Chewie and Leia

Wordhugger

I’ve taken the plunge and bought a page on Wordhugger. What’s WordHugger?

“Word Hugger is a website about micro investments, which are the internet’s newest virtual real estate gold. Investors can pick a word based on their hobby, business, interests, or expertise in a particular field. For a one time investment of $60, you own a page on the Word Hugger site for 10 years.”

Will WordHugger work? Who knows, only time will tell. I previously wrote about why I thought MillionDollarWiki will not work - so why would I take a chance on WordHugger, which is very similar? Firstly, Collin (the guy running it) says that he will manually check each submission and will not allow spam keywords. Secondly, half of the $60 per page goes to charity. And finally, the site has a real nice look and Collin seems like a nice guy!

I bought the hearing aids keyword. Lets see what I can do with it.

Interviewers: at ease!

In the past, I’ve been for many interviews and I’ve been nervous as hell. Even when I’ve gone for jobs that I knew I was full qualified to do, I still got myself into a bit of a panic as I went into the interview room.

Recently, I’ve been doing some interviewing and I’ve found that a majority of the candidates have been nervous too. I think the interviewer should take the initiative and try and put the interviewee at ease - the interviewer is in familiar surroundings and is holding all the cards, they must be the one to ease the tension. Also, it’s in the interviewers interests as the candidate is more likely to show their skills, and suitability for the job, when they are relaxed and happy.

So, a few things I’ve found that are good ways to put the interviewee at rest:

• One interviewer - Have only one person doing the interviewing. If you need more than one person to assess the candidate then at least start the interview with only one interviewer - that at least gives the candidate time to settle in.
• Look interested - There’s nothing worse than being interviewed by someone who looks like they’d rather be eating a shit-sandwich. If you know the person isn’t getting the job then cut the interview short; there’s no need to inflict more pain. If you’re having a bad day then leave it at the door. Looking interested can be a real problem with multiple interviewers - some interviewers tend to switch off when others are asking the questions and this real off-putting for the candidate.
• Start easy - Give the candidate some easy questions to start off with.
• Be friendly - Obvious really but an opener of “How are you?” and “Did you find us OK” and that kind of thing does settle the butterflies.
• Talk first - The interviewer should probably go over company and job details before diving into questioning; gives the candidate time to take in the situation and settle.

Enum belt and braces

This code snippet comes from the Worse Than Failure blog. Someone wanted to make super-sure that an enum contained a valid value:

public enum EmailsFormat
{
    HTML,
    Text
}

...

public static EmailFormat FromEmailsFormat( EmailsFormat emailsFormat )
{
    switch ( emailsFormat )
    {
        case EmailsFormat.HTML:
            return EmailFormat.HTML;
        case EmailsFormat.Text:
            return EmailFormat.Text;
        default:
            throw new Exception( "Unknown EmailsFormat enum value!" );
    }
}

Sports teams using mobile CT scanner

Eric Bailey from NeuroLogica Inc, a Danvers, MA company, recently brought his miniaturized CereTom™ CT scanner to a boxing match. He positioned it just off the ring, and offered the organizers the ability to diagnose anything that might happen, right on the spot. Lo and behold, after a match that ended with an off the ring CT scan, Lorenzo Bethea was rushed by ambulance to a hospital for diagnosed intracranial bleeding. His life was saved. American football teams have taken notice and some are purchasing the relatively mobile and affordable CereTom scanners for their fields.

… the Las Vegas incident intrigued enough teams in the NFL that two — the Oakland Raiders and Indianapolis Colts — have agreed to use the CereTom in their home stadiums. The hope, Bailey said, is that teams can use the CereTom to immediately examine players for serious underlying conditions that might not register in regular screenings.

“This should help advise the physicians and help make decisions in real time,” Bailey said.

From MedGadget.

Blogrush and windows

I was following through some links from the Blogrush widget on this page and noticed that all links are, by default, opened in a new window. This sucks. I need to go back to the Blogrush site and see if that can be configured - if not, it needs to be.

