Road Rage

Today as I drove past the theater at Lexington Green, a car ran a stop sign through the intersection in front of me. Didn’t even slow down. I must have given him a “what the heck are you thinking” kind of look, although I don’t recall exactly.

As it happened, I had made a wrong turn, and I did a U-turn at the intersection to go back the way I had come. When I completed the turn, I saw Mr. No Stop Sign reversing towards me up the road. I tried to go around him, but he rolled down his window and yelled at me “You have a problem!!?” I responded, somewhat flippantly, “I have lots of problems, but you’re not one of them.” and kept driving past him.

He FOLLOWED me back down the road, through the Target parking lot, and part of the way over to Arby’s, where we were going for lunch, as I started getting more and more alarmed that he was going to follow me all the way over there and pick a fight.

What the heck goes through people’s minds in traffic that makes them think that it is sensible to pick a fight with a complete stranger? In Kentucky, I can carry a firearm in my glove compartment even if I don’t have a concealed carry permit, and I can use it to defend myself. That means that anybody that I encounter in traffic might have a gun within arm’s reach. But even if that weren’t the case, what would posses someone to pick a fight with a stranger in a car with a woman and two kids? Had he had a bad day? Was he just looking for a fight, or did I seriously offend him? Did my making a U-turn make him think that I was picking a fight with him?

I guess I’ll never know.

New Roof

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We got a new roof from BesTop. This morning we started installing it, just putting on the doors. This involved taking a blade to the old ones, which are stitched on to the steel frames. That was a little unnerving, but, once started, it had to be finished.

Now I have a black roof and tan doors, and for the first time *ever*, I can see clearly through the side windows. I kept thinking that the windows were open. It’s always been scratched and fuzzy, particularly when it’s raining.

So, hopefully by next week, I’ll be driving with an entirely new top, free of duct tape and flapping noises.

We’ll post pictures of the process later on.

Resumes

Ben, at work, asked me what I look for in a resume. I’ve been looking at a LOT of resumes in the last 2 weeks, and most of them have been simply dreadful. So I started writing a few of my thoughts. I got a little carried away. So I’m going to repost it here, too, so that my erudition isn’t lost in the ether.

Here’s some of what I look for in a resume.

I look for sentences that tell me why I should hire you. I hate bullet lists. “PHP” or “Excel” or “Linux” in a bullet list doesn’t mean anything at all. “PHP” in a bullet list might mean “I installed WordPress”, or it might mean “I’m a committer on the core of PHP and implemented the internationalization stack myself over an evening, and gave a talk about it a PHP Fest the next morning.” I’d rather read one sentence that tells me why you’re worth hiring than a 20-item bullet point list that tells me that you’ve heard of various technologies.

I look for participation in something outside of work. Whether this is PETA or Habitat for Humanity or an Open Source project doesn’t matter a lot – although participation in O.S. projects impresses me immensely. What I’m looking for is that you have a personality. If you come to work, and go home at the end of the day, and that’s your whole life, chances are you’re going to bore me to tears. People with outside interests are better employees. I want employees who are glad to have the job, sure, but it’s at least as important that they have something to go home for, too.

I look for something that indicates passion. Do you program because you love solving problems? Do you design because there’s an artist striving to get out? Or do you have a computer degree because someone told you that it was a good way to make money? Passion is the difference between doing an acceptable job and blowing everybody’s socks off. If you are working towards a computer degree because you heard there was money in it, but you *REALLY* want to study rocks, you should drop all your classes RIGHT NOW and go sign up for geology. A life working in the wrong job is what makes people go crazy and shoot their co-workers, and nobody wants that.

I look for things in your resume that indicate that I’m not the first person you’ve ever shown it to. Typos, grammatical errors, and misusing technical terms tell me that you didn’t have anybody proofread your resume. Always show your resume to your mother, your colleagues, your professors. Show it to the people who you know don’t care if they hurt your feelings about it.

I look for a resume that looks different from everybody else’s. Understand that this doesn’t mean fonts and colors and designs – I will read your resume in plain text if at all possible. I mean that if it’s just a list of technologies and the fact that you interned at Lexmark, then it looks exactly like the other 25 that I looked at today. I want to know that you volunteer at the library, reading to kids, or that you took a trip to Haiti over spring break, where you installed a wireless network for a non-profit, or that you really really like painting daisies on the side of cars that are stopped at traffic lights. Ok, maybe not the daisies. That might be illegal. But definitely the one about Haiti. Tell me you’re passionate about life.

