“References upon request” - this is a phrase you find in most resumes posted for North America. But how truly can someone get an opinion about yourself and your past expertise based on what someone else says about it?

Job Hunters

It may happen (and I would say it happens) that job hunters be more interested in getting the names, positions, phone numbers and email addresses of people hiring other people from different companies, than taking care of one of the thousands poor guys looking for jobs. We know about 80% of available jobs are not published anywhere and part of them may be made available to these job hunters exactly through our references.

Company Policies

Many large companies, such as Microsoft, have internal policies that deny their employees to provide references, after one of their subordinates leave. So you may have worked for such a company, but you’re not even allowed to prove you’ve been in good relationship with your boss and did a good job. Most embarrassing is when you have later to deal with recruiters who have no idea about this and look at you in a very suspicious manner when you tell them. It may happen your former manager to be nice and accept your request, but he does it on his own risk. Continue reading »

For soccer fans from Canada, here is the printable schedule for Euro 2008 matches on TSN/RDS and SportsNet, in Eastern Time: Continue reading »

If you haven’t seen 300, grab a copy from the video store and watch it with your girlfriend, wife or daughter.

Despite all the violence and bloodshed no Hollywood movie can unfortunately miss, you may also learn about the true values a man used to be made of in other times. Just like Maximus the Gladiator, King Leonidas of Sparta is that single person people feel honored to die for. Or rather for the values embraced by King Leonidas and his Spartans. Continue reading »

We’ve seen the last couple of years this tendency of identifying some races, ethnic groups and categories of people by new different names. Black Americans became Afro-Americans, North American Indians (the few left) became First Nations, Romanian Gypsies or Tziganes became Roma… Did this solve the problem of their discrimination against? Is people looking now in a really different way at these groups?

Some of these name changes have been requested by the groups themselves, and the society and political class - in most cases - have been very glad to ascend to their demand. Why? It was the easiest way to “do something” for these groups with no cost at all. But as long as the general perception, people’s mentality and discriminatory attitude toward these groups didn’t actually change too much, the name switch is even worse for these categories than before. Why? Because they allowed the other categories to show and prove their “generosity”, when they in fact did nothing at all. Continue reading »

I was just curious, the other day, to browse the web and see what kind of people spread the excessive defamatory blame toward Romanians, for their so-called discrimination against Gypsies. It comes as a surprise that most these accusation come from simple and ignorant people, who are usually associated with Christian charities. Or lonely persons who get in touch over chats, in good faith and tones of naivety, with whoever else happen to be at the other end, a potential Gypsy friend or - why not - a pedophile or serial killer.

This article is not against Gypsies, it’s not even about them. But rather about those ignorant, irresponsible and ultimately stupid people from rich countries who, pretending they care and help the oppressed, under the cover of a charitable association or “innocent” blog, are rather spreading their negative prejudices against other groups of people they know nothing about.

While their irresponsible messages and lobbies brought to Romanians a huge and unjust negative image, I will no longer watch my language and harsh words, and point my finger to what they do and say. I’ll introduce here only two of the numerous texts so discriminatory toward Romanians as people and nation. Continue reading »