The most important interview skills

Interviews, they’re evil. They seem to bring the worst out in people. Personally, I manage to forget everything I know the second I step into an interview room and spend the next hour or so waffling rubbish about nothing in particular. Here’s some tips to nail that interview:

• Talk with confidence: Show the interviewers that you own your subject.
• Be friendly: Be friendly, but always be professional - this isn’t an old-boys reunion, so don’t start wheeling out the anecdotes about the time you spilt beer on the stripper. But do smile, a bit. Just try and act normal, yeah?
• Pause: If you get a question you are unsure about, don’t start rambling straight away - take a second or two to have a think about the answer. A lot of pauses could get awkward but it’s OK now and again.
• Do your homework: Look up the company. Find out what they do - the employer wants to see that you are interested in the company as well as the big money on offer. Read up about recent events and maybe pick out something about the company that you can ask about.
• Get ahead of the game: Try and work out what kind of questions you are going to be asked and have some ideas about the answers you will give. Not always easy
• The eyes have it: Look the interviewer in the eye. If there’s more than one interviewer, make sure you look at them all during the interview, don’t just address one person. Although eye-contact is good, this isn’t a staring competition - look away regularly. I always get a tea or coffee, which I can look down at on occasions to break the eye-to-eye stuff.
• Don’t get down: It can be easy to get dis-heartened if you mess up some questions early on - you might think, “I fluffed that question, there’s no way they are going to employ me now”. Don’t lose it, keep going, keep being positive and confident - yes, you screwed up but a strong performance for the rest of the interview could make them overlook your earlier mistake.
• Admit it: If you don’t know a particular answer, say so. If you have no idea of the answer then just admit to that - if you are not quite sure then say, “I’m not 100%, but I think it’s….”. No-one is perfect, no-one knows everything.
• Ask some questions: I always write some questions down on a notepad and take that with me (because I forget everything in interviews) - I ask some general questions like, “Where would I fit into the team”, “Does the company have any social events”, “What technologies do you think the company will be using in 5 years”. And so on. As well as that, I pick up specific questions during the interview. You should always ask something during the interview, it shows you are interested.

Is MillionDollarWiki worth a go?

I’ve been mulling over buying a page on MillionDollarWiki. Yeah, it’s only $100 but I just can’t convince myself that this site is gonna work.

At the time of writing, the site has sold 765 pages. That’s 76.5k for the site owner, very very nice. A great idea and already a nice earner for them - question is though, would it be a nice earner for me if I bought a page?

Most people are going to be using their pages to act as a portal to drive traffic to their other sites. Shoe has done this and has seen some clickthroughs to his ringtone site almost straight away. So it has worked on a small scale for him.

Way I see it, the only chance that MillionDollarWiki has of driving real traffic is if a lot of pages are put up that will, over time, start to get inbound links and rank in organic searches. Given enough time this may work. But there’s a few reasons why I don’t think this is gonna work:

• If it gets popular, the spammers will jump onboard and create many, many link-farm pages for viagra and whatnot. Legitimate site owners may not want their sites associated with this kind of stuff.
• Search engines could decide to pull the plug on the MillionDollarWiki domain if they decide it’s getting too spammy and is not providing value to organic searches. This happened to Squidoo.

But, as Shoe says, “Are you going to take a chance for only $100 that you missed the boat on your niche?”

Ikaruga, Rez and other shooters coming to XBLA

Some new titles were announced for XBLA at the Tokyo Games Show and it looks like Microsoft are aiming for some retro-cool to try and sell some consoles to the Japanese. And when the releases include gaming-gold like Rez, I’m not complaining.

Ikaruga is the other big name on the release list, but that’s probably old news to most people now.

As if those two classics was not enough, Triggerheart Exilica and a version of Every Extend was also announced.

If Bangai-O and Psyvariar 2 get a release I’d be able to finally put my Dreamcast to bed for a well earned rest.

Stronger passwords?

There’s a great article at Coding Horror that makes an interesting proposal for strengthening passwords: using pass-phrases rather than pass-words.

The idea is to use a phrase rather than a single word. For example, a worst-case scenario would be:

old password: password

new password: this is my password

Whilst I agree that a passphrase may be marginally stronger than a password, I still think they will suffer the same weakness: the user. User’s pick passwords that they can remember and these are nearly always weak - their dog’s name, their favourite book, etc. A phrase would be no different, people would use a quote from a film, a common saying or something else easily recognisable.

As stated in the comments of the Coding Horror post, the problem with passwords will always exist: a user needs to remember a password and because of that they will nearly always choose weak ones.