And remember, résumés aren’t just for job-seekers: keeping mine up-to-date and editing it on a regular basis has helped me keep my personal and professional development goals on track.

A great starting point when looking to create/renew your résumé is LifeClever’s Give Your Résumé a Facelift; one of the best résumé design resources I’ve come across, giving simple but effective results.

Following on from that, if you’re looking for something a bit more special you could do worse than checking out these 36 Beautiful Résumé Ideas That Work. However, making your résumé stand-out as much as some of these do may not be advisable in some sectors, and I wouldn’t imagine that all 36 work. Instead, Michael Gowin shows a few of the best (see image, right).

Of course, design will always be secondary to content; write, re-write, and then triple-check your résumé. Here are some great articles giving some worthwhile advice (with some overlap, ordered by importance):

• 21 Ways to Improve Your Online Résumé – 11) Be sure any technical terms are understandable to non-technical personnel.
• The Five Most Common (And Most Avoidable) Résumé Errors – A great way to test the quality of a resume is to read just the first word in each sentence, and see what image those words build of you as an employee.
• Ten Easy Ways to Improve Your Résumé – Eliminate clutter from your resume.
• 25 Words That Can Hurt Your Résumé – Be extra-careful before putting these nice-sounding but empty words in your résumé.
• 10 Ways to Tweak Your Tech Résumé – Assume that any future employer will do a quick Web search on you.
• How to Write a Masterpiece of a Résumé – To write an effective resume, you have to learn how to write powerful but subtle advertising copy.

My tip? Stick to a constant grammatical voice. It’s my grammar Nazi showing, but there’s nothing worse than reading a sales document (what your résumé/CV really is) that intersperses the passive and active voice; choose one and stick to it, damn it! Personally I would choose the active, remove the word ‘I’, and start sentences with action verbs – very powerful.

Don’t forget to write that killer cover letter!

And is it just a new job you want, or a new career? Maybe the Princeton Review Career Quiz will shed some light on what you should really be doing?

(I originally meant to post this on LoneGunman.co.uk (an abstract is there instead), but decided against it as it didn’t seem to fit with the shorter, link-based posts I usually put there. Aren’t you lucky?)

This in itself is not that impressive. What makes this newsworthy, however, is Merrill’s past… as CIO and vice president of engineering at Google.

Google’s corporate information site says of Merrill (for now, at least):

Douglas Merrill joined Google late in 2003 as Senior Director of Information Systems. In this capacity he led multiple strategic efforts including Google’s 2004 IPO and its related regulatory activities. He holds direct line accountability for all internal engineering and support worldwide.

Previously, Douglas was senior vice president at Charles Schwab and Co., Inc, a multinational financial services company. At Schwab, he was responsible for such functions as information security, common infrastructure, and human resources strategy and operations. Prior to his tenure there, Douglas worked at Price Waterhouse as a senior manager, ultimately becoming a leader in security implementation practices. Before that, he was an information scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he studied topics such as computer simulation in education, team dynamics and organizational effectiveness.

Douglas holds a BA from the University of Tulsa in Social and Political Organization, and an MA and Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University.

I for one think this is great news. With the music industry in deep trouble and constantly being crushed by new technologies, they need new ideas… and fast. Litigation is only going to go so far in helping a struggling company to increase its profits.

As I’ve said before; “we can’t hold back technological advancement and especially the evolution of music and its distribution“. With that said, what the big labels need to do is not sue, but evolve. A ‘digital business model‘ is what is required to revive the industry and with this move it seems that EMI have realised this glaringly obvious fact.

This was my most recent introduction to Edward de Bono; the father of ‘thinking outside the box’, and the pioneer of ‘lateral thinking‘: a creative problem-solving technique that involves looking at a given situation from unexpected – and often unusual – angles.

I was first introduced to de Bono in university when his theory of ‘thinking hats‘ was introduced to us as a way to acquaint us with parallel thinking to expand the way we look at information systems. It was an interesting 10 minutes, but after that I had completely forgotten about these techniques ’til now, when I happened upon de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats when brainstorming for books to add to my 2008 reading list.

