Desperate Freelancer

Today, I've learnt that Bill Gates is going to retire from the head of Microsoft.

He is going to retire at 53 years old with an estimated wealth of 58 Billions dollars.

After 33 years of good service for the computer industry in a company that has achieved such great results, he is going to step out and say bye bye.

Indeed Microsoft had many great achievements to its credit. Microsoft has for example :

- imposed the windows operating system in almost every PC whether you want it or not

- launched in average a new version of this very same operating system about every 3 years. Thus compelling consumers to upgrade their version regularly to stay up to date, for the new softwares that were not compatible with the old version.

- launched a hell of unfinished products letting their own customers be the beta-testers

- killed, each time they were able to, any form of competition

-chocked Netscape in the nest by setting deals with computers manufacturers to have Internet Explorer be installed in every sold PC

- impeded the development of the Internet by trying to launch its own network instead of a standard that was already well acknowledged.

- created a new version of Windows named "Vista", which is seen (but not told) as a total piece of crap by most computer professionals

- spied his own customers by installing spying softwares to be certain they did not possess any illegal copy of theirs products

- created products filled with securities holes so that hackers and kiddies could have a great fun ever and ever..

- paid developers throughout years to do things such as hiding a complete flight simulator in Excel...

And that man, he can retire peacefully with 58 billions dollars, whereas I should struggle till I die ?

Life is unfair.

Ok he is going to give 90% or whatever percentage of it to his foundation for charity, but he will still have 5.8 billions dollars left. Which is what a country like Zimbabwe produces every year.

Which can give you if invested at a no-risk rate of 3% the little amount of 174 millions dollars earnings every year.

So, I guess he could sleep well indeed.

But no offense man. That's the way things are. Bye bye Bill. Enjoy your retirement.

Everybody knows the Google Fight game. The principle is to compare the number of search results for 2 queries. The fun of the game is to oppose to contradictory terms, such as stupid vs clever, Omer Simpsons vs OJ Simpsons, Hilarry Clinton vs Paris Hilton, Facebook vs Myspace, Microsoft vs Law..

You can play at Googlefight.com

But do you know the Google Trends Fight ? It's the very same game but better. Better, because more visual. You can see results on a graph.

When I get bored, I start playing this game. I ask Google Trends which is the more popular of a couple of terms.

Examples :

Or :

Yet, asking and trying to guess the results before it shows up, is quite amusing, but the real fun is trying to interpret them. To find out the reasons, the meanings behind the volume of search results.

Can you say people are more good than they are evil ? Or are they more interested at goodness ? Do they want to become more good because they feel evil ?

Or is evil the appropriate term for that comparison ? If we try with "good" and "bad", you can see that bad is closer to good than evil was. And bad and evil together overcomes good.. Frightening huh ?

What about Microsoft vs Apple ?

A few years ago, it was obvious that Microsoft was the winner of the two, but nowadays the curbs are converging.. Is Apple going to overtake its enemy ?

Whereas it has just been beaten by an orange ?

And what about "Desperate" vs "Freelancer" ?

As you can see, since the last term of 2004, there is a sudden explosion of search for the word desperate, while freelancer remains stable and tends to lower slowly years after years..

How can we explain that ? The US recession has not yet occured and this blog wasn't opened yet. Can it be the Wisteria Lane's tarts who all of a sudden make people think they were better on TV than in front of their computer searching for a freelancer job ?

Irak vs Foreclosure ?

2007 is the year where american people's interest switched from troubles they had outside to troubles they had inside their own territory.. Interesting isn't it ?

And so on..

There are plenty of nice discorery about people's interest through this game. The game itself is infinite and you can play with friends too, betting drinks which expression is going to win..

For the week to come, I suggest you to try
- McCain vs McDonald's
- drug vs rock'n roll
- sex vs money

You will learn a lot about mankind.

On the Internet, everyday is a discovery. There are so much websites about so many subjects.

I recently found out one called Howcast.com. Its aim is to explain you through videos how to do things. Yeah. That's it.

For sure, there are some people so desperately geek that they will need the Internet to learn how to cook an egg or how to drive in a nail. But we are now in a strange society if we need websites and videos to learn things such as kissing, to paint a wall, how to tie a tie or even to chop an onion

We are now putting everything on the virtual side of life : shopping, meeting and making friends, talking and now learning. Where will it stop ? Will our grand-children learn to read and write in front of a computer at home with a graphic tablet ? Will we they be teached how to drive in a car simulator ? Will they learn what's worth in life, what's true and fake, bad or wrong through videos programs ?

