I've been having a week of highly unsettling health problems, and have the beginnings of a scale for describing the literary complexity of one's health. But I need help filling in the gaps.

Level 0: Mickey Spillane. Your circumstances are very simple. You may actually be too healthy for your own good.

Level 1:

Level 2:

Level 3:

Level 4:

Level 5: Gene Wolfe, William Faulkner. Your situation is very complex. Important truths are hidden in multi-level allusions, and very little (if anything) is as it seems.

What should go in the intervening slots?

Posted December 14, 2007 11:39 AM by Bruce Baugh

The Wreck of the Old 97.

Posted December 14, 2007 11:48 AM by fidelio

Your bindery looks... ah... cozy, Abi.

Posted December 14, 2007 11:49 AM by Serge

Can a necktie bind a book? Maybe not as well as Abi does, but people often talk of the ties that bind.

Posted December 14, 2007 11:50 AM by Serge

The Living Embodiment of Wikipedia.

Posted December 14, 2007 11:58 AM by Dawno

97 is the largest two-digit prime number.

Posted December 14, 2007 12:00 PM by Marc Moskowitz

If you go look at the livejournal linked in particles as "Two kinds of dead stubborn", you will find (rare) evidence of JMacD being WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Like so many others, I am a fanatic on one side or the other of this question.

Posted December 14, 2007 12:01 PM by BSD

Dawno @ 5... Eek.

Posted December 14, 2007 12:13 PM by Serge

#5: Well, there's a webcomic that won't have a Wikipedia entry much longer.

Posted December 14, 2007 12:16 PM by Jon Meltzer

I was watching 1965's Charlie Brown's Christmas Special when I noticed how strange it was that some of the original characters are now gone. And some hadn't shown up yet. Like Woodstock. And Peppermint Pattie. I think she was my favorite, which is probably why I married her adult counterpart.

Posted December 14, 2007 12:25 PM by Serge

fidelio, 2,

The Wreck of the Old 97.
ObOffTopic:
I wonder how modern day casemodders and pimp-my-ride types would build steam engines, were they in use today?

Posted December 14, 2007 12:31 PM by midori

BSD 7: Under what posting name?

I cannot type without putting two spaces after a period. I just hate the way it looks with only one. I even do it when I KNOW html is going to take out the extra.

See my comments elsewhere about learning to type on a manual typewriter. In a fixed-pitch font, no less. I am scarred for life.

When preparing a manuscript for submission, I just have to globally replace dot space space with dot space. I cannot type that way ab initio*, and I probably won't ever learn.

*abi nitio?

Posted December 14, 2007 12:42 PM by Xopher

"Brian Dettmer carves into books ... " He cuts up books? Somewhere inside, I am bleeding. At least the people who cut prints out of library books don't destroy the prints when the steal them.

Posted December 14, 2007 12:44 PM by Manny

In re: Bruce Baugh @ #1:

Level 2: Hunter Thompson. You may or may not be healthy, but you're not feeling any pain.

Posted December 14, 2007 12:45 PM by Scott H

When they decommissioned the card catalog at the San Francisco Public Library, they took 50,000 cards and had people write quotes from the corresponding books (or related books) on the cards, then they papered the walls of the new library with them.

It's pretty cool.

Posted December 14, 2007 12:50 PM by Kristi Wachter

Manny @13:

So you're not going to like it when I do my binding of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, then. When I can find a clothbound* copy of Hamlet, I'm going to take it apart and use it as binding materials.

-----
* gotta be clothbound. I need to unravel the cloth for thread to sew the book.

Posted December 14, 2007 12:52 PM by abi

The LA Central Library has some elevators wallpapered with former-catalog cards. And the elevators tell you the Dewey Decimal Numbers for the floors.

Posted December 14, 2007 12:59 PM by P J Evans

I'm still hanging on to an old card catalog at my place... This is giving me some very good ideas...

Posted December 14, 2007 1:06 PM by Emma

Speaking of end papers, here's some eye candy featuring a demonstration of Turkish marbling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgg0GIfbszg

And let's not forget the relevant Arcimboldo still life.

Posted December 14, 2007 1:09 PM by Debbie

Xopher @12:
abi nitio?

There's no word nitio in Latin; I presume you meant niteo, which means "I shine, I sparkle", with a secondary meaning of "I am charming."

You also missed a comma.

So, rephrased,

abi, niteo?†

To which, Xopher, the answer is nites* You are shiny.

-----
* because there is no Latin word that means "yes", you restate the verb to agree with the question.
† we are entirely ignoring the Latin requirement for question words or suffixes, because it's not entertaining to add them in.

Posted December 14, 2007 1:13 PM by abi

abi 20: Et nites. Way more than me.

Posted December 14, 2007 1:19 PM by Xopher

So...would "Io, nitet!"* be a good Latin translation for "Ooo, shiny!"?

*fix ending if needed; trying for "that shines" or something.

Posted December 14, 2007 1:27 PM by Xopher

Nitemus! I think. I'm extrapolating from Spanish.

Which leads to Nightmouse, and they can make mice fluoresce. I'm thinking a very nerdy brandname for a very nerdy pet.

Posted December 14, 2007 1:30 PM by Diatryma

Those autopsied books are beautiful. I totally want one these book purses, but I know my archivist roommate will evict me if I ever used a book violated in that manner as a handbag.

In other news, last night I saw a movie that I can say objectively was a great movie that I didn't like one bit. Very interesting experience.

Posted December 14, 2007 1:36 PM by nerdycellist

So I've brought it up most everywhere else, but I figured the Fluorosphere might have its share of special insights.

My company announced to me a couple of weeks ago that, Surprise!, I get to look for a new job, as they no longer want my group around. So anyway, I get some severance as condolences for the lay-off, but I haven't looked for a job in almost 8 years. Any advice for a (relatively) young man in the tech (specifically Oracle & Crystal reports, with a side dish of Office VBA automation) field who hasn't done this in a while?

Example discussion fodder: the one page resume is, according to some, a relic of by-gone days. Do you agree? Why, or why not? Is this an artifact of the Tech Industry, or more broadly applicable?

Posted December 14, 2007 1:39 PM by Skwid

Bruce Baugh @#1

Level 2: Jane Austen. Although there are some complications, by sticking with a reliable formula, everything will turn out as it should.

Level 3: Tolstoy, Henry James: You will eventually understand what's happening, because your ailment is fairly straightforward. Still, it will not end well for you.

Level 4: Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco: You can't possibly understand what's happening to you, but it's meaningless and will have no perceptible effect, so don't worry about it.

Posted December 14, 2007 1:39 PM by Mary Dell

I've been saying that my current parenting set-up is the worst of all possible worlds: my still-teenage daughter is away at college, and my fully adult son is living at home while he works (at a job that often has him driving when the bars close) and goes to school. All of the worry, none of the solitude.

I love them both without limit, they are remarkable people for their ages, but they are still people of their age, and I am a woman of my age and would prefer a bit more private time and a lot less cooking.

