Why Not?

I love career fair, I have been going to them since freshman year. Career fairs are the easiest way to interface and meet with company representatives, from HR people, recruiters, to engineers and maybe some executives.  This past year I learned and tried various tricks and social engineering to be able to get every single representative I talked to remember exactly who I was.

I will share with you these basic techniques I used.

*NOTE:* I am a software engineer and have tweaked these techniques accordingly for my field, not everything will work or be necessarily appropriate for your field, so change things accordingly!

Distinguish Yourself by Dressing Sharp

Everyone that enters a career fair has the standard shirt and tie, a polo, khakis, or even a business suit. They all look the same.  Now the business suit will always guarantee you a good look, if it’s properly tailored that is, but you still do not set yourself completely apart from the crowd.  The whole idea to win at the career fair is to separate yourself, and going with the standard dress is going with the crowd.  Now I am not saying to show up to the career fair in a t-shirt and ripped jeans, doing that will set you up for failure before you even begin.

So what did I wear? I wore a button down shirt, a sports jacket, and jeans.  The shirt and sports jacket gives you a sharp, and professional look, while the jeans give you style.  The sports jacket also gives you the sophistication that can come with a suit, but you still look casual enough to be approached by anyone.  The odds of people wearing another look like this is very low, and thus, you set yourself apart from the crowd.
Now, a little research and finding the right style that makes you look sharp will have to be done, the above example is what worked for me.  Just remember that the entire idea with your clothes is to look professional, but different, and the wild card with the outfit for me were the jeans.

One other note is that this style will be accepted depending on the company and field you are interviewing with.  In software engineering, many companies have a laid back culture, so my outfit was not too far outside their comfort zone.  For companies in other fields, say the governmen, things can tend to be a bit more on the conservative side.  My outfit would probably work out negative for you in this case. You can take the chance and wear it to set yourself apart, but you might impress those interviewers better with a business suit.  My field of interest is software, so I understand the culture behind it well, just as how you will understand your field’s culture better than others.

Talk to the Company Reps on a Personal Level

The company reps are standing around their booths all day talking to hundreds of different people, asking the same questions, and saying the same things over and over.  They are just going through the motions until they see an intriguing individual.  Now this individual will either have a good resume and work experience, or they find another defining feature and will want to talk to the candidate further.
To get past this barrier, there is one thing you need to know about all people: they love talking about themselves. How do you make this work with a company rep?  Well when you go up to them and introduce yourself, before they have a chance to say a word, you ask:

So what do you do at (insert company name here)?

They may go into some topic about what the company does in general, but when they finish you ask them again what they personally, specifically do.  They might actually work on some pretty cool stuff you might be interested. If you are knowledgable about the topic, then you can talk with them on an equal level.  Hey look, you just started a CONVERSATION, one of the most basic interactions between humans.  Through a normal conversation with this person, about a topic the two of you are equally interested in, you have now bridged the gap of interviewer and interviewee, into building rapport with a colleague.  The amount of other people they will do this with are very few, and by doing so, you will be remember with great thoughts.  Then when they actually do look at your resume, they will be more impressed with it because they know you. Just a note on topics, I would try to steer away from anything that is argumentative, a conversation with a company rep about emacs vs. vim vs. IDEs is probably never a good way to build rapport.

Go to the Career Fair on “Behalf” of a Student Group

In the past year, I became one of the officers for a student group on campus.  We usually coordinate events that bring in engineers from companies to give presentations.  To increase our network of company reps, I went to every single company in the career fair and told them I was there on behalf of the student group and would be interested in coordinating events with that company.  Now this is not going to get you an instant interview or job on the spot, what this tactic actually gives you is the foundation of a relationship with the company, reps, and their engineers.

With this technique, I was able to get the personal business cards and emails of every company rep that was interested in doing an event with us, and most of them joked about how “they don’t gives these cards our to just anyone!” The importance of this in the long term is that you have just built a relationship with the company.  They are going to remember that you are the one they need to talk to about coordinating campus events.  You have just become an important person to know.  Again, you have distinguished yourself from the masses.  For future purposes, when you are about to graduate from school and look for a full time job, the company reps and engineers that you have met are going to remember you and how good of a person you were to collaborate and work with.  As long as you can do the work, you now have a really easy way to show that you have a good personality and mindset to be a great team member.

