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Résumé Achievements Not Worth the Ink [Resume]
Sep 30th, 2009 11:44 PM

The purpose of a resume is to tout your talents to a prospective employer; however, not all talents deserve a listing. Yahoo’s HotJobs sets out criteria for which achievements you should include and which you should leave off entirely.

Photo by jon tunn.

According to their post, any accomplishment you highlight should meet three criteria. Subjective wiggle room notwithstanding, the accomplishments in question should be 1) truly noteworthy, 2) relevant to your current career goals, and 3) relatively recent.

On the other hand, job seekers should leave off what the post calls “The Unquantifiable Accomplishment,” meaning bragging rights that can’t be confirmed by your current employer or through another simple inquiry. Using superlatives to describe your work skills generally meets this no-no.

Also worth avoiding is “The Not-So-Notable Accomplishment,” such as a less than stellar grade point average (though the further into your career you get, the less relevant your G.P.A. is anyway) and any offbeat accomplishment that bears no relevance to the job you’re applying for. We would add however that an offbeat accomplishment can be useful as a talking point or springboard during the interview itself, or even as a way to distinguish your resume from the pile, so don’t rule these out entirely.

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50 Flights, and Still Stuck in the Airport
Sep 30th, 2009 11:44 PM

Wired.com’s Terminal Man has flown on 50 different flights in a bit more than 20 days, and he’s still got more than a week before he’s done.

Native Instruments working on a $200-ish Traktor controller, blinkenlights guaranteed
Sep 30th, 2009 11:44 PM

International musician and man-about-town Richie Hawtin has a track record of collaborating with Native Instruments on its DJ products, frequently putting stuff through its paces well before it’s made available to the public at large — and once again, the dude’s been caught using some unknown gear at a show in Berlin. Seems like pretty much everyone and their mother has made a controller compatible with the company’s Traktor line of software at this point save for Native Instruments itself, and that’s where this new hotness comes into play — check out the video after the break starting around 19 seconds, where you can clearly make out a couple NI-branded boxes allegedly designed to control two decks at a time (so a grand total of two, like Hawtin has here, would be enough to control a four-deck Traktor setup). We’ve heard rumors from inside the company that it’ll be available for around $200, which would be extremely competitive for a pro-level box that’s specifically matched to Traktor’s capabilities. Even if you don’t have the slightest urge to get on the decks at any point in your life, the lights sure are pretty, aren’t they?

[Via Engadget German and De:Bug] Read the rest of this entry »

20 Years of Moving Atoms, One by One
Sep 30th, 2009 11:44 PM

It’s the 20th anniversary of a major research breakthrough from IBM, in which physicist Don Eigler moved and positioned individual atoms to spell out the letters I-B-M. We present a gallery of nifty single-atom compositions and Eigler’s thoughts on the significance of his work.

Chumby Guts kit lets you build your own Chumby device
Sep 30th, 2009 11:44 PM

Chumby may now finally be branching out with a few less cuddly products of its own, but it looks like you can now also expand your Chumby options yourself with a few basic DIY skills — or you could if you were lucky enough to get in on the first batch of Chumby Guts kits. Offered exclusively through the Maker Shed, the kit includes all the necessary “guts” to let you build any sort of Chumby device you like, and has apparently proven popular enough to sell out before the first shipment even arrived. Those hanging on for that Chumby toaster of their dreams won’t have to wait too much longer to get their fix, however, as the second shipment is set to arrive in late November, and will run the same $99 as before.

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Give Out (and Receive) Your Google Wave Invitations Here [Google Wave]
Sep 30th, 2009 11:44 PM

Google just started handing out Wave invites, and they’re planning to dish out more all day. The door is open to 100,000 new users; if you’re one of the lucky ones, you can share the love (and your invites) here.

It’s 11am in Sydney, Australia, where the Wave team is based, so “all day” means they’ll be handing out invites for quite a few more hours to come. From what I’ve heard, they seem to be sending out those invitations by hand (that is, it’s not an automated push to every single user), so it will probably take some time.