And for the next month, starting tonight, both of them will be home.

Posted December 14, 2007 1:43 PM by JESR

I too learned to type in a formal setting on manual typewriters; the last class of the day my junior year in high school. I always tried to get one of the Smith-Coronas; the Royals the school used didn't feel right.

I've always been glad I learned to touch-type back then; it kept me in beer money in college typing other people's term papers. Then I was ahead of most other recruits when in Navy Radioman school I didn't have to learn my way around the TTY keyboard.

Oh, and Xopher, I double-space after periods and colons too.

Posted December 14, 2007 1:49 PM by Linkmeister

JESR, I don't know how my parents are going to handle our house for the holidays. This year, they've had just themselves, the big yellow dog, and the fiercely territorial cat (and a snake, but she's not important). Soon, my siblings Baby Sister and JM both come home, one of them bearing the entire contents of her dorm room (she's transferring to the community college) and one bearing his girlfriend's ferrets, Flower and Bubba. Then I come home, which puts us at something like nine cars fitting into the house and streets, and I'm bringing another cat. We will also have JM's friends and girlfriend over quite a lot.
And the house is all Christmassed up. This could get very interesting very fast.

Posted December 14, 2007 1:49 PM by Diatryma

JESR: Make them cook. Tell them that from X time to Y time you need to be left entirely alone unless the kitchen is on fire.

Give them specific cooking assignments. Don't have a backup meal.

Posted December 14, 2007 1:54 PM by Xopher

Skwid, 25,
Example discussion fodder: the one page resume is, according to some, a relic of by-gone days. Do you agree? Why, or why not? Is this an artifact of the Tech Industry, or more broadly applicable?

Disagree. If I* meet you outside of a tech environment, and I'm interested in you, how do we exchange data? A one page advertisement for you that tells me what you do and how to get a hold of you is going to be way more useful than...pretty much anything I can fit into long term memory.

If I'm interviewing you, and I decide I want to hire you, but I have to convince the rest of the commitee, then having that sheet of paper I can photocopy and pass out at our next meeting is great. If you didn't bring that sheet of paper with you to your interview, then you have to count on me remembering to find it on the company's (buggy) HR webapp.

Arguably, if you can fit the essentials of what you know how to do, and where you did it, onto a single sheet of paper, that's awesome, because nobody is ever going to want to read more than that.

I'm thinking the question isn't "are resumes still useful" but "what are resumes actually used for?" As far as I can tell, all of the scenarios mentioned above, plus the data in them is useful for sorting out who not to call back. That step may or may not be taken over by crappy HR webapps.

*I = hypothetical hiring person

Posted December 14, 2007 1:55 PM by midori

Diatryma, your parents obviously win, and would win on points for either the ferrets or total dorm-room dump, let alone both. I can only hope their house is much, much larger than mine.

And speaking of houses, let me pass on a piece of hard-earned life wisdom on the same scale as never create with a bulldozer a problem you will later have to solve with a shovel: If you are of the Christmas/Yule/Solstice tree persuasion, DO NOT SIGN THE MORTGAGE PAPERS ON ANY PERMANENT DWELLING UNLESS YOU KNOW PRECISELY WHERE A CHRISTMAS TREE WILL FIT.

Fourteen years here and we've yet to find a place that doesn't entail terrible inconvenience.

Posted December 14, 2007 1:58 PM by JESR

Xopher @21:
Gratias ago tibi.

& @22:
Less sure about the Io than the nitet, which is correct.

But I'm not up on my Latin exclamations.

Diatryma @23
Nitemus means "we are shiny", in both the visual and Firefly senses. Spanish is a good extrapolation here.

Posted December 14, 2007 2:00 PM by abi

The people I work with want resumes, because that's how they decide who might be worth calling in for an actual interview. Notes get made on the paper copy, too.

(Also, it separates the people who are really clueless about work history and resumes from those who have some competence. I saw one once where the misspellings and inverted dates alone would have killed any possible interview, if the history of frequent job changes hadn't done it first.)

Posted December 14, 2007 2:02 PM by P J Evans

When I saw "autopsied books", I immediately thought of the books bound in William Burke's skin, some of which are on public display here in Edinburgh.

Posted December 14, 2007 2:08 PM by Iain Coleman

Xopher, in actual fact the "make them cook" stricture has been in force for a decade or so. The problem is that making the elder do more than he's doing now (which includes his own laundry, feeding cattle, 35 hours a week on the job and full-time college) offends my sense of fair play. The younger is six hundred miles away most of the time; she cooks when she's here, but that leaves a whole lot of dinners when she's not.

Privacy is a tricky thing; we've yet to negotiate a common definition.

Posted December 14, 2007 2:10 PM by JESR

If the book is a biography, will it be biopsied?

Posted December 14, 2007 2:10 PM by Serge

@22, #33--Ecce, nitet!

Posted December 14, 2007 2:15 PM by fidelio

I really like the way you've got the workbench set up for natural lighting. I'm going to have to keep that in mind when I move into a house...

Posted December 14, 2007 2:16 PM by DarthParadox

Bruce #1 and Mary #26, Is there room for:

Level 4.5: Umberto Eco, David Foster Wallace. The diagnosis is written in English, but you need to read it three times and consult two encyclopedias before you can begin to tease out the meaning.

Posted December 14, 2007 2:16 PM by Monica Toth

We have a very large house. This is why all three kids are such terrible packrats: there's always room to put a box of post-bedroom possibly-trash. Since I'm living relatively on my own now, Baby Sister has taken over both my room and hers, as well as most of the front of the house. My parents walk through the front of the house to get to the front door, but otherwise live in the great room.
Besides, a lot of what Baby Sister is bringing home started out there, and it is dwarfed by what she left behind.

The first Christmas in the house, we put the Christmas tree in the big picture window in the music room. It was disappointing, not least because even then, the front of the house was for kids, and the back was for adults. The next year, we had to figure out a way to get a tree into the great room, which has a two-story ceiling and a perfect place for a tree, right next to the stairs going up to the second-story kitchen lofty thing.

Do you know how big a tree will fit in two stories?

Do you know how interesting it can be to get a fifteen- to twenty-foot tree into an interestingly-shaped house?

Posted December 14, 2007 2:18 PM by Diatryma

My company announced to me a couple of weeks ago that, Surprise!, I get to look for a new job, as they no longer want my group around. So anyway, I get some severance as condolences for the lay-off, but I haven't looked for a job in almost 8 years. Any advice for a (relatively) young man in the tech (specifically Oracle & Crystal reports, with a side dish of Office VBA automation) field who hasn't done this in a while?

Example discussion fodder: the one page resume is, according to some, a relic of by-gone days. Do you agree? Why, or why not? Is this an artifact of the Tech Industry, or more broadly applicable?

When I saw your question I assumed that the distinction was between one-page resumes and longer resumes, but I see others are making a different assumption.

