A Top Site for Finding Work

Best of the Web/Top Site for Finding Work – Job-Hunt.org is a “Top” or “Best” site for job hunting and careers according to US News & World Report, Forbes, and PC Magazine.

“Job-Hunt is dedicated to the millions of people who have had their personal lives disrupted by the loss of a job.“

The Internet Has Changed How We Live Our Lives. How We Communicate. How We Date, Work, Play…

and how we look for work. More and more we go online. And where the people go, that’s where you’ll find the criminals and predators. Please be aware that Identity Thieves have – for some time now – been posting fake job openings, fake employment websites, and various other employment scams online.

Some time ago now, I wrote about “cyber-safe” resumes, and I received a nice letter from Susan P. Joyce at Job-Hunt.org. She reminded us that,

“The recession has multiplied the scams, and people need to be very careful using any job board or even “employer” Website – not just when using Craigslist (which is often a good source of jobs).”

Please see the excellent, Job Search Scam Avoidance Guide

Job search scams look very appealing, and even smart people “fall” for them. The result can be loss of the money you do have, trouble with the IRS or other law enforcement agency, and identity theft when your SSN is provided to the fake “employer.”

And if you are (or you know someone who is) in the process of seeking a new job/career, please click here, read, and learn how to “Put the “Safe” in your Cyber-SAFE Resume by modifying the content of your resume! Take control and create your own privacy protection this way, without depending on the Web job site to do it for you. Do this to protect your existing job, if you have one, and your privacy.“

Related reading: Cyber-safe Resume Gets Noticed

Copyright 2007-2010 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved. post to jaanix.

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Competing With Google Search

Neither Microsoft (with MSN or Bing) nor Yahoo! can compete with Google in the arena of Tech that matters most — showing you advertisements. So…

“A powerful new choice in search is coming”

“Microsoft® and Yahoo! have now received regulatory clearance to form the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance in the United States and European Union. This milestone is an exciting step in our effort to give your business a time-saving and cost-efficient way to connect with show ads to a larger combined audience of potential customers.

After the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is implemented, you can:

• Reach more potential customers: Search ad inventory from both the Yahoo! and Microsoft networks will be joined in a new, unified search marketplace powered by Bing™, with a combined audience of over 150 million searchers in the U.S and nearly 577 million searchers worldwide.
• Save valuable time and effort: You’ll use a single platform—Microsoft adCenter—to manage your campaigns easier and faster. With just one buy, your search ads will reach users on Bing, Yahoo!, and other premium partner sites and networks, such as The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, msnbc.com, FoxSports.com, Facebook, and Buy.com.“

Just a few helpful results

Related: This “alliance” between Microsoft and Yahoo is interesting.. because I seem to remember Yahoo! selling ad space to Google a while back.. see Google-hoo — a world run by ad revenue…

And for those of you who feel as I do, How to block ads (updated)

Note: I am a big fan of healthy marketplace competition, and not a big fan of monopolies, so I have set the “default” search engine to a different provider on each of my different machines.. to “spread the love” (IE users, to do that yourself, click here). Which ones? Well, basically any one but Ask.com.. but I will say I am a fan of Dogpile.

Copyright 2007-2010 © Tech Paul. All Rights Reserved. post to jaanix.

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Google’s Dominance Is Your Reward

If you have been paying attention to Tech news you will have noticed that the #1 and #2 Search players have been been making bids to buy the #3 player, Yahoo!

Essentially, Microsoft “Live” Search tried to buy up Yahoo! to better compete with Google’s undisputed #1 (and get advertisers back onboard).

That plan didn’t work. And now Microsoft is offering a rewards program to get more people to use MSN as their search engine (thus, today’s title).

“Sign up to start earning great perks just for searching!

Sign up for SearchPerks! and start earning tickets towards exciting prizes whenever you search the Web – up to 25 tickets per day. It’s free, easy to use, and your tickets accumulate as fast as you can search.*

And because SearchPerks! is brought to you by Microsoft Live Search, you know you won’t compromise quality while earning rewards.

Be sure to sign up before the registration deadline on December 31, 2008—the sooner you sign up, the more opportunity you have to earn tickets!”

