The GirlAlive Blog

Edinburgh Book Festival

This last weekend I went to see John Green at the Edinburgh Book Festival. I’ll show you some crappy pictures that are really just still shots taken from my video camera.

I also took some video when John was speaking. It is a bit crappy because we were sitting way in the back. My husband is 6′5″, so we didn’t want to block anyone’s view.

Also, while we’re on the subject of nerdfighters, my guinea pig Spike is a nerdfighter.

He has a deformed paw in the front (we don’t know how it happened and it doesn’t seem to hurt him), and the toes are separated like a nerdfighter gang sign.

Uneventful Week and Musings on Editing

This week has been a bit boring. No eye implosions. Just a trip to the JobCentre. There are pretty much no jobs out there, which is why I’ve taken a few steps to keep myself busy.

First of all, there are the Tumblr blogs that I mentioned in the last post. I’ve been reviewing books like crazy, and posting random crap. I also did a favor for my cousin. He needed someone to do a little proofreading, so I gave him an hour of my time to nitpick.

The project I was working on was related to Green Routes. If you live in, or plan to visit the upper Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin, and a little of the surrounding area) you need to check that site. It is full of great information about small businesses that try to operate in an environmentally responsible way. And beyond being “green” a lot of the places just look fun and interesting.

Working on proofreading and copy editing things always makes me feel a little defensive. Like, people think that I think I’m smarter than they are because I know a lot about punctuation and spelling. I think some people get paranoid that I’m judging them whenever they make a typo. The truth is, I’m completely aware that spelling and punctuation have basically nothing to do with intelligence. I have friends who can’t spell to save their lives, but they’d kick my ass on any IQ test any day. I just happen to have a talent for English nit-picking. I like editing because it allows me to help some of those smart people sound as smart as they really are.

People also think that I’m probably one of those grammar nazis that trolls all over the internet pointing out everyone’s typos. I’m not. Why should I give out my services all over the internet for free? I notice typos, and usually don’t mention them. Especially when they are perpetrated by people I like. However, there is one situation in which I will use my superpowers for evil. And that is against internet trolls. I hang out at I’m With Coco quite a bit, and every so often we get some obnoxious Leno fan trolling there. Rather than arguing with them, I just correct their grammar and spelling. So the general rule is that I will only tear your grammar apart if you annoy me, or if you pay me. Which I admit is a little weird. I’m like a grammar dominatrix.

New Front Page

If you came here from GirlAlive.com you probably noticed some changes to the front page. You’ll have to excuse the boring buttons. That’s the best I could do with MS Paint. (I’m still trying to recover all the software lost from when my laptop died. It’s pretty much fixed now, but I’m still not back to where I was.)

I wanted to give a quick explanation of what the new buttons are. There is the blog button, which you would have pushed to get here. Then there is the Book Review Blog button. That one takes you to my new book review blog over at Tumblr. Then there is the British Food button, which goes to my British Food reviews, as usual. Then I also added a button for my Twitter feed. Cause I use Twitter quite a bit. Then there is the mysterious “GirlAlive Tumblr” button. That is a secondary Tumblr blog that I created, mostly to do some testing and other stuff for the book blog, but then I decided to keep it as a feed somewhere between this blog and my twitter feed. It’s more information than Twitter, but less than here. It’s mostly where I re-blog stuff that I find amusing or whatever. The kind of things I post on Facebook, but I don’t generally want complete strangers friending me on Facebook. So the Tumblr is there instead. Then the last button is my cafepress shop.

I’ve been saying that I want to get out of cafepress for over a year now, but for the moment nothing will happen with that. I can’t get my original image files back from cafepress, and they’re all on my laptop that was stolen last year. At the moment I don’t have any good image software. So it’ll be cafepress for a while more.

Anyway, that’s the new front page. Lots of buttons for stuff. I’d fill you in on everything else I’m doing, but you’d be so bored. I’ve been looking for a job. Turns out there aren’t any. Besides that, I’ve been lurking on YouTube watching the Vlogbrothers and other nerdfighters, and also playing some KOL, since I hadn’t played for something like two years. If you sat and watched how I spend my day, you’d be bored into a coma.

Oh, and for those on Twitter who heard about my eye problem last week, my eyes are fine. I had a weirdness in one eye when I woke up, so I got checked to make sure my retina was still where it should be. It is fine. I just smooshed my eye in my sleep or something.

My new thing.

I’ve decided to blog about all the books I read. As well as some I have read in the past, since I do not generally finish an entire novel every day. However, I know that many of you don’t give a crap about what what I’m reading, so I’m doing all this over on another blog at tumblr. So here is my new blog:

http://alanaisreading.tumblr.com/

So if you want to read fairly random book reviews and other stuff about authors or reading or whatever, you can go there and follow me if you have a tumblr account. If you don’t have or want a tumblr account, it also automatically posts to Twitter whenever there’s a new post there, so you can follow me on Twitter.