Use the Strategies from this Video:

Be Confident and Have Fun

In the end, what is going to set you apart from the crowd is your confidence.  When you go up to the company reps, don’t wait them to come to you, just go straight up to them, grab their hand and introduce yourself first.  Try to lead the conversation by asking questions to them.  Be a leader, be excited, and have fun! Career fairs are all about tfocusing on how awesome you are to people who are getting paid to hear you talk about yourself.  So go ahead, be a complete narcissist, talk about yourself, and have fun, you just might get a job out of it!

This is the type of situation where you don’t even know HOW to word it for google to search for the answer.  But anyways…on to the situation:

You have run into a situation where you need to change your web page’s URL. Simple enough, all you need to call is the following:

window.location.href = "http://google.com";

Now consider a situation where you have to check that a certain situation is met AFTER you change the URL of the page. Or you just have code that is written after window.location.href is changed in the function. Does the code after the change get executed?

Yes. It does.

Consider the following function:

function test()
{
	window.location.href = "http://www.google.com";
	var strings = "cool!";
	window.location.href = "http://www.gamefaqs.com";
	alert( strings );
}

If you run this code, the web page does not end up at google.com, but rather at gamefaqs.com. Before that transition even occurs though, an alert box pops up saying “cool!”.

To prevent this situation from creating a problem for you, and end up at google.com, we want to end the function and stop the code from being executed:

function test()
{
	window.location.href = "http://www.google.com";
        return;

	var strings = "cool!";
	window.location.href = "http://www.gamefaqs.com";
	alert( strings );
}

Now your page will end up at Google, and no alert box appears.

I was running into this error whenever I tried to close a Visual Studio C++ application I was developing.  It said the following whenever I closed it:

Unhandled exception at <MEMORY ADDRESS> in <APP NAME>.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0xccccccc8

What this exception is telling you is that you have uninitialized variables in your application whose memory address you are trying to manipulate.  My problem was that I was trying to delete a pointer that was never being initialized.

To fix this, you will have to being debugging you application, then hit Alt+F7 to view the call trace in Visual Studio.  Looking through it, you should see the point in your app where things go awry, probably something that involves the value of 0xcccccccc.  Whenever you see either memory address of 0xcccccccc or 0xccccccc8, it is VS’s way of telling you that you have an uninitialized variable being used.

For further help with this problem, consult the two following links (the first helped me best):

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=505687

http://seek42.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=9764&p=99420

Phew! I have just spent the night getting this all set up and learning how to use WordPress as a CMS. Yes i know, it is super easy, but the theme I am currently using and like had HORRIBLE coding standards and thus required me to move through it slowly. Worth it in the end though! Hope you like the new site.

MUCH thanks to Casey Link for helping out with hosting and setup on his servers.

Now here’s to hopinh to become the #1 John Ryding when searched for on the web.

Tonight at VT there will be a tech talk by the CEO of a Raleigh start-up, Neogence Studios.

Come to Pamplin 30 today October 21^st at 7pm for some FREE PIZZA and listen to Robert Rice talk about the future, innovation and ambition. Mr. Rice will discuss emerging trends in technology, what we can expect in the near future, the evolution of interactive and immersive media, and how to think outside of the box, innovate, and seize opportunities to get ahead of the curve. He will also discuss his own experiences and challenges as an innovator and serial techpreneur.

About Robert Rice
Robert is a futurist, techpreneur, and author of MMO EVOLUTION. He is an expert in persistent immersive environments, simulations, virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games as well as large scale communities and social networking. With more than 15 years of experience in multiple technology fields, he is a multi-talented individual with a strong combination of Business, Design, and Technical skills. Recognized as an “Internet Gaming Pioneer” by Advertising Age Magazine in 1996, Robert was also called “a Founding Father of the Digital Nation” in 1998 by The Raleigh News & Observer while he was designing immersive interfaces and next-generation concepts for a 3D internet.

Pamplin 30 @ 7pm, Free Pizza will be had

Have you accidently locked your main screen on your lg vx8600?

Well to unlock it, the code is the last 4 didgts of your cell phone number!

Tonight I will be doing a presentation for VT’s ACM Students Teaching Students Series.

It is titled: Doing More with Less: Javascript and jQuery

I will be going over the basics of the javascript language and the jQuery framework.  It should be a great time with some free pizza and soda as well!

If you are in the Virginia Tech area here are the details:

Place: McBryde 110

Time: 7-8pm

And here are the slides: javascript_jquery

See you there!