Ok. I get a bit anguished with all that philosophical questions. So let's see the fun side of it. Even if these kind of websites are not going to teach us much about life (for the longest time possible I hope), they could be quite amusing.

You just have to choose the most delectable videos and watch them. With an ironic eye or not (if you don't know what's Irony, please learn it here)

Here are a few I did like much :

1. How to grow grass on someone keyboard

2. How to tell your parents you are accidentally pregnant :

3. How to lose your virginity

4. How to fake beeing sober

5. And the last, my favorite, one good office prank :

I am a new soul myself in this world of sophisticated technology. But I clearly don't see the point in buying that stupid Macbook Air. Surely because I am too new as a soul to understand why a laptop

- with only one usb port
- with no firewire nor ethernet
- With no CD or DVD player
- with no user-accessible battery
- with a Wi-Fi system that is not a standard yet
- with such a slow hard drive disk

could cost 1800 Dollars...

It's thin as hell right, but what do we care about ?

Do I really need to put it in a envelope ? I am not going to send it to my mother by airmail. I am not going either to store it this way : I will never find it again in the huge pile of folders I have on my desktop.

Why the hell does it need to be so thin, If I need to carry with me a USB hub, a restore disc, a USB ethernet adapter, a headphone adapter and so on ?

I am not going to put it in a toaster, in case it had a good taste with peanut butter on it.

I am not going to hide it under my shirt to cross the Ukrainian Border with confidential datas in it.

I am not going to use it as a razor to shave my beard in the morning.

I am not going to mix it up with a DVD and insert it in some DVD Player to watch a movie.

I am not going to cut vegetable into slices with it to cook any delicious French recipe.

And I am not going to wedge my old wobby armchair with it.

So, please, do tell me, why it's so nice that the Macbook Air is so thin ...

When being a freelancer or a freelance consultant, you are compelled to seek new jobs all the time. That's why you need a hell of a good resume.

To help you avoid things like this (though it's quite funny in the end), I decided to give you a few tips I learned in my long experience of job searching.

Here are the key to write an efficient and attractive resume :

1. Don't write a mission statement, job title or stuff like that
You don't know what the person who will receive your resume is looking for, so why eliminate all the leads he or she may have in mind. Be a generalist kind of guy rather than a one job's man.

2. Don't put your photo on it
Apart from you, everyone knows you are ugly, disgustingly repulsive and that your photo is not an asset to find a job. And even if it is and you are right about it (but please do consider that 99% of common people overestimated their physical attractiveness), finding a consulting job is not a beauty contest. You don't want to be selected because you look like the sexiest pet, do you ?

3. Focus on what you can bring to your client
The guy who is going to provide you with your next job or mission is not especially interested in all your experiences. He wants to know how you can make his own job easier or how you can help him to make more money. That's all. The rest is bullshit to preserve appearances. If you can't answer these questions in your resume, then spreading lots of skills and knowledges like jam on a slice of bread is not much worth for anyone.

4. Lie, lie, lie and lie.. but don't get caught
You want the job so hard, so why not change in your resume just the little bit needed to become THE perfect applicant ? Everyone does it.. Invent references, give friends phone numbers for recommendation calls, write down good training or education, people barely verify.

But be realistic because you don't want to raise suspicion, which will lead you to get busted.

5. Don't talk about your hobbies or centers of interest
Because you don't have much room on your CV, and every room you can use to market yourself is better employed than chitchating about the books you read or your passion about building bridges with matches. And surely because your future client won't give a damn about it.

6. Design your CV
Even if you are not a designer, do spend some time to make your resume looks great. Some managers receive hundreds resumes every week. You need to stand out of the pile.

Get out the grey and boring CVs style everyone is falling into. You can use color, headlines, different typos, bold or italic ... everything that can make you stand out of the crowd of the boring ones. Why do you think people prefer reading magazines rather than newspapers ?

But don't go in the clowny paper however. You are not going to be hired for making sea-lions juggling.

7. Don't put contact details
If you have done your job properly so far, the reader should be yelling hell for being in urge to contact you and not managing to.

Why do you make this first "mistake" on purpose ? You need to create frustration. The reader should be desperate for getting in touch quickly. Ok some will reply to the mail you sent, but in most cases, the CV is printed and the mail erased (mainly because they are sure you did put your contact information on your resume). To be attractive, you must be hard to find.

That's why, when you do call to have some news, you can look like the savior himself, providing relief to your new client to a point he would consider you like THE solution for his company (even though you created the problem).

Of course, there are lots of other tips to write a killer cv that are pretty good. And you can find some good advices on the web. Most of them are valuable but don't forget that most of people that write articles on CV are in most cases haven't been searching jobs since a long time ago.