It’s no secret that HR departments regularly search for their current and prospective employees on the Internet, and so it’s easy to find advice on how not to be found. But if your job description involves the Internet, I would argue that hiding your online tracks could be a bad career move. Maybe I’m just a snob, but I don’t lend much credence to technology workers whom I can’t find on the Internet (and no, your LinkedIn profile doesn’t count). For example, if I was a hiring manager and you applied for a job in IT at my company, I would be looking for your technology-oriented blog and/or any open source projects that you’ve contributed to, because I want to be assured of your passion for technology. Failing that, I should at the very least be able to find some forum or newsgroup posts to prove that you’ve actually worked with a computer before. But if I looked for you and found nothing, I would just be disappointed.
My point is that when your job depends on the Internet, your online presence automatically becomes an extension of your resume (whether you like it or not). What I don’t understand is why more people don’t use this to their advantage. Rather than hiding yourself, why not make sure you can be found easily? That way, you can be sure that anyone searching for you will only see what you want them to see. Yes, I’m basically describing a propaganda campaign against HR, but the point is to show yourself in the best possible light to anyone you might have a professional relationship with. As long as you’re not spreading disinformation, there is no ethical dilemma.
Taking this to its logical conclusion, the idea of multiple (completely segregated) online “personalities” is a no-brainer to me. Just use your full name on everything you want people to find, and use a pseudonym for everything that you don’t. As long as your multiple “personalities” can’t be discovered from one another, you’re good.
I bought a fancy new domain last week and moved all my old “geek” posts over there. That way I can have a “professional” website (for people that I want to fool into thinking I’m a mature and well-behaved young man) and a “personal” website (so I can act like an idiot semi-anonymously). This domain is going to be used for fun stuff again.
So I’ve been quietly (i.e. in my own head) tossing around tattoo ideas for almost ten years now. I knew I wanted to do something about the hastily-done Spitfire tattoo I got when I was eighteen (yeah, that flaming head logo everyoneelse has), but I started to think more seriously about my options in 2002 or so, when I first saw some work that Nick Baxter did on a friend of mine. Before then, I obviously had no idea what a good artist was capable of. I finally decided to make an appointment with Nick last summer, but after having waited patiently for over a year, I found out that he was moving to Austin, and he wouldn’t have time to finish the entire piece. Oops! I guess the moral of that story is not to wait five years to make an appointment with a good tattoo artist!
Before Nick left, he was nice enough to recommend a few people to me, one of whom was Luca Natalini. When I started looking at his work, I soon discovered that one of my favorite “Nick Baxter” tattoos was actually one of Luca’s, and I just didn’t realize it. I love surreal Salvador Dali style art, so that pretty much sold me.
My idea was always to do something pro-technology or pro-science, but I didn’t know how to do that without coming away with some cheesy sci-fi or generally stupid looking thing (take a look at pretty much every tattoo at the Science Tattoo Emporium to see what I’m talking about). And after living through eight years of a regime that consistently put political and religious ideology before science and common sense, I ultimately decided that I wanted something that depicted science and religion as diametric opposites.
So how does someone go about getting a tattoo that is largely anti-religious without offending fanatics and possibly getting himself killed someday? What I finally decided to do was to convey my (really vague) science v.s. religion idea to the artist and give him full creative freedom to translate them into an abstract, unoffensive tattoo for me. Here’s what we came up with:
I still have backups of every database containing every post and comment from every version of my site going back almost 10 years. I was looking through them last night with the intention of possibly importing them into WordPress, but man, most of them are pretty embarrassing! I sure spent a lot of time being a jerk and bashing people back then. Oh well, I guess I’ll chalk it up to teenage (and early-twenties) angst. I still haven’t decided if I should do the import though. If not, maybe I’ll do a weekly thing where I repost some of the good ones.
Reh Dogg has some really groundbreaking visuals in his music videos, such as washing dishes, taking showers, and whatever you call that thing he does at 3:07 in this video.
