ON COMPUTERS | BY BOB AND JOY SCHWABACH
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IS THIS FOR REAL?
A few days ago, one of our contacts at LinkedIn.com sent us an
invitation to join NotchUp.com, a
job hunt Web site where you get paid to go on interviews. Joy thinks it
sounds good; Bob is a cynical reporter and remains skeptical. (As
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.
COREL DRAWS AGAIN
The original CorelDraw was one of the first heavy-duty graphics programs
to
The new CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4 has a list price of $429 ($199 for
upgrades), which is pretty hefty, but nothing compared to the time cost
of starting over. The large installed base of users should like the new
features: There are 80 templates for producing business documents,
advertisements, newsletters, etc. Each template can be further defined
by selecting the type of business you want applied to the form. If you'd
like to share your thoughts on any design, the program has a "ConceptShare"
button that takes you to Corel's Web site where you can look over and
talk over other people's designs.
A feature we've always liked in CorelDraw is the ability to bring in any
bitmap drawing and automatically convert it to a vector drawing. In
plain terms this means that enlarging a drawing that has been converted
to vector art gets rid of the so-called "jaggies" you see as a bitmap
gets bigger. The jaggies are those stair-step lines that appear on the
edges when a bitmap drawing is made larger. The vector transfer routine
can now be applied to mechanical drawings and signatures as well.
New features in CorelDraw X4 include 10,000 pieces of clip art, new type
fonts, support for RAW camera files, and the ability to add notes to
imported PDF files. You can save any files in formats that can be opened
by users of Microsoft products and AutoCAD.
A new feature that should appeal to many writers, editors and type
compositors is "What the Font." Clicking on this takes you to the
MyFonts.com Web site, which can identify what font is being used in a
document someone gave you to work on. (Free trial at
Corel.com.)
INTERNUTS
MyBoneYard.com wants to be
the place where you bury your old gadgets and computer gear. For
qualified products it provides a pre-paid shipping label that
MyRegistry.com provides a
place to register your wishes for presents for any occasion. You can do
this at several other Web sites, but this one claims a difference
because you can request presents from particular stores.
Software-DOD.com offers
discount deals on software. The "DOD" part of the name stands for "Deal
of the Day," so the deeply discounted price applies to one product for
one day. The product changes every day. Discounts range from just 10
percent to more than 90 percent on some software.
NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns here at oncomp.com or seven years worth of columns at oncomp2.com
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comedienne Lily Tomlin once remarked, "No matter how cynical I get, I
just can't keep up.")
