20 ’Elul 5767: Skyscraper Day/Labor Day

Greetings.

Divine misconception of the day: “Washington Post, Other Newspapers Won't Run 'Opus' Cartoon Mocking Radical Islam”—continued. Last Wednesday, I reported on the hypocrisy of The Washington Post and other newspapers who refused to carry an “Opus” cartoon mocking radical Islam when they will carry cartoons by the same artist mocking evangelical Christianity, which is less worthy of mockery. This is frankly an Islamic attitude: any religion other than Islam can be mocked, but woe to those who mock Islam. Please note that anti-Semitic cartoons are routine in Islamic countries and draw no complaints, but Muslims riot and kill unbelievers when cartoons mocking Muhammad are published. This double standard is grossly unfair. For the sake of protest and free speech, I published a link to the first of these “offensive” “Opus” cartoons last week. Since the sequel to last week’s cartoon is also supposed to not be published by the aforementioned newspapers, you can find this week’s “offensive” “Opus” cartoon here.

Today’s news and commentary, some of which Barry is responsible for:

• “The New Jewish Year 5768”
  
• “Close to the edge” (Shame on ’Olmert for not bringing the Qassam attacks to a halt! May he be thrown out of office if he continues to do nothing!)
  
• “Pope to criticise tax evasion as 'socially unjust'” and “Corporate Profits Take an Offshore Vacation”
  
• “Whales get blown off: Federal court says Navy can do sonar testing” (I smell the influence of George W. Bush.)
  
• “Misinterpreting the Mideast”
  
• “Thirty years tracking faint whispers from space”
  
• “Starfish Robot Shows Robotic Introspection And Self-Modeling”
  
• “Why women dress skimpily in the cold” (Fortunately the situation is not hopeless. I heard something yesterday about the beginnings of a modesty movement.)
  
• “Monster says millions of users' data may be stolen” (As someone looking for a job, this does not make me happy.)

As someone currently unemployed, I have to fill in a lot of forms on-line to apply for jobs. Unfortunately, many of these forms are designed by people with little idea what they are doing, possibly characters straight out of a “Dilbert” cartoon. In an effort to blow off steam, today’s weird thing is a list I have compiled of downright stupid things I have encountered in on-line job application forms. Enjoy and share the weirdness (or be scared or something).

Aaron

PS: If anyone wants to hire me as a job application on-line form design consultant, I’m game. If I have to fill out these awful things, I might as well get paid for it.

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Things I do not like in forms encountered in job-hunting on-line

Aaron Solomon Adelman, PhD

1) Forms that are painful to fill in.

2) Asking for things that are already in the resume/CV.

3) Asking for information irrelevant or useless to the job being applied to, such as what county one lives in, typing speed for non-secretaries, whether one has a driver’s license for jobs not involving travel, and how much one can life for jobs not involving manual labor.

4) Asking for the same information every single time one applies for a position and not remembering it from application to application.

5) Requiring two clicks when one will do just as well.

6) Not permitting the user to fill in sensible values in forms.

7) Putting stupid restrictions on the structure of passwords. There is no point in restricting what characters can appear in a password or setting a maximum length. Such restrictions only reduce the work of anyone trying to break into the site.

8) Asking for the same information more than once in the same form. This includes the blatantly stupid idea of asking the applicant for his/her resume twice, once in plain text and once in another format.

9) Allegedly being able to import information from a CV/resume, but refusing to do so.

10) Asking for “confirmation” of anything selected from a pop-up menu which results in reloading the page for anything that could easily be typed as plain text, especially when that data can be easily deduced from data which has already been entered.

11) Opening a second window just to fill in the value of a field.

12) Sites that malfunction so as to render registration difficult or impossible.

13) Text fields which put arbitrary restrictions on the length of the text that can be entered, especially when they are obviously too short.

14) Asking the user to type in “N/A” or some other value to indicate inapplicability when said inapplicability can be easily inferred.

15) Not allowing the applicant to submit a fully-formed resume/CV but instead forcing him/her to tediously submit all the information via forms.

16) Using a job application as an opportunity to try to sell the applicant something.

17) Asking for a Social Security number, which is legally improper.

18) Asking for the applicant to log in after he/she has already logged in just a minute previously.

19) Pages which merely tell the applicant what is on the next page of a form.