I would say that yes, you need a resume, but it doesn't have to be a single page. Mine isn't. Of course, I've been employed for 14-22 years, depending on how you count it. If you have only been employed for a few years you can probably fit everything onto one page. If not, I would at least make sure that the most important information is on the first page - for example, don't lead off with your education, since unless you just got a degree that's not critical.

Posted December 14, 2007 2:24 PM by Dan Blum

Diatryma @ 23... they can make mice fluoresce

A fluorescent hamster, now that would be a great mascot for this neighborhood.

Posted December 14, 2007 2:42 PM by Serge

Dan is correct, I was unclear. I don't think many people would question the need for a resume of some sort, the dilemma is whether one should bend over backwards summarizing so as to keep everything on one page. This was the advice I most often received a decade ago (countless horror stories about bored HR reps going through stacks of resume slush, throwing out anything of more than one page unexamined), but my sources these days are saying that one should be much more specific and spill over onto a second page. For now, I've still got my cramped one-pager, but I really think I should have an expanded version if it should be requested, at the least.

Posted December 14, 2007 2:50 PM by Skwid

The worst resume requirement I saw for either grad school or a summer research program wanted my CV in four hundred characters. It was possible, but only barely.

Posted December 14, 2007 2:55 PM by Diatryma

Skwid, in my experience the usefulness of the one page résumé depends on who/what is hiring. At big bureaucracies/governmental organizations/universities we usually are not allowed to qualify someone for an interview unless we can prove it from the résumé. And arguing with HR is ... umm... well, there's a reason Catbert is the evil director of HR.

Private industry usually has more flexibility, and the one pager is usually more appropriate.

Résumés are like other things, where it's not size that matters, but demonstrable skills. ::grin::

Good luck!

Posted December 14, 2007 2:57 PM by Tania

According to my own experience reading resumes, the best practice is still to have a one-page resume and a cover letter which addresses your fit for a specific job; sending multi-page resumes to HR departments without seeking a specific job is a great way to end up in the round file.

Two pages is on the cusp. Better a two-page resume in readable format than a one pager in eight-point.

Posted December 14, 2007 3:12 PM by JESR

In the tech companies where I've been involved in hiring, there are three distinct hurdles to get past. (This is all talking about "individual contributor" tech positions -- I have no idea how or if the process differs for management or non-tech positions).

First, you have to get to the hiring manager. There's someone else, either a headhunting company or an internal recruitment staff, who's doing first-run triage on resumes. They generally don't really understand what the team is looking for, so more often than not this comes down to comparing the resume against some keywords the hiring manager has suggested. So for this, you need a resume, and you need to have guessed some of the right buzzwords.

Next, you have to look interesting enough to the hiring manager for it to be worth a technical person's time to talk to you. The resume's all this decision is based on too, so it still matters: obvious lying and a complete lack of communication skills are bad here, but other than that as far as I can tell it largely comes down to luck.

And finally, you talk to people. From here out, the resume is primarily just a starting point for conversations, and doesn't matter much. Do be careful that if you claim to be an expert on a subject that you can back that claim up, though.

Good luck! Where are you located?

Posted December 14, 2007 3:19 PM by Todd Larason

Skwid, when I hire folks for my team, I tell our HR recruiter what we're looking for, both in terms of personality and specific tech skills. And I give her a job description that's got some key phrases in it like "unix admin experience a plus" or "SQL knowledge required." She goes on dice.com and some other industry looky-see places and does keyword searches, and she puts the word out to recruiters, using the same phrases, etc. Then she reads through all the resumes and gets me anything that seems to match.

When I get the resumes, I go through with a highlighter and mark off anything that matches up to what I'm looking for, and I also look for a pattern showing width/depth of knowledge, since different positions call for different things. For example, a help desk person needs a broad base of shallow knowledge; a db architect needs in-depth expertise on one thing. I also look to get an overall sense of the person's level so I can figure out if they're in our salary range.

So, from a manager's perspective, I think the best resumes are the ones that show a pattern of activity and experience, and are liberally peppered with specific accomplishments and technologies. If it's 3 pages long, no problem, since I'm just skimming anyway. Whereas if it's 1 page long and doesn't happen to list the one odd thing that will catch my eye, you could miss an opportunity.

Posted December 14, 2007 3:22 PM by Mary Dell

Bruce Baugh #1 -

Level 4: Thomas Pynchon - even when you know you what you have, you have no idea where it came from.

Level 4.01: J.D. Salinger - whatever you got has been hanging around for 50 years.

Level 1.02: Michael Chrichton - even if you think you have it, you don't have it, particularly if you think you have a fever.

Posted December 14, 2007 3:38 PM by Steve C.

Skwid @ 25: I think Rands' take on this is very useful: your resume needs to make an impression in 30 seconds or less. His take on what he's interested in: your name (because he's about to Google you, or he knows you), who you worked for (know the company? good guess at what you do. don't? scans for keywords), job description and history (what have you been doing, how long, any inconsistencies), and finally other interests and extracurriculars (how is this resume different from the last 50 I saw?). And that's the 30 seconds.

Highly recommend reading the whole article.

Posted December 14, 2007 3:39 PM by Joe McMahon

Skwid @ 25: Any advice for a (relatively) young man in the tech (specifically Oracle & Crystal reports, with a side dish of Office VBA automation) field who hasn't done this in a while?

Also relatively young & techie, I've hunted jobs twice in the last 12 months. (Contract expired followed by dot-bomb collapse.) I found the following to be effective:

1. Post your resume on Computerjobs.com, Monster, and careerbuilder. MS-Word format is standard for recruiters, but some of the job sites want you to jump through a few site-specific hoops. Throw in as many buzzwords as you feel comfortable asserting competence in. Recruiters will begin phoning about 5m after you post.

2. For each of the above web sites, do an a.m. scan of the new postings. If something looks particularly choice: 1) send an email with attached resume 2) follow-up 1h later with a phone call.

3. Resumes should be as long as you need to communicate your skill set. My last one ran well over a page and no one blinked.

4. Based on my experience on the hiring side of the desk, the following translation table applies. You may wish to fluff your resume accordingly:

claim="1 year experience" --> actual="I've heard of it"
claim="2 year experience" --> actual="6 months. knows the basics."
claim="5 years experience" --> actual="either actually competent or a gifted bullshitter"
claim="competent" --> actual="very good indeed but still modest"
claim="expert" -->actual="incompetent AND arrogant"
claim="less than 1y" -->actual="hasn't sent out resumes in a while"

Oracle is still pretty happening. You shouldn't have too much trouble finding something. Happy hunting.

Posted December 14, 2007 3:46 PM by Scott H

Skwid, let me recommend LinkedIn. I know a number of tech folks who have gotten interviews through LinkedIn - since you know someone who can vouch for you, you tend to get past the slush process and at least to the phone interview stage a lot faster.

For getting the resume down to one page, I suggest using the heading "Relevant Experience," which indicates that you have plenty of other experience, too, but you've been thoughtful enough to highlight just the bits your reader will care about.

