A story I continue to follow concerns the 2257 laws. My most significant essay on 2257 Freedom Under Assault: Porn and Politics explains in a more visceral way what is happening with the newly proposed 2257 laws. This morning via Digg I read an in depth WSJ story following up on the story:

The US Government is trying very hard and very quietly to put all online adult websites out of business. The rules and regulations that the government wants all websites owners to adhere to are so confusing that essentially EVERYONE will be found guilty, hence they’ll be out of business

Despite the government’s wishes, if that’s what this is about, adult sites en masse won’t go out of business. Many will move offshore, which just means they’ll be a little harder to prosecute. However, these legal scares which really begin clear back around election time 2000 when the adult industry begin to fear John Ashcroft being in power and waging war against porn. Ironically, this took a backseat to the 9/11 attack.

Some readers might be tired of me bringing up this subject from time to time, but it’s important not only for protecting adults right to view pornography, but for the greater protection of freedom of speech.

This governmental action starts with the alleys and dark corners of nation and then will move into brighter lights and more familiar places. We cannot permit the United States government to take away our freedoms. We cannot stand by and say: ahh, it’s ok, it’s only porn.

On a much lighter and technical subject, this is my first subject blogged via Digg. If you go into your digg.com profile you can actually blog entries directly from the Digg website and your icon shows up on the Digg page. It works with Wordpress and other blogging programs.

Update 3:03am PST: I noticed after publishing that a “more link” for the story is automatically added by digg along with a digg this story link. Yesterday I added a share link space in place of the MyWeb button, inspired by the Yahoo UI blog, which offers readers (and myself) the ability to easily bookmark any post in MakeYouGoHmm by clicking the link. Look for the green text and links right aligned at the end of each post.

Two things make me feel really, really old. One, that I would actually admit I take naps once in awhile. Have to do it sometimes during the day because the wee hours of the morning be prime time.

The other? Paying $5.18 for Air Supply Live 2004. Man, these guys are like 900 years old. We saw them a couple years back at an indian casino and they talked about a new album. This CD was from the tour. Never saw any new album, but see a lot of gray hair (I have a bunch too).

I don’t expect anybody to get with me on the Air Supply Live (and hope I don’t lose my metal headbanger license), but how about power napping? Any readers willing to admit to enjoying a power nap or two?

Shelley Powers’ dissed meter is twitching again.

I’ve seen and experienced firsthand the clubbiness that Ms. Powers talks about (I don’t like the ‘A’ word, though) and this seems to summarize how she feels about people in this group who don’t link to her:

When people are critical, don’t label them with being a bitch, shrill, hysterical, whining, flaming, or any combination of the same. If this environment was full of people who only smiled, who only agreed, who went around as if we’re all partaking of joy joy juice, and nary a harsh word was heard–you wouldn’t be where you are today. You need us. You need us, a hell of a lot more than we need you. Your fans may make you feel good, but it’s your critics who made you famous.

Let me add ‘wack job’ to Shelley’s list, which is the label one popular blogger chose recently for me (now proudly a former reader) because he didn’t like my flames over nuking all his past comments, but to his credit at least he linked me in as part of the conversation. Nevermind that I was the only person (that I saw anyway, I’m sure somebody else somewhere offered help) who ultimately gave the guy a two minute one line code technical solution to the whole mess — which he has still ignored to date. Just because people disagree agree with you doesn’t mean they are any of the labels Shelley or I mentioned. In fact, I think when someone tries to sink in a debate to namecalling or stereotyping, it weakens their position severely.

I may not like the words that some people choose to use when disagreeing with me, nor may I appreciate getting flamed over something I’ve said or done, but dammit if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. You know what, as humans, we are wrong all the time. We aren’t perfect. We are flawed. We make mistakes. Today you might make one and so might I. Maybe this blog entry is a mistake. We will say or do something that we wish we could have back. Human beings don’t admit they are wrong often enough today.