Reading more about de Bono I find that in another of his books – Simplicity – he argues that the subject of simplicity should be taught in schools as a defining characteristic of quality, something I wholeheartedly agree with. Look at the themes running through the design of most of the successful Web 2.0 (and 1.0) companies and you’ll see that simplicity and usability are at the forefront of every design decision. Look at the design of really great ‘real-world’ objects – simple, right?

Of course, simplicity isn’t everything, and it depends somewhat on your definition of the term. To me simplicity is about delivering more from less by focusing on what’s important to the end-user: a simple – yet effective – strategy which appears to be midway between ‘Getting Real‘ and Don Norman‘s idea of user-centered design.

So, Six Thinking Hats and The Design/Psychology of Everyday Things are on my to-read list (I’ve only read extensive excerpts of the latter) – if I hadn’t already read all of it, Getting Real would be too. I guess all that’s left to ask now is; what does Simplicity/Usability mean to you, and could Marmite bring peace to the Middle Yeast? It’s definitely food for though. (Puns – unfortunately – intended. Sorry.)

Yesterday, the company’s preliminary financial results for 2007 were released and they were, unsurprisingly, rather disappointing. On this news, their shares fell almost 50% to 2.07p from 4.10p six hours earlier.

A company statement released with these preliminary results was quick to point the finger too. The following quote is from The Register’s article, Patientline Results Prompt Share Meltdown:

Revenue per terminal per day fell 6.4 per cent to £1.62, this figure has been falling for the last three years. The company blames deflation in telecoms charges, reduced treatment times and more use of mobile phones for the fall. The statement further noted: “The NHS ethos is antipathetic to the very idea of patients being charged for anything in hospital.” Revenues have been further hit by “The failure by Trusts to generally adopt Electronic Patient Records…”

I won’t comment further on this, but if you want to hear more, you can do worse than checking out the comments on The Register’s article and Peter Troy’s site.

As you can imagine, this principle has far reaching implications when it is applied to such disciplines as marketing (20% of ads produce 80% of enquiries/sales), IT (80% of resources are used up by 20% of the code) and even business streamlining (80% of income is drawn from 20% of the customers; 80% of an employee’s time is taken up with 20% of the results)… but how many people have applied this principle to their personal lives?

When you realise that in your personal life you use only 20% of your belongings 80% of the time (clothes, music, etc.), and that when it comes to your own work (as a self-employed entrepreneur, an employee, or even as a student) you spend 20% of your time producing 80% of your output, you can start to take dramatic steps to alter your lifestyle.

And thus starts Tim Ferriss’ epiphany in his new book, “The 4-Hour Workweek” – the newest book to storm the tech and geek communities since David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” (GTD).

After realising that Pareto’s principle applied to almost every aspect of his life, he went from an over-worked, 16-hour day, start-up founder in Silicon Valley to an ‘ultravagabond’ – working 4 hours a week from any destination as he travelled the world on ‘mini-retirements’. As a Guinness world record-holder in Tango and a national kickboxing champion earning $40,000+ a month, Tim is living the good life – and in his book he promises to show us the secret to his success. The only question is, does he succeed?

Like many other books in the ‘personal/lifestyle development’ genre, The 4-Hour Workweek is crammed with tips and strategies on how you can – in this book’s case – be more efficient in order to free up more time and make more money so that you can do what you really want. The only problem is, I don’t want pages upon pages of tips or a set of rigid rules that I need to follow; I need an adaptable and expandable framework or principle that I can apply to my situation… I don’t want to be told exactly what to do, because the chances are it won’t apply directly to my circumstances, and as such is useless. Luckily, the book has a few of these too.

From helping you realise that the 80/20 principle can be used in you daily life, giving you a base structure on how to create a more efficient company and giving a useful structure on how to avoid work-day interruptions, the book is (on the whole) a useful read. Read with scepticism and with an analytic eye, you can garner some useful information from this book, but I would hesitate to take anything from it at face value. I’m still left pondering: ‘What can I do with this information, and what else in my life can be made more efficient with Pareto’s principle?

Ramit Sethi’s review is worthy of note, along with a few from Amazon.co.uk. John Chow is also giving away a signed copy!

However, a 2006 study in the British Medical Journal found that they affected only 4% of medical devices, and only at a distance of less than one metre – a smaller percentage and distance than the ‘walkie-talkie’ handsets already carried by hospital staff. In light of this, the Health Minister said that he could see “no reason for trusts to have an outright ban on mobile phones”, and advocated the removal of it – especially as the majority of hospitals have mobile base stations on their roofs already!

