The beaver is a proud and noble animal

I’ve just spent the last hour going over a dozen resumes for a job opening we have at work. Quite often I wonder what these people are thinking.

Sending me a generic cover letter doesn’t inspire me to really look at your cv. Sending a cover letter about the wrong job really doesn’t. Sending one full of typos means I don’t even try. In all cases, your cover letter is there to sell the high points, not tell me your life story.

A cv should be clear, concise and relevant. If you have more than 5 years experience, I don’t give a toss about your school grades. If you have less than 5 years experience, DO NOT PAD YOUR RESUME WITH EVERY TLA KNOWN TO MAN. It makes me think you’re either lying through your teeth or you don’t know what you’re talking about.

I do not need to know what sort of World of Warcraft character you play, nor which level you’re at. Same goes for what sports you play or what sort of music you listen to. I want to hire you, not date you.

Finally. Spell check. USE IT!!!

For reasons unknown, the database servers are being extraordinarily naughty at work and it’s getting impossible to get anything done. I’ve been trying to rebuild a biomart for the last 2 days and the scripts keep borking on me. Finally, it seems to be working now, but it’s sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.

So, in the meantime, there’s naught else to do but browse on my new toy.

It’s bad. It’s really bad. I’ve already installed 6 games, a few productivity apps and the complete learner’s guide to the UK motorcycle theory test (which I need to study for because my exam is next Friday).

I love my phone.

Current Mood: Aggravated

Current Mood: Amused

This is a stitched picture of the “best view of Prague” as seen from a vineyard atop the old city. All of my Prague pictures from the Staff Association retreat are now online at http://flubu.com/various_pics/prague_may_2010/. You can right-click to save/view a full-size version of the image.

Current Mood: Calm

Ever had one of those days?

Current Mood: Amused

I just had a very interesting phone call. It went something like this:

Phone: Ring!Ring!
Me: Hello, Proteomic Services.
Phone: Hi, I’m new to the field of proteomics and would like to know what the difference is between a full-length protein and a mature protein.
Me: Buh! Sorry, you just caught me debugging some code, so give me a minute to go into science mode.

In a nutshell, the person on the phone wanted to known which protein sequence to use to generate antibodies against. I explained the differences in protein sequences and steered him towards PDBe so he could use structure information to make sure the peptide he’s trying to raise antibodies against isn’t buried deep within the 3D structure.

The amusing bit came when I asked him how he got my contact information. Turns out my name is the first in the list when you search all staff in the proteomics team.

Hee hee, turns out 6 years of biochemistry hasn’t been wasted after all :D

Current Mood: Amused

Dear applicant. Please, please, do not lie to me. I will find out you padded your resume with a few simple questions. Furthermore, saying that you have been a TA on a Java programming course and yet you are unable to answer some very basic questions will most certainly not improve my impression of you.

Slight embellishments, I can live with. Outright lies, you lose.

Current Mood: Aggravated

It would seem that I have been lax with my blogging in the past few weeks. Besides one or two events, there hasn’t been lots happening (which might have explained my silence. Or maybe I’m just lazy and/or addicted to Farmville).

My mom came for a week to visit us. And by us I mean the beastie. She basically threw us out of the house one day so she could have him all to herself. Katy and I were able to have a nice pub meal at the Red Lion and go see a movie (though it would now appear that I’ve forgotten what we went to see – this is me getting old). I do remember that Katy really, really, really enjoyed her bacon double cheeseburger from Burger King :) Pictures will be up as soon as I can get them converted and properly formatted.

My mom had asked for a nice roast and some profiteroles for her birthday, so I happily obliged. The roast rolled shoulder of pork took 6 hours to roast, but damn if it wasn’t nice :) The in-laws and Stu came over for the day to say hello. It was a nice day. The weather was rather unimpressive so we weren’t really able to give my mom a proper tour of Saffron Walden, though she did like the weekend market (and especially the sausage burgers from the Giggly Pig). I did manage to use the power of the for-sale list at work to snag my mom a cheap ipod and load it up with her favourite music for cheap. That reminds me that I need to ask her if she’s using it or not.

Speaking of which, I’m saddened to say that my trusty Shure E3C earphones finally died a death. I had to buy myself another pair of earphones. I got S-Jays and they do live up to their potential. Still, they’re nowhere near as good or comfy as my Shure. Having said that, they’re a fifth of the price so, you know, there is that to consider. Still, I will mourn my old faithful buds.

Things have been brewing with Katy’s employers and we’re investigating options on that front. I don’t want to say a lot more because I’ll start swearing at them again. Bastards and fucktards, the lot of ‘em (well, most of ‘em anyway). Katy’s looking into other avenues, but returns on investments haven’t been all that good. Still, there’s no harm in sending feelers out.

The staff association at work organized a group jaunt to go see Varekai at the Royal Albert Hall last weekend, so Mel and Pam came down to look after the beastie. It was the first time that somebody else than us put him down for the night. Mostly, they did a good job save for a few details and something that bugged me a bit but… meh. No harm no foul, but still a silly thing to do and leave it at that.