I saw the ad for SearchPerks on my Hotmail page, and it includes a link, or you can click here to sign up.
Sign up and get 500 “bonus tickets”.

It smacks of desperation to me.

[note: to earn tickets, you must use Internet Explorer when you search, and download a small data collecting app.]

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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New search engine respects your privacy

There’s a new player in the search engine game. It’s named Cuil (and yes, it’s pronounced “cool”) and it claims to have indexed three times as many webpages as Google.

We all have our favorite search engine, and whether yours is Google, or Yahoo, or MSN, or Ask, or.. whichever, I think you should at least give Cuil a look-see. Why? (You ask) Well, Cuil does things a little differently than those others do them.
* results are not “ranked” by popularity, but by keyword, relevance, and page content.
* your searching history is not tracked and stored.

It is this second one that appeals to me. Here’s Cuil’s privacy statement: “Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies. Your search history is your business, not ours.”

And here’s (part of) Google’s*:

Google uses cookies and other technologies to enhance your online experience and to learn about how you use Google services in order to improve the quality of our services.

Google’s servers automatically record information when you visit our website or use some of our products, including the URL, IP address, browser type and language, and the date and time of your request.

(*Yahoo, MSN, and the others do the same thing.)

And so, if your privacy is a concern of yours, and/or you would like to stop playing the popularity game, I recommend you give Cuil a try. And since it produces results in a different layout than you’re used to seeing on the others– such as the use of tabs, and “drilldowns” (used to narrow down the list of results by category)– I also recommend taking a brief moment to look over the explanatory “features” page to see how it works.
http://www.cuil.com/info/features/.

Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix

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Find hidden files

Today’s article was triggered by a reader’s question. The reader had hidden a file, and now could not find it again.

Q: How can I find folders on my computer if they’ve been “hidden”?
I think we have all placed something carefully out of sight from others.. and then forgotten where we’ve hidden it ourselves. If you have hidden a file (or folder) on your PC, and now cannot remember where it is, there are a couple of ways to go about finding it again.

Method 1) If you know what folder you’ve hidden the file in, but not the name of the file, navigate to the folder (in my example, I’ll use the My Documents folder) and do the reverse of the steps I outlined in my article “Create a hidden folder for your private stuff“. Namely, Click on the “Tools” menu and select “Folder Options”.

Now click on the “View” tab. Look down the list to the “Hidden folders” options, and change the radio button from “Do not show..” to “Show hidden files and folders”. While you’re here, uncheck the option “Hide extensions of known file types” if you haven’t done so already. (This is not only good policy, but will help us if we need to use the Search feature.)

(If you are not sure exactly which folder you hid the file in, click on the “Apply to all folders” button, which will unhide all your hidden files.)
Now any files (or folders) you have hidden in the folder (My Documents, in this example) will appear as a slightly ‘faded’ entry. For purposes of demonstration, there was a hidden text file in My Documents titled “hidden file.doc” which is now visible.

If you have done this, and the file you’re seeking does not appear, do the steps shown above and click on “Apply to all folders”, and then open the other folders you think it is possible that you may have used to hide the file inside. Do a little bit of ‘hunting’ through the most likely places.
[Note: This method is not a good way to look for spyware that may have hidden itself on your computer. If you suspect that there may be spyware on your computer, run two different anti-spyware programs in “Full” (or “Deep”) scan mode. I have a list of good (free) anti-spyware programs here.]

Method 2) If you do remember the name of your file (or folder).. or parts of its name, but not its location, the easiest way to find it again is to use an “advanced” option in the Search tool. Open Search (Start >Search) and select “Files and folders”.
Now click on the down-arrow next to “More Advanced Options”, and then place a check in the “Search hidden files or folders” and the “Search subfolders” options.

There are two Search boxes; the top one looks at file names, and examines your directory, and this is the better one to use. (The second one looks inside files for the string of text you’ve entered, and seems to me to only work about half the time.)
Enter as much of the file’s name as you can remember, and to reduce the number of irrelevant results, specify the file’s type– in my example, it’s a text document, so I will add “.doc”. Use the “*” wildcard symbol in front of and behind the letters you don’t remember. Let us say that I remember that I used the word ‘hidden’ in my file’s name, but I can’t remember if I used “Paul’s”.. or if I named it “file” or if I used “document” instead — I think I may have named it “pauls_hidden_doc.doc”, but the only word I’m pretty sure of is ‘hidden’– so the proper entry in the top Search box would look like this “*hidden*.doc” (w/out the quotes). This tells Search to accept any characters before the word ‘hidden’ as well as any after it, and to only look for text files.

