If you don’t wipe your device before installing the Android M preview, very weird things will happen

As I mentioned in my previous post, the first time I tried flashing the Android M developer preview to my Nexus 5, I didn’t exactly bother with the whole wiping my device first thing. Starting over from scratch is hard. You have to reinstall all of your apps. You have to log back in to all of those apps. You end up spending days tracking down where Facebook moved the setting to turn off those damn popping noises every time you get a notification (turns out you have to do it in two places now). Even though this post is...

24 hours with the Android M developer preview

I installed the Android M developer preview on my Nexus 5 yesterday, not because I’m looking to test and optimize any apps, but mostly because I can and I gain some sort of perverse joy out of being on the bleeding edge and submitting bug reports. I was helping run MomoCon over the weekend, so I didn’t get to install it right away, but it was one of the first things I did after I got back from my trip and slept a little. In case you missed it, Google I/O was last weekend, and they announced what is essentially a...

Experiments in hacking my sleep patterns: Why I may never be a morning person

I’ve read in so many places over the years that the most successful people in history were almost invariably early risers. Over the weekend, someone challenged me to 7 days of waking up “stupidly early,” as a way to test if it would improve my productivity. I asked them to define, “stupidly early,” and they replied, “two or three hours before you usually get up.” For me, that’s still a lie-in for most people–being self-employed as a freelance writer, I typically rise around noon (sometimes later if I was up very late engrossed in a book or a side project...

Creating and running the Information department at MomoCon: An unexpected journey

This post is part of my Extended Resume Project series. For all the posts in this series, click on the “extended resume project” tag at the bottom of this post.  Volunteer work is a tricky thing to put on a resume and cite as work experience. For some reason or another, when people say “unpaid volunteer work,” employers tend to hear, “non-serious, irrelevant hobby.” I’m not saying that’s always the case, and I know that many employers look favorably on the fact that people do volunteer work, but rarely does it seem that the skills required and the skills learned in...

Taking a new approach to my employment search: The Extended Resume Project

They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I have been networking, doing daily job searches, setting up alerts, applying for jobs, and sharing my work experience in the same way for nearly four years with no success. So clearly, a different approach is needed, because this really is beginning to feel like insanity. When it comes to my job search, I do have one massive flaw: when I’m out networking with people or I’m in a job interview and they’re looking at my resume, and someone asks me, “so tell me...