Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Using an objective in your resume

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, editing, grammar, Personal, resumes, Uncategorized, writing on June 16, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Of all the possible contents of a resume, the objective statement is by far the most controversial. Many consider it a waste of time, a piece of puffery that is as empty as a mission statement. Personally, I am in favor of using one, but only if it is written and regarded in the right way.

The major objection to using an objective is that it is too vague to carry much meaning. If you are referring to the sort of objective that most people write, I would have to agree. A single phrase like “a programming position” is wasted space on your resume, especially since you can put the same information in a title after your name.

Nor are hirers going to be impressed by “to be CEO,” a statement that I’ve seen at least a dozen times. This is the kind of objective that is passed around the office for its unintentional humor. It’s especially ineffective at a small company or startup where the person reading your resume is the CEO. Just what everyone wants to see — someone with ambitions to replace them.

The trouble with the kind of objective statements that you usually see are that they say nothing meaningful. However, if you view an objective statement as a kind of teaser, an executive summary that encourages those reading your resume to read more, then you can start to write a more effective objective.

And how do you encourage readers to continue looking at your resume, instead of scanning it and then tossing it among the discards? Simple: use the objective to summarize what you can do for the company. With any luck, the hirer will then read the rest of your resume more carefully.

Let’s take an example from one of my resumes. It has three parts: A statement of the general category of position for which I am looking for work, a description of the three main traits that I have to offer, and, finally, a description of how I can use those traits to the benefit of the company to which I’m applying.

The first part is simple: “A marketing and communication position.” I make it the first five or six words, so that readers know immediately what work I’m applying for.

The second part involves more thought. Before writing it, I made a list of two dozen job skills I could offer in marketing and communications, describing them in a phrase and polishing the phrases until they were as concise and precise as possible. Then, I chose the ones that I wanted to emphasize for this particular position: “defining and developing corporate strategy; building communication links; and marketing products.” These are general traits — if I had more specific information about the position, then I would try to use more specific ones.

The third part is crafted in much the same way as the second. I built a list of different ways that I could help a company, then chose the most appropriate ones based on what I knew about the company. Again, I didn’t know very much, so I kept the list general: “to enable a company to define and realize its objectives and production schedules and to create relations with business partners.”

The final version reads: “A marketing and communications position that involves defining and developing corporate strategy; building communication links; and marketing products to enable a company to define and realize its objectives and production schedules and to create relations with business partners.”

This objective isn’t perfect. It’s more general than I would prefer, but you don’t always have the information to do better. However, it does tell hirers what I am looking for. In a few lines, I’ve made clear that I am not looking for an entry level position, but a reasonably senior position (since I talk about shaping corporate strategy first and also mention defining objectives). It also suggests that I might be interested in product management, and that I have experience working with other companies. If I’ve done my research properly in looking for places to apply, with any luck I will have attracted a readers’ interest and he or she will be looking at my resume a little more carefully than the rest in the pile.

Also, since I use semi-colons correctly, I am signalling that I have a high degree of literacy. The implication, if anyone notices, is that I can be counted on to represent the company in a polished and professional manner.

Boiling down your career goals to a few lines isn’t easy. Realistically, you can expect to spend at least several hours coming up with an exact summary of your skills — and don’t be surprised if you spend even longer. But considering that the point is to interest readers enough to notice the details of your skills, then you’ll find that time well spent.

Read Full Post »

9 common misunderstandings about resumes

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, resumes, Uncategorized on June 13, 2007| 2 Comments »

For years, resumes were my life. As a marketing consultant, I not only submitted hundreds of resumes to clients but also maintained a stable of different resumes for all occasions. As a manager, I’ve waded through hundreds of the things. As a mentor, I’ve helped people write their resumes, and as a freelancer, I’ve written resumes for pay. From these experiences, I’ve learned that the average person’s ideas about resumes can be as strange and misguided as celebrity gossip.

The trouble is, unless you understand the conventions of resume writings, you are unlikely to write an effective one. Here are the most common misunderstandings I’ve run across — misunderstandings that, far from landing a job, may ensure that you aren’t even considered:

A resume will get you a job

Occasionally, people are hired on the strength of their resumes. However, more often, they are interviewed because of their resumes. A resume is really the second filter for applicants (the first is the cover letter).

Instead of thinking of a resume as an end in itself, think of it as the equivalent of a marketing ad. aimed at those with the power to hire. And, as with any ad, a resume should be tailored to its audience. That’s why taking the time to write and proofread a resume and format it in a professional manner is so important. A professional-looking resume suggests that the person it concerns is competent and business-like, the qualities that any hirer wants to see.

Your resume will be carefully read

Have you any idea of how many resumes may arrive for a single position, especially if it’s advertised in major newspapers or on the job-boards? Many companies can’t possibly afford to have anyone read every single resume. Just to survive, they have to develop techniques to weed out as many as 90% of all the resumes they receive.

If your cover letter is poorly written or suggests a lack of experience, at the most your resume will be scanned. It might not even be read at all. If your resume is poorly organized or relevant information is hard to find, only part of it will be read.

Think of the hirer as someone who is over-worked and has a low boredom threshold. This image is not very fair, but it should help you focus on the main goal of getting the hirer to read your resume all the way through. The easier your resume makes it for hirers to find the information they want, the greater the chances that they will read all the way through – and, as a result, invite you for an interview.

A resume is an objective job history

A complete and utter job history may be possible – and relevant – when you are just out of high school. However, people switch jobs so often today that, before you have been working for five years, becomes impractical.

Even more importantly, hirers are only interested in the parts of your resume that help them make a decision about you. Put in too many details, and they may miss the relevant ones.
A resume should be truthful and not exaggerate your experience. But nobody expects you to give all your history. Today, when nobody has a job for life, that’s just not practical.

