Prototype of a Person

Right now I’m loving/hating…

Loving that Leisha Hailey (Alice from the L Word) and band Uh Huh Her are set to play the Village on the 2nd of March (via UnaRocks). Hating that Ticketmaster can’t tell me when the tickets go on sale.

Loving reading 100’s of old Sinfest webcomics - adorable, American-manga that deals with religion and other dirty (contemporary) stuff. Look out for my favourite characters Pooch and Percival and this strip made me LOL (no really! it’s not a Loi). Hating how addictive it is.

Loving learning new things from the WikiHow, for instance I learned a valuable lesson - don’t put your headphones together, as this pushes the internal magnets together, overflowing the power and making them useless. Cool. Hating today’s spotlight article - How to Use a Bidet. Gross.

Loving Songza.com - it’s a music search engine. Type in ANY artist and/or song and it’ll give you a list of streaming tunes to play. Hating that you can’t download the tracks, but it does allow you to setup a playlist and also links to the music video and legal methods in which to download the them.

Irish Blog Awards 2008

The Irish Blog Awards take place on March the 1st at the Alexander Hotel, and I’m pleased to say that I’ve been nominated in the “Best Personal Blog” category, thank you to whoever that was. This particular category has a very long list of nominees - including some personal favourites of mine (UnaRocks, Red Mum, Irish Flirty Something, Swearing Lady etc.,) and some very big hitters (Maman Poulet, Grandad, etc.,).

Please do check out all the nominees and categories over on Awards.ie

Fishing for Jobs

I have started looking for a new job (yes, again!). The severe boredom of the office I currently inhabit has me feeling like I’m stuck in a Groundhog Day-esque nightmare. Of course, I’ve been reminded by my peers that all jobs feel like this once the novelty of that “new job feeling” wears off, but I just don’t want to believe that. There simply MUST be an interesting, challenging (please for the love of god!), and rewarding job out there for me (am I being too naive?). I suppose it would be easy for me to wait until I have my Masters completed to begin job searching again, but my Groundhog Day is as unappealing as the thought of living at home for another year and a half.

I’ve learned quite a few things about job hunting since finishing my degree, some good and some bad (mostly bad).

A really handy tip whilst job searching is to register with Monster.ie and make sure to change the title of your CV regularly - it’s like hooking bait to entice the hungry recruitment agents (I assume their systems alert them everytime someone updates their CV). Over the past few weeks mine have included “Bored Graduate Seeks Challenge”, “Bored Graduate, Passionate about Technology, Seeks Challenge” and more recently “Graduate, Seeks Challenge, NO SALES”.

Unfortunately, recruitment agents have one major (very major) flaw, it’s that they are only capable of what I like to call “selective reading”. It’s almost as if they completely ignore the entirety of your CV and only focus on what is relevant to the jobs they themselves are trying to sell. For example, I spent months trying to get out of retail sales (successfully - horray!). Unfortunately I have over 5 years sales experience and although I’ve been working in an office environment for almost a year now the recruitment agents still go wild trying to make me take sales positions. The other annoying thing about recruitment agents is that they’ll waste your time. For instance, even though I have “E-mail contact preferred” listed on my Monster CV, they still call me, in the middle of my working day, and even when I ask them to e-mail me the details, so many of them insist on setting up a meeting with them instead. This, let me tell you, is another waste of everyone’s time. The best thing you can do is 100% insist that they send you a job spec (a long winded description of the job) before even going near their offices. Make sure that you are interested in a position they are recruiting for and that you can actually gain something from them and not the other way around.

Another lesson I have learned about job seeking in Ireland is that employers expect you to be a highly qualified individual with at least 2 or 3 years experience in your field, and this is for an entry level position. Seems to me like the job market is highly competitive at the moment. What I want to know is, where are all these people coming from with years of experience that are willing to re-start their careers in another company?

From abroad?

Could these guys please direct me to their old companies? Maybe they would be more willing to take a chance on an Irish graduate seeking some experience. And although I really don’t want to leave my partner, my family, my friends - I might just have to, and I recently applied for a User Experience Research internship in London. So, cross your fingers for me.

Guide to the Creative Zen

Back in November I wrote that the next gadget that I was going to buy was the Creative Zen, and believe it or not, I did. That’s actually quite unusual for me, as more often than not a total information overload (damm Internet!) usually leaves me undecided for a very long time. At the last minute I almost listened to the little voice that said “What about that cheap iPod? It could double as an external hard drive” even though I don’t need one. I’m glad I didn’t listen because I’m totally in love with my Zen. It’s so perfect for me. Perfect size for watching a few videos now and again, perfect for popping into my pocket to walk down the road listening to some tunes. Perfect for flicking onto the radio to catch a news/traffic bulletin… oh, and the microphone is going to eventually come in handy during lectures (at least that’s the idea). It also has this one shortcut button that you can assign to open any application on the player - mine simply plays all my songs on shuffle, it’s seriously handy. You know what? I can’t imagine an iPod being so versatile… at all. Accessories wise, I bought a case for it but haven’t felt the need to actually use it, because it feels so sturdy in your palm. I also got a pair of Sony headphones (the standard creative ones in the box are seriously low end) and one of those sticky screen protectors so I don’t scratch it whilst it’s bouncing around with my keys and change.

There are some minor drawbacks, however. This IS of course the case with most technology these days (what, you expect it to work out of the box?!) Despite what the sales people drone, even an iPod won’t play your DVDs for you straight out of the box. A number of minor tweaks are required.

Guide to the Creative Zen

The first step with the Zen is to update the firmware for the device. Firmware is a computer program, it’s similar to an operating system (like Windows) and it can be updated in order to have new features added (just like Windows). You can find and download this on the Creative website, or directly from here (links to the European site). All you have to do is make sure your Zen is connected via USB before opening the downloaded file.

The second step is to download and install the newest version of Zen Media Explorer (this is a very handy utility for transferring files to the player), also on the Creative website, or here. Once this is done, your player and transferring files will run smoothly. If you don’t follow these two steps be prepared for the occasional need to reset the player and you might also encounter a few issues with transferring large numbers of files.

So, now you’ve got music… but what about a few videos? Personally, I don’t even bother ripping DVDs, I get all my video goodies online, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t still have to convert them. Unfortunately, Zen Media Player doesn’t convert videos very well (just trust me on that one). Thankfully there are many free converters out there. I currently use iRiverter, which you can download here. This will convert videos you’ve downloaded from the Internet, like movie trailers etc., but it will also convert DVDs to play on your Zen.

The reason I’ve chosen to recommend this software is because it is the fastest I’ve tried, but in order to get iRiverter working for you (as the name suggests, it’s not exactly designed with the Zen in mind), you’ll need to download this file (links to anythingbutipod.com, registration is required). The folder where you have installed iRiverter has a subfolder called “profiles”, unzip the file and save it in this subfolder. When you’re using iRiverter make sure that you change the device that you want to convert the DVD for to “iAudio” and then “D2″, the reason we do this is because the settings for the iAudio D2 player are the same as the Creative Zen.

Ripping DVDs is can seem like a daunting task, but all it requires is some patience and you’ll eventually get the hang of it. Depending on the length of your DVD, it can take quite some time to convert and this all depends on how much computer memory you have for the task. If you find it’s taking a long time, don’t sit and wait for it to finish, go be productive elsewhere for 30 minutes. Although, converting video files you already have on your computer takes very little time in comparison.