Stop me if I'm babbling

You would think that since I'm unemployed, I'd be updating more. You would be wrong.

I started the week by attending a Business and Technology trends workshop at ITO. It is a three-day course - well, actually 2.5 days - that talks about different areas of high tech work in Ottawa, as well as different strategies for finding a job. One of the interesting things about the course was deconstructing company web sites to find out more about the company. For example, reading the news page might tell you more about their specific products (and thus the skills used to make their products, which might tell you whether you should apply or not). They also talked about reading all of the job postings, not just those you are qualified for. The purpose of this is, for example, if they are hiring an architect for a C++ product and you aren't qualified to be the architect (but an be a C++ developer), you can send in a resume and essentially beat the rush. Since companies often hire without posting jobs, your resume will be on file in case they decide to find a C++ developer without posting the job.

I'm not sure I'm explaining this well, but it was an interesting approach that complemented the approach that the last outplacement place I dealt with suggested (which was much heavier on face-to-face networking).

One of the other people in the workshop and I have been reviewing each other's resumes, and I think both of our resumes are much stronger as a result.

On Monday, I am signed up for the resume course, so hopefully that will be helpful as well.

This has also been a good week for talking with friends. Two of the people I worked with in my last job e-mailed or called me this week, I had lunch with a friend yesterday, and today I went in to my previous employer (i.e. the one I got laid off from 2 years ago) to have coffee with some friends there. The place is like a ghost town now. It's really sad (but coffee was fun). I brought in a plain cheesecake with brownie bits baked in to it. I called it an experimental cheesecake, but really all of them are experimental. I rarely make the same thing twice. It was good, though, and the guys appreciated it.

On a completely different topic, I'm glad today is my last day for the eyedrops for my eye infection, because for the last day I have gotten progressively worse at remembering to use them.

Changing topics yet again, Blogger has been acting weirdly for me lately. When I cut and paste web links, it treats them as text. Also, I am completely incapable of commenting on Sydney's blog. (I can comment on other blogs, and other people can comment on her blog, so I don't know what is going on.)