It’s not a matter of honesty so much as the need to be selective. Think of the need to be selective as a chance to prove your organizational and communication skills.

A resume is a static document

Rather than writing a single resume and using it for every job application, you will probably land more interviews if you take the time to customize your resume for each job. Depending on the job, you may want to mention different skill sets, or even to describe the same job differently. For instance, if you were Manager of Sales and Marketing at a company, you might have one job description that emphasized your sales duties and and another for your marketing responsibilities.

Some job hunters maintain several different resumes, each with a its own emphasis. Another way to streamline customization is to use either the macro or autotext features of a word processor to store a variety of customizations in the same document. In this way, you can conveniently store variable content and quickly produce a custom resume. However, be sure to proofread each custom resume before printing it, just in case you’ve duplicated content.

A resume has an ideal number of pages

Ask each hirer how long your resume will be, and you’re bound to get different answers. Some will tell you a single page, citing Donald Trump as an example. Others will say two, or that it doesn’t matter.

The point is, no one agrees on the ideal length for a resume. The most agreement you’ll get is that if your resume is longer than four pages, you may want to take a long look at its content and layout. Yet, even then, some hirers might make an exception for exceptionally absorbing material.

Before you start fiddling with fonts and margins in order to squeeze your resume into an arbitrary length, ask the hirer what their preferences are. Alternatively, consider adding an executive summary, a single page description of your qualifications.

Whatever you do, think twice about removing content. Otherwise, you might wind up with a resume that is so general that you look unqualified for anything.

A resume is more effective if it includes keywords

Some larger companies scan resumes, then use software to look for keywords that cover some of the skills that the position required. This practice has led some job hunters to include a keywords section in their resume, sometimes in white letters so that they are invisible to humans.

Unfortunately, this practice is so easily abused that a prejudice against it has set in among many hirers. Many may actually resent keywords as an attempt to game the system.

To avoid this reaction, study job descriptions and try to fit the keywords naturally into your resume, so you don’t cause any resentment.

Education should come first in the resume

Since you want to gain the attention of hirers, the most relevant information should come first in your resume. If you are just out of school, that information may be your education. However, the older you are, the more likely that your education will be less important than your job experience. For this reason, experienced job applicants usually list education near the end of the resume. Some very experienced applicants even leave it off altogether.

A resume should include reasons for leaving a position

Forty years ago, some resume templates included this information. It was a different era, when many people wanted the same job for life, and switching jobs seemed unusual enough to require an explanation.

Today, however, people hold many jobs in their lifetimes, and the reasons for leaving a particular one are less important. Anyway, many hirers are more interested in what you can bring to the job than in such details.

Still, you should have explanations ready, just in case a hirer asks. But, whatever you do, don’t imitate one man I knew, who mentioned that he had left two positions after taking his employer to the labor relations board – then wondered why he never got an interview,

A resume should never include hobbies or interests

Hirers seem divided on whether they want such personal information on a resume. However, so long as it only takes up a few lines, such a heading can’t do much harm.

Moreover, in some cases, it can do you good, so long as you are selective about what you include. For instance, if you are a graphic artist, the fact that you design fonts shows another side to your skills that your work experience might not show. Also, some hirers like to see volunteer work listed, in the belief that such a background shows a team player with solid values.

Listing your interests also gives interviewers some talking points, a way to make both of you feel comfortable. For example, on my own resume, I list my interests as “Running; parrots; punk folk music; history, science fiction, and 19th century novels; Linux.” Almost every interviewer has asked me what I mean by “punk folk,” which gives us something to talk about.

Occasionally, too, you’ll find some common ground with the interviewer. I once got a job after a forty minute conversation about parrots that the interviewer and I had known. We didn’t spend five minutes talking about the job, but, by then it didn’t matter.

Understanding how resumes are used and written doesn’t guarantee that you will write a good one. You could note everything I say here, and still write an ineffective resume. However, at least you will avoid some of the more common errors – and that’s a start. The rest is up to your planning and ingenuity.

Read Full Post »

The first preen from a parrot

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Parrots, Personal, pets, Uncategorized on June 11, 2007| 2 Comments »

Unlike cats and dogs, parrots are still wild animals. Although the CITES treaties have all but eliminated the export of wild birds, even now, few parrots are more than three or four generations removed from the wild. That fact alone means that getting a bird to accept you is very different from training most domestic animals. You don’t tame a parrot, or enforce more than temporary obedience. Rather, you reach a point where a bird decides to trust you.

My first experience with such trust came with Ning, our first bird. I had been training him to step up on a stick and my hand, and he was learning, but it was a matter of persistence on my part more than anything else. To any unabused parrot, status is always negotiable, and, while Ning obeyed, nips to show his distaste for the exercise were not exactly unknown.

Then, one night, I was lying on the couch with Ning on my hand, when he suddenly looked as though he had made a decision and started waddling determinedly up my arm. Although Ning is a nanday conure, and not the largest of parrots, I was nervous as he touched the side of my head with his beak — as Diana Paxson once said to me, anybody with a five hundred drill press on their face automatically commands respect.

But instead of attacking me, he started delicately preening my sideburns. He spent the next twenty minutes on that side of my head, then moved on to the back. At one point, he paused to give me a desperate look, as if to say he hadn’t realized how large I was, but he kept on before giving up halfway through the second side of my head

The next night, he did it again. The night after that, when he was finished with me, he marched along the back of the couch to Trish and did the same to her. That’s when I knew that we were solid.