Last month I bought an EEE 1000H for school to have a more mobile computer to use around campus.  This model had some of the best stats of the EEE at the time of purchase except that it only came with WIndows XP installed.  After some searching I was able to find a torrent for the EEE version of Xandros and install it onto my EEE.  Here is the process I took:

WARNING: This will COMPLETELY remove WIndows XP from your EEE

Requirements:

-A usb drive or SD card that is AT LEAST 2gb large, it will use the entire disk space

Procedure:

1. Download this torrent: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4345648/Asus_eee_pc_1000_Xandros_Restore_Disk

2. Unzip the boot.rar file

3. Mount the Asus1000.iso with a tool like Daemon Tools

4. Plug in your USB drive or SD card

5. Run AsusSetup.exe and follow its prompts

6. Plug in the USB drive into your EEE and turn on the computer, press F2 to enter the BIOS

7. Press the right arrow key to the Boot Tab

8. Go to “Hard DIsk Drives” and make your USB drive or SD card the “1st Drive”

9. Go to “Boot Device Priority” and make sure that the 1st boot device is your drive

10. Save and Exit the BIOS and the installer takes care of the rest!

Now you will have Xandros fully installed on your EEE.

Last fall I went into the school year with a few expectations.  I would stay there for the year, be a Resident Adviser, find a new internship for next summer, and just have an all around good time.  Then came the time of the fall’s Engineering expo.  I was invited to a lunch with company recruiters, professors, and other scholarship winners from the past year.  At my table I got to sit with the recruiters from IBM, Google, Microsoft, and a defense contractor.  It was an enjoyable lunch, great (free) food, and a chance to get to know various reps.  When the lunch was finished and before I got back to my room at my computer, I already received an email from the IBM recruiter asking me if I would be interested in a co-op in Raleigh, NC.

I had never been to Raleigh before, not even North Carolina, and I was scared to go at first because of the horrible time I had in West Virignia the summer before.

How was I going to meet people?  Were there going to be others there my age?  Where will I live?  What is there to do there?

And how do I feel at the end of it all?  Raleigh. is. awesome.

The past seven months have been one of the best times I have ever experienced.

The only other times in my life that have been equivalent to this were my summers at Camp Marshall.  Looking back on it, the reason I loved my summers there was because I grew as a person throughout each summer.  The people there were always older and more mature than me, and being from all around the world, all had varying amounts of wonderful stories and experiences.  Camp was the place where I developed who I was as a person, it helped create the personality I have today. Unfortunately, there was a quality of my personality that I was never able to embrace while there, and that was my geeky side. This is the reason why I loved my co-op so much.

Working at IBM was an amazing experience because of all the friends, colleagues, and people I was able to meet.  The people I interacted with were of a sort that I always wished I grew up around.  These people were experts in my field, all at varying levels in various specialties.  I have been able to meet authors of technical books I have seen, commiters for major open source projects, executives who have decided what products will do, heck my boss alone helped launch a space ship.  My mind was blown. But the real enjoyment came from the other co-ops I met. The friendships born from the people in the same position as me were the ones I cherish most.  It was these people with whom I could trauly be myself and embrace the geeky side of me.  These people inspired me greatly just from the amount of passion and drive some of them had.  These people helped to push me to be a better developer, a better thinker, and much more experienced with my field.  These were the friends who I could come up with an idea ofr a hack, a mod, a website, or program, and they would push me as much as my push them to learn and create these ideas.  For that, I could not thank them enough because I now feel like I am becoming an expert in my field.

Beyond that, there was so much that I was able to experience and do with them.  Almost everyone I met had the same mindset when an idea was brought up: let make it happen.  This is the mindset that I believe is what makes people enjoyable, it allows random fun, exciting adventures to happen.  Just to name some of the most memorable I had:

-The Krispy Kreme Challenge
-Skydiving
-White Water Rafting
-Creating a pool of Non-newtonian Fluid
-Patent Meetings
-Working from anywhere
-This game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-WVC2JsJ9o
-Sir Circus Rock Band Group
-Salsa Dancing

And this is not even scratching the surface of what IBM alone offered me. The chance to work with people from around the world.

Thank you to everyone that helped to give me a wonderful time full of amazing memories.

Here is a quick jQuery snippet to remove all DOM elements from a list except for the first one:

$("li:not(:first)").remove();

Where would this be useful? Say you are adding user choices to a list for a query and you have a remove event attached to each item. But you want the user to be able to remove all of their choices and start a new list of choices?

Enjoy!