Posted December 14, 2007 3:47 PM by Kristi Wachter

Iain @35:
Out of curiosity, are you a geocacher? Not because I know you from gc - I don't hang out there any more - but because if you are one, are in Embra, and are interested in Burke & Hare, I have a recommendation*.

-----
* yes, blowing my own horn on this, but it's relevant.

Posted December 14, 2007 3:58 PM by abi

I have a summary resumé for initial contacts and a longer one to take with me to interviews.

The "Relevant Experience" paragraph makes a lot of sense.

Posted December 14, 2007 3:59 PM by Linkmeister

abi @16: Brilliant, I love it!

Manny @13: I still feel queasy hitting books with hammers, rounding and backing. It's getting better, but I think it will be a few more years before the horror has completely left.

Posted December 14, 2007 4:25 PM by Ralph Giles

Ralph Giles @56:
I'm still looking for a copy of Hamlet to tear down, of course, but I'm glad you like the idea.

If you find rounding and backing feels like beating up books, have you tried Jim Brockman's technique of concave rigid spines?

Posted December 14, 2007 4:35 PM by abi

I have a thermal mug question. Here in the high country, I like to take a mug of tea with me if I'm going to be sitting outside in the cold somewhere for longer than an hour or so. I have a few thermoses and insulated mugs, but I prefer my tea with milk, and without exception, the tea tastes nasty from the plastic lined thermal device. I also like blackcurrant flavoured tea with some sugar, which tastes fine from the thermal things, but does anyone know of a thermal mug or flask that doesn't make tea with milk taste weird?

Posted December 14, 2007 4:36 PM by flowery tops

Speaking of bookbinding...

Posted December 14, 2007 4:51 PM by Lee

Abi @ 54:

I'm not a geocacher, but thanks for the recommendation. Sounds like a good wee walk for a dark winter's evening.

Posted December 14, 2007 4:53 PM by Iain Coleman

I'd like to make mulling spice sachets to give away for mini-presents this winter. I have cinnamon sticks, cloves, allspice berries, and cardamom pods. I also have fresh ginger slices and fresh orange zest strips. What should I do to those last two things (or substitute for them) to ensure that the spice sachets have a decent shelf life?

Posted December 14, 2007 4:53 PM by shadowsong

Lee @59:
Oooh...nice.

But I note they used a pre-made headband. Should have sewn it by hand.

Posted December 14, 2007 4:55 PM by abi

There are steel/aluminum-walled thermos-type objects, but I don't know whether they might give your milky tea a "metallic" taste. Generally I've had excellent experiences with the Nissan/Thermos brand.

Posted December 14, 2007 4:55 PM by Julie L.

If I downloaded OpenOffice onto a PC clone running (yes, I know, I know) Vista, could I read .xls files?

Eventually, I would like to take up the church newsletter again, which would also mean downloading OpenOffice because my new computer has nothing more complex than WordPad. I pride myself on creating elegant, readable pages. And I go into FROTHING RAGE when I download one of those cute little "fill-in-the-middle" frames or word bubbles or what have you and I can't actually PUT ANYTHING IN THE BLANK PART IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PICTURE. What good are they?

Posted December 14, 2007 5:02 PM by Jenny Islander

xopher @ #22, I think I'd go wth "Eia, nitet!"

nerdycellist @ #24, I've had that experience. With Osama, for example.

Posted December 14, 2007 5:03 PM by Lila

JESR #32: DO NOT SIGN THE MORTGAGE PAPERS ON ANY PERMANENT DWELLING UNLESS YOU KNOW PRECISELY WHERE A CHRISTMAS TREE WILL FIT.

Amen, sister. This is our fourth Christmas here, and I'm still not happy. We're of the "put the tree in or near the front window" persuasion, and we've got a doozy of a window, a huge bay. Unfortunately this is also the obvious/OneTrue place for the couch. So for three years we moved the couch, with a resultant furniture arrangement that turned out to discourage guests from even entering the living room. (It damn near discourages me!) My husband, swearing that he will never move the couch again (it has a queen-size bed inside and is more than just quite heavy) insisted last year that after Christmas the couch stay where it had been temporarily placed. The tree looks good, but that couch has been bugging me for a whole freaking year. And will continue to do so. (My personal theory is that the tree would look great in the equally-large upstairs bay window in the bedroom, where it wouldn't discourage anything bu maybe the cat, but carrying the tree up the stairs would be, umm, difficult in several senses of the word. Alas.)

Posted December 14, 2007 5:05 PM by joann

Jenny @ #64, I don't know why Vista would make any difference. I just opened an .xls file using OO with no trouble whatsoever. The only caveat I can think of is retaining it as an .xls file after working on it. If you want to, be sure to save it as such, because OO defaults to its own spreadsheet format (.ods, I think).

Posted December 14, 2007 5:10 PM by Linkmeister

Also, OO uses semicolons instead of commas to separate arguments in a function, and is incapable of using an entire column or row as a range. For example, Excel would say =COUNTIF(b:b,a2) and OO would say =COUNTIF(b2:b2000;a2). And if the text in A2 contains parentheses, that COUNTIF function will return 0 no matter how many matches there really are. ARGH.

Trying to use OO after spending more time than is technically healthy for me dinking around with Excel 2003 is infuriatingly not quite right.

Posted December 14, 2007 5:26 PM by shadowsong

Skwid@25 ...
When I'm hiring[0], I don't care if the resume is one page or 16 pages (academic resumes *sigh*). What I -do- care about is being able to figure out if you're interesting enough for me to want to read further after the first page.

What that means (for me, slightly incoherently, since it's been a long week):

(1) There should be something that tells me what sort of job you want to have ("UNIX administrator" is useless - do you want to build genome sequencing clusters, or would you prefer a highly predictable 9-5 job, where you're responsible for specific, well understood things).

(2) There should be something that tells me what you can do for me, vis-a-vis your previous work experience and skills. ("Normalized a database of ten billion entries, reducing end-of-month reporting time from 3 days to 3 hours" (spurious example, but hopefully clear enough) "Negotiated a 15% reduction in support contract costs", yada, yada).

(3) I don't have to work at figuring out what's on the page. That means no fancy fonts, no smushingeverythingtogether, so it's unreadable, no murky acronyms, IYKWIM.

It's (hopefully) obvious, but having your name and the page number on each page of your resume makes it obvious if a page has gotten lost, as well.

Unlike somebody further up the page, I'd never recommend padding your resume - the reason I suggest the "what you can do for me" section is that it highlights what you can do, which is completely separate from the years you've been doing it.

[0] Tech industry, everything from no experience through to senior level experts

Posted December 14, 2007 5:29 PM by xeger

nerdycellist@24:

It's possible that the artist used just the boards (aka covers), and the textblock/book itself* lives on in a less attractive but more durable library binding, although it's hard to tell whether that's the case** here or not.