Since then, I’ve experience the first preen from a parrot many times. At times, it is a delicate preen of the eyelids, as it was with Sophy, the only bird I trust to do that. At others, as with poor abused Jabberwock, it was a gentle preening of my forelock, followed by sitting, nose to beak for minutes at a time. With fledglings, it’s combined with the strangely boneless slump of a content and perfectly trusting parrot. Last year, the first preen came from Beaudin, our latest rescue.

The whole experience is very much like earning the trust of a two year old child — and, if you think that sentimental, take a moment to search out Irene Pepperberg’s work with African Grays like Alex: parrots really do have the intelligence of a young child, and that clearly makes them sentient beings.

Perhaps that is what makes the trust of a parrot so special to me. Far more than with a dog or a cat – who are semi-sentient, but not in a parrot’s class — it is a trust based on an evaluation of my trustworthiness. I’ve experienced that moment many time in my life, and it always leaves me excited, humbled, and more than a little honored.

Read Full Post »

What makes a writer a professional

Posted in Bruce Byfield, editing, English, fiction, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing on June 8, 2007| 6 Comments »

I’ve thought of myself as an aspiring writer for so long that I took several years to realize that I had become a professional. The regular checks from Linux Journal and SourceForge should have tipped me off earlier, but somehow my situation seemed more a fantasy than a reality. My change of status only sunk in when I tried to describe what was happening to an acquaintance from school, and – more importantly – when a couple of people emailed me recently asking how they could break in to professional journalism.

The first time, I didn’t know what to say, but, the second time, I started to codify the differences between a professional and an amateur writer, based on my own experiences and observations:

Professionals don’t wait for inspiration before working
Often, of course, profesionals can’t wait for inspiration because they have deadlines. But, even more fundamentally, professionals have learned that word done when you’re inspired is not necessarily better than work done when you’re not in the mood. What’s far more important is to keep in practice by writing regularly.

Professionals don’t obsess over grammar
Naturally, professional writer care about clarity and precision. But grammar is only one of the means to those ends. I’ve yet to meet a practicing writer who doesn’t cheerfully break any rule in the textbook if they can write more effectively by doing so.

Professionals submit work in readable form
Remember the story of great writers who submit work full of spelling and presentation errors and written on the back of napkins and paper bags? Some of them are true – but very few. And even in those cases that are true, the writers are often handicapping themselves by creating a reputation as difficult.

For anyone else, ignoring the advantages of a clean presentation that follows the publishers’ style guides is career suicide. The less work that editors need to do in order to make your work ready for publication, the more likely they are to accept it – assuming, of course, that it is at least minimally competent. It takes very unique content to make an editor accept the extra work required to correct poor presentation.

Anyway, you don’t want mistakes to distract from what you say. Think of the editors to whom you submit work as people with Adult Attention Deffict Disorder. Anything you can do to ensure that they’re not distracted from your content is only going to help you.

Professionals meet deadlines
At Linux.com, the editors regularly accept story pitches from amateurs. Yet a surprising number – maybe as many as two-thirds – never return with the finished story. For editors who constantly need content, writers who do what they promise when they promise are rare assets. In fact, writers who finish what they start are so valuable that editors may prefer them to people who write better stories but are more erratic.

Professionals accept editing (mostly)
Edit amateurs, and you are likely to get protests. They’ve usually worked long and hard to produce their writing, so they’ve become fiercely attached to the results. Professionals don’t like editing any better than amateurs, but they’ve learned to accept it. They know that publications may have style guides that differ from their personal preferences, and that writing may have to be edited to fit a given space. They’ve learned, too, that a trustworthy editor can make them look better, or at least keep them from making mistakes in public. Professonals may complain if an editior changes the sense of what they’re saying – but then they will try to respond calmly. Those who do otherwise rarely last in the ranks of professionals.

Professionals take the work seriously, not themselves
For amateurs, writing is tangled up with their sense of who they like to be. Accepted professionals, by contrast, don’t have anything to prove. They know that their work is going to be uneven, and that they’re going to make mistakes sometimes. Having done the best they could under the circumstances, they know enough to let the work go. They still find praise gratifying or abuse deflating, but they realize that their work is not them.

Professionals write
At some point or other, anyone who has hung around amateur writers has been cornered by someone willing to talk at great length about their plans for some great work. My own worst experience was a house guest who kept wanting me to read her fan fiction when the kindest comment I could muster was, “Oh. Typed, I see.”

By contrast, few professionals will give more than a sentence or two about their current work. Some are afraid that talking will replace writing – and, considering the example of amateurs, they might be right. However, the basic reason that professionals don’t talk about works in progress is that they are too busy planning or working. Writers, by definition, save their efforts for writing.

You may notice that I only talk about work habits and say nothing about the differences between how amateurs and professional use language. The reason for this omission is not that I’m a crass commercialist, but that there is little to say.

Many amateurs show that they have a love of language and some skill in using it, yet they never become professionals. Conversely, I know several professionals who have no more than basic competence in the way they use language. So, I conclude that talent alone does not distinguish the professional from the amateur.

Instead, the difference is your willlingness to work and your attitude towards the way things are done. Amateurs are unwilling or unable to adjust, so their love of language remains a part-time interest. Professionals work and adjust, and are rewarded by being able to do what they love for a living. In the end, the difference comes down to attitude rather than talent.

That suggestion is both good new and bad news to amateurs. On the one hand, it suggests that you don’t need to be special — or not very — to become professional. On the other hand, it does sugges that you need discipline and flexibility — and those may be even rarer than talent.