This April saw no change in stance on the ban, and Patientline – the only current supplier of “hospital bedside entertainment and communication” systems – has announced a 160% hike in phone charges from bedside phones.

For those unaware of what Patientline provide, here’s a brief summary: you get a touch-screen monitor providing television, (aggressively censored) Internet browsing, a variety of radio stations and – most importantly from a patient’s point-of-view – a telephone. This monitor is touch-sensitive and hangs on a mechanical arm for easy storage beside hospital beds. The majority of NHS trusts around the country are ‘locked-in’ to exclusive contracts with Patientline, and cannot offer an alternative to patients for many years to come.

Currently, outgoing calls cost 26p per minute, whereas incoming calls range from 39p per minute (off-peak) and 49p (peak)! To watch television for a day you need to part with £3.50 while Internet access will set you back £2.20… an hour. To compensate for this price-hike however, Patientline promised to make available a £2.90 flat charge, enabling users to listen to the radio, surf the Internet and watch TV for one day. This package has not materialised.

Now don’t get the wrong idea; I’m not writing this to show how patients and their families are being exploited for monetary gain due to the privatisation of hospital facilities – although this is a important point – what I’m more interested in is how the technology this system employs is being incorrectly used.

Put simply, Patientline’s current telephone network is digitally switched the ‘classic’ way, just like at home with lots of wires (hidden in the walls). Where is the advantage in this, where was the cost analysis, and where is the intelligence? With every bedside system already connected to the Internet, who decided that it would be resourceful to use this method of communication? Who decided against VoIP (Voice over IP, the technology behind Skype, etc.), or didn’t suggest it in the first place?

I’ll be the first to admit that VoIP has some serious QoS issues, and to get around some of the inherent drawbacks you need a high quality, high bandwidth network – but when this is already in place (as it is in hospitals using the Patientline system), network latency is low and packet loss is barely existent. I would be willing to bet a lot of money that the Patientline system could offer a pretty impressive wired, VoIP solution. The cost benefit? To patients the price would be the same as the Internet charge… amounting to a 91.5% reduction in cost, and for Patientline the reduced costs would undoubtedly mean increased usage.

However, with the call to remove the ban on mobile communications in hospitals, there is the further possibility of being able to offer wireless services to patients. Offering WiFi connectivity akin to that of The Cloud in London’s ‘Square Mile’, wireless VoIP phones and WiFi enabled-devices could be distributed to patients to offer a cheap – yet profitable – viable alternative to Patientline’s proprietary, closed system.

There are many other advantages that a wireless solution could have for hospitals in this country though. This platform-independent, device-independent, cheap and “non-physical” solution can be deployed many times faster than a wired system and without the need to disrupt a hospital’s workings. Once implemented, the ongoing, working costs of the system are minimal, and charging users even a moderate fee for usage would easily cover these expenses. As for upgrading the system; the price to do so would be almost non-existent compared to a wired solution!

With this proven technology becoming available for patients and the visiting public, it wouldn’t be long before the hospital would want WiFi and VoIP for its staff. With security consideration, another WiFi network could easily be created for hospital staff, enabling technicians, nurses, doctors and consultants to carry a portable VoIP-enabled handset making them available constantly for emergencies when in the hospital (rather than the rather ineffective paging system). Tablet PCs for staff would also allow them instant access to patient data – and a myriad of other required records – when face-to-face with patients.

The technology already exists, and with hospitals are already implementing the technology in the US, it won’t be long ’til the same is happening in the UK for patients, their families, and the staff of the NHS. It’s the next logical step. Before Patientline won their numerous exclusive contracts with NHS trusts around the country, the UK National Computing Centre actually recommended wireless and VoIP as the technology for a 21st century hospital’s staff and patients. For the few progressive hospitals in the UK who have already invested in and implemented wireless technology, the successes are well-documented, but the technology is still only available exclusively for staff and patient tracking.

