Writing A Cover Letter

Admit it – writing a cover letter, or re-doing your resume is not fun.  As much as professional careers (or careers in general) require it, nobody likes doing them.

There are ways around it.  You could hire someone to do it for you, it is expensive with prices ranging from $400 and working their way into the thousands.  I’ve only ever paid once to have my resume redone, and wasn’t overly happy with the results so am very skeptical when anyone offers to redo my resume.

I’ve had my resume reviewed by those same writers that charge $400 and up and many of them have said that my resume is “pretty good” but could use some polishing.  I may take them up on the offer at some point.

Resume writers can also do more for you than simply rewrite your resume, they can help build your brand by advising you on how to integrate your social media profiles into one cohesive image (or brand).  They would take your Facebook profile, meld it with Twitter and LinkedIn plus other profiles to help you develop a brand.

I’ve been told (again by the same reviewers) that my profiles are well done and that I don’t really need to spend a lot of further refining them.  I’m flattered.

But what do you do when you don’t have the hundreds or thousands of dollars to help build your online profiles?

Read.  Read.  Read.  There is lots, and lots of great information available on-line that will aid you in developing your social media profiles.  There are others that will concentrate on this area exclusively and could probably do it for a few hundred dollars.

There are also many sites available to give you solid advice on writing your resume, and covering letter.

One great site that I recently found (actually an article, I visit the site regularly) is HBR (Harvard Business Review).  There is a great post (though old) by David Silverman.  Hit the link to read the best cover letter ever.

Cost Of Running Devices In Your Home

With the cost of everything going up, there are many ways to save money.  If you are able to commute via public transportation, you could save yourself $100 – $200/month since you won’t use as much gas.  But what about other ways to save at home?

Consider picking up a Belkin Energy Use Monitor (actually it’s called Belkin Conserve Insight F7C005q Energy-Use Monitor) it retails for under $39.99 and is around $28.00 on Amazon.

There is another device that seems to be better but you’d have to get on your hands & knees to read the output as it’s built right into the device.  If you’re interested (over 760 reviews giving it 4.5 stars) it’s the P3 International P4400 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor also available on Amazon.  There are over 660 4+ star reviews for the device – it’s very popular.

So what does the Belkin Energy Use Monitor do?  Quite simply, it tells you how much energy certain devices are using and it will provide you with an average cost per month or per year for that device.

There are actually three things you can measure.  The first is the amount of CO2 the device is contributing to the environment either on a 30 day period or 365 day period.  The second is the cost of the device (again over 30 days or 365 days) and finall the number of watts of power the device is using.

So the first thing I plugged this into was my Belkin 3-power outlet that has a small desk fan plugged into it and a set of speakers.  The speakers are not super powerful or fancy, just a regular set of desktop speakers.  Unfortunately I don’t have the box for either so can’t tell you much more than that but.

So with the fan turned off, and speakers turned off and only a small LED on the Belkin power outlet that remains on the Belkin Conserve Insight tells me that the light is costing me $1.84 per year, ujsing 0.9 watts of power and contributing 23.1lbs of CO2 to the environment.  Now multiply that with ALL the devices in your home that have little LED’s and you can see that the cost adds up.  In my home I’m certain there are at least 50 such devices (remember to include items like the microwave, and stove as they contain digital LED that always show the time).

Next I turned the fan on, there are threee speed settings on the fan.  Now as you do need to run the devices for a period of time to get the true cost, I simply ran the fan for about 5 minutes.

The fan also contains a LED that displays whether the power is on or not — I honestly don’t know why it includes that because if the fan is on, you will feel the breeze otherwise will not.  The fan also has a rotate setting, I did not use that but would assume that it would add to the cost since the fan would draw more power to enable it to rotate.  The rotate is a simple on/off.

How long you keep the fan running will also impact the cost/month and cost/year.

1. Lowest speed setting
   1. Fan went from 24.5 Watts of power down to 19.7 Watts of power
2. Medium speed setting
   1. Fan went from 36.2 Watts of power down to 24.5
3. Highest speed setting
   1. Fan is using 36.2 Watts of power
   2. Approx $0.43/month (it was only running for 5 minutes)
   3. Approx $5.32/year (again based on it running for only 5 minutes)

Based on this if I run the fan for only 1 hour per day it should theoretically cost me $5.16/month.  I’m sure there are some flaws in the way I’m calculating this, but simply knowing the approx. cost of running this fan will prompt me to think about how often I use it, how many times it’s turned on and I leave so it’s not serving any other purpose.

Next I turned off the fan and turned the speakers on.

Initially the device reported 3.2 Watts of power being used, but finally settled a few seconds later at 1.8 Watts.  So there is a small spike when I turn it on.  This was consistent, as I tried this test about 10 times.

Now unfortunately as the device was plugged into a 3-outlet bar the numbers it gives me are not going to be correct for this device, ideally you should only plug in one device per energy use monitor to get an idea of the cost to run that device.

If you want to get more information on how much it costs to run different devices in your home, check out this site http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html there is a lot of great information on the site.

Something else which may very well help households cope with their electricity usage is the move towards smart meters (in British Columbia, Canada – BC Hydro is moving towards smart meters, learn more about smart meters by visiting the links).  I do worry about smart meters because my home is powered by electricity – heating, and hot water and the idea is to increase the cost of power during peak times — however it’s not feasible to not turn the baseboard heating on or turn off the hot water tank during peak time.

But armed with my Belkin Conserve Insight F7C005q Energy-Use Monitor I can run around the house and plug various devices into it to get an idea of what it will cost me to run those devices monthly and yearly.

UPDATE #1 – I’m using a Gateway NV53 laptop at home, and based on information found here (http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html) I was able to calculate roughly how much it’s costing me to run my laptop over the course of the year.  According to the specs, my laptop uses 65w of power so according to the calculation if I use my computer for about 500 hours per year (which is probably a good estimate) then it’s costing me 65 x 500 = 32,500 / 1,000 = 32.5 x $0.15/kwh (the approx cost of electricity where I live) for a total cost of $4.88 per year.  VERY inexpensive.  According to my current usage patterns the Belkin Insight is telling me that it will cost be around $3.71/year to run my laptop — not that far off from what my rough calculations show.

Can Your Facebook Profile Reveal The Real You?

Just read a great article on Mashable (albeit short) about how your Facebook profile could be used to determine your job performance.

That’s the advice of a new study from the Northern Illinois University, the University of Evansville and Auburn University. The researchers recruited a group of four Facebook-savvy human resources professionals and students to evaluate the Facebook profiles of 56 users. The four perused each of the profiles for about 10 minutes each before grading them according to the so-called Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism).

So here is an idea for a startup:

Develop an algorithm that will automatically calculate or grade your Facebook (or any account) on the big five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) and then tell you how to modify your profile to make it appear perfect if someone were to grade you on those personality traits.

Honestly I don’t know if the system could be gamed or not since most traits really define who you are, and eventually the real you will come out regardless of how you modify your profile.

Is that cheating?  Probably.  Are these types of tactics already being used, though through different methods?  Yes – there are many companies that will help optimize your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other profiles to paint a much rosier picture of you.  They help build you as a brand so that you stand out; it’s only when that individual is hired does the company find out that they are in HR HELL.

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