The key is to learn from these mistakes and not to make them repeatedly. That’s the hard part. Making a mistake is easy, not making it again is supposed to be easier. And for too many, sadly, admitting to making the same mistakes over and over and over again is hardest.

This time Shelley guides the laser on Doc Searls, but I remember a “where’s the linklove” post from her about Dave Winer too. She has also spoken out against how women have a tough time getting links. This is a recurring theme for Ms. Powers. Her post and others raise the spectre of a much more serious topic — discrimination — and that’s something I haven’t written a lot about. Not here, anyway, yet. Here’s my chance and let’s hope I don’t screw this up.

While at Northern Voice, I read about a blogger named Ed Dunn who claimed TechCrunch Michael Arrington was snubbing his search engine service because he was African American. An allegation which Arrington swiftly and strongly refuted.

Like several others who commented on this story, I hadn’t heard of Mr. Dunn’s Fooky search service either. I noticed immediately that the logo wasn’t very original with the different colored letters. Pressing on, I submitted a ceremonial vanity search there for “TDavid” and it returned several of our sites including this one with the same: ‘no description available.’ This was only one search but is Fooky acting screwy? What do I need to do to get Fooky to realize there should be a description available for at least one of our sites? Maybe I’m missing something here … ? Am I supposed to put those descriptions in Fooky? Not an instantly pleasing new search experience, Fooky.

Just for the record, I don’t think all white male tech bloggers at the tops of these lists behave the way Ms. Powers suggests. I think some of them legitimately want to point out what the little guys are doing and not give more exposure to the same groupthink over and over again. By following the current crop of blog news aggregation services can definitely source many of the same names and lead to clique conclusions.

Let’s see if I can add all these negative words together: white male tech bloggers in the club are chauvinists, racists and snobs, did I leave any out? If any of these accucastions are more than hot air then note to the person(s) holding the admission tickets: please do not ever let this white tech blogger (moi) into this group. I’d rather sit on the sidelines maintaining some level of intellectual and social integrity than be part of these type groups. If that costs me traffic, fame and fortune, then so be it, I’ll make money in other ways.

Can’t help wondering as this blog gets more traction if it will be moved closer and closer to being wrongly assigned to these type of groups? Sort of like a ship being sucked into a black hole. I wonder if this is part of what concerns Ms. Powers on a deeper psychological level? That she gets noticed for when she bitches — which is the very thing she is complaining about. How ironic — not — that Shelley’s post is near the top of tech.memeorandum as I write this, so she has been assimilated into the group by (nicely) flaming the group about its close-mindeness.

Surprise, surprise, I can’t change my skin color and ethnicity. Can’t change my age (I’m getting older by the minute). I could change my sex, but my wife would probably miss the equipment (wishful thinking, I know). I can change those who I choose to associate with and none of the groups outlined above do I have any interest in joining.

Still, I bet right now there is somebody, somewhere who feels that they aren’t getting any linklove from Hmm (me) and should and there are a list of reasons why s/he thinks I’m not linking to them. Note to this person or persons unknown: that’s a steaming pile.

I link to stuff that makes me go hmm and it doesn’t matter if your site, product, software, service, blog, whatever is brand new or it is the hottest new thing from GYM. In fact, I sometimes intentionally do not link to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft because I’m sick of reading about them too. I also do not factor in whether to link to stuff based upon the author’s race, sex or sexual orientation, age, etc. In fact, sometimes the nicknames that people use confuse me as to if they are male or female anyway, so how would I know?

How to send a private message through this blog
Readers, please tell me what interesting experiments you are up to, especially if you have a blog, so that I can follow your writings as well and occasionally talk about what you are doing. If you worry that you might be spamming, then do the following:

1) add the word: PRIVATE to your comment and
2) add a few extra random characters to your name so that it thinks you are somebody new commenting. This will hold our post over in the moderation queue. First time commenters/comments are always held for moderation. So if your regular posting name is Jim Smith you might use ‘Jim Smith 8y3jb3o’ as the name and the system would hold you over.

