in charge of news apps for the Chicago Tribune.

I searched around on the internet this morning and I couldn’t find an example of exactly what I wanted to do, but I DID figure it out, so I thought I’d post it  here in the hopes that it would be useful to others.

Here’s the situation:

• You have a new printer on your network.
• You’ve set up a shared printer queue on your Windows-based server, and it’s printing just fine.
• You can connect to the shared queue from other computers, and it works alright.
• You now want to deploy the printer to all the other Windows machines on your network, but it’s a pain in the ass to walk around to every single machine and set them up by hand.

Solution — remotely deploy the printer to your clients by means of your login script.

And here’s the magic formula:

rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /b “{Printer Name}” /n\\{server}\{shared printer name}

Put that line into your login script, replace {Printer Name} with the name you’d like the printer to have on the client machines, and replace \\{server}\{shared printer name} with the correct UNC path to the printer queue on your server, and BAM, you’re done!

Now, the next time your users log in, they’ll get the new network printer automatically set up on their machines, all ready to go.

Your mileage may vary, of course, and this solution won’t work for Mac client machines.  Those you still have to touch.

Was this tip helpful?  Leave a comment and let me know!

This one was shot on the Fourth of July on the shore of Lake Michigan.  You could see fireworks stretching all the way from downtown Chicago to Evanston.  What’s even better is that the beach was just full of people, all shooting off their own arsenals before, during, and after the “official” Chicago shows.

Lots of fun.  I’m glad that Chicago decided to split up the city’s show into three different ones that ran the length of the coast.  It spread people out, and made it easy to get a great view.