I understand that Patientline is a business and that they need to recoup their investments after setting up these systems (estimated at £1m per hospital), but I do wonder if their business model is a good one and whether or not they are using their existing infrastructure in the most efficient, cost-effective way possible. Charging more isn’t necessarily the way to bigger profits; using technology intelligently and offering competitive alternatives will allow this… with or without a lifting of the mobile phone ban. To survive, Patientline need to future-proof their systems before another company comes in and steals their business from under their feet.

Note: There are some recent (June/July 2007) developments in the Patientline saga. See my new post, Patientline: In Need of Financial Treatment

Hospital Phone Charge Rises 160% – BBC | TimesOnline
Patientline Tech News at The Register
Californian Hospital Offers Patients and Visitors with WiFi – Net News
WiFi and VoIP in Healthcare (2005) – UK National Computing Centre

Three years later and three days before Christmas 2003, Jon was acquitted for the second time after releasing a number of other controversial programs. Another three years later and Jon, at 24, has been placed 19th in PC World’s article: The 50 Most Important People on the Web.

This is an impressive and overwhelming article listing everyone from venture capitalists and investors to bloggers, gamers and even a MySpace ‘personality’. Four of the top five on this list are under 35 and the youngest on this list – Matt Mullenweg – is only 68 days older than me. He created WordPress – the blogging format used by millions (including me) – and the anti-spam system ‘Akismet’ used by even more. His company Automattic has five employees, one of which is Toni Schneider… an ex senior Yahoo! executive.

What does this list teach us and what can we learn from it? That the Internet is the only way forward for entrepreneurs aiming for success; or that if you want success on the Internet you have to be young, intelligent and gifted? Not in the slightest. It’s telling us, in no uncertain terms, that the Great American Dream is over – the Great Dream is now available to every single person, the world over.

There is success and fame to be found in ‘real-life’ offline businesses, by entrepreneurs that aren’t even born yet; there are riches to be made for countless young technophiles using technologies still to be invented and there will be a whole new wave of Internet opportunities when Web 2.1 (3.0?) is unveiled sometime in the future. All this list illustrates is that if you’ve got an idea, it’s now easier than ever to realise your dream.

I referenced Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech and Steve Pavlina’s 10th business lesson which, at least in part, promote working towards making a business out of a personal passion. The same goes for employees: if you wouldn’t do what you’re doing now if you didn’t get paid, you need a new job.

Now it seems Donald Trump is getting in on the action – here’s an excerpt from a recent interview by Guy Kawasaki:

Guy Kawasaki: TV is TV, real life is real life: What’s the most important real-life advice you can give to an entrepreneur?
Donald Trump: You have to love what you do. Without passion, great success is hard to come by. An entrepreneur will have tough times if he or she isn’t passionate about what they’re doing. People who love what they’re doing don’t give up. It’s never even a consideration. It’s a pretty simple formula.

After my post detailing some of my goals, Carl commented, writing that one of his goals for 2007 is “to give the same renewing energy to each month, week, or day rather than just once a year.”

In reply to this I was wondering how to go about this – to keep this ‘New Year’ dynamism you must first instigate change or create a system to keep these changes at the forefront of your mind, right? What’s the best method? A reward system?

Carl directed me to the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA – Steve Jobs’ Commencement Speech at Stanford, 2005

Then today I read Steve Pavlina’s most recent blog entry: 10 Business Lessons from a Snarky Entrepreneur. At first they seemed totally unrelated but in fact they are not. To quote the 10th business lesson:

Do what you love, but be damned sure it’s profitable.
If you do work you love, but it doesn’t generate income, your business will fail. If you do work you hate, but it generates income, your health will fail… and your business along with it. If you can’t do what you love and make it profitable, you’ve either got a hobby or a headache, not a sustainable business. Don’t settle for anything less than passion and profit.

This, paraphrased and put bluntly, was one of Steve Jobs’ three points in his speech: find what you love and make it a career; passion breeds success and success takes time; don’t settle.

My opinion is slightly different to Steve Pavlina’s though – if you do work you love, but it doesn’t generate income, your business will fail unless you work harder and find a more successful business model. If it truly is work you love, work at it and you will eventually find a way to make it profitable. Don’t settle for an ineffective business model.Have I found my passion? Am I doing work I love? Is my answer to one of the most important questions ‘Yes’: Would you continue your work on a daily basis for free? No I haven’t, and my answer is ‘no’. But I’m young and have plenty of time to find out what this passion is and work towards it.

Wealth, happiness and health may come in time, but if you’ve found your passion you won’t care. Have you found yours?

So, I may be what a lot of people call pedantic and slightly obsessive compulsive. No matter how much truth lies in this it is definitely true that I like to organise things, for better or for worse – and usually the latter, which annoys me! This blog acts as a great place to organise thoughts and construct plans. That’s why, this New Year I am going to use this blog as a regular place to organise and discuss my various plans.

So what are my ‘non-resolutions’ for 2007 then? They can easily be categorised into four broad categories: Food/Health, Work, Hobbies/Travel and Money.

Food/Health: I need to start a proper diet. Not diet in the 21st Century meaning of the word but in the actual dictionary definition of the word: a diet as an eating regimen. One that is healthier than my current one and that is more enjoyable. I’m talking more eastern fresh food and less western modified products; fish; prepared lunches; a lot less junk food and more experimental, colourful and flavourful cooking.
‘Menus’ would be a good idea too as with forward planning I can buy nicer, fresher, cheaper food from local markets rather than plastic-laden, reformed goods from supermarkets.
Playing sport regularly would be good too as my once weekly Squash sessions are turning into once monthly.

Work: A third of my life is spent at work: 8 hours a day, sat in the office, writing code and not progressing – just earning. Investing in myself is key to progressing whilst also earning. Building my work-life reputation and increasing my future worth will in turn further my prospects and undoubtedly make this third of my life more interesting and, dare I say it, fun! Courses, certifications and training will all help me to obtain this, as will offering myself up for opportunities that arise in work and at home. Also, enthusiastically working on projects outside of my day-to-day employment can’t fail but help.
As well as working, a further third on my life is spent sleeping. This leaves, after preparing for and commuting to work and preparing and eating meals, around 6 hours. I plan on rising earlier in the mornings and getting into work at a more respectable time, allowing myself to get home from work much earlier and hence reducing my travel time considerably (no rush-hour to contend with) leaving myself with more time at home during more sociable hours.

Hobbies/Travel: I want to learn to take much better photographs than I currently do, make good progress on my personal projects and travel more: all whilst still being able to sit down, watch a film and have a drink.
A big one though is that I want to make the Internet profitable for myself. How? I’m not quite sure yet, but I do know that I do not want to do it with auction websites and in an ideal world I would like to think that it could open up some doors for myself and possibly lead to another income stream.
Writing for an average of 30 minutes a day would also be nice but is ambitious. It’s not something I’m going to do straight away and give-up on within a few weeks, but rather something I want to work towards. Undoubtedly blog based, I hope this will be a method for me to improve my style and content here.

Money: The ‘big gun’ of my New Years plan and something that I won’t discuss here right now to avert a fully blown (and boring) essay.

I’ve given myself a fair bit to do here and the hardest part is going to be how to start and how to continue. I’ve come up with a simple, two step process for hopefully completing all my objectives or, at least, realising that it was futile: progressive goals and ‘freeware’ testing.

Progressive: These goals are the ones that I neither plan on or hope to achieve immediately and hope to achieve in the long run by working towards a goal slowly. These include writing; photography; project work; exercise; and my work plans.

Tests: You can download ‘freeware’ programs from the Internet to use for a 30 day trial period. When these 30 days have passed and if the program is something you cannot use or can do without you delete it and do not use it again. However, if you realise after this period that it makes your life easier, better, or is something that you cannot now live without you purchase the program and make it part of your life. This is what I plan on doing with a few of my objectives: testing them for a month and seeing if it was worth it or whether the goal was futile.
If after this month trial something has made my life better or I want to continue it, it will be a lot easier to continue as I would have already been doing it for a month. If I want to quit: I will.
The foundation of this test is: if something is difficult I can continue doing it with ease for a month (“I don’t like getting up every day at 7am but I’ll continue for a month and then give up.””) but when that month passes I may be used to it and it’ll be easier to continue (“I hated getting up before but now I’m used to it.”). Whereas if something was not enjoyable or not as expected I’ll simply quit (“I ate fish at least twice a week but didn’t enjoy it so now I’ll stop.”). This will be a better method for my diet, early rising and some of my money plans.

How are you planning on sticking to your resolutions or plans?