journalism

How to get your first job in IT

Dave Farquhar Careers , , , , , ,

I helped a friend of a former coworker with his resume this week. He’s looking to get their first jobs in IT, and found it difficult, even though he was applying for an entry-level helpdesk position.

His resume certainly indicated he was educated and able to hold down a job, but that wasn’t quite enough. Here’s what I had him do to beef up that resume to get past those initial rounds of screening and get interviewed.

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A contrarian (but defendable) view of e-books

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , ,

Tech author Nicholas Carr has some interesting statistics that led him to state that perhaps e-books will complement printed books, rather than replace them.

It’s not hard to find history to support that hypothesis. Read more

Writing clearly vs. concisely

Dave Farquhar Writing , , , , ,

I had a disagreement last week with a technical writer who argues that a sentence should always have as few words as possible. No exceptions, for no reason.

I don’t agree.

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Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson needed to explain himself

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

I understand Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s predicament. I don’t agree with how he handled it.

You see, both Scott Thompson and I work in the technical industry, and neither of us have a degree in computer science, computer engineering, some other kind of engineering, high mathematics, or another socially accepted relevant-to-the-industry field. Read more

The difference between blogging and true journalism

Dave Farquhar Writing ,

If you want the difference between true, honest-to-goodness journalism and blogging, this Slashdot story is a good place to start.

The key is the word “reporting.”
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Take back some privacy

Dave Farquhar security , ,

The creepy Girls Near Me smartphone app is drawing some much-needed attention at data brokers, companies that aggregate information about you from public information and information you provide to marketers. I even found an article that talks about how to opt out from selected brokers.

I recommend you do. Open up a temporary Yahoo or Hotmail account, use it for your opt-outs, then close or abandon the account. Read more

The old days of viruses

Dave Farquhar security, Viruses , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
The old days of viruses

Blogging pioneer John Dominik, inspired by my Michelangelo memories, wrote about his memories of viruses later in the decade. So now I’ll take inspiration of him and share my memories of some of those viruses. I searched my archives, and at the time it was going on, I didn’t write a lot. I was tired and angry, as you can tell from the terse posts I did write.

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What I would say to someone starting to study journalism today

Dave Farquhar Journalism , , ,

One of my former classmates sent out a query, asking what we’d tell someone who was thinking about studying journalism today. Predictably, a lot of people wrote “Don’t do it!” or “Newspapers aren’t hiring anyone,” or something similar. I never had time to change careers; my IT career essentially started a week after I started taking journalism classes and I was working full-time in IT a good three months before the dean of the school shook my hand and gave me my diploma.

Although I’ve had to explain my education virtually every time I’ve been interviewed for a job, I don’t regret it.
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Digital distribution, not SOPA and PIPA, is the best long-term solution for the MPAA

Dave Farquhar Copyright , , , , , , ,

Fightforthefuture.org declared victory yesterday, saying that SOPA and PIPA have been dropped. Their e-mail said some other important and interesting things, but most importantly, it made some references to China. Communist China. Totalitarian Communist China.

The distinction is important.
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My first really bad day in IT

Dave Farquhar security, War Stories , , , , , , ,

Next weekend is Labor Day weekend. I can’t remember if it was one Thursday or two Thursdays before Labor Day weekend in 1997, but one of those two days happened to be the beginning of the first crisis of my career.

Whichever Thursday it was, it was getting close to midnight when my phone rang. It was Max. The print server wasn’t working. That happened a lot. That server had IBM’s Services for Macintosh on it, which never worked all that well, and, worse, tended to make the rest of the server act up a lot. That in and of itself shouldn’t have been a crisis. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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