My dear readers,

It has recently come to my attention that my friend Sarah Zelcer has finally been able to set up a Peace Corps Partnership for her women’s group, Las Orquídeas, some of whose members are pictured below:

It was my pleasure to have worked with this group and I wish them all the best. I encourage those of you who can afford to give a little to do so! I can personally vouch that this is a worthwhile project.

Thanks!

So I've been using the LinkedIn Resume Generator to easily sync up my resume with my profile. It's a really nifty app, but it is definitely still a little rough around the edges. Here are a few tips:

Bullet points

I discovered after some searching that the resume generator supports markdown syntax (but not your LinkedIn profile!). Here's my solution:

* Bullet 1
* Bullet 2
* Bullet 3

These asterisks are not rendered as bullet points on your main profile, but it doesn't look bad, and your resume is rendered with bullet points and appropriate line breaks. Close enough, I guess.

Page breaks

My resume was page breaking in an inconvenient spot--right after the header for one of my job entries. But the resume builder does not allow one to specify where the page should break. My solution? To pad the previous entry with blank characters. I tried appending several line breaks to this previous entry, but quickly realized that LinkedIn will trim the end of the entry if it only consists of whitespace.

How to get around this? First, I looked up the Wikipedia page for spaces in unicode, then I copied the empty space between brackets (looks like: ] [) listed under the Display column in the En Quad row, then I pasted it into the end of my previous job entry in LinkedIn. It looks like this:

(end of previous job entry):
For this work at XYZ Widget Co. I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize...
[empty line]
[empty line]
[space character pasted in]

This tricks LinkedIn into thinking that there is content at the end of that previous entry and thus including the empty lines. This has the intended effect of padding the space between entries, thus forcing the page break to occur before the next entry begins.

Obviously, you should determine how much padding (how many empty lines) to add experimentally.

I would paste the character here for your convenience, but my blogging platform chokes on the character. Just click on the Wikipedia link above and follow the instructions.

Voila! Hope this helps someone.

attrib /D /S -r -s -h X:\*