If you were lucky enough to get an invite, you’ll also score eight invitations of your own that you can hand out to your friends and colleagues. If you’re interested in sharing the love with your fellow Lifehacker readers (and scoring some serious geek karma points), post a comment and let others know you’ve got an invitation or two to share. Users who don’t mind putting their email in a public place (we always type it out like tips at lifehacker.com, though you could use something like previously mentioned Scr.im) can reply to the offer and invites could go out on a first-come, first-serve basis. It’s not the best system in the world, but hopefully it’ll help get out some invites to some hungry-for-wave users.

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Bojam Launches Web-Based Collaborative Sound Studio
Sep 30th, 2009 11:44 PM

One of last year’s TechCrunch50 startups, Bojam, is launching in public beta today and we have 500 invites. Bojam is a Web-based sound studio that lets musicians practice playing music, find other musicians around the world to jam with, and lay down tracks together on the same song. Click here to try out the service.

Bojam is a fully functional music mixer. You can adjust the volume on each track or add effects like distortion and reverb. Similarly, you can solo or mute instruments, loop, cut, copy, paste and trim audio clips. Bojam also includes a plugin that allows you to record and upload directly into the mix, or you can upload tracks recorded in Garage Band or other software.

One upcoming interesting feature of Bojam’s mixer is the ability to embed a mixing widget in blogs, social networks and websites where users can remix and edit audio from within the embeddable widget. The widget should be rolled out within the next few months

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BumpTop Goes Multi-Touch. Um, Awesome.
Sep 30th, 2009 11:43 PM

Screen shot 2009-09-30 at 6.47.36 PMWhat if the desktop on your computer was just like your actual desktop? That’s the core idea behind BumpTop, a really nice looking graphical overlay for Windows-based operating systems. But as cool as BumpTop looked, you still had to use your mouse and keyboard to manipulate it. As I made clear yesterday, I want those to die. So good news for me today: BumpTop is adding multi-touch support. And the result is awesome.

When we think of multi-touch right now, most of us think of the iPhone. But really, with such a small screen, there are only so many gestures you can do. Multi-touch BumpTop greatly expands that roster, and includes several gestures that it claims to have patents for. Basically, they have gestures that use all of you fingers, and both hands, and even the side of hands. You can “lasso” things, “shove” them, “scrunch” them, and “crop” them.

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OpenCandy Suggests Apps You Might Actually Want During Installs, Lands NitroPDF
Sep 30th, 2009 11:43 PM

Ah, the Windows install process. Long associated with repeated clicking of the “Next” button, it’s also home to one of the more shady practices to exist in modern software: the bundled application. Hapless users looking to get through the process as quickly as possible inevitably wind up installing some junk software that they don’t really want or need, only to scratch their heads when their browser is suddenly slowed down by a clunky new toolbar. Users may not like them, but many developers don’t want to scrap these bundled software packages entirely because they’re a steady source of income. OpenCandy, a startup that launched last year, may offer the solution by pairing up users with software they might actually want. And today it’s announcing that it’s been integrated with the latest version of PrimoPDF by Nitro PDF, the most popular freeware PDF creator.

We’ve written about OpenCandy before, when it made the revolutionary decision to ban germ-spreading handshakes from company board meetings, but until now we haven’t explored the company’s product. From the user’s perspective it’s quite simple: when you go to install an application that uses OpenCandy, you’ll be presented at some point during the install flow with an option to install a sponsored application. It may sound just like those unwanted app installs that we’ve seen for years, but it has a few key differences.

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Simon & Schuster Authors on "Game-Changing" Platform for Digital Book/Video Hybrid with a New "Vook"
Sep 30th, 2009 11:42 PM

In the fast-changing landscape of digital book publishing there is now something called a vook, a product and company which is a hybrid of text and video, delivered on the Web and as an iPhone download .

Simon & Schuster's Atria imprint, is working with Vook, a San Francisco-area start-up, to publish four “vooks,” of both non-fiction and fiction. They are Promises, by Jude Deveraux; The 90-Second Fitness Solution by Pete Cerqua; The Embassy by Richard Doetsch and Return to Beauty by Narine Nikososian.

The multimedia products sell for $6.99 and are available on the Simon & Schuster and Vook sites and on the Apple iPhone application store. It is not yet available on Amazon. Vooks wont be available on the current crop of Kindles as they don’t support video.

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