Read Full Post »

The grammar neurosis

Posted in Bruce Byfield, editing, English, grammar, Uncategorized, writing on June 6, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Today, I received an email praising my recent article about the Kamloops School District’s conversion to free software, but taking me to task for alleged grammatical errors. On the Linux.com IRC channel, suggestions about how to respond ranged from “Bite me!” to “I don’t see your name on my cheque, so why should I care?” (the response I eventually chose when I got a second email from the same person) I was more amused than peeved by the brief exchange, but as I rode the exercise bike this afternoon, I started thinking about the grammar neurosis that grips the English-speaking world.

When someone becomes obsessed with grammar, they are worrying more about rules than about effective use of language. Of all the dozens of writers I’ve known, none worried about grammar beyond the basics necessary for clarity. If clarity was best served by an ungrammatical phrase, none of them hesitated to use it.

By contrast, I can think of only two English writers who could be described as grammarians: John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, neither of whom are considered major writers today. Yet Dryden frequently took Shakespeare to task for his poor grammar. So, whatever the concern with grammar is about, it isn’t about writing well — despite what generations of school children have been told.

Of course, learning rules is easier than learning how to write. Since we don’t even have the technical vocabulary for discussing writing properly, teaching someone to write even competently is usually difficult and slow. But rules are as clearly defined as writing is not. That makes them easy to learn, and even easier to test.

People tend to obsess about grammar for the same reason that a person I know once learned all about jazz: not because they have much appreciation for the subject, but because they want an expertise in an obscure subject so that they can assert their superiority over the rest of the world. In today’s case, this sense of superiority led my correspondent to contact a complete stranger and correct them on points that were debatable at best. Even if she had been correct, that’s as rude as accosting someone on the street with your fashion advice. Anything that causes such impoliteness, I insist, is dubious for that reason alone.

In Canada, another reason for becoming a grammarian is the idea that spelling like “honour” and “centre” are somehow expressions of national pride. To me, that seems a very shaky base for any sense of cultural identity. Besides, if Shakespeare could spell his name several different ways, why should other writers care about the spelling conventions that editors use in their published work? You might as well worry about the paper or the computer monitor that your work will appear on.

However, more than anything else, the self-appointed guardians of grammar fail to understand what their subject represents. Any language is constantly evolving, so how can it have any firm set of rules? The most you can do is what linguists do, which is to provide a snapshot of how a language is used in a particular place and time. And, although that is what grammarians are doing, most of them are unaware of the fact. What they present as eternal truths are, for the most part, the rules of language as they were used by the educated elite a few decades ago. The elite has the power to make this snapshot the official version of the language, but, for all their efforts, they are unable to do more than slow the natural evolution of language. They are trying to do the impossible, and they don’t realize it.

That is not to say that grammarians do no harm. In fact, if, like me, you had ever watched the agony of first year university students as they try to put their thoughts down on paper, you would soon realize that they do a good deal of harm. Not only do the grammarians in our schools emphasize a relatively minor aspect of writing, but, in the process, they instill such a fear of making a mistake that most students are almost paralyzed when asked to express themselves.

As a result, the average graduate of our school system struggles with even the simplest bits of communication, and loses a potential sense of aesthetic pleasure. Far from educating people, the grammarians convince most of us that education is something that we can never have, and that we are hopelessly ignorant.

Then, just to make sure that we never recover, they leave us completely misdirected and focused on a meaningless goal, so that we can only stumble free of the limitations with which they have blinkered us with patience or luck.

In fact, so early and deeply is the grammar neurosis embedded in our minds that the average person, faced with what I have said here will instantly leap to the defence of grammar. They will mishear, insisting that these observations mean that I am calling for the abolition of all rules. Unable to conceive that any alternative could exist, let alone what that alternative might be, most will simple retreat into their neurosis.

Yet the alternative is very simple. Just as Nelson once said, “No officer can go very far wrong who lays his ship alongside an enemy,” no would-be writers can go very far wrong if they forget about grammar when they sit down and focus on saying what they mean. It’s as simple — and as complicated — as that. And the real tragedy is that, in the reign of the grammar police, most of us forget it.

Read Full Post »

A dictionary of parrot sounds

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Parrots, pets, Uncategorized on June 5, 2007| Leave a Comment »

In one of his early books, Samuel R. Delany uses the phrase “as expressionless as a macaw.” Delany is a talented writer and critic, but, I’ve never quite trusted him after reading that unobservant phrase. Having lived for years with nanday conures, a kind of small South American parrot, I can tell you that the last thing any sort of parrot can be described as is expressionless.

Here’s a list (in no particular order) of the most common noises I’ve heard from the nandays who are slowly chewing our living room to pieces:

  • Drinking: A trill that sounds like falling water, and shows deep appreciation.
  • Thank you: A single chirp ending on an upbeat, used when a bird has just been given something.
  • Greeting: A noise similar to a thank-you, but longer and more drawn out. Used when seeing another friendly bird or human, and when stepping up on a human’s hand or arm.
  • Mutual preening: A sound halfway been been a chirp and a trill.
  • Mild annoyance: A chirp mixed with a trill.
  • Extreme annoyance: An outraged squawk, higher-pitched than usual. Unfortunately, it says a lot about the state of human-parrot relations that this is the sound that many people most often associate with parrots of any species.
  • About to regurgitate (a sign of affection): A husky cough made in the throat.
  • Content: A cooing noise, usually accompanied by fluffed feathers and a bonelessly limp attitude.
  • Content and sheltered: A purr that sounds like a cat, or maybe a noisy refrigerator.
  • Pleased excitement: A chuckling noise. Often, I’m afraid, a sign that a bird is doing something that we humans would object to, like chewing the wooden furniture.
  • Looking for flock: A moderate scream consisting of one or two notes endless repeated until answered. Even birds that don’t like each other will make this noise if they don’t see each other.
  • Alarm: A steady scream that continues until either the danger is gone or all birds are convinced that no danger exists.
  • Curious: A single chirp, rising at the end, almost like a question mark.
  • Curious and Fearful: Like the curious chirp except shorter and abruptly cut off.
  • Bathing: A loud noise halfway between a coo and squawk, made not only by the bird that’s bathing, but all the birds in the flock.
  • Sex: A noise that sounds like a rusty water pump being cranked, getting gradually faster. Interestingly, mated pairs often twist so that they can look directly at each other during sex, a behavior that some people have claimed is unique to humans.
  • Brief Outrage: A sound halfway between a squawk and a cough. May be followed by an attempt to bite, depending on the bird. For others, making the sound is enough.
  • Prolonged Outrage: An extremely energetic, high-pitched scream with few pauses. All Nandays have a strong sense of self and entitlement, so this sound can be triggered by putting them in their cages or giving one bird something and forgetting to give the equivalent to another.
  • Fear and alarm: A high-pitched, full-volume scream that goes on and on with pauses for breaths. Most often used when a strange bird or human comes within a few meters. Often accompanied by much puffing up and stalking up and down, especially by the cocks.
  • Eating: An excited single chirp, often repeated.
  • Panting: A noise made only when they are too hot. A sign that they need to be moved from where they are, and given water or even a bowl to bathe in so that they can cool off.

This list is nowhere near complete. For instance, I have left out a kissing noise which several of our birds make because it is a sign of affection that they’ve learned from humans. Nor am I entirely sure about whether some of these sounds are unique to the birds that I’ve known.

Also, most birds, I’ve observed, have one or two vocalizations unique to them. For example, our parrot Jabberwock, who spent some time in the wild, must have sheltered among pigeons, since he would make the same sound as pigeons make whenever he took to the air. Similarly, Ning, our eldest male has a combination trill and chuckle that he only makes when he is playfully stalking bare toes in a series of small leaps and bounds. And Beaudin, our newest bird, makes cockatiel sounds because he once hung out with one.

But, for all these limitations, these examples are enough to show the range of vocalizations that birds can make. And I haven’t even gone fully into the body language and behaviors that extend this range of communications.

No wonder, though, that the larger parrots are some of the best talkers outside of humanity. Many are social species, and they’re used to vocallizing at length and in great detail.

“As expressionless as a macaw.” Sure, Delany. What were you thinking?

Read Full Post »

Printers then and now

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Free Software, freesoftware, hardware, laserjets, laserprinters, Personal, printers, technology, Uncategorized on June 3, 2007| 2 Comments »

Last week, my trusty Lexmark Optra R+ laser printer expired after eleven years of hard service. In a couple of days, I made myself an expert on alternatives, and bought a replacement. This effort at responsible consumerism emphasized to me how much and how little has changed in printers over the past decade.

Eleven years may seem like a long time to keep a printer, so I should explain that, while I’m a tech-journalist. I’m not a technophile. Nor am I a technophobe. I keep current on new technology, but, for personal use, I try to avoid the two extreme approaches by evaluating new hardware carefully according to its features and my needs before I introduce it into my life. By the time I accept a new piece of technology, I’ve researched it thoroughly and I’m prepared to pay for what I want.

That was the case with the old printer. Having installed it, I forgot about aside from occasionally cartridge replacements – until, years later, to my dismay and amazement , it commanded my attention again by failing to work.

What I bought was state-of-the-art for 1996: with true 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution and 16 megabytes of RAM. I might have topped it off with more RAM, but, today, it still compares favorably to new laser printers in its price range. In fact, many comparable laser printers still do only 600 x 600 dpi. Considering how much the clock speeds and caches of motherboards have increased in the last decade, this lack of change in something as basic as printer resolution is surprising. Apparently, 600 x 600 dpi is good enough for most people, and the industry has largely stagnated.

Most of the innovation in printers is in low end inkjets and color laser printers, both have which have dropped dramatically in price. There are even low end lasers for less than $100. But,on average, the main differences between today’s printers and those of a decade ago are that today’s printers carry more memory, and cost a quarter of their early counterparts. For example, I paid $1200 for my older printer, plus another couple of hundred for extra RAM. To buy the same functionality with four times the RAM cost me $320. Other differences, like built in support for more languages and perhaps a twenty percent reduction in size also exist, but these are relatively trivial differences.

Overall, things have changed so little in printer hardware that the largest innovation is probably the all-in-one machines that combine printing, scanning, copying, and faxing. But even these are a mixed blessing; because I have a color inkjet and a black and white laser printer, I now have three scanners, two of which are inferior to my dedicated scanner and that I never wanted.

That’s the difference, I suppose, between technology driven by the demands of the gaming industry and the demands of business. If video card development were driven by business’ needs, we’d probably still think that two megabyte cards were blazingly fast.

However, one area where great changes have occurred is in installing a printer under GNU/Linux. When I first installed GNU/Linux, printing support was via the lprng command and the painfully basic printtool, and I had to run dozens of tests before I found a driver that supported my printer. Had I been buying a printer for GNU/Linux, the only real advice would have been to get one that supported the postscript printing language.

By contrast, my first stop last week was LinuxPrinting.org, Till Kamppeter’s database that divides printers into four categories, based on how they work under GNU/Linux: Perfectly, Mostly, Partially, and Paperweight. My first stop was the Suggested Printers page to look for ideal models and manufacturers. Then, I went through the websites of half a dozen local hardware vendors, keeping an eye out for recommended manufacturers and checking the available models against the database and my requirements. After several hours’ work, I had produced a shopping list of half a dozen possible printers.

The next day, I located my first choice. Thanks to the foomatic database and the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS), it was installed and running twenty minutes after I lugged it home. And most of that time was unpacking and assembling, and crawling around under the computer desk.