This result appeared in less than a second, and happens to be just what I was looking for and, if there had been a document I had labeled “Paul’s hidden letter” (and forgotten it as well) it would show in the results also.

Also, those of you familiar with DOS can use the DIR command with the following switches, /w /a, appended to see all hidden files and folders listed (c:\>dir /w /a).

Today’s free link: It used to be that if you wanted to connect a new TV or stereo that all you had to do was plug it in– and maybe connect one cable or a couple of wires. Nowadays, the assortment of different cables and wires you have to untangle and sort out and properly configure is pretty complex and confusing. There is a Consumer Electronics website that is essentially a wizard which will walk you through setting up your new device’s cables and getting it to work with your existing devices. It also helps ensure that you purchase the right cable for the job. Visit the Consumer Electronics Association’s connections guide for some excellent help and instructions.

Copyright 2007 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved.

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People google the durndest things

I suppose I’m not alone in this, but I am a stat-watcher. It is a way for me to learn about you — the reader: about what topics you’re interested in and which ones you don’t bother to investigate (“you” in the broad sense). I love to get into all the statistical details, and sincerely believe that a fella cannot be presented with too many informational statistics — and I always want more. I hope Word Press brings back the Feed Stats, and does it soon.

I am fascinated by “keywords” that catch your eye: a great ‘for instance’ is that this blog is for the most part a ‘how to’ and is almost always posted in that “category”, and yet only one “view”, so far, has been linked from there. (What is that telling me???) It surprises me sometimes that my “catchiest” titles have the lowest number of views, and that I would get a lot more Google Search “hits” if I simply titled a post “System Restore”…as an example. [Now I don’t want you to think I’m ‘hit-desperate’, and would start resorting to such tricks. I’m not. Honest. But it does make one think…)

I am fascinated by which of my “Today’s free links” get used and which one’s don’t so much. It says nothing about which one is more useful than another, but it does tell me some things. For instance, apparently my readers already have anti-spyware tools or just aren’t concerned about malware, yet a large number just as apparently delete files they’ld like to get back. Curious. At least to me it is.

But the most interesting statistic is the Search Engine Links, which shows not only how many people found my article via a search on Google (Yes. I know. There are more engines than just Google.) but what words they used in their searches. These “search terms” have been the source of ideas for posts I’ve written, and will continue to be so. There is one inescapable factoid that becomes quickly obvious when reading these search terms, and that is: I am not as poor of a speller as I thought I was…by comparison. Of the many people who googled ‘system restore’, not one spelled it correctly. The folks at that outfit are doing a terrific job of not only deciphering our gibberish, but doing it in micro-seconds, and I for one am grateful for it. They sent me one spelled “sistim restro”…amazing!

Tip of the day: If you are like me and need a helping hand spelling a word every now and then you probably (like me) hailed the “built-in Spell Check utility” as the greatest thing since sliced bread. And you’ve probably learned over time (like me) that they miss far more than they catch, and cannot see the difference between they’re, there, and their, and generally aren’t much help at all. The one here on WordPress is terrible. You simply won’t be doing yourself any favors if you rely on spell-check, and I don’t care whose it is.

Instead, bookmark an online dictionary like Merriam-Webster and enter your word into their search box. Unlike a real dictionary, you don’t have to know how to spell the word to find out how to spell it. Enter “sistim” and the top choice of spellings/words is “system”. It gives definitions, so you can make sure it is the word you’re thinking of. And it has a thesaurus so you can find words with the same or similar meanings. Online dictionaries are great resources, and I hope you will find them as useful and handy as I have. I couldn’t write this post without one…

Let’s just have some fun with Today’s free link: Thinks.com offers free puzzles of all sorts (crosswords, soduku, jigsaw, etc.) and games like checkers and chess. Fit for the whole family.

Copyright © 2007 Tech Paul. All rights reserved.

 

 

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