Two important life goals reached

I have achieved two extremely important goals today. More specificly, I found stuff, really cool stuff.

1. I found a job. Two actually. I went to two interviews and got both jobs. I rejected the PHP programmer offer and chose the job where I will learn C# at work.

2. I found a Hello Kitty item that wasn't listed yet on Hello Kitty Hell. It's a Hello Kitty hole punch:
The image credit goes to HelloKittyMuseum and the entry on Hello Kitty Hell is now here.

Career experiments

We're living in a bit difficult times when it comes to career choices. As kids we have those illustrated books about jobs and we see: teacher, doctor, stewardess, shoemaker, butcher, baker, tailor. This list has very little to do with the real world. In high school, most people still have no idea of what to do in life and in college, they start finding out what they like to do but still often don't know how to make a career out of it.

That was the case of 26-year old Sean Aiken. After graduating as valedictorian of his class from British Columbia's Capilano College, he didn't know what he wanted to do and decided to try one job a week for a year. He blogged about it on his website during the whole year. The thing is that, as far as I know, he still doesn't know what he wants to do.

Now a slightly unrelated, but really inspiring story. Adam Shepard decided to try te american dream and start life with only one gym bag of personal belongings and 25$ (literally - he slept in a homeless shelter at the beginning). Ten months later, he had an apartment, a car, and $5000 of savings. You can read interviews with him here and here, as well as his own book.

The last, but biggest, career experiment I'd like to mention, is called "Vocation Vacations". It's a project that lets you get an internhip at your dream job to see if it really is your dream. Here's an article about it. Too bad it U.S./U.K. only. There's no programming category, no cryptologist either. But, one of my dream jobs is chocolate taster, and there is a chocolatier position:

Package: Two days of one-on-one mentorship in your dream job as a Chocolatier
Price: $999 per person

Besides chocolate taster, my other dream job it stylist in a magazine. You get to pick clothes and take pictures of them (but this part of the work is done by a photographer) and where do the clothes go afterwards? Here we go, fashion stylist:

Package: Two days of one-on-one mentorship in your dream job as a Style Expert
Price: $1149 per person

Finally, songwriter. There are quite a few positions as songwriter and music publisher, all about 2000$. Yep, the internships are paid, but the other way around. Still, it's a great opportunity to try our dream job, so I guess it's worth it.

[Update] I just learned about a very similar French project for students called Pro d'un jour.[/Update]

So I was saying we were living in a bit difficult times because it's so hard to find one's way in life. But, on the other hand, we're living in times when we can literally do whatever we want, and that's awesome.

Random Linkage: Photoshop Disasters

I'm sick and tired of my life and my school today (don't worry, it will go away soon), so instead of writing about me, I'm starting a new column on the blog. It's called "random linkage" and consists of random linkage and will appear at random times.

Today, I'm recommending you a blog called "Photoshop Disasters". It features Photoshop disasters like these:


A three-armed princess...

... and a three-armed pop-star (which is not photoshopped, but still fun).

Besides funny pictures, this blog showcases how fake most pictures we see everyday are. Have a look at these:



Now think of all the women who hate looking in the mirror because they look like the pictures on the right and not on the left. But that is a bigger conversation.

Flag the bastard! (with cool Firefox add-ons)

I listed my blog on a few blog toplists and decided to see what other interesting blogs are there. One of these sites didn't have an "adults only" section and among the top blogs, many had inappropiate content. I decided to flag them a little bit. Now please don't give me the tolerance speech, flagging a blog doesn't send the authors straight down to hell, see here or here.

The rules are simple: bloggers are free to blog about what they want, readers are free to flag them. Cool. But one of the bloggers disabled the navbar. I'm pretty sure he didn't do it for estethical reasons, as he didn't care for a nice blog template. I felt my right to flag has been violated. I got angry. The dude had to get flagged. But how?

First thing to do, RTFM. A help group led me to The Real Blogger Status, who advised to make a bookmark to the URL "javascript:toggleFlag();". I was too lazy to make a bookmark and only copy-pasted the command in the navigation bar using that blog as a lab rat (intending to unflag it right away, of course). Failed. Still to lazy to make the bookmark and afraid the solution might be outdated, I decided to find my own way.

