Speaking of other forms of internet communication, let’s talk about email.  Specifically, about emails you send to try and get a job.  There are a few things we’ve seen at the office recently that seem like they should be obvious, but apparently need to be repeated.

1.  When sending an email, spell your name correctly in the subject line.  I felt bad for this guy–he did everything else pretty right, but obviously was at the point where he’d typed the same thing so many times it didn’t look like a real word anymore.  He had spelled his name one way in his resume and the body of the email, but it was spelled wrong in the subject.  Typing fatigue for sure.

2.  When sending an email, try to spell things correctly. People in the industry do often have notoriously bad spelling, but when you’re applying you should make it as easy as possible for the person reading your email to understand it.  When we have to puzzle out spellings of words it doesn’t endear you to us.

3.  Don’t send out mass-emails. Yes, you’re applying to a lot of places.  We understand that.  But for the love of corndogs, don’t leave fifty emails in the “to” line on your application.  We can see those. When the “to” field of the email is longer than the email itself, it’s unprofessional.  It also makes us laugh a lot.  Do yourself a favor.  Email all those companies separately, and try to tailor your cover letter to each company.  It will make you look much more professional and appealing.

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In completely different news, I wrote my very first knitting pattern and published it online!  It’s for socks.  For all four of you people who read this and like knitting, here is the pattern.

TwinkleTwinkleLittleSocks

If you do knit it, please let me know!  I’d be excited to see it.

Also, here is some eye candy of yarn I dyed myself.

Purple hand-dyed yarn.

It was a lot of fun to do!

Giant sweater for Chris.

Giant tall socks for my dad:

Fingerless gloves for me (remember that last post about it being cold in our apartment?  Yeah, still the case.):

A bag for my almost-mother-in-law:

And a hat and bolero set for me!

Also, I feel obligated to warn all of you.  I got this:

And this:

For Christmas.  I have to admit, this doesn’t exactly bode well for my free time…

Happy New Year, one and all!

On that note, here is some yarn I made!

YanYan approves this message.

One I am done with my somewhat massive amounts of holiday yarncrafting, I will be back to playing video games and posting about those.  Until then, you can probably expect more yarn.

At least it’s pretty yarn, eh?

Into this:

It’s about 22 yards of my very first handspun yarn, and I’m quite proud of my lumpy messed-up wool baby.  I’m finding spinning to be very relaxing, in a similar way to yoga.  You do some of the same movements over and over again, slowly and carefully, and just pay attention to what happens.  In yoga, what happens is you get some nice exercise and are hopefully a little closer to being able to touch your toes when you bend over.  In spinning, you end up with yarn!  I found it so enjoyable I felt the need to repeat the process with another pile of roving:

Mmm…   The colors.

PS:  If anyone has any questions they’d like to me answer about video games or whatever, please ask ‘em in the comments!  I’d like to make the Q&A a more regular part of the blog.