The beastie’s been a handful for a few days now. He’s caught a cold and is now a snot monster. He’d been coughing a bit for a few days now but it really went full-blown over the weekend. He’s not been too bad, sleep-wise, in the last night or so so we’re hopeful that it’s not going to last too long. He’s really getting mobile now and can take one or two tottering steps before falling face-first on something or someone.

Katy got some maternity back-pay so we were able to pay off the last of the xmas credit card. We still have a bit left over and we’re itching to buy stuff :) Katy wants to get a Wii and Wii Fit but they seem to be out of stock everywhere I look. I bought a NAS for home backups (mostly because I realized that all of my MP3s, documents and the digital pictures from the last 5 years only exist on the home laptop and a few scattered CDs or DVDs).

I’d like to get a new phone (I’m lusting after the googlephone), a new camera, a camcorder. Thing is, I already have stuff that covers those roles and most of it still works perfectly fine so I can’t really justify the expense. Katy wants a Tassimo and a KitchenAid. The KitchenAid is something that we’ve both been lusting aftet for years now, but it also means that we’d be cooking more cakes and pastries and that’s really not a good plan at this point in time. I’ve put on a helluva lot of weight in the last year and I need to start shifting it before bad things happen.

Besides that, not a lot. Work is work. I’ve reviewed two papers and submitted one. Barring any incident, I should have another first author paper and a few more associated author papers to add to my CV. I received notification that I need to have my end-of-contract review meeting with the powers that be before the end of April. I’ve already fixed a nasty bug in the PRIDE mapping job and I’m in the process of testing code that I wrote before going on holiday that will hopefully make the current PRIDE webapp more responsive. Florian’s buggered off to Costa Rica for a month (not that I blame him) so that means a lot of work’s been dumped on me. The good news is that we have a new team member starting in a few weeks and we’re holding interviews for another position in the coming week. So, busy busy busy but good busy.

Rui from work bought me some japanese cooking supplies from an asian shop on Mill Road so I’ll be able to start playing around making chawanmushi and dobinmushi, as well as wonton soup and spring rolls. Watch this space.

Current Mood: Busy

- Ring! Ring!
- Proteomic Services, Richard speaking. How can I help you?
- Hi. Is XXX there?
- No, he’s not in today, can I take a message?
- It’s YYY from purchasing. He asked us to order some software for him and I need to know if it’s for Mac or Windows.
- Well, if you tell me what the software is, I can probably answer that.
- Can you? oh good. It’s a copy of Windows 7 Professional.
- [very loud silence] That’s probably for Windows…
- It would be, wouldn’t it?

Current Mood: Amused

They’re antsy and edgy, tired of waiting for promotion opportunities at work as their elders put off retirement. A good number of them are just waiting for the economy to pick up so they can hop to the next job and get what they think they deserve. Oh, and they want work-life balance, too.

Sounds like Generation Y, the “entitlement generation,” right?

Not necessarily, say people who track the generations. In these hard times, they’re also hearing strong rumblings of discontent from Generation X. They’re the 32- to 44-year-olds who are wedged between Baby Boomers and their children, often feeling like forgotten middle siblings and increasingly restless at work as a result.

“All of a sudden, we’ve gone from being the young upstarts to being the curmudgeons,” says Bruce Tulgan, a generational consultant who’s written books about various age groups, including his fellow Gen Xers.

This isn’t the first time Gen Xers have faced tough times. They came of age during a recession and survived the dot-com bust. In recent years, though, more members of the generation – stereotyped early on as jaded individualists – began settling down. It was time, they thought, to enjoy the rewards of paying some dues.

“We were starting to buy into the system, at least to some extent,” Tulgan says, “and then we got the rug pulled out from under us.”

Now, in this latest recession, nearly two-thirds of Baby Boomer workers, ages 50 to 61, say they might have to push back their retirement, according to a recent survey from Pew Research.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the age spectrum are members of Generation Y, who are often cheaper to hire and heralded for their coveted high-tech knowledge, even though many Gen Xers consider themselves just as technologically savvy.

“It’s so annoying,” says Lisa Chamberlain, another Gen Xer who wrote the book “Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction.” “First, it was always the Baby Boomers overshadowing everything. Then there was this brief period in the mid-’90s where Gen X was cool.

“Now it’s, ‘What are the new kids doing?’ It’s like ‘Yo, hello, the Google guys are Gen Xers.’ ”

They can sound a little whiny. But there’s also some evidence that Gen Xers really are being taken for granted at work.

One survey done this year for Deloitte Consulting LLP, for instance, found that nearly two-thirds of executives at large companies were most concerned about losing Generation Y employees, while fewer than half of them had similar concerns about Gen Xers.

The assumption is often that members of Generation Y are the least loyal and most mobile, says Robin Erickson, a manager with Deloitte’s human-capital division.

However, she points out that a companion survey found that only about 37 percent of Gen Xers said they planned to stay in their current jobs after the recession ends, compared with 44 percent of members of Generation Y and 50 percent of Baby Boomers.

Current Mood: Blah