What is the navbar anyway? Normally speaking, the navigation bar at the top where you can search or flag the blog for example.
Geek speaking:

1. Click down here to activate Colorzilla.
2. Move the cursor here to find out what it is.
3. Get the answer from here: div#b-navbar. So it's called "navbar" and is placed in this div.

Okay, now to the bastard blog. In the Web Developer Toolbar, let's pick "CSS", then "Edit CSS".
What to we have here:

1. Inappropriate content (blurred, kids are reading).
2. No navbar to flag it!
3. A "navbar" iframe (I guess it's in the div mentionned above.) with the "display" property set to "none".

So what did I do?
1. Of course, changed the "display" property. Removing it didn't help, but setting it to "block" did.
2. Flagged the bastard!

I'm not saying it's the best or easiest way or anything. However, Colorzilla and Web Developer Toolbar are definitely cool to have.

Bruce Schneier facts

You've all heard the Chuck Norris facts and you're all fed up with them. I recently came across
Bruce Schneier Facts. They're all crypto-related and I've spent hours browsing them.
Here are my favourites:

Bruce Schneier puts the "cry" in "cryptography"

Bruce Schneier uses a different salt for his soup every day.

When Bruce Schneier counts, you can't predict the next number he's going to say.

When Bruce Schneier uses double ROT13 encryption, the ciphertext is totally unbreakable.

Bruce Schneier isn't saying what you think he's saying.

Bruce Schneier mounts chosen-ciphertext attacks without choosing the ciphertext.

Bruce Schneier shaves with Occam's razor.

"Who's this Bruce Schneier anyway?" you might ask. He's a cryptographer and he owns a blog about security. His most famous book is Applied Cryptography, which of course, is on my bookshelf. (Although it's not mine but my friend's, but I'm buying my own as soon as she wishes it back.)

On my wishlist: a ball pit

I'm not easily influenced by ads. I'm also not the kind of person who wants something because everyone around has it. However, when geeks around have it and document it with pictures like these: ...I want it!
The Last.fm geeks have it. The xkcd geeks have it (that's their picture). I have to have it!
I've only been in a small one as a kid and it was already too small for me. Time to get [into] a big real one!

Other bloggers: "Young people who rock"

I ran across an awesome blog today: "Young people who rock". It's so inspirational! A girl (Jen MacNeil) who tries a new thing everyday for a year, teen AIDS activists, a 11-year-old fencing champ, a guy who went to Lebanon and Iran to interview Hezbollah members at McDonald's... WOW!
Not all stories inspire me equally, of course. For example, Isha Jain, a science geek:

In the fifth grade, she started a math camp. By sixth grade, Jain was breezing through college-level work and trigonometry classes. When she was in the eighth grade, she aced advanced calculus. Her taste for science started at 9 when she created a paradigm to explain the molecular structure of candy.

Great. Respect. But, does it inspire you? Most of us are not half that talented (I am definitely not), plus, you won't turn back time. But most of all, things you achieve at such a young age really depends on how your parents raise you, how your teachers support you and things of the kind. I was always told to have good grades and never learned for my own curiosity. Don't get me wrong, I've got loads of respect for Isha, but I'm just not inspired. I can't follow her example.
Brittany and Robbie Bergquist, however, inspire me a lot. They started a thing called "cell phones for soldiers". That's how it works:

People donate their old phones to the teens. They came up with the idea to sell them to a recycler for $5 and use the money to buy calling cards. Since they started three years ago, the pair has raised more than $1 million in donations and sent 400,000 minutes to troops. They hope to increase that amount nearly tenfold in the next five years so that more soldiers can call and say, "Hey, Mom."

That's my favourite kind of help: you start with few, people contribute few, but in the end you can give so much! Plus, the kids started it at 12 and 13, they just had an awesome idea! Anyone can do that! (Just find the good idea... think!)
A similar example: Rebecca Kousky, the founder of a non-profit organization called Nest that helps women all around the world create their own security.

Nest offers micro-finance loans to women from India to Israel. Female designers and artists worldwide come to Nest for small loans to help them with their businesses typically involving the fabrication and sale of goods like jewelry, pottery or clothes. In return for the loan, the artists have the option of paying back the loan in cash or with their product which is then featured on Nest's online shopping site, buildanest.com.

Again, you give few (50$), and someone gets so much!
Another one (man, they're all great!): Matthew and Emily Leinwand, two kids collecting crayons for kids in hospitals. If kids can help so much, co can we!