Oy ... what a weekend. Not for any "I'm so busy" reasons, but from tackling a project that's been on my "to do" list for several months. You see, I had new asshole ripped for me in the comments to a post here regarding my resume (which, I might add, has been reviewed by nearly a dozen recruiters, headhunters, job service folks, consultants, and even resume writers and been judged "fine ... no major changes needed"), which, of course, sent me into a spiral of a depressive "crisis of confidence" over it. Now, I had been meaning to do an update to my base resume for months, as the version that I've been using hasn't reflected any of the activities I've been involved in since it became evident that Simuality/Liminati wasn't going to survive (as you may recall, we tried to keep it running past losing our offices in Evanston, but there were just not enough projects "in the hopper" to make that work). The only change I'd made since last May was to switch from "- Present" on that to "- 2009" to at least make it clear that I was no longer employed. So, on Saturday night I started wrestling with it.
My resume is already "pushing the envelope" on what is "acceptable" as it's been two solid pages of mostly 10pt or smaller text for a while. So, part of my hesitancy of getting to this project has been due to knowing that I'd have to do some cutting, and I had, frankly, trimmed this already to the limits of my natural tendency to the verbose. However, there were two things that I felt could go ... first (and this was one of the things that the commenter to the previous post was focusing in on) was the section on my "technical" skills. This was a bit of "boilerplate" that the Career Services folks down at the Chubb Institute had folks coming out of the "Web Development & Business Programming" program add to their resumes as it was (from their perspective) a list of what had been crammed into our heads over those six units. Of course, this was '02-'03 and with some exceptions (HTML, CSS, a bit of Java this or that), I'd never had an opportunity to use any of that training, so at this remove I'd pretty much have to at least run through a "for Dummies" book on any of that stuff to be even plausible as "knowing" it. While I'd kept it on as a way of showing that I was conversant on the topics (and would thereby be a great guy to communicate information in that realm), it was becoming less and less meaningful as the years clicked by when I wasn't doing programming. So, that was the first section to go. The next area was my PR experience. I had already re-dated that as "Previously" rather than having those 1970's dates screaming off the page, but I also had it sub-divided into my pre-VP and post-VP activities. I'd made that division to show "advancement", but as that part of my career is pushing "20 years ago", I figured it was time to get rid of the division there and the (slight) redundancies invovled.
So, this trimming got me about 1/3rd of a page to work with and I spewed out the new stuff, which, fortunately (and with a little bit of font-size manipulation) got the new stuff and Simuality/Liminati on one page and the rest on the second (albeit with very slim top and bottom margins). My next challenge (this on Sunday morning) was trying to get the new resume into the various formats that I use it. The original is, of course, in a .doc (or at least in an OpenOffice.org version of .doc ... sometimes there are "issues" there) file, which was trivial to "print off" as a .pdf, but there also needed to be a .txt and an .html version, each of which took a bit more careful editing. I have a "very particular" version for the text file that is set up so that it "looks as good as possible" in that format, so I'm hesitant to just save off a copy to .txt and re-format and instead opt for trying to make sure that all the edits that went into the .doc make it into the .txt ... of course, from there, it's pretty much just a cut-and-paste issue to update the .html file.
This was a hassle, but not a trauma until I got to the next step. As those of you following along may recall, my "good" computer died right before New Years and I've not gotten that back to functioning. On the files on that computer were all my FTP settings for my various domains ... settings that appear to have changed for the domain where I've kept the web-based resume (pointed to by btripp.info) and accessible .pdf file. So, there I was, trying to figure out how to get in (using data that was 15 or more years old) and failing over and over again. I was able to get into the "control panel" via the hosting company's site, but still couldn't get in. What made me NUTS was that, even though I was able to get a live body, they STILL haven't gotten back to me with whatever ID/PW/settings I need. So much for my telling them that I needed to have that up by the afternoon!
I eventually "gave up" and uploaded all this to the Degerberg site I have over at Warped, and just re-directed btripp.info to point there. Which reminds me ... the folks I have the btripp.info domain with, Active-Domain in the UK, I specifically have used just because it's so easy for me to pop in and change stuff like that. They, however, REALLY PISSED ME OFF this weekend, as I'm "losing" 3 of my old domains because I didn't get to them fast enough and they have "officially" expired. It used to be there was a month or so "grace period" on those, but they told me it would be a TWO HUNDRED DOLLAR PER DOMAIN charge to renew them at this point!!! Since I barely have the $30 to re-up the domains at this point, $600 isn't going to happen, so I guess I'm losing those. None of them were (fortunately!) things I was currently using, but they were all stuff I would have preferred to hang onto. I guess I have to start checking every week or so to see if they come up with another registrar. This sucks.
So, much of my weekend was dealing with insanely frustrating web stuff. Which is, of course, WHY I'm always hesitant to launch into projects like dealing with the domains or refreshing the resume. Whenever I think of projects like this, every emotional fiber in my body is screaming "RUN AWAY!" from somatic memories of previous traumas (this is also why my other computer is not functioning as yet, although "all the pieces are available" ... I have not been in "an emotional state" solid enough to face trying to get the back-up of what had been on the system off of the external HD and onto a brand-new HD ... just thinking about it makes me feel nauseous!).
Anyway, more information than you needed or wanted to know. Over there ===> is the new The Job Stalker post (clicky-clicky!), with my "weekend reading" and some angstification about time management, etc. ... what fun, eh?