Archive for November, 2006

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15
Nov

Answering: What are your weaknesses?

By amd 3 Comments
Categories: business

People sometimes worry about this interview question where you’re asked what your weaknesses are. If you read the interview advice books, half of them will tell you to make something up that’s untrue but can be turned into a strength, like “I’m a perfectionist, which makes it hard for me to finish things, but I’m also a workaholic so I’ll be here 90 hours a week to make sure I do”. I think that’s a load of rubbish. (The other half of the interview advice books are even less useful.)

I think this is a BS question, but I don’t want to give a complete BS answer, so I try to answer the question straight up.

This is a question where people usually come up with faux weaknesses that they can turn into strengths for you, like I could say that I’m an obsessive, perfectionist, workaholic with a habit of arriving at work too early.

Well, actually I’m not a perfectionist or workaholic. Not sure about obsessive.

One weakness I do have is that I tend to be bluntly honest and sometimes that offends people. On the other hand, oftentimes people really appreciate the honest approach and lack of bull.

That’s my answer - your mileage may vary. Let me know if you think it’s dumb or brilliant, or somewhere in between, via the comments box below.

02
Nov

Using del.icio.us and Live Bookmarks

By amd 3 Comments
Categories: geek

This is a quick overview of how to use del.icio.us with Firefox Live Bookmarks. Why is it so good? You’ll find out!

First you’ll need a del.icio.us account - go to http://del.icio.us/ and register:

Using del.icio.us with Firefox Live Bookmarks

Once you’ve completed registration and logged into del.icio.us you should drag the bookmarklet up to your Tool Bar:

Using del.icio.us with Firefox Live Bookmarks

Using del.icio.us with Firefox Live Bookmarks

Using del.icio.us with Firefox Live Bookmarks

You can see that after I dragged up the bookmarklet I renamed it to “BOOKMARK” so I remembered to use it instead of using the normal browser bookmarks.

Here I’m at a blog post that I want to bookmark, so I’ll click on my BOOKMARK icon…

Using del.icio.us with Firefox Live Bookmarks

Ok so here’s where some of the magic happens. This box that says “tags” - this is where you enter whatever descriptive words that you want to tag the link with. If you’re not sure what to use then imagine this: it’s a year later and you need to find this page in the middle of 2000 bookmarks. What words might you use to describe it?

In this case I’ll tag this blog post with:

Using del.icio.us with Firefox Live Bookmarks

Hit save and we’re done - back to the original page we were looking at.

Using del.icio.us with Firefox Live Bookmarks

Ok, so what’s the big deal here? Huh? Oh yeah, the Live Bookmarks!

Using del.icio.us with Firefox Live Bookmarks

Using del.icio.us with Firefox Live Bookmarks

Here you need to type in (with your userid you registered) http://del.icio.us/rss/userid/:

Using del.icio.us with Firefox Live Bookmarks

Check to make sure it’s in the correct folder (called “Bookmarks Toolbar Folder” in Firefox 2.0 or “Personal Toolbar Folder” in older versions) and it should appear as an orange icon on your toolbar! If you click it a drop-down will appear with the latest 30 or so of your bookmarks.

Using del.icio.us with Firefox Live Bookmarks

Advanced or “How it gets really cool”

Let’s say you have 5 websites you check every day. When you bookmark them on delicious add the tag “daily” to the tag list. Then add a Live Bookmark with the address http://del.icio.us/rss/userid/daily (with your correct userid of course). This will show your daily sites on one dropdown.

If you know my del.icio.us user id then you can tag something with “for:userid” and it will show up on my del.icio.us page - cool for sending on a link.

You can Live Bookmark the http://del.icio.us/rss/popular and you’ll have a live drop-down that shows the top 20-30 most popular webpages on del.icio.us right now.

Play around with del.icio.us and you’ll find it’s a very powerful and useful tool.

Other stuff you can do with do with Live Bookmarks: bookmark http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml and you’ll have the latest BBC news headlines.

If you’re interested in the latest posts on a vBB bulletin board like the boards.ie Rugby board you can bookmark http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/external.php?forumids=388 to show a dropdown of the latest posts.

Anywhere you see “XML”, “RSS”, “Feed”, “Syndication” or the orange buttons you can more than likely “subscribe to the feed” using Live Bookmarks

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