The value of legitimate, relevant comments
I see every reader who takes time to make legitimate, related comments as being helpful to this site and to me and enjoy reciprocation. It’s part of the reason I don’t like using rel=’nofollow’ on comments and speak out against others who treat commenting like it’s some sort of leprosy. Readers can be and usually are a valuable part of the conversation and nobody else will tell me differently. Look at a post like this one RE: Netflix throttling and tell me that the comments are not more valuable than the post itself?

If a blogger wants to be on his own lecture circuit, that’s fine too, but Hmm isn’t that type of blog. Enjoy and be a part of this site if you want, or don’t, but don’t be completely lame and say just because your site doesn’t get linked (ever or often) it’s because of some discriminatory action by a member of an elitist group.

Ms. Powers seems to have been set off by the gatekeeper discussion between Seth Finkelstein and Doc Searls, commented on by Adam Green’s post where the discussion and debate is over the secret, cool linklove handshake. As you can see I tossed all of them links but in the course of normal reading probably would have passed on the whole philosophical soap opera. Why? Because it’s mostly blogging about blogging about blogging and the horse is not only beaten and dead, it’s a decomposed sack of bones. Searls, Finkelstein or Green didn’t say anything revolotionary, exciting or new, only said it using a bigger thesaurus. I grow weary of reading people who don’t follow the KISS principle (and I don’t mean the band in makeup rolling out Detroit Rock City). Maybe if one of them would have have offered some sort of meaningful solution it would have piqued my curiosity further, but as it stands, it seemed more like flatulence than futuristic. Did I miss the solution part, or just get the bitching part?

Shelley Powers’ post actually had some more meat on the bones — cutting through without all the intellectual masturbation and saying: “what about me?” — and made me stop and reflect because this is a horse she keeps riding. Whenever she mounts that brazen stallion, she gets noticed for it: irony 101 or planned venting? And what about Ed Dunn’s racism claims? Yeah, that made me think too. Made me realize that no matter what we do on this great earth, somebody somewhere will always feel slighted about something. Oh, and if you have yet another search engine and can’t get people to look at it because of the product/service itself, make a strong, serious discriminatory allegation about somebody in the spotlight like Arrington.

How to get linked
If you want to be linked for something you’ve done, then do something extraordinary. Be different, unique, rise above the zillion other things being said, written and done today. Avoid echo chambers. The reason I didn’t post Saturday’s live blog posts made at Northern Voice is because they didn’t pass my own crap filters; my posts just weren’t that interesting or worthwhile. Be your own toughest editor and critic of what you do in life. Is it any good? Would you link to it? Why not? Answer these type of questions honestly and you’ll receive and earn plenty of linklove. It might take days or months or even years and maybe your project will never be as popular as you think it should be, but keep trying and you will break through. It will happen no matter what obstacles either exist or are imaginary.

Discrimination definitely exists out there, but the most discriminating person about what you do should be the person staring back in the mirror.

Here’s a fascinating technology and social story developing that you probably won’t read on memeorandum or its many clones this morning.

In August last year, I noticed that Zinio who provides outstanding digital versions of print magazines was venturing further into erotic waters by offering Playboy digital subscription effective with their October 2005 issues. Apparently this went over well because yesterday I noticed they added Penthouse:

And here I thought the venerable adult publication Penthouse was on its way out? A couple years back there were stories about Penthouse having troubles covering printing costs and it looked like an adult magazine that had been in print since the mid 60’s was in some serious trouble. A sure sign that the internet has not only impacted newspapers.

