Minh’s Notes

Stanford’s Career Development Center provides your typical list of action verbs to add that fleeting pizzaz to your résumé. After all, who wants to be something good long-term, when you can do something good and be done with it already? So for those still padding their résumés and for everyone else’s reading pleasure, here are 25 completely reasonable suggestions for action-filled job descriptions, ranging from the inept to the utterly inept, and extrapolated from the CDC’s action verbs (in bold):

1. Acted childishly.
2. Conceptualized nebulous abstractions.
3. Imagined being CEO.
4. Planned to get work done.
5. Contracted and delegated it out instead.
6. Figured the job was for life.
7. Arranged deck chairs on the Titanic.
8. Cut and pasted. Copied too.
9. Discovered gravity.
10. Referred self to psychiatrist.
11. Drew the curtains.
12. Oversawed plywood for the deck out back.
13. Invented all kinds of excuses.
14. Fabricated lies unabashedly.
15. Maintained own innocence.
16. Bound and gagged.
17. Drove self home every night.
18. Merged onto I-75.
19. Installed spyware accidentally.
20. Operated a pencil sharpener.
21. Collated. (Yes, collated.)
22. Produced bugs.
23. Furnished own apartment.
24. Assembled IKEA furniture.
25. Interviewed self for the job already; thanks for the offer. (Problem solved.)

Amelia Bedelia would be proud.

Warning: Tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Entry №1267, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 11:20 PM | Edit | Permalink
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Spurred by my dorm’s photography contest on Flickr, I finally made a place for my photos online (a place other than Facebook): say hello to Minh’s Portfolio. I’ve been meaning to add a “portfolio” of sorts to my website for around four years now, but for both a lack of time and a lack of resources, most of my work has stayed hidden on my computer.

Occasionally you’ve seen some of my work illustrate blog posts here, but that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Eventually, I hope to add my actual art and website portfolios to the gallery, but for now it’s just photography. Since the gallery doesn’t show full-resolution images, you wouldn’t notice that the equipment I’ve been using is, well, lacking.

Until last year, all the photos were taken with a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P72, a now-antiquated digital camera that takes photos at a resolution of 640×480 pixels. A resolution that low would’ve been acceptable several years ago, when we bought the camera. In contrast, the newfangled gigapixel cameras these days can probably discern strange quarks from top quarks.

Because the Cyber-shot was the family camera, I only had access to it during family vacations. But last spring, I was forced to replace my trusty, non-flip, cameraless Nokia phone with a battery-draining Samsung Sync, weighted down with no end in pay-to-unlock gimmicks. (I also had to swap my reliable Cincinnati Bell service for Cingular, but that’s a sad story for another day.) At least the new phone comes with a decent camera, which means I can snap photos on a whim. For a phone camera, it’s not half-bad: the resolution is 21^st-century, and the quality isn’t much worse than the film cameras we used to operate.

(Remind me to tell you about my family’s hardy Canon film camera some day.)

I know my “photography” doesn’t hold a candle to that of some of my dormmates, but I’ve at least established that I can operate a camera. Maybe some day, I’ll prove myself worthy of moving up to a disposable digital camera. They didn’t have those around when I was growing up, y’know.

Entry №1205, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 2:55 AM | Edit | Permalink
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All this year, students on campus have been frantic, anticipating the big new role California was to play in the presidential primaries yesterday. After all, when was the last time California was at the starting gate, Super Tuesday, deciding who gets the nomination and who gets written off? This was a big deal for the state, and students on campus – who are allowed to vote in California, regardless of their state of residence – were strongly encouraged to vote here rather than their home state.

I didn’t vote yesterday. I received a few snickers from peers who found out I’m planning to vote in a month, in the Ohio primaries, because by then the nomination would’ve already been settled.

As it turns out, although California will award more of its delegates to Clinton, the “settled” race is far from over, so look to the Other Super Tuesday on March 4^th, when Ohio, Texas, and a few other states actually decide who makes the cut. Wouldn’t be ironic if – in an election cycle where the states tripped over each other to be the first to hold primaries – the states that, undeterred, kept their late contests mattered more?

I predict Iowa will feel mighty irrelevant come the party conventions. As for California, enjoy the 15 minutes of fame.

Entry №1169, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 11:50 AM | Edit | Permalink
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