In short, I want you to tell me why I’ll regret it for years if I let you slip by.

Come work for me

I’m looking for a PHP programmer looking for an challenging position in the Lexington area. Our code uses the Cake PHP framework, and we’ve got several projects with a certain amount of shared code between them. Our biggest projects are ClearMyRecord.com and Hard2Hire.com, both of which are about helping people get their lives back together in one way or another.

I’ve got job postings on Monster.com, but I’ve found that finding people by word of mouth and personal contacts is way more effective than any of the job boards, both in finding the people with the skills and finding people who are likely to be a good fit for the team.

Ideally, we’re looking for someone with some OO PHP experience, and some knowledge of, or experience with, MVC methodologies. If you’ve used Cake, that’s great, but it’s certainly not required. And if you have MVC experience in some other language, like Ruby on Rails, or Catalyst, that actually translates pretty easily into what we’re doing, particularly if you’re interested in learning new things, and can convince me that you’re the right person for the job.

If you’re interested, or know someone who is, or want more information about the position, please contact me.

Butterflies and Postcards

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I was wondering if you, my readers, who are spread all across the world, would do me a favor.

My son’s class at school is doing a project with butterflies. They’ve put up a bunch of pictures of butterflies all over the class room, and have been studying them.

Then there’s the secret additional part of the project. Over Spring Break (that’s this week), the butterflies are going to fly away, and this is part of a geography project. We were hoping that you could help us with this part. The kids won’t know where the butterflies have gone. We need you, if you can, to send a postcard saying that you saw one of the butterflies.

The example given was this:

Dear Mrs. McQueary’s Class,

While I was out walking my dog this evening in San Francisco, California, I had an unusual butterfly land on my arm. As I observed its vibrant colors, I remembered hearing that your classroom butterflies had escaped from Picadome. I tried catching it in my hand, but it fluttered away so quickly! Could it have been your butterfly?

As they receive these cards, they are going to put marks on a map of the world to show where the butterflies ended up.

Would you be willing to send a postcard for them?

The address is:

Mrs. McQueary’s Class
1642 Harrodsburg Road
Lexington, KY, 40504

The Prince

I finally read The Prince, by Machiavelli. I have tried a couple times before, and found it somewhat tedious. I suspect that it’s a question of what translation you choose, since this time it was a very easy read, and made a lot of sense, and the last few times it was very very hard going.

I’ve long thought it a great injustice that the important decisions of history have been made by brute force, rather than by negotiation or reasoning. Machiavelli makes this observation early on, but then, in his practical way, dismisses it from consideration, because that’s just the way things are.

I believe I’ll probably have to read it again, at least once, to get the more practical implications of the book to today. I read most of it while I was on airplanes over the past week, and that’s not the time when I think the most clearly. There are those who insist that it’s the best available book on management. I’m pretty much convinced, having read it, that either they are speaking entirely tongue-in-cheek, or are focused on some particular chapter or other. In particular, what get mentioned is the chapter about whether it’s better (more effective in retaining power) to be loved or feared. Interestingly, the answer to this was not what I was told it was. That is, Machiavelli says that it really doesn’t matter, as long as you’re not hated.

Anyways, on the whole, a thoroughly enjoyable read, if only from a historical perspective. The examples that he gives to illustrate his points are simply fascinating.

Cut bus routes

This morning I read about St. Louis cutting bus routes. I feel for these folks. Around here, the situation is similar, with bus routes cut almost every year, with the city council deciding to spend money on more important things, like multi-million dollar hotels for folks who never show up.

But I have to wonder whether this is yet another case of complaining about the wrong problem. Why is it a 45 minute bus ride to the nearest gym? It seems like our addiction to cars has led to a situation where there are no neighborhood businesses, and we have to drive, or ride, miles and miles to get to things that, once, would have been in walking distance. Every time I visit Europe, I’m reminded of how dysfunctional our neighborhoods are in the USA, and how broken our zoning system is.

I hope that out of situations like this, the result is more neighborhood businesses, rather than folks protesting and demanding that they are somehow entitled to be ferried to businesses in other neighborhoods.

Along that same line, last night we ate at 7 Leguas, which, although we didn’t walk to it, we *could* have chosen to walk. It would have taken a while. Perhaps we need to make a more concerted effort to go to businesses that we can walk to, and choose to walk to them. I walked farther than that for dinner in Amsterdam earlier this week.

The Margin Is Too Narrow