Will Zinio go even more hardcore?
I say it’s just a matter of time before Hustler, High Society and other hardcore adult mags cut deals with Zinio. Of course I have no internal knowledge of this happening or not but I would be surprised if the conversations aren’t already underway. Those who are into this type of content can thank the adult webmaster publication Klixxx Magazine for starting this revolution. (Disclaimer: I used to write for Klixxx magazine). The editor, Joe D, over there was forward thinking enough to get with Zinio and work in how it would be a nice fit. The first place I saw naked flesh in Zinio was in advertisements in Klixxx.

Once that door was opened and the Zinio stuffed shirts realized that hey, it is possible to have adult content and mainstream content without alienating everybody in mainstream, the doorjambs were greased for Playboy … and now the little bit more hardcore Penthouse. Some of those Penthouse letters are very steamy. This is definitely another step.

I’ll give it a year before we’ll see more explicit adult magazine offerings in Zinio and then the waters will truly be tested.

Morality gone wild!
I realize some people don’t like porn and will see this as a very negative sign for Zinio. Some people think it’s evil and immoral and a lot of other things, but I have a much more healthier outlook on life and adult content’s place in society. If consenting adults want to look at content like this, that’s fine with me, who am I to judge? Heck, I might just buy a Penthouse subscription to support this Zinio movement. Those who dislike Zinio working their way into harder adult content, no pun intended, should realize that society as a whole needs to stop being so paranoid about sex. The hypocrisy that exists with violence compared to sex is mind numbing. We can watch people get brutally murdered on regular TV, but show wardrobe malfunctions are a national crisis.

I don’t support orgies on the streets or anything too extreme like that, so please don’t put words in my mouth, nor do I support exposing sex to non-consenting adults. I do strongly support consenting adults right to view this type of material in the privacy of their own homes. Should some businessman be viewing Penthouse or some even more hardcore magazine on his laptop on an airplane? Only with the person(s) in viewing distance permission, I think. We need to recognize and respect the rights of others as adults in public, but that guy should have the ability to look at the magazine on his computer privately as much as he likes. I will speak up, out and against the government any time they seek to strip these freedoms through backdoor legislation.

These are deep waters that Zinio is venturing into in a day and age where the legality of adult content (obscenity statutes which vary from zip code to zip code and parish to parish literally) continues to be under fire. If you aren’t supporting Zinio with a magazine subscription, please consider doing so (any subscription, doesn’t have to be an adult mag, of course). Nice work, Zinio.

Decided today to see what I could find in the way of interesting Superbowl XL links, so this post will continue to be a work-in-progress throughout the day. Enjoy the game and … go Hawks!

1. Watch the Superbowl ads after they appear today in iFilm 2006 Superbowl Ads showcase, as well as past ads from Superbowl 2002-2005. This year they are adding a feature where you can “snag” your favorite ads and easily add them to your blog/website. For a snag example, check out last year’s banned GoDaddy.com ad below:

2. The official NFL site.
3. Microsoft offers two Super Bowl party game templates.
4. Blank betting sheet containing various betting options like coin toss, team to receive kick-off, who will score first, etc. (Word .doc version)
5. Superbowl Bingo cards. Dip, chips, and Bingo, what a combination. Just refresh, print out cards and hand them out to everybody at your Superbowl party.
6. CNET’s match the Super Bowl teams to stadum game. Uses Google Earth.
7. Bestselling Superbowl eBay items stats being used to predict the winner of the Superbowl. As of this writing, Seattle leads with $148.20 to $105.73 Pittsburgh.
8. Interactive Flash Super Bowl map. More useful for those actually at the Super Bowl and dreamers, this shows the hotspots surrounding the stadium and Ford Field itself.
9. The ad saturation sucks, but about.com has a good Super Bowl XL section containing games and other activities.
10. 7 Tips for How to throw a Superbowl Party from ehow.com
11. Tagging: Technorati: Superbowl, IceRocket, Topix.net

Hey, I’m concerned about Kama Sutra too. Nothing like getting down with the ancient indian text on sex.

My wife just leaned over and said: “Apparently there is a new virus going around. Am I gonna get this one?”

Bummer, different Kama Sutra!

