“Using LinkedIn” by Patrice-Anne Rutledge, $20 from quepublishing.com, has some great tips. For example, to find old friends from college, click “add connection” and then click “classmates.” Put in the years you were there and what you studied. When Joy did this for the University of Southern California, over a thousand names showed up. Each name has an “invite” link, in case you want to add them to your network.

The book has videos, podcasts, and screencast tutorials to guide you through the LinkedIn service. Learn how to use the service to find a job. If you have a blog, learn how to link it to your LinkedIn profile . Some say LinkedIn will one day be as big as Facebook, because it follows you throughout your career. Here’s how to make the most of it.

You see them on many things today every UPS address label, for instance. It’s a small square with a bunch of dots pushed together in sort of a mish-mash. It’s actually a kind of barcode, but you have to have a special reader, like a smart-phone to read it. You also need an app to read the code, but they’re free.

Businesses often use QR codes to offer extras to smartphone users, such as contests, rewards, and videos. You can also make them yourself: One clever guy put a QR code in a picture of himself on the back of his resume. When you move your smartphone over the code, the lips of the photo appear to move and you hear the guy’s voice explaining who he is and what he does. You can see it at victorpetit.fr. Click the “Curriculum viate.”

If you want to take a course at Learnable, read the teacher’s biography and look at an outline of the course. All courses are vetted before they appear. About a fourth of the courses involve programming or web design.

Talk about a jazzy resume. The ones we saw at Mashable, a leading tech blog, would blow you away. You can see them at on.mash.to/2jobs. If you’re not applying for a whiz bang graphics job, however, you probably don’t need anything that colorful. For a standard resume, we like the ones in the new version of “Resume Deluxe” from WinWay.com.

We started by filling in a few key words about the type of job we were hypothetically looking for, and the program gave us a sample resume to edit. (There are over 14,000 sample resumes and 400 cover letters.) Next we clicked “jobs,” typed “writer, journalist, editor,” and saw over a thousand job listings from just from one state. A few were a bit off the mark: “surgeon” and “receptionist.” (I’m not really a surgeon but I can play one in this resume.) Still, it was handy to see the whole list without leaving the program, and they all had links to further info online. If we’d actually wanted to post a resume, clicking “post” would bring up links to 15 leading job sites.

The program goes beyond resume building and lets you prepare for interviews through video tutorials. (We always hated the question: “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?”) Click “salary” to learn how to negotiate the best wage. Under the “Resources” tab, there are links to government jobs, science jobs, hotel jobs, “the green economy,” “work at home” and so on. The program is $30 as a download from WinWay.com or $40 for a boxed copy.

Big Problem: Many publishers don’t want to see your idea. The publisher may already have a similar game concept in the works and worries that the person submitting the idea will later claim they were ripped off.

A guy we’ve known for years at PopCap, says you should start by searching Gamasutra.com. It has job postings for writers, game testers and programmers. There’s also Kongregate.com, a site geared to small independent developers.  Here you might find someone willing to develop the game concept into an actual playable demo or prototype.

It’s called “UpMo.com,” which stands for upwardly mobile. The service measures your readiness for your next promotion and helps you get there. New to UpMo.com is the “intelligent job search,” which filters jobs using criteria you supply when you fill out your profile page. It uses salary data from 4,000 jobs at salary.com to show what you might be able to earn, and uses simplyhired.com to scour job boards and company websites for postings. You also get a membership in the UpMo group on LinkedIn.com, which may bring you contacts to help get you that next job. (We are both on LinkedIn, by the way, but are not looking for jobs.)

To us, the role models at UpMo.com were intriguing. You can choose a role model from dozens of suggestions in your chosen field. These are real people with real life stories, though you won’t be able to send them an email unless you already know their address. You can see their career plotted on a graph superimposed on that of your own career. It gives you a good idea of what people did to get where they are. Joy chose Dean Takahashi, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who now covers video games for VentureBeat. You can keep selecting role models till you find one that inspires you.

The service is free for the first 10 days. After that it’s $7 a month, or $30 for six months in advance.

The courses offer certification in Linux/Unix System Administration, Web Programming Open Source Programming, and “.NET” Programming. The courses cost around $300 to $400 each. See more info at OreillySchool.com.

OK, so you are paid to go on job interviews, and you set the fee, typically $500. The idea behind this is that people who are quite happy with their current jobs are often the most desirable candidates for a new job. But these people normally won’t enter the job market without some incentive. (This is where Bob’s cynicism kicks into high gear: Why wouldn’t people just take the fees for going on interviews, instead of taking a new job?)

You have to justify the price you set for showing up at a job interview by listing your qualifications, including your present salary. You can say what companies you would like to talk to about a job change and what companies you don’t ever want to talk to. Your personal information remains private, says NotchUp, until you accept an interview, and then only the interviewer gets to see it.

At this point the defense takes the field and tries to prevent people from gaming the system and just showing up for interviews to collect the fees. People who don’t seem to be serious about their job interviews are given bad ratings; those ratings are given by the interviewer. Too many interviews and bad ratings and no more invitations will come your way.

You have to receive an invitation to join NotchUp, or you can apply at the Web site. (We received an invitation, which naturally made Bob suspicious, as in the old Groucho Marx remark: “I don’t want to be a member of any club that would accept me as a member.” Besides, we don’t want a job.) Finally, if you recommend someone to NotchUp and he goes on interviews, NotchUp says it will pay you 10 percent of that fee for making the recommendation. The site says that companies using Notchup include Google and Facebook. (We contacted a spokesperson at Google, who wasn’t sure about the arrangements, but said it sounded legitimate.)