Clearly, then, some progress has been made in printers over the last decade – but it has been by the free software communities as much as the manufacturers or the marketplace. Admittedly, LinuxPrinting.org is part of The Linux Foundation, which many manufacturers support. Also, many of the advances in GNU/Linux printing are due directly to Hewlett-Packard’s free tools and drivers; because many of HP’s printers are postscript, they also run many of the printers made by other manufacturers. But the point is that, together, the community and the manufacturers have taken so much of the pain out of installing a printer under GNU/Linux that all I had to do was be a responsible consumer and shop around – and I would have done that regardless.

Still, I admit that I am disappointed to realize how little the basic specs have changed. A decade ago, I expected that 4800 dpi laser printers would be available by now – the equivalent quality of a fine book. So, while I’m pleased by the ugly but functional HP 3050 that I bought, I’m also a little disappointed that it is such a small improvement over my old printer.

Not for the first time, I’m left reflecting that, for an industry that once thought of itself as being composed of mavericks, the tech sector has grown awfully conservative.

Read Full Post »

Kicking the caffeine habit

Posted in Bruce Byfield, coffee, health, hypertension, Personal, Uncategorized on June 2, 2007| 2 Comments »

Three years ago, I gave up caffeine in all forms. I’m convinced I’m healthier for the decision, and that it gives me a certain edge over people. However, it constantly proves socially inconvenient.

Until I made the decision, I never imagined that I could do without caffeine. Like many people, I practically ran on it, drinking a cup of tea first thing in the morning, and two or three cups of coffee during the day – and, more often than I care to admit, a coke or chocolate on top of that. When I was teaching at Simon Fraser University, I was notorious for showing up to an early class nursing a large cup of coffee and a chocolate chip cookie. And for years, I thought a couple of coffees at Starbucks was a perfect way to spend a late Saturday morning (although never with my laptop; that would be pretentious). Similarly, in my days of office servitude, I thought sipping a cup of coffee first thing in the morning an ideal accompaniment to planning my day.

But my family has a history of high blood pressure and a couple of experiments showed that I was becoming so sensitive to caffeine that I could feel one hundred milliliters of coffee for over fourteen hours afterwards. In other words, not only was I gambling with my health, but I effectively lived with a perpetual buzz. Under these circumstances, quitting only made sense.

The first days of caffeine withdrawal quickly convinced me that I was physically addicted to the stuff. I had perpetual headaches, and I was unable to shake a listless irritation. But I was convinced that I would be better off, so I persevered, and eventually got the craving out of my system. Once the withdrawal symptoms stopped, I started feeling stronger and more alert. Aside from minute quantities of chocolate, and the occasional cup of tea to be polite – usually left unfinished – I’ve been clean ever since.

I miss the caffeine, and the sugar, if anything, even more so, but I discovered that what I really wanted in my day was a hot drink. An herbal tea like chamomile or peppermint does just as well, and helps relaxes me, rather than making me tenser.

This sacrifice on the altar of health has all the benefits that I expected. My blood pressure remains fine, thanks – in fact, it’s considerably lower than when I was a two-fisted coffee drinker. As a side benefit, I also sleep better, because my body isn’t constantly hyped up and I can relax more easily than I could before. Also, I can actually function on less sleep than previously, because I’m not whiplashed by the highs and comedowns of caffeine addiction.

However, there are other advantages, beyond what I expected. For one thing, when you live caffeine free, the artificial sense of urgency that many people seem to have simply vanishes. I can still respond to an emergency, or recognize the need to hurry, but I’m not constantly on edge.

Moreover, a caffeine-free body doesn’t lie; I know when I need sleep, and can make the effort to get it. Notoriously, most people in our society run on too little sleep, and, according to at least one study, every hour short of what they need robs them of a few IQ points. That means that, by the end of the week, a normal person can be operating at the level of a mentally challenged person. They take coffee to counteract their lack of sleep, but, just as caffeine after alcohol only makes a wide-awake drunk, caffeine on top of sleep deprivation only makes for an alert dullard.

If that’s true, then by foregoing caffeine and being aware of when I need sleep, I have an intellectual edge on many people, especially on Thursday and Fridays. And, even if that’s not true, I still have the energy to make those days as productive as earlier days in the work week.

The biggest problem I’ve had with my new diet is socially. When I’m away from home, finding a snack that isn’t chocolate is often next to impossible, even though my sugar addiction is still as strong as anyone’s.

But the real problem comes when I meet with someone, or attend a social event. People are used to vegetarians, or people with allergies, and will nod sympathetically when someone mentions these limitations. Even not drinking alcohol is socially acceptable these days in many places.

Yet, for some reason, many hosts are uncomfortable with someone who doesn’t use caffeine. They will constantly offer it, and, many times, even after I explain my preferences, the only way to calm their anxiety is to take a cup and then not drink it. Refusing caffeine almost seems an insult to your host’s hospitality, and many can’t rest easy until you accept some. If I ever fall off the wagon altogether, it will probably be because I’m tired of resisting the constant offers and want to be left alone. Modern society runs on caffeine – a fact that’s never more apparent than when you don’t.

However, I don’t think I’ll ever revert. Like most ex-addicts, I don’t want to go through withdrawal again. And, like many ex-addicts, I can be nastily smug when watching those still addicted when they’re struggling to get their fixes. So far as caffeine is concerned, a sizable portion of the population are actually functional addicts. Whenever I’m tempted to slip back into the habit, all I have to do is observe the fact to realize that I’m well out of it.