Somehow she became a victim of the last one, that Zotob monstrosity that just booted and rebooted Windows 2000 machines.

We try as a general rule not to cover viruses that often on Hmm because I think that only feeds the pain. Plus I think most Hmm readers are pretty savvy about this type stuff and won’t be prey to these bastards. However, if you haven’t already been bombarded with the Kama Sutra news this morning and are still curious about what that other Kama Sutra that you don’t want to catch see Lifehacker for details

As always, be careful out there fellow netizens.

Valentine’s Day is a mere 11 days away, are you thinking of your sweetheart yet?

I first learned about Bliss The Game for Lovers from a Wired article by Regina Lynn.

Ms. Lynn describes Bliss as:

I’ve been playing with Bliss, a computer game for lovers that puts a tech twist on an old concept. Part Cranium, part Monopoly and part Kama Sutra, Bliss offers a completely customizable, different-every-time-you-play erotic experience for couples.

The creators of Bliss describe the game as:

Since we recognized that everyone has a different sexual relationship and different sexual preferences, we realized that the game had to be very customizable. Bliss can be configured to meet the needs of any loving couple. Wild or Mild, the game can be configured either way.

Bliss is designed to help couples explore the sexual aspect of their relationships through our computer based romantic games. Unlike many sexually oriented games, Bliss focuses on romance, love, and intimacy rather than blatant and sometimes offensive sexuality. Bliss is full of unique and innovative romantic ideas.

Downloading the trial
A 10 game / 30 day free trial of Bliss is provided but registration reminders are guaranteed to spoil the mood. Just imagine in between: kiss your — er, wait, you need to register dammit — lover passionately. If you are serious about actually playing this game, just whip out the — no, not that — plastic.

As of this writing there is a special price deal for Bliss and the Action Editor Bundle for $39.95 USD ($10 savings). There is an add-on pack called the Dr D Light available for $12.95. You can be snailed a demo CD for $7, but I’m not sure why somebody would want to do that when you can download the same thing for free (sentimental value?).

Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for list has Microsoft weighing in at #42 with 1% workforce growth and 37, 746 U.S employees. Yahoo made it at #73 with 5,444 employees and a 29% percent increase in workforce growth. Google? Sorry, didn’t make the list.

Other notable tech companies in the top 100 list? Cisco at #25 with 8% workforce increase and 26,644 employees. Network Appliance #27 with 2,712 U.S employees and 26% increase. Wholesale Electronics and office equipment provider CDW ranks #34. Intuit is just a notch below Microsoft at #43 and up from 64 place in 2005.

Wonder what kept Google out of this list? (see comments) I’ve heard the food is great there. And the stock options? We know those have been great. Any surprises on or off this list to you?

Update 7:04pm PST: Changed the title to “Google ineligible” thanks to Hunter pointing out that they were in the comments below.

Who would have thought that plants were emitting methane? A group of scientists have discovered that since 1760 the concentration of methane has almost tripled:

IT’S not just farting cows and belching sheep that spew out methane. Living plants have been disgorging millions of tonnes of the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere every year - without anybody noticing.

The study also finds that plants might be responsible for as much as 30% of global methane production, so it’s not just grandma’s chili. Although some 60% of the world emissions, according to the methane entry in the Wikipedia: “… are from sources affected by humans. They come primarily from agricultural and other human activities. ”

Sources of methane include out decomposition of organic wastes, swamps, marshes, aging process of asphalt, digestion in animals, bacteria found in rice plantations and industrial sources.

And now: plants.

I just realized that my last two post titles started with ‘another’ so I thought, why not make it a trifecta.

The writing here this past week has been a little leaner than normal, because I’ve been spending a lot of time in my Second Life. That virtual world interests me lately more than what’s happening in the real tech world despite such anticipated events as CES 2006. We are planning on being at CES 2007, BTW, just decided to sit this one out. With Vista and Office 12 and PS3 and Nintendo Revolution all on the docket by next CES, that show I think will blow away this year.

