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| Editor: Larry Welling | www.sfpcc.org | Newsletter: Jan/Feb 1999 |
Contents: FIFTEEN YEARS OLD JOB HUNTING USING THE WHAT'S A WRITEABLE EXECUTIVE BOARD |
Fifteen Years Old!
Two months from now, our club will reach a milestone of serving the computer community for fifteen years. Many user groups that were around in 1984 no longer exist, but our band of merry men and women have beat the odds! Congratulations to our members, past and present, who have made our club a fun place to be as we make our lives more productive and entertaining through the use of personal computers. Thanks to all of you who have stuck-it-out through "thick and thin" in supporting the club with your attendance and help with official duties. Happy New Year to all as we enjoy our benefits. As we travel through 1999, we will be investigating possibilities for changing our meeting location. The Board has already bandied about some ideas such as recreation centers, senior centers, or library or bank meeting rooms. One star possibility may be the new San Carlos library which is under construction and will likely have modern meeting equipment in the room. The new library is located about ½-mile from our current meeting site. One thought is that a meeting place such as a library or social center could provide the club with closer contact to outside community members who may notice we are there and be curious to see what we are all about. Perhaps the club will discover opportunities for outreach to prospective members at such a site. However, our new meeting site may not be free. Our current meeting site has been nice for fifteen years, but the club has caused some friction with a few members of the condo association in whose building we meet. They have been concerned about taking up parking spaces in front, noise outside of the meeting room, and there's been some interest in turning the room into the condo's exercise facility. Occasionally, for the club, the room may be too small and the acoustics can make things too noisy for us to easily hear a presentation and in the summer the room may get hot. Also, we have to discourage parking directly out front. If you have a site suggestion, let a board member know. We do not necessarily
have to stay in San Carlos, but this geographic location is centrally
located on the Peninsula. So, what do you think? You are
welcome to attend the next board meeting, speak at a regular meeting,
or write e-mail to board members whose addresses appear on the back. Job Hunting Using the Internet By: Marsha Brandsdorfer
I went to the unemployment office and signed up for "Cal Jobs" (http://www.caljobs.ca.gov). This
enabled me to put my resume on line. I could also respond to ads
on "Cal Jobs," and I did find several opportunities in the
legal field. Thus far, I have received four responses through my resume
on Cal Jobs from employment agencies and have signed up with two of them. Again, I searched for "Cal Law" on the library's computer and the result of my search was several job-wanted ads and employment agencies that engage in legal work only. I contacted them. One of the agencies I contacted placed me in a four month legal word processing position with the largest law firm in Northern California. With yet another agency I discovered on the Internet, I'm presently in a temp-to-hire legal secretarial position with a Menlo Park law firm which does patent litigation. I've been busy making money, and found that my job hunting through the Internet has been successful. If you don't have access at home, you can also use the computer to set up a free Internet e-mail account which you can use at the cafés, a friend's computer or at the library. For instance, I have an e-mail address on (http://www.yahoo.com) which is entirely free. I can give this e-mail account to employers and people I "meet" on the Internet to contact me. Job-hunting is something that takes a lot of time, dedication, and mostly
luck. I found that by using the Internet as my main source of looking
for work, I could make doors of opportunity open for me. I look
at the Internet as an information tool. The Internet has "search
engines" also called search databases. Using these databases
by entering key words of what you are looking for will search the World
Wide Web (the Internet) and will find you web sites that might be connected
to what you need. An analogy might be looking at a search
engine as this huge library card catalog that helps you find information
of a topic of interest. For instance, if you were to do a search
using the Internet search engine (http://www.yahoo.com) for the word "jobs" or
the word "employment," you will be given a response of over
6,000 searches for each word, divided into several categories. Other
popular search engines are: It is also important to know what type of work you are looking for. I
was able to narrow my search down to the legal field, because most of
my job experience has been in this area. I knew about "The
Recorder" and I was happy to discover that I could access it on
the Internet. Many daily, weekly newspapers, magazines and trade
papers now have databases on the Internet and if you are familiar with
some trade papers in your field, you may be able to access them online. There are many sites where you can put your resume on line. I decided to choose (http://www.caljobs.ca.gov), but there are many others and you can again use the search engines to find what job sites allow you to do this, either for free or a small fee. One such example is (http://www.CareerPath.com). Their site says:"Th(is) career management site (is) powered by the nation's leading newspapers. Information on who you are, how to contact you and where you've worked will never be shared with employers unless you give the OK. We've created a simple online form for writing a complete, professional-looking resume and career profile. Your resume and profile will become part of our confidential database from which employers will search for qualified candidates. Once completed, you'll receive E-mail from CareerPath.com whenever an employer wants you to consider a new job. Then you'll respond by E-mail to tell us if you'd like to apply for it." Again, if you don't have home access to the Internet, you can set up your free e-mail account at (http://www.yahoo.com). So, in conclusion, you can open more doors for yourself by taking advantage
of opportunities offered to you through the World Wide Web. Remember
to do the following: What's a Writeable CD-ROM For? By: Larry Welling I thought some of you might be interested to know a little about the newer CD-ROM technologies on the market. Let's see...we have the read-only variety, the write-once kind, and finally the re-writeable forms of CD-ROM drives. There's even one called a DVD drive which stands for "Digital Versatile Disk"...of all things. I think that's enough confusion for any one subject, so I'll confine most of my remarks to the "write-once" kind which Hank Skawinski recently installed on my computer. Whatever you may investigate in the store, just find out what formats it's backwards compatible with. For example, ask whether it will read that CD-ROM disk you bought two years ago for use with your original 6X read-only drive. Anyway, I think the write-once form of drive makes a lot of sense for
the home user. Hank installed a Panasonic model for me that will read
all my old CD-ROMS as well as read and write on the new kind of disk.
The new disk is the same size, but it's made differently so you can write
once on it. The new drive reads at 8X. The new disks are quite reasonable
at around $1.50 each for a name-brand such as TDK with a good jewel box
to hold it. (The disks for the other re-writeable technology are
about $6-$12 each.) What a neat drive! Meeting Calendar Jan 14: Hard Disk Crash Recovery and Backing-Up. This will
be the theme of the evening in free-forum discussion. Put your thinking
caps on and let us know what your backup strategies may be and what you've
done to recover from crashes. It is too dangerous to assume your computer
will never break. This information probably will be of utmost importance
to you when you have your first problem! |
When
I was in Los Angeles, I was thinking how am I ever going to get out of
there? The smog made breathing difficult and driving was equivalent
to crawling. But the worst part of being there was that overall
employment opportunities in my field were limited, competitive, and paid
poorly. I was a legal secretary and through experience, I remembered
that northern California, the Bay Area in particular, seemed to have
a better opportunity for jobs. Several years prior, I lived in
San Francisco, so I knew the area, and thought that finding jobs there
again would not be as difficult as it was for me in southern California. However,
since I was living almost 500 miles south of San Francisco, it made job-hunting
a bit more difficult, because I knew that I did not have access to the
local papers. The newspaper I was most interested in was "The
Recorder." "The Recorder" is the daily legal newspaper
of California. I had a friend in Northern California send me a
copy of the "The Recorder," and upon receipt, I sa_ink for "classified
ads" and then more specifically "secretaries," and then
for the location "San Francisco." Then I hit "go" and
like magic, I received a list of jobs, descriptions, and phone numbers,
addresses, where to send and/or fax my cover letters and resumes.