Read Full Post »

Playing with sonnets

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, poetry, sonnets, Uncategorized on June 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »

After the four line ballad stanza, the sonnet is one of the most enduringly popular verse forms in English. Consisting of fourteen iambic pentameter lines, it is often divided into eight lines that express a situation (the octet) and six concluding lines that comment upon the situation (the sestet). The advantage of a sonnet is that it’s short enough to fit well with the English lyrical tradition, yet long enough to develop a complex thought. By tradition, it has become the standard vehicle for serious subject matter – mostly love, but also such subjects as death. The sonnet represents such a richness of tradition that it’s no wonder that centuries of poets have wrestled with its structure and natural tendencies, and attempted various innovations.

The standard English sonnet is the Shakespearean, named after guess whom, whose efforts in the field could be a textbook of how to play with the standard meter. With a rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefgg, in the first twelve lines, the Shakespearean sonnet tends to minimize the effect of the rhymes, and to encourage development of a thought in either a single line or in four. By contrast, in the final couplet, the temptation is to sententiousness. The following sonnet is an effort, not entirely successful, to work against those tendencies, or at least control them:

The Trackless Land
All maps agree: This is a trackless land
That lacks you. Here, the needle swings in riot,
Each GIS runs antic. Nothing’s scanned,
And, looking round, the horizons disquiet.
Old cartographers doodled monsters here;
I conjure from my footfalls strange pursuits,
Here lurk the hulked regrets and stalking fears,
And I am lost and long strayed from the route.
Departure was definitive, I know.
You stay away, from cowardice or choices,
I come across your camps, sometimes,
And breezes people sleep with hints and voices.
So why, when doubting binds me like a rope,
Am I perverse, and persevere with hope?

Another popular form is the Spenserian. It is named after Edmund Spenser of The Faerie Queen fame, although Robert Parker once wrote one from the viewpoint of his private detective who shares the same surname. With a standard rhyme scheme of ababbcbccdcdee (with variations on the last six lines), the Spenserian sonnet is often considered more difficult to write than the Shakespearean, even though it often lacks the distinction between the octave and sestet. However, it would more accurate to say that it presents a different set of artistic problems – namely, the difficulty of keeping the couplets from becoming self-contained and creating too much of a singsong. One of the first sonnets I wrote as a teenager was Spenserian, and reflected my growing love of fantasy. I had never read the romance Amadis of Gaul – actually, I still haven’t – but it seemed to fit into the poem:

Dreams of Courtly Love
Beneath the bannered rafters of my hall,
The minstrels and poets have sung to me
Of candle-magic and moon mystery,
Of the Green Sword and the hero of Gaul,
And pre-Adamites who walked ere the Fall
Across the star-strewn sands of Araby —
But none my roving heart and soul agree
May quite approach her power to enthrall.
The ancient ballads at her glance become
High fantasy to rival Oberon,
So should my helm but bear her golden glove,
My every foeman should be overcome,
And, day to day, my battles fought and won,
For Catherine, my elfin lady-love.

No matter what the technical structure of the sonnet, it is hard to escape a sober tone, or to avoid sounding like Shakespeare. Even noted sonneteers like Keats don’t always succeed. As a result, one of the first experiments that most sonneteers try, especially in the last couple of centuries, is to alter the tone of high seriousness. One of the most successful of these experiments is the Canadian poet Roy Daniells, who started one sonnet with:

My enemies were certain I was starving,
It must have given them a fearful shock,
Through the binoculars to see me carving
A roast beef up on the barren rock.

One of my own efforts at a different tone came when I tried to express my reservations about the critical reductionism I found around as a grad student in an English department:

The Rites of Grad School
Come, splay the word and stake it to the page.
No need to fear; we have indulgent priests.
Remember in our light its strength is least –
Seesaw the knife through meat and cartilage.
Who cares how it might cadge, or plead its age?
All of us here have catered to its feasts –
Strike, I say, and when the damned thing is deceased,
Lower it to lie, our blood its hemorrhage.
We will not cross ourselves, nor keep a wake;
Dead’s dead, and needs no eulogy again.
Our undertaking over, in this vein,
This time there’s no inevitable mistake:
No innocent admits the thing again;
There’s nothing, nothing tapping at the pane.

Another area in which sonneteers have often attempted innovation is in length. A few have tried a double sonnet of twenty-eight lines, but these efforts only show just how ideal the basic form is: at fourteen lines, you rarely get more than a line or two of filler, while at twenty-eight, you often get seven or eight. By contrast, the curtal sonnet of 10 ½ lines, invented by Gerald Manley Hopkins, works extremely well, although the half-line at the end often seems abrupt. One of my own efforts at a curtal sonnet was published by Prism International in its Under Thirty issue in 1977:

A Summer Single
Yes, I have walked the way of beaches, stared,
pretending not to stare when blue-smeared eyes
opened deer-wary. When each body’s bared
in lotioned ease, I’ve eyed across breast-rise
and knotted on nylon-bound loins I’ve passed,
blood wilding on the bottlecap-bright sand.
Then every shadow has seemed couple-cast
except my own. From tideline I’ve toed fast
past those sprawled back on grass, hands spread on hands,
and, empty as an echo, found cement,
my unmingled heat unspent.

However, despite all the frequent efforts to innovate, poets continually return to the basic format. Within its 140 syllables, there’s enough challenges to keep even the most accomplished poets busy, no matter what their subject matter.

The Kingly Ones
The kingly ones who send assassins out
Can order innuendo or abuse
As calmly as from a catalogue, or accuse
Anonymous by cell, and never doubt.
A curbing’s committed; they’re not about,
Kneecapping’s done while they sip morning juice.
No animosity is their excuse,
Everything’s convenience and clout.
Just cross them once, and you’re left with a label,
– The law is theirs, you see, to cut and paste –
Complain, and you’re perverted and unstable,
Persist, and you’ll be lonely and disgraced.
To their bland lusts, we’ve lost our innocence,
Our rapes revised for their expedience.