And since today from 7am to noon the Second Life crew were upgrading the grid and software that gave me a little more time to get outside and see all the good stuff I’ve been missing.

CES 2006 seemed like a good event for me not to go to as Microsoft didn’t do much of anything new and Google’s announcements, well, let’s just say Robin Williams and the car seemed like the best part there. Yahoo quietly announced their mobile gig and they bought Webjay the online playlist organizer and sharing service. On the Tivo front, looks like I’ll be skipping the Series2 and be considering the Tivo Series3 this year, and here I believed TiVo would be swallowed by a bigger fish by now. Wrong there. Think I’ll stay out of the prediction business for awhile. Miss Cleo I have nothing on you.

And this week the news in the Mac space is newer, more expensive hardware — who’d a thunk it? — the MacBook. There is more news on the Apple front that I need to get caught up with, particularly their blog client with AJAX: iWeb. My Mac blog is extremely outdated. Will get on that in the next few days hopefully.

Speaking of getting to things later, I definitely am wanting to get more into the MSN AdCenter stuff. It’s on the list, on the list. Really, the signup screen has been in the browser for almost the last 24 hours.

But wait, none of that is what I really wanted to talk about in this entry.

Onto the subject of hiring good people.

Today I had an interview with someone who may be our next producer. By the time you read this the interview will already be over, so there is no outside chance if she is a Hmm blog reader that she’ll get any clues for how to interview with me (this time around, at least).

In the small few jobs I’ve held and businesses I’ve ran, I’ve hired hundreds of people over the years and conducted many more interviews and fortunately have had only to deal with a few terminations (management and employee) directly. I don’t like having to reprimand people, write them up, much less fire anybody, but if you own or manage a business and have people working for you, then it’s a necessary part of the job. I won’t talk specifics of course on any of the past hires or fires, that would be totally inappropriate, but I will share some of the things I’ve learned about hiring good people in general.

Does level of schooling really matter? - I think if someone has a college education it’s important but some people can’t afford to get a college education or get in a relationship and have a child or make mistakes that prevent them from getting a college education. Should these people pay for it for the rest of their lives? Should they be forced to find low end, minimum wage scale jobs? Or should they be given a chance to show what they have if trained properly?

Circumstances might have them going to get work early in their life instead of being able to pursue schooling more actively. I was on my own at a very young age, paying rent while still in high school. I worked two jobs, three jobs at one point and have only really had a half dozen jobs in my entire working life (20+ years), two of those jobs (one currently) which lasted 10+ years.

Frankly, I’m more concerned about the school of hard knocks then only what school a person graduated. All this emphasis on hiring people only — or primarily with — college educations is bogus. Yeah, I know there are studies which tell you that college education candidates make more money but there are also some self-made millionaires, and dare I suggest billionaires who barely got a high school diploma. Putting too many eggs in the education basket can lead to a bad hire.

Relevant job experience - another common thing that too much emphasis being put on prior relevant job experience. I worked in the restaurant business before going into our own current offline business which is almost totally unrelated and I can tell you from experience I had absolutely none of it in either profession. The only experience I’ve ever had is writing experience. I’ve been writing most of my life. Since I could walk around with pen and paper and form coherent thoughts. Pretty young.

I certainly didn’t have any sales experience and my offline busines is all about selling. If they had looked at me and said: this clown has no circus experience, I likely wouldn’t have the time to be writing this now. Maybe I’d be dying hanging over a fryer because the cook didn’t show up. Restaurant management is a very time consuming thing and though the pay can be good if you get into higher level management, it is long hours, weekends and nights with employees that often care more about their hair and who’s dating who than customers. I applaud any and all restaurant managers for their hard work, especially those who have been at the same job for more than five years. Those people should be high on the probable hire list into any job which requires patience, good communication skills and determination and not super specialized skills (like rocket science). Relevant job experience should be a factor, yes, but you also have to look at what this candidate did and for whom and how long.