I’m probably not going to generally be mentioning it much from here, so bookmark it now if you care.

Mistakes Hiring Managers Make

There are a hundred or more articles out there about all the mistakes that job-seekers make either on their CVs/resumes or in interviews or in cover letters or whatever. But no one talks about the hiring managers who are complete asses.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the people I’ve dealt with in the process of looking for a job have been really great. Most are polite and take their job seriously and are truly trying to find a good match for a position. I have now done three job interviews with the University here, for different positions, and everyone has been nice, and has done a good job interviewing and communicating with applicants. I keep applying at the University because the people I’ve met in these interviews have seemed genuinely nice and professional. But there are a few places I’m not going to be applying again.

I had one job interview in Seattle with an internet company long ago. I don’t remember the name of the company and they probably don’t exist anymore. I dressed up, caught a bus downtown, and went to my interview. The guy was late and seemed to have forgotten that he had an interview to do. Then he proceeded to ask me a series of questions that could all be answered by pointing at my resume that he had in front of him. “What other web sites have you worked on?” “There’s a list of them at the bottom of my resume there.” The whole time I got the clear impression that A) he had never had any intention of hiring me and B) he was completely wasting my time. I was so pissed off that after the interview I sent him a bill for the time I wasted and the bus fare I spent wasting my time in his presence. I never expected any money from him, but I hoped he’d at least think about how he is treating people.

This week I had another encounter with an asshole. I applied for a position I’m completely and incredibly qualified for with an internet company here called Boffer Inc. I spent time writing and editing a custom cover letter and sent off my CV through the job site where I found the listing. A short time later I checked my email. I had the confirmation email from the site I sent the CV through. And, received four minutes before that email, I had a form rejection letter from Tom Mursell, the smug 12-year-old asshole who runs Boffer. So before I even received confirmation of the receipt of my CV, he had the balls to send me a rejection letter beginning with, “After careful consideration…” He couldn’t have even had time to download and open my CV, much less actually read it.

After that I looked him up and found that he fancies himself some sort of job expert. I posted on his blog the following:

As someone looking for a job, the one thing I hate is form rejection letters that are full of obvious lies. Like, I sent off a CV and cover letter to some internet company today, and got the form letter saying I was rejected “after careful consideration” four minutes before I even got confirmation that the CV was sent. So they “carefully considered” it for about 0.04 minutes. How insulting. Let’s see if I remember the name on the bottom of that insulting rejection letter. Um, I think it was Tom Mursell. On the positive side, at least I know what kind of people I’ve avoided working for.

He has so far refused to publish my comment, or respond to it. I will not only not be applying for any other jobs with his company, but I also will not ever be buying anything from their online stores. If you’re not going to read my CV, that’s your business. But you don’t have to be so freaking rude about it. In fact, if you decided you hate me without even reading my CV, at least tell me what I did wrong. What made you hate me so much and so fast? Give me a reason for your rejection instead of feeding me a bunch of crap about “careful consideration”. I have no respect for liars.

Anatomy of a job scam

I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs since last August. Most of them are fine and dandy “normal” job applications. And then there are the ones like this. Here is a screenshot of a response I received to a job application I sent in. (Click to embiggen.)

First, let’s look at the email address it came from. Admin@realfreedeals.info. Does that web site exist? Is it a web site that has reviews of other web sites? No, and no. I checked the Whois information for that domain, and it shows that the website is inactive, and even more suspiciously, it was only registered for one year, expiring in a few months. What about the company quoted at the bottom, Magnum Magazine Media? I can’t find any evidence of this company existing.

So we don’t know who this is, or who they work for. We can guess that they are receiving some kind of referral fee from the site they are making people sign up for to write their “test review”. Or maybe they do have a web site in which they review other sites, as they claim, but they won’t tell the applicant what site that is. So what is the scam? They’re not asking me for money. Just a paragraph.

Back in the 50’s my grandmother ran into a similar scam, but at the time it wasn’t about writing internet reviews. Back then it was advertising for people to sew garments at home for money. I think they were ties. They’d send you a pattern and fabric and you’d have to sew it up and send it back to “test” and see if you were a good enough seamstress to work for them. Everyone failed. But they still had plenty of ties to sell, thanks to all the “test” ties that they got people to sew. This is the same scam.

They say that you have to respond within 48 hours, in order to make sure you don’t have time to research them. They say that is because they get so many applicants. If they have so many applicants who are each sending them a review of a website for free, why would they ever pay anyone £200 a week to do that job? The bottom line is that they won’t. I’m guessing that they never hire anyone, and instead steal your written review and publish it somewhere (which is why they don’t tell you what site they really work for). It’s a lot cheaper to just put out a Gumtree (or Craigslist in the US) ad every week or so, and just see how many free writing projects you can harvest. They’ll never hire anyone. So, no, Robert Moore, I won’t be applying for your “job”.