I'm not sure whether or not that would mollify your roommate. I'm always a little ambivalent about these sorts of things, myself.

* -- I'm not entirely comfortable with calling this "the book itself". It's *most* of the book, but its original binding served as something more than just a container for its information, unlike this.

** -- unintentional bookbinding pun

Posted December 14, 2007 5:35 PM by kyubi

joann, the best place for a tree in my house, from the traffic-flow and seating viewpoint, would be in the corner bay window in the kitchen. Kitchen? Who puts the tree in the kitchen? And anyway that's where the orchids live. In fourteen Christmases we've had it on the dining room table (which makes entertaining guests impossible), on the entry table (which makes entry a challenge), and jammed in the corner of the living room (which is now the location of a stack of boxes my sister insisted on getting out of her house, just because it was our stuff. Imagine!).

I'm stuck with this house; even if we wanted to swap it out (it's a double wide; we're real farmers, in that way) it would involve digging up and storing out of the way some giant irreplaceble landscape plants, and I'm not up to the job. I have yet to win the argument for a teeny tiny tree, and somehow no-one wants to talk about getting a fake one and hanging it from the dining-room ceiling.

Posted December 14, 2007 5:47 PM by JESR

Hey!

Where did all these fellow bookbinders come from? Cool! How long have you been binding? What kind of binding do you do?

I'll have been binding six years come January; I'm self-taught and bind mostly in leather. I do fine binding and some designer binding, mostly traditional structures. But really, I just do what interests me.

Posted December 14, 2007 5:54 PM by abi

Not a sonnet, but stimulated in part by Avram's thread on childhood memories:

dark seedpod sword nature's provided toy
what worlds were dreamt in that forbidding place
with pleasures of the bloodless hunt and chase

it took such little things to bring true joy
as all unthinking we created grace
dark seedpod sword nature's provided toy

yet far too swiftly each discards the boy
too much to do though different in each case
and far too fast deep lines will groove the face
dark seedpod sword nature's provided toy

Posted December 14, 2007 5:56 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Skwid @25,

Having gone through Silicon Valley searches, I think the single most important thing is to have a really good cover letter. And cover letter system.

Your CL connects the dots between their reqs and your skills. It also lets gatekeepers know-- or at least leave them unable to vote against you-- that you are qualified, even if they don't understand the details (and they often don't). By gatekeeper I mean the HR or recruiter who'll send resumes on to the actual hiring manager.

I made sure that even 10 seconds of reading- or even glancing- on their part would let them know that I met their main reqs.

For example, If they needed 4 years of experience in XYZ, my resume might have those 4 years at 2 different companies in 2 different industries / languages / etc, so the reader couldn't automatically see it. The cover letter, in contrast, could have "4 years..." as the 1st bullet point. The resume is proof of your qualifications, but the CL is your claim.

More later, and I'll email an example.

Posted December 14, 2007 5:58 PM by Kathryn from Sunnyvale

fidelio 38: "Look, shiny!" Useful too (and will appear here before long), but not quite what I had in mind.

Lila 65: 'Eia'!!!! That's the word I was looking for. Thanks!

Posted December 14, 2007 6:14 PM by Xopher

I meant to link to this page about types of Chinese bookbinding found in the Dunhuang caves on one of Abi's earlier bookbinding threads, but I don't think I ever did.

Incidentally, does anyone know if it has ever, anwhere, been a common practice to bind books with the spine horizontal rather than vertical in the field of view of the reader? I.e., such that one turns the pages from bottom to top rather than from right to left (or vice versa)? And does that orientation have obvious disadvantages, or did things just happen to work out this way?

Posted December 14, 2007 6:38 PM by Tim May

Skwid:

My advice, in a direction somewhat orthogonal to the general flavor of advice you're getting, would be that now is a good time to diversify. For your next job, hunt a job which uses some of your existing skills - so they'll hire you - but builds on them in a new different direction. If you've got experience with Crystal Reports and Office VBA automation, for example, hunt for a job where you're using that in a .Net programming context, and then leverage it into doing VB.Net and C# or J# programming. (MS .Net programmers will be in demand for quite a while, I think.) Or get a job which uses your Oracle reporting skills and find a way to take on DBA responsibilities and pick up DBA skills in that job. Etc. In the short term it's easier to get hired by having lots of years in one thing. However when the industry suddenly changes course, as it does from time to time, and nobody is using X/Y/Z any more, that can turn deadly to your career. Better to keep adding new skill areas from time to time.

I agree with the general flavor of the advice up thread, especially from Mary Dell and Katharine - use a couple pages if it takes that to comfortably fit in all your buzzwords, but be ready to summarize it in a less-than-one-page cover letter.

Advanced play: Classify the jobs you are going after into discrete niches, and have a custom version of the resume for each niche, emphasizing different skillsets as primary. You may even wish to tweak your resume a little for each job you're applying to.

Posted December 14, 2007 6:38 PM by Clifton Royston

Oh, also I found Dice.com to be the most useful site to post your resume to for relevant queries. YMMV.

And IMNSHO never ever pad your months/years of experience - that's just the kind of thing that will throw you right out the door of a job you might otherwise have had. One of the absolute worst things that can happen during the hiring process is if the interviewer suddenly finds a reason to suspect your moral character - they are likely to drop you like a hot potato and go for someone less qualified but who they think is more trustworthy. I have had to drop candidates like that myself, when our reference checks cast serious doubts on claims they'd made.

P.S. Kathryn, not Katharine. Excuse me! It was right there above my post, too!

Posted December 14, 2007 6:47 PM by Clifton Royston

Jenny: Yes, OpenOffice will do fine with .XLS files. However, the formula language is different as noted upthread and if you are experienced in writing Excel formulas, that will drive you insane; I can rant and rave at length about this. The word processor and presentation program (Word and Powerpoint clones) are pretty acceptable.

Posted December 14, 2007 6:52 PM by Clifton Royston

Clifton @ #77, "However when the industry suddenly changes course, as it does from time to time, and nobody is using X/Y/Z any more, that can turn deadly to your career."

(Flashing red lights, bells...)

Fat lot of good managing a mid-sized IBM S/34 and its data entry personnel for nine years has done me.

Posted December 14, 2007 7:01 PM by Linkmeister

Lee @59: Pretty, and at least somewhat appropriate to the aesthetic of her other books. Do you know if she hand-wrote each copy, or are the others facsimiles?

abi @72: I started taking occasional classes about 4 years ago, but am only now trying to put together some of the larger tools so I can do things at home. I just bought myself some gold and hand tools. Still getting the hang of warming them on the kitchen stove...

Pictures of some of my books.

I've heard of the concave spines but never done one. About the instructions you linked: What does he mean about "the...top board may be cusioned"? And I'd only heard of a yapp on the fore edge. Is that what he's describing, or is he putting them on the tail as well? I guess if it filled the square at the top of the foredge it would also help support the book block.

Thanks everyone for the various binding links!

Posted December 14, 2007 7:33 PM by Ralph Giles

Scott H #52 typed:
"Throw in as many buzzwords as you feel comfortable asserting competence in."

Be careful. Not sure of the laws where you are but we had a high profile case of that ended with a jail sentence.

Posted December 14, 2007 7:35 PM by Soon Lee

Lee, #59, This is the official link, if people interested in bookbinding and self-publishing want to check out the Amazon page for their recently-purchased copy of one of a very limited edition. (Several rather large images.) Some other background and detail are in the newspaper story, with links, here (you can read this while you're waiting for the other page to load if your connection is slower).

Posted December 14, 2007 7:41 PM by Epacris

Skwid, I'm job hunting too. Got laid off Wednesday, ave severance etc. sufficient for a bit.

Last time this happened, I had a new job before the severance ran out.

Unfortunately I'm just a power user, not a programmer. But that may not be a bad thing.

Posted December 14, 2007 7:45 PM by Paula Helm Murray

Clifton @79: Have you ever tried Gnumeric? It's supposed to be a closer clone, but the Windows build isn't nearly as well supported. Just curious, but I prefer it to the OpenOffice.org spreadsheet on Linux.

Posted December 14, 2007 7:52 PM by Ralph Giles

I want to take this open-thread opportunity to thank Serge for his comment a couple days ago in the inner-lives-of-rodents thread that linked to the Girl Genius webcomic. I have now read the whole thing, am utterly addicted, and have put the book collections atop my to-buy list. ( www.girlgeniusonline.com )

yay!

Posted December 14, 2007 8:07 PM by ink cannery girl

Linkmeister @ 80 ...
Fat lot of good managing a mid-sized IBM S/34 and its data entry personnel for nine years has done me.

Hmm... any idea how transferable your S/34 skills would be to the AS/400 ? I know the AS/400's theoretically the successor to the S/34, but that doesn't tell me much about how related the skillsets are.

Posted December 14, 2007 8:22 PM by xeger

@52: Recruiters will begin phoning about 5m after you post.

There are still recruiters? I thought all of them moved over to be real estate salesmen.

Posted December 14, 2007 8:26 PM by Jon Meltzer

xeger, I dunno, and to be honest, I haven't done the managing systems thing in about 15 years. I should have used a different tense in my bad-tempered grouse above.

There was another aspect to job-hunting that always hurt me, too: unwillingness or inability to relocate. Hawai'i is a fairly small job market, and there weren't a whole lot of S/36 or AS/400 machines installed here when I left my last DP job. In fact, through various user organizations, I knew a lot of the people managing the ones that did exist.

No, my gripe has always been that employers looked at "data processing manager" on a resumé and focused on the DP part and not the manager part of the title. The degree was in BusAd, not IT/IS.

I've been freelancing as a researcher for about ten years and have forgotten most of my programming skills, which were all self-taught and in a dead language (RPG II).

Posted December 14, 2007 9:01 PM by Linkmeister

Linkmeister @ 89 ...
xeger, I dunno, and to be honest, I haven't done the managing systems thing in about 15 years. I should have used a different tense in my bad-tempered grouse above.

How about this sort of grouse? ;)

There was another aspect to job-hunting that always hurt me, too: unwillingness or inability to relocate. Hawai'i is a fairly small job market, and there weren't a whole lot of S/36 or AS/400 machines installed here when I left my last DP job. In fact, through various user organizations, I knew a lot of the people managing the ones that did exist.

I understand - the largest concentration of organizations doing the type of work that I do/enjoy/like are assuredly not where I live, nor where I'd want to live. The advent of telecommuting as a viable option certainly hasn't hurt anything, however.

No, my gripe has always been that employers looked at "data processing manager" on a resumé and focused on the DP part and not the manager part of the title. The degree was in BusAd, not IT/IS.

Ahhh! I'd have said "Manager, Data Processing" - but that's far too much time spent dealing with organizations that make ASN.1 seem flexible and unconscious of hierarchy.

I've been freelancing as a researcher for about ten years and have forgotten most of my programming skills, which were all self-taught and in a dead language (RPG II).

Neat! Any chance you'd comment about how to do[0] freelance research?

[0] Get paid for...

Posted December 14, 2007 9:09 PM by xeger

Skwid @ 25: my husband went through that last year. He recommends playing up your experience with Crystal Reports and that if you have/can gain MS DBA certification you've got it made. The medical IT company where he works just hired someone with a Crystal/MSDBA mix of experience. He was very impressed with the applicant throughout the hiring process.

If you'd like a few recommendations of IT recruiting firms we'd work with again, contact me via e-mail.

Posted December 14, 2007 9:11 PM by Melissa (oddharmonic)

The demise of the card catalog is *not* sad. The online catalog has many many many benefits for library user and librarian alike.

More than one person can search the same general area -- no waiting until the guy doing a bibliography of books about George Washington finishes with that drawer.

It can be quickly, easily, and cheaply updated to fix mistakes, add new materials, enhance searching.

And about that enhanced searching -- you can have as many entry points to an item as you and your catalogers have the time, energy, and storage for. And storage is waaaaay cheaper than more card catalog cabinets and drawers. Not to mention the cost of the cards themselves.

I can acess the online catalog remotely to determine if the library has the item I need, which branch it's in, and whether it's on the shelf before I leave home.

Terminals take up lots less space than bulky catalogs and can be anywhere in the library.

No looooong waits for filing to get done.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

MKK--former cataloger

Posted December 14, 2007 9:15 PM by Mary Kay

abi@62

It kind of goes with the hollow back/case construction and the false raised bands, I think.

Posted December 14, 2007 9:24 PM by kyubi

xeger @ #90, here's my self-marketing website, with explanations in the FAQ.

First you have to find clients, which means network with people who know people who might find your services useful. This is unquestionably the hardest part of the process. The second-hardest is getting paid on a timely basis, particularly if you work for startups. In the biotech/pharma business the startups are the ones who need this kind of service, but they're also the ones who have terrible cash flow.

It's an up-and-down business.

Posted December 14, 2007 9:40 PM by Linkmeister

Linkmeister, #80: Sympathies. That's one of the reasons I'm now a jewelry designer -- 15 years on S/3, S/34, S/36, got laid off and couldn't get hired for AS/400 work because it was based on the S/38 OS, which was nothing at all like the S/36 and with which I had ZERO experience. I even tried going back to school for an AS/400 certification -- which turned out not to be about the machine, but about "Programming 101 on the AS/400", which was... less than helpful, and not what I needed, which was a crash course on the operating system.

xeger, #87: Not. See above; IBM made some major OS changes from the S/36 to the S/38, and the AS/400 is successor to the latter. The system architecture and command language are completely different.