Read Full Post »

The day Loreena camped over

Posted in Bruce Byfield, folk music, harps, Loreena McKennitt, Personal, Uncategorized on May 30, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Last fall, when Loreena McKennitt’s An Ancient Muse was released, I felt the satisfaction of the world sliding back into its proper place. For one thing, McKennitt is one of the few modern musicians whose work can literally be described as uplifting, simultaneously relaxing and inspiring. Really, it’s a sense of spirituality set to music. For another, she camped overnight on our futon many years ago, an experience from which I emerged with the conviction that, if anyone deserved to have success on her own terms, it was McKennitt.

At the time we met, McKennitt was a cult figure about to hit the big time. Trish and I were part of the organizing committee for the Mythopoeic Conference, an annual mixture of fantasy convention and academic conference that we had discovered through Paul Zimmer of Greyhaven. A west coast booking agent contacted us through our friends at a local bookstore, and asked if we wanted McKennitt to play at the conference.

Some considerable hemming and hawing later, punctuated by our pleas of extreme poverty on behalf of the conference, the agent was gone and McKennitt had agreed to play in return for the right to sell albums at the conference and transport to her next gig at the Mission Folk Festival the same day. Nothing was signed; it was all on trust.

The arrangement brought screams of outrage from our nominal committee chair. Our contract with the University of British Columbia, where the conference was being held, didn’t allow us to sell anything. However, at that point, the rest of the committee had spent the better part of a year working around the chair, so we went ahead. We knew that the conference would be full of harp-mad people full of the yearning for the Celtic Twilight, and the opportunity was too exciting to pass up. Besides, we wouldn’t be selling anything ourselves, so, even if a campus official did check on us on a Sunday afternoon, we figured we were still legal.

After a day of rushing around staving off catastrophes at the conference, at 2AM on Sunday, we met McKennitt at the airport. Knowing her image mostly through promotional pictures, we expected an ethereal and delicate creature wafting dreamily though the airport. Instead, we encountered a small but sturdy woman with a brisk stride trundling a harp. Although she was obviously tired from catching the red-eye from Toronto, she was clearly practical and well-grounded in the here and now.

As we went to the car, I made a mental note to myself: Never mistake a public image for the real person. It’s not that McKennitt didn’t have a spiritual side; it’s just that she was a much more rounded person than her stage persona suggested. I perceived, too, that, while she was friendly and polite, she only revealed so much, and would defend her privacy if it was threatened. Years later, when she sued a colleague for writing a book that violated her privacy, I wasn’t the least surprised. That fitted my sense of her when we first met.

To our surprise, we found that McKennitt had made no arrangements for a place to stay. Somehow, the matter had never come up, and we were too inexperienced to anticipate it. Unable to think of any suitable hotel, we invited her home, and started along Southwest Marine Drive. She collapsed on our futon, and, five hours later, when we rose to return to the conference, she was drawing aside the covers on the cages for a peak at our parrots, dressed in a sensible-looking white nightgown. I wondered if it was the same one she wore on the cover of Elemental, but I didn’t like to pry.

Still, for all the sense of how strong her personal boundaries were, we learned a little about Loreena ferrying her back and forth. Possibly, the fact that we were all functioning on too little sleep made her more forthcoming than usual. At the time, she was making some important career decisions, like whether to sign with a big label or continue on her own. Control of her own material and career, she made clear, was her chief concern, and we quickly came to admire her mixture of determination and ethics.

She talked, too, of the difficulties of travelling with her favorite harp, and how she usually paid for a second plane ticket, since she couldn’t trust the baggage handlers with it, no matter how it was crated. If I remember correctly, she had had some nasty experiences doing otherwise.

We entered the conference quietly, but as McKennitt looked around the lobby for the best place to play, several fans quickly gathered. She was obviously psyching up for the performance, but, for a while, she chatted with them, deftly deflecting one man’s wish to enter a correspondence about religious beliefs and another one’s enthusiastic praise of her work. Somehow, without ever looking abrupt or flustered, she managed to satisfy them and detach herself from the crowd to set about her business.

Attended by about two hundred people, the concert was nothing short of magical. The lobby acoustics were almost those of a cathedral, and McKennitt had the audience entranced from the start. At one point, the sun burst through the clouds and the skylight, spotlighting some of the crowd, and I heard an audible sigh of happiness from everyone. Later, many people told us that the concert was one of the highlights of all the Mythopoeics they had attended.

After the concert, I stood at a table, selling CDs. For at least ten minutes, all I could hear was the slap of jewel cases as we unpacked them from the boxes and placed them on the table.

Then the conference chair began squawking like a goose at our alleged breaking of the rules. My thesis supervisor took her aside, while we handed McKennitt the money and spirited her out the door. I didn’t think I had the right to count the money, but most of the audience had bought two or three CDs, so she had made a tidy bit of extra money from what was really a side gig for her. I do know that the roll of bills I handed her just before Trish drove her to Mission was so large that I couldn’t pinch its ends together in one hand.

Since that day, we talked to McKennitt only once, although we kept track of her career and often attended her concerts. We were delighted at how she managed to stay successful without giving up control, but, the truth is, we didn’t want to presume. Over the years, she must have stayed with hundreds of people, and I have no idea whether she would remember us — probably not.

And, to an extent, I don’t care. For me, McKennitt is a living example of how to combine practicality and artistic integrity. While I wouldn’t mind sitting down with her for a long talk, the fact that she showed me that possibility is in some ways more important than having a personal connection.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »