This post is part of a series. You can read the introduction to the series here.

This is another song that perfectly demonstrates my “taste” in music: I can’t make out the lyrics very well and don’t try; it changes time signature a few times; it has an orchestral instrumentation and interesting harmonies and dissonances.

This song was first released in 2006, but I just ran across Anathallo a few months ago when someone who knows what I enjoy recommended the group to me.

This post is part of a series. You can read the introduction to the series here.

This song is a very good example of my odd focus on rhythms, riffs, less common time signatures harmonies, and less common instrumentation in music. It has it all. First off, there are no lyrics; all the vocals are just sounds. It starts off as a single melody backed by minimal instrumentation behind the voices, then it gets repeated with harmonies; other instruments and melodies are introduced until it’s a jam. Then in the middle, there is a pretty big shift in the B section, finally returning to a finale again for the A section.

Below is a Youtube video of a live performance of the song, and I enjoy that, but the album recording also features a trombone soloist which makes it better to me.

Paper Bird was released on the two-volume Carry On album. Here’s what the wikipedia page has to say about it. I’m going to have to see if I can find a video of the ballet.

In the fall of 2010, Paper Bird began working with Ballet Nouveau Colorado. The band composed the music for a ballet entitled Carry On. Their music was then combined with the choreography and films by Garrett Ammon, it thus became a multi-media performance which debuted at the Lakewood Cultural Center on February 4, 2011, and was played to sold-out houses in February. Carry On was released as a full-length, two-act live album on June 11, 2011. They recorded it live onstage with the ballerinas. Paper Bird hired Mark Anderson and Stelth Ulvang to perform the ballet. Anderson was inducted to the band’s roster after the ballet.

In the introduction to this series of posts, I claimed that I don’t really listen to lyrics. Well, now the second song that I post is a story song. My issue with lyrics has its limits; songs that tell a story clearly are an exception to that claim. I enjoy it primarily for the story that Dar tells in the song.

I have a friend of almost 40 years who was a huge fan of singer-songwriter Dar Williams back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and he turned me on to her. I’m not much of a live music fan, but we moved from Austin to New Jersey for a few years in the 1990s, and this long-time friend timed a trip to visit us with a live performance that Dar was giving close to us in New Jersey, so we saw her there.

Dar Williams a great songwriter and performer. This song is a brilliant example of both. It makes me happy due to the positive message of reconciliation in the story told in the song.

I’m not much of a music aficionado (the fact that I didn’t have a “music” category for my blog until now is a big hint). I have preferences, but I would not call them tastes. To me, having a taste in something implies that you’ve educated yourself in that subject and have opinions that you can describe using that knowledge. 

Due to some quirk of my brain, I don’t really listen to lyrics much, and I have a lot of trouble understanding them in many songs. What catches my attention mostly are patterns that I find interesting: catchy bass lines, percussion riffs, use of less common instruments, harmonies, and time signatures other than 4/4. I don’t consider that a taste. 

I know what I like when I hear it, but I couldn’t point to any specific type of music that fulfills my preferences. In fact, often I’ll listen to a playlist containing music I’ve never heard before, hear a song that I like, search out that artist and discover that the song is an oddity among their corpus. For this reason, my playlists often contain one or two songs by a variety of artists.

Tangential to the above, I’ve long had a Spotify playlist called “Stan’s happy place” which contains, as the it says on the tin, songs that make me happy. I was overwhelmed by the news the other day, so I played this playlist instead, and it had the desired effect: making me happier, or at least less stressed. I hadn’t actually listened to this playlist in a while, so the positive effect came as a mild surprise.

I thought I would share some songs on my playlist. I’m starting with “Do it anyway” by Ben Folds Five. I’ve long been a big Ben Folds fan (his music often hits my weird preferences above, and he’s a dang good musician), and I try to keep up with his new releases. Somehow, however, I overlooked this song until I ran across the performance of it on Fraggle Rock. It’s a rocking song, and the performance with Fraggle Rock makes it 10x better.

Ben Folds Five has also performed a mashup of this song with “Heaven on my Mind” from Jesus Christ Superstar. I can just imagine them in the studio, one of the band members notes some similarities between the two songs, and there it is. It’s pretty awesome as well, and listening to them jam this song live is a treat: Ben Folds Five – Do It Anyway/Overture-Heaven on Their Minds

I’ve been a software quality assurance engineer for more than thirty years and have done my share of job hunting. Also, I’ve been a hiring manager a number of times throughout my career, so I’ve screened a lot of technical resumes as well. I’ve developed some opinions about how resumes should be formatted to facilitate the way I do resume screening as well as some other opinions about resumes. Recently, quite a few of my friends and former coworkers have been job hunting, and I’ve helped a number of them with their resumes, so I thought it was time to write up my opinions.

I know that there is a ton of advice out there about resumes, much of it conflicting. My expectation in writing all this up is just to offer my perspective. I’ve gotten good feedback from people who I’ve helped with their resumes, but I do not claim that my advice is best practices. I As you read this, take the things that make sense to you, discard anything else.

My resume screening process

When I’ve been a hiring manager, here’s how the resume screening stage of hiring has always worked (in cases where I didn’t work with an HR partner and had to do all the resume screening myself, the process starts with my scanning for keywords, at step #3 basically):

1. Meet with my HR partner to discuss what I’m looking for generally and to give that a set of keywords that a good candidate must have in their resume as well as desired levels of experience with those qualifications.
2. As the HR partner looks at submitted resumes, they’re looking for the existence of my desired keywords. and, if a resume has them, then they try to get an idea of whether the candidate meets my overall criteria (years of experience, etc.)
3. My HR partner passes off selected resume to me. As I review them, I’m doing basically the same thing as the HR partner did; the only difference is that I understand the technical terms more than the HR person did:
   1. I screen a resume for the desired keywords
   2. If a resume has those keywords, I look for those keywords in the bullet points for the candidate’s various jobs to see when and where they used each skill that I’m interested in. I literally do CTRL + F for each keyword in the resume. I don’t even necessarily read the relevant bullet points, just confirm that the skill appears in recent job bullet points.
   3. If the resume makes it through the steps above, I actually spend the time to really read the resume in detail.

I spend literal seconds screening a resume

These days every opening gets hundreds of applicants. For the position I was hiring recently, we got over 400 applicants, and we didn’t promote or advertise the opening. Therefore, speed and efficiency is the focus of  the people doing the initial reviews, and it’s easiest to reject candidates for pretty much anything. When I’m doing a first-pass screen of applicants, I spend literal seconds on the keyword scanning and keyword matching phases, and I assume that my HR partner does the same. If I can’t easily find the keywords that I’m looking for, I reject the resume.

It’s the same for the keyword matching phase–where I try to figure out when and where a candidate used the skills that I’m looking for: if I can’t get a feel within a matter of seconds for when and where the candidate used the skills that I’m looking for, I toss the resume. As I review resumes for friends and ones submitted for my job opening, I’m amazed at the number of candidates who list a skill in their summary section but that skill does not appear elsewhere in their resume.

Formatting your resume for screening

If you’ve read this far, then the next section shouldn’t be a surprise: if your resume isn’t specifically formatted to make it easy to a.) find the relevant keywords and b.) to identify when and where you used skills and experiences, your resume will be tossed. Specifically:

• Facilitating keyword scanning: the first section below your name and contact info should be a summary of skills and experiences.
• Facilitating keyword matching: the bullet points for each past job should contain the relevant keywords for technologies and skills that you used in that job. I’ve seen some candidates go so far as to bold-face the relevant keywords in the bullet points. I love that because it just makes my job that much easier.

Outdated resume advice

As someone who’s been in the industry since before everything was electronic, I think a lot of common advice about resumes is a holdover from days of paper and is therefore not very relevant today:

Cover letters

In ye olden days before everything was electronic, it was quite common for paper copies of resumes to be passed around with little additional context. Say I go to a conference, have a conversation with someone and they give me their resume. I get home from the conference, sort through all the materials I picked up at the conference and don’t really remember who gave me this resume or why. In that scenario, a cover letter makes sense: it provides context for the resume.

In the modern world, however, resumes are rarely passed around without some kind of context. Take the same scenario about going to a conference: if I’m at a conference these days, that other person will not hand me a paper copy of their resume; most likely, they’ll send me an email and attach the resume. The email serves the same purpose as a cover letter used to: provide the context for the resume. In my opinion, the same applies most of the time with regard to submitting cover letters with job applications. I’ve not written a cover letter in decades, and I typically don’t read them when reviewing candidate profiles, but I’m sure there are some circumstances where they are still appropriate.

Career objective statements

My opinion about career objective statements on resumes is essentially the same as my opinion about cover letters. Back in the days of paper, career objective statements provided context that is rarely needed today.

One-page resumes

Back in the days when resumes were always printed, the possibility existed that additional pages of your resume could be misplaced, so a one-page resume served a very practical purpose. There are good arguments that your resume shouldn’t be too long, but in my opinion, there’s no good reason today to go to great lengths to keep your resume one page. And certainly do not sacrifice readability (“screen-ability”) just to keep your resume an arbitrary length.

Odds and Ends

I also have a few other miscellaneous opinions about resumes.

Avoid subjective statements about personal qualities

This is one of my pet peeves. I just viewed a few of the resumes that were submitted for the position that I was recently hiring for, and I immediately found some examples:

“A proactive team player with excellent problem-solving and communication skills, ensuring smooth collaboration with development, operations, and product teams.”

“Excellent analytical, problem-solving, communication, and interpersonal skills along with a good attitude for learning.”

“Detail-oriented approach adhering to timelines”

“Ability to work independently and participate in team environments”

I am strongly against using such statements in your resume: anyone can make such claims, they are very hard to impossible to validate in interviews, and they take up space in your resume that could be used for more quantifiable and directly relevant descriptions of your qualifications

Use industry-standard job titles

A resume is a marketing document, and the purpose of it is for people to get an idea of your skills and experiences at a glance. If you had cryptic or inaccurate job titles in  past, I advise you to use on your the industry-standard job titles that most accurately reflect the work that you performed in that job. When you fill out job applications or background check forms, you might want to use the actual job title. If someone asks about the discrepancy, just use the reasoning above. I have used this strategy for decades and in many cases, I no longer even remembered my official job titles, and nobody has ever asked about it, and it has never caused an issue with a background check.

Don’t list general skills

Here I’m talking specifically about adding skills such as “Proficient in Microsoft Office” (or substitute in any of the Office applications or other very general skills) unless they are directly relevant to your experience or the position you’re applying to. Otherwise, I assume that any knowledge worker can use these applications. And again, listing these skills that are common to all knowledge workers just takes up space that could be used for more relevant qualifications.

Use a very plain text-based format

I see a lot of resumes that use fancy formats with color, multiple columns, graphics indicating skill levels, etc. These formats presumably do not get parsed as well by applicant tracking systems, and in my opinion, this formatting hampers the keyword searching and keyword matching.

I see a lot of people online recommending using the Jake’s resume template in LaTeX, and I think that’s a good choice. Also, keeping the master copy of your resume in a structured format such as LaTeX ensures that formatting doesn’t hinder ATS parsing of the resume. Overleaf is an online LaTeX editor that offers a free tier for personal projects. I keep my master copy in very simplified HTML, using header tags appropriately to indicate document structure, and that has worked well for me. If I were starting from scratch today, I would use LaTeX format and Overleaf.

Always send your resume in PDF format

PDF format (sorry for the redundancy) was designed precisely for the use case of ensuring that a document looks the same regardless of the specifics of the device someone else is viewing it on. Do not send anyone your resume in Microsoft Word format. These days, with the popularity of online tools such as Google docs for creating and viewing documents, you can’t assume that people viewing your resume have Word installed. If, for instance, I open a Word document on my personal MacBook that doesn’t have Word installed, it will open in the Apple Pages application, and I’ve seen many instances where the Word formatting was butchered in Pages. Using PDF avoids such problems.

Here’s a mediocre example

I’ve tried to apply all of my own advice to my resume. I call it mediocre because I see a lot of things that I would like to improve, but I’m not job hunting at the moment, so I don’t feel the urgency at the moment to make the improvements.

NOTE: I’ve keep a copy of my resume on my personal web site, though I don’t think that’s a particularly relevant practice these days; I just continue it for continuity; I started the practice long ago and don’t see the need to take it down.

As a hobbyist nature and wildlife photographer in Central Texas, summer is my least productive time due to the heat. We had some cooler temperatures a couple of weeks ago, and I went again to Berry Springs Park, where I captured a photo of this fine specimen.

This article reminded me of something that I haven’t thought about in decades: the presidential physical fitness test that we had to take in school when I was a kid. The author writes:

My positive relationship with movement developed not because of the test but in spite of it. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s and had run a half-dozen half-marathons, at a comfortable pace, that I even began to believe I was an athlete.

I’ve heard similar stories from recreational exercisers, exercise scientists and fitness professionals.

I’m one of those people. I did horribly with the test, and, like the author, it was the source of a lot of anxiety and shame for me as a kid. And also like the author, despite the test, I later developed a lifelong exercise routine. Despite running hundreds of miles per year and running a half marathon a couple of times, it wasn’t until I was in my 50s that I began to consider myself an athlete. Now I consider exercise a core part of my identity; I prioritize it above many other things.

When I think back on my early history with sports and movement, one other thing comes to mind. The rural middle school that I attended had traditional competitive sports: only limited openings that you had to try out for, and athletes competed with similar schools throughout a large area. In sixth grade, I tried out for basketball and tennis, but I didn’t qualify for either one.

But the next year, our school district tried something new: everyone who wanted could participate in sports,  competition was just between the three middle schools in our district, and each school fielded as many teams of a given sport as needed for all the students who wanted to play that sport. And while it was still competitive, the focus was on everyone being included, getting a chance to play, and  having a positive experience.

I was indeed terrible at both basketball and tennis, but I had so much fun in that program. Then I moved to high school which only had traditional competitive sports, so I didn’t play sports after middle school. If I had had the opportunity to play lower-stakes sports in high school as I’d had in middle school, I’m convinced that I would have had very different attitudes toward sports and movement.

We have a greenbelt and small creek directly behind our house. I caught this magnificent specimen out there earlier today trying to catch its lunch.

We had a professional family portrait made in this same location when the kids were young. This past weekend, we updated it with our current family.