I’m reviewing resumes for a job posting at the centre, and have well over a hundred to filter from the first few days it’s been listed. With so may candidates, the first pass through the stack is pretty quick. What the resume experts say is true - state why you’re the person to hire up front to give me a reason to read through the rest.

A couple of nit-pick points about resumes in general:

• A summary of skills should briefly describe your skills, and not simply be a shopping list of every application or protocol you’ve ever seen. I won’t read more than three or four lines, if it’s just a list, I stop after the second item. I’d rather see a few points with specific skills and tasks you’ve performed - pick some that directly apply to the posting.
• Don’t include a references section simply if you’re only going to state that they’re available upon request. You’ll be asked for them if they’re needed.

Those who’ve taken the time to tailor their resume to highlight things they’ve done that are similar to what we’re looking for have the best chance of getting interviewed.

I recently found out that I needed reading glasses, and have become quite conscious of web sites that make use of puny fonts in their design. Usually the browser can adjust the text size up and down easily, but the page layout can sometimes get messed up doing this. ABC News has a great little widget on their site that lets the user adjust the font size, which lets the web admin control the layout as the font is adjusted.

April brings spring and tax season. In years past I’ve simply purchased Quicktax for income tax preparation, but my recent problems with Intuit software activation, and a desire to find a solution that runs on Linux led me to look for alternatives. I looked at QuickTaxWeb / Taxwiz Online, but it didn’t support either Firefox or Linux.

uFile.ca supports Firefox 1.x, and worked well. It noted that I didn’t have Acrobat reader installed, but considered that an optional requirement. The return looked fine in Gnome’s PDF viewer, but I haven’t tested printing from it vs. Acrobat to see if the output is identical yet. I may not have to; Adobe has announced Acrobat 7.0 for Linux will be available later today.

Intuit makes some great software - I’ve used Quicken for years - but their activation system is annoying. When I installed Linux on my primary workstation, I transferred the contents of my Windows installation to a smaller hard disk for installation in another machine. Quicken can be installed on two computers, so it was reactivated, but WillExpert stopped working, claiming I’d already installed it on another computer. The problem was solved relatively easily with a phone call to their support centre, but I discovered the problem on Good Friday when the office was to be closed for the next few days. The time we’d set aside to update the wills was lost as a result.

I’ll be avoiding Intuit products in future, which will be easy enough - they don’t run on Linux anyhow.

It is surprising to come across sites that still check your browser and then refuse to serve their content if you do not meet their standards. Even more surprising is when a major organization such as the Ontario Hospital Association does it.

The web is supposed to be about using standards to present information. Browser prejudice back when browser incompatibility was a problem was understandable, and barely acceptable. Today, it just shows poor site design.