Flexibility - every job I’ve ever worked for has days where things go sideways. Sometimes that means having to work longer, sometimes going some place you didn’t intend to go. I’ve met customers at Denny’s at 2am to close deals because that was where and when the time was right. If the position being hired for requires a candidate who is flexible be sure to focus on flexibility questions like: what if you had to stay an extra three hours to get the work done on time? What if you had to come in early every day for a week or two to complete a task/project? How would you feel if you had to take an earlier lunch than longer? Dealing with schedule disruption and unexpected changes can be quite revealing. The answers to these questions, particularly if they appear genuine can say a lot about the candidate and what they like and dislike.

And I suppose here is where I should mention professional interviewers. Some people have been in and out of jobs so many times that they know exactly what to say. With people who have lots of jobs in the past and never stayed with them one of the first questions should be why? And then if we hired you here, would we just be another line on the resume?

What did the candidate dislike about their prior job? - everybody has something they disliked about their current and prior jobs. If they answer with I loved everything they are lying, sorry. I can rattle off a list of a dozen things I disliked about the restaurant busines but at the same time I can list a lot more that I enjoyed or was proud of when I worked there.

Knowledge tests and quizzes - I hate tests and quizzes. I had to take some really dumb personality tests which asked questions like: what would you do at a party with a bunch of people you didn’t know? Sit in the corner? Go up and talk to people? Hmm, let’s see … I think I’ll sit in the corner and never say anything to anybody. That should go well.

Not.

How many people answer these questions honestly (I did, because I’m an outgoing person, actually)? It’s one thing if you are hiring a computer programmer and asking them to rough out some code or talk about how they might solve a particular coding challenge, but quite another to show them some code and time them or watch how quickly they solve the problem, relying heavily on the results of the test.

Really you are testing/quizzing how well the candidate takes test, not really how smart they are. Some very smart people just aren’t very good at tests. Maybe, just maybe because they don’t want to be. Tests actually prove very little in the real world. Retention of knowledge, maybe. I’d rather see what steps a person would take to solve a problem than know they memorized answers from a book and scored 100%. Maybe that’s just me.

I’m a lousy test taker. However, give me the information that will be included in the test and some time to research, I will come prepared, and though I might not be able to pick the right answer out of a multiple choice, I will be able to describe the basic answer. Therefore, I usually shy away from hiring people based primarily on tests or quiz results. I have used them for a few positions — sometimes it was required that I did that — but they weren’t a key factor in the hiring decision. More like something just to see how they handled taking a test.

I’ve got more but this post is starting to get away from me. I left out a lot of stuff, bummer. I’ll continue if this stuff interests folks, but I’ll shut up now if it’s not going anywhere productive. I’m even struggling into what category to put it in. Health and lifestyle? Mmmm, ok. That’s about as close as hamburger to pizza.

Bottom line in hiring folks is to find what kind of person would fit the jigsaw puzzle of the team as close as possible. Not having a good idea what that position is like first (do they have to be a team player, will h/she work more independently, meetings, telecommuting, etc), can make it much easier to hire the wrong candidate.

Also having too many preconceived notions about the quality of a resume. I read stuff about resumes and their importance all the time. You know what my resume is?

If you guessed nowhere then you are correct. I have written maybe two or three resumes in my life, besides when it was required for class projects. I don’t have one now and if I was asked to make one, then it would be something out of the ordinary and very unboring.

It’s where I’ve been and what I’ve done, yes, but it’s also what I have the ability to do tomorrow and how much I care about the work I do. A resume can’t answer those questions.

Anybody wanna hire me? If you subscribe to this blog, then in a sense you just did.

Ok, I’ll let this one go, this isn’t an employment blog, but if more of this material is of interest then I’ll continue in the comments and/or another post.

A Robert Frost aside:
… and miles to go before I sleep.