Posted December 14, 2007 9:43 PM by Lee

skwid@25: I was last laid off 13 years ago; the placement agency my company hired said 1-pagers were uncommon. I've seen a handful of resumes (my company hasn't been hiring much for the last 6 years) and they've all been multi-page, even in the web age. Kathryn@74 makes a \good/ point on cover letters; if you have a lot of time you can tailor the resume itself, but the CL lets you match their bullets. And extending Dan@42, consider putting the whole thing in reverse-chronological, with the degree at the end; even if you don't have the mismatch I had (SWE with a degree in chemistry), it's not just history but theory -- it doesn't tell what you can \do/.

abi@33: my first reaction was it should be nitent, since the number is unclear; but I don't think I ever learned what Latin does in that case....

Xopher: agree on "ecce" (involves a 2nd party), but I thought "Eia" was noisier than "Ooo". (But not really sure, since I'm recalling it used in medieval Italian).

Posted December 14, 2007 10:34 PM by CHip

CHip @96: Latin doesn't have unspecified number any more than English does. In practice you'd want to use "nitent" if there were multiple shiny things. As far as the interjection goes, my Oxford Latin Dictionary says that (h)eia is for various attitudes, including astonishment. It even gives the quote "Heia ut elegans est!" from Terence's Self-Tormentor. So I think "Eia, nitet!" is pretty good.

Posted December 14, 2007 11:16 PM by Marc Moskowitz

Open Thread and all...

The NZ SPCA has a Christmas CD single designed for dogs - recorded at frequencies audible to dogs but not humans.

Posted December 14, 2007 11:30 PM by Soon Lee

Abi, thank you for the marvelous links! The video of the nonsense-filled bindery made me laugh, but yours looks a very nice place to visit; I now lust after purses decorated in the same styles as the à la fanfare, Jacques Anthoine-Legrain, Pierre-Lucien Martin, and Henri Creuzevault examples; and I am both fascinated and slightly appalled by Brian Dettmer's art (mostly fascinated, but still...those are BOOKS!).

Thanks also to Debbie @ 19 for the video on marbling--I just wish I could have examples of the finished products!

Like Xopher, I'm a period-space-space typer. The "single space after the period" development irks the bejeebus out of me: there's not enough white space to nicely delineate the beginning of a new sentence.

JESR @ 71--As long as you have a sturdy but decorative hook screwed into the ceiling's equivalent of a stud (a joist? I dunno...), and a hook-and-four-straight-wires version of a hanger for plants in plastic pots, you can hang a small live tree from the ceiling. My mom and I did so for many years, as a means of thwarting the lummox dog (who nearly knocked down the tree to see out the corner window behind it) and the climb-the-trunk, bat-off-the-ornaments cats.

It worked well, not only in those capacities but to enable the stringing of lights and tinsel garland--just spin the tree one direction, then the other! (Slowly, of course.)

Posted December 14, 2007 11:47 PM by Syd

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.

Posted December 15, 2007 12:04 AM by Paul A.

Bill Moyers is interviewing Keith Olbermann on his Friday-evening show.

Might be in some web archive or other.

Posted December 15, 2007 12:06 AM by Stefan Jones

Re the dog-only CD: does the CD audio format really support that, and if so, why? It's been a long time since I really knew this stuff, but if memory serves, if we ignore harmonics[1], accurate reproduction of frequency X requires sampling of 2X. CD audio is sampled at 44.1 kiloherz, allowing accurate reproduction up to 22.05 kiloherz. Humans vary, of course, but Wikipedia suggests that 20hz-20khz is a reasonable rule of thumb for what "humans can hear", with young people in particular able to hear somewhat above that range.[2]

That only leaves the range 20khz-22khz usable for doggie music. A full frequency doubling is required for an octave; I'm not sure how to figure out how much of an octive that gives, but it can't be much, maybe not even a full note.

So...am I missing something fundamental here, or are doggies not going to be getting much out of these CDs either?

[1] and that simplification may be where I go off the rails
[2] I used to be able to hear when a computer monitor was powered on but not getting a signal; I no longer can. Do new ones not make sound or is that another sign I'm getting old?

Posted December 15, 2007 12:16 AM by Todd Larason

ink cannery girl @ 86: "One of US, One of US..."

As a fellow heterodynaholic, I send my sympathy (and, of course, sinister laughter).

Posted December 15, 2007 12:39 AM by heresiarch

I do a touch of bookbinding myself, ever since I took a class from this brilliant fellow at Evergreen. Coptic stitch and sewn-on-cord -- I haven't the patience or space to make many covered spines.

It may very well be addable to the list of 'things which people interested in Making Light are often also interested in.'

Yangzhou has a block printing museum which I'm going to be taking some students to see -- maybe next weekend, or in any event whenever I've got this kitten in good enough shape to rehome.

Posted December 15, 2007 12:51 AM by A.J. Luxton

Todd @102: Sounds (hee) odd to me too. Mastering equipment can often record at 96 or 192 kHz these days, so It's certainly possible to record and playback (assuming appropriate mic and speakers) sounds well above human hearing. But people mostly do that to avoid artefacts in the harmonics when the sound is manipulated digitally. As you say, on a CD it's downsampled to 44.1 kHz.

Google (and dog whistles) suggest dogs can hear up to around 44 kHz, so above CD (and normal stereo amplifier) frequencies. Maybe dogs can just pay attention to noises above 14 kHz, which we mostly hear mostly as timbre anyway.

Pretty much all CRTs do whine in my experience, but it's much less common for the newer LCDs to do so. (The LCD itself is silent, but they usually have a florescent backlight that isn't.) Also, nowadays CRTs are often driven at higher resolution, which raises the frequency of the whine and makes it harder to hear, I think.

Posted December 15, 2007 12:52 AM by Ralph Giles

Todd Larason @102:: I can, in my early-mid 40s, still hear CRT flyback transformers. LCDs don't work the same way, but I can sometimes hear them if something's going wrong with the backlight (normally it's far outside human hearing range).

Also, older LCD monitors could behave "interestingly" with an out-of-range or absent/floating signal, but modern ones (mostly) detect that early and put the display into low-power mode or substitute an internally generated signal.

Posted December 15, 2007 12:54 AM by geekosaur

Lee @ #95, I knew there were other people in my shoes!

The last DP job I had was at a major Waikiki hotel. I left it in 1993, when they were still running two S/36s, one for front-office and one for back.

Posted December 15, 2007 12:58 AM by Linkmeister

Todd Larason @ 102: That only leaves the range 20khz-22khz usable for doggie music.

Not even that, really, since you only get all the way up to Nyquist if you have infinitely steep filters, which we don't. (That's why DVD-A, running at 96kHz or 192kHz, sounds better* than CD--not because people can hear frequencies up to 96k, but because the designers can use better-sounding filters.)

My guess is that the CDs have tones in the upper half-octave at a fairly low level, which is going to be hard for humans to hear (maybe impossible in a noisy environment, or if the humans went to too many punk shows in their youth the way I did), but easy for the dogs.

I sure hope they come with warnings not to play them too loud...

*In principle. Implementation counts.

Posted December 15, 2007 1:12 AM by Tim Walters

Syd, #99 (and several others): I seem to be alone among my age-group in strongly preferring the single-space style. But then, I never had typing in school; back then (early 70s), it was being strongly suggested that women who wanted careers NOT learn how to type, because that would condemn you to the secretarial pool no matter what your other qualifications might be. I do recall being told, at some point or other, to put two spaces after a period, but it made no sense to me and so didn't stick. My typing skills came about because of a programming position that involved typing text to be printed, and space was at a premium (monospace font), so adding extraneous spaces was frowned on there as well. If I copy-and-paste something and happen to notice that it has extra spaces after the periods, I'll take the time to edit them out; they don't look right and never will.

Posted December 15, 2007 1:33 AM by Lee

Level -1: See Bruce puke. Oh no! Bad dog, Spot, bad dog!

Posted December 15, 2007 1:34 AM by Allan Beatty

I took typing class in the Seventies, learned to type two spaces after periods and colons, worked as a secretary for several years typing that way, and... I think it looks like ass. I decided one day not to do it any more, and after a week or so, I rarely did.

Posted December 15, 2007 2:06 AM by Tim Walters

Mary Kay @92:
The demise of the card catalog is *not* sad. The online catalog has many many many benefits for library user and librarian alike.

Since I work in the library catalog search software world, I don't see the demise of the card catalog as being entirely sad. I think there are insanely neat things you can do with an online catalog.

But I am also nostalgic for the physical presence of the card catalog. When I was at UC Berkeley, I took a Library Science course because I wanted to get a stack pass*. One day the instructor mentioned that there were still a few handwritten cards in the drawers, and I decided to find one. I spent several hours looking up books that I thought might be obscure enough that they had not been replaced since the advent of the typewriter. And I found one.

I still recall everything that was in my field of vision when I saw it (for a mid-19th century translation of the Argonautica). I even remember the color of shirt I was wearing (olive green).

Much as I love online catalogs, that experience is irreplaceable.

-----
* If anyone doesn't understand the appeal of spending time in the stacks, I cannot possibly explain it. It's like jazz; if you have to ask, you won't understand the answer.

Posted December 15, 2007 4:29 AM by abi

Ralph @81:

You do some lovely work. I'm almost embarrassed to link to my sites. I think it's obvious how much you've benefitted by real instruction, no matter how much fun I've had figuring things out from books.

What does he mean about "the...top board may be cushioned"?

It means chamfered, in this context. A lot of fine bindings will take the right angles off of the edges of the boards to increase the appearance of delicacy.

And I'd only heard of a yapp on the fore edge. Is that what he's describing, or is he putting them on the tail as well?

I'd never heard of just putting one on the fore edge. I'm fairly sure he meant all around.

You can see some of his, and his son Stuart's work in the [British] Society of Bookbinders gallery pages. (Actually, those pages are have lots beautiful bindings, organized by binder. The Events > Bookbinding Competition pages are also full of amazing work*).

My question on concave spine books has always been what the fore edge of the text block looks like. I don't like the thought of a convex text block.

-----
* mutter mutter frames no deeplinking mutter mutter

Posted December 15, 2007 4:49 AM by abi

Tim May @76

I meant to link to this page about types of Chinese bookbinding found in the Dunhuang caves on one of Abi's earlier bookbinding threads, but I don't think I ever did.

Eia, nitet!*

Incidentally, does anyone know if it has ever, anwhere, been a common practice to bind books with the spine horizontal rather than vertical in the field of view of the reader? I.e., such that one turns the pages from bottom to top rather than from right to left (or vice versa)? And does that orientation have obvious disadvantages, or did things just happen to work out this way?

In Western bookbinding, which is derivative of the horizontal scroll format, there has never been a tradition of top-binding until the advent of the stenographer's notebook.

In Japanese bookbinding, certain book types (account books**, primarily) appear to have been bound across a short edge, but even there, they appear to have been used with the spine perpendicular to the reader/writer. This book has one photo of a receipt book (hantori cho) that looks like it was used like a steno notebook, but the text isn't clear either way.

-----
* singular in reference to the link, or to the webpage, or to the collection of items
** which were traditionally bound by professional ledger binders, rather than bookbinders.

Posted December 15, 2007 5:12 AM by abi

abi @ 113, start here to get deep links to the Society's competition pages. What browser do you use? Most or all of them have ways to let you find that, but they're different enough and it's late enough I don't think I could write general instructions.

Posted December 15, 2007 6:18 AM by Todd Larason

abi @112 -- If anyone doesn't understand the appeal of spending time in the stacks, I cannot possibly explain it. It's like jazz; if you have to ask, you won't understand the answer.

Oh, I understand that very well! In grad school at Undue Perversity P.U., I spent many an hour exploring. It was there I found Merrill Moore's "Clinical Sonnets"*, a number of pages of which I photocopied. But I am equally happy for the advance of electronic cataloguing and online used-book-selling, which led me to Alibris, where I can find said book.

*illustrated by Edward Gorey, no less!

Posted December 15, 2007 6:25 AM by Debbie

Not infrequently, where I work, we'll get presentations to print out that are in landscape orientation. (PowerPoint seems to encourage this.) Since most bindings we have are designed to go on the 11" edge of the paper, the presentations get bound on top. If they're printed double-sided, the back sides get rotated 180 degrees from the front, so that you can read a double-page spread without having to turn the book -- this is called "military flip" (opp. "top-to-top").

Posted December 15, 2007 7:33 AM by David Goldfarb

Florescent Cat

The making of the GoshWowOhBoyOhBoy Bible, otherwise known as St. John's Bible. This is the first completely hand-lettered on vellum, gold-leaf illuminated Bible to have been made in over 500 years. 24 1/2" x 15 3/4", 9 years, New Standard Revised Version, over a million dollars, commissioned by Benedictine monks in Minnesota, and utterly gorgeous. I recommend getting the book--the website doesn't have nearly enough images from it, especially of the calligraphy.

Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky, who's spent his adult life rescuing Yiddish books. Jewish history is sadder, funnier, and weirder than I knew.

And an employment question....I know a CPA who would like to work for a company which is law-abiding and honest. I don't know how much of this is conscientiousness and how much is irrational pickyness, but I've brought up the possibility of looking for a company with the desired traits, and gotten told that it just isn't feasible--you pretty much have to take the jobs that are available. Are things really that much a matter of luck?

Posted December 15, 2007 8:39 AM by Nancy Lebovitz

Nancy Lebovitz @118 - Law-abiding is easy, because criminal prosecutions or regulatory infractions are usually public record. Honest is more of a value judgement, but most of the places I've worked seemed fair.

Every year Fortune published their list of the 100
best companies to work for. That would be a start.

Posted December 15, 2007 8:53 AM by Steve C.

ink cannery girl @ 86... You're welcome.
heresiarch @ 103... BWAHAHAHAH!!!

Posted December 15, 2007 9:13 AM by Serge

Nancy @118:
Technical note: when putting URLs into an <a href... tag, be sure to start with the http://. If you just start wit