Standing out at a Career Faire can make a difference in your career search. Career Faires are starting to pick up, and Dice is running some nice ones, called Targeted Job Fairs. At a Bay Area Job Fair in January, 10 companies as showing up, and a major job search company has 82 career fairs scheduled for 2010 across the US.

How do you rise above the crowd at a Career Faire? The competition can be substantial, but you can help yourself jump out from the gang with early planning. At AA-Careers, we have a straight-forward step-by-step process to prepare. Plan to go? Here’s how to prepare:

First, investigate the organizations that are going and pick your objectives. Use the web to research the companies that are there ahead of time. Go to their sites and see if they have their openings posted. Pick a rational number to target, and get ready to spend up to an hour researching each one. It’s hard to do more than seven in a day, and four to six is a much more reasonable target. For each hiring organization, you want to know: key product lines, recent news, and executive names. Try to see if you know anyone at the target companies. You’ll end up with a page or two of research for each company/job.

Second, if there are job openings on the web, read them to see what the hiring manager is looking for. Create a mapping of your achievements and skills to the prerequisites of the job. Make the language match. If the hiring organization calls customers "clients", your resume should do the same thing. The achievements should be written in the style of the hiring organization.

Third, create a ‘thumbnail sales pitch’ for each likely company/position combination. Write down a 90 second ‘thumbnail’ that you can repeat out loud depicting why you are a fantastic prospect for that position. You’ll use this in your resume and when you meet people at the job booth.

Fourth, modify your resume for each position. The objective on your resume should exactly match the job you’re targeting. The executive summary should be a written form of your “mini sales pitch” for the job. Then choose the accomplishments and skills that most clearly match the job description. Especially at a Career Fair, the purpose of your resume is a sales tool for you – to get you on-site job interviews. It should be obvious to see that you’re a match based on your resume.

Fifth, dress and prepare as if you’re doing on-site interviews. Dress nicely and be properly groomed. Don’t overdress (this isn’t a date!) and don’t underdress (no jeans or t-shirts, no matter how much you paid for them). Avoid strong cologne or perfume.

Finally, rehearse your ‘mini-sales-pitch’. Collect your research and the resume for each position - bring a couple of copies for each – and put each in a understandably labeled folder. Keep them in a lightweight briefcase or folio.

Remember to smile, and good hunting!

The Elgordo Loteria is part of the Euromillions Euro lotto, but if you don’t know anymore than that you should really get to learn more. The lottery is well-known for payouts that are among the world’s richest - payouts that can be up to 2.6 billion Euros. And yet there’s more. With over thirteen thousand prizes being offered, your odds of winning something work out to around one in every six. That’s very good if you hold it against what comparable lotteries can part with.

Now, if you want to get in on the action there is a full ticket known as a “serie”. There is also a cheaper option; called a “d©cimo” which is worth one tenth of a full ticket. Both serie and decimo have the same chance of winning, but of course their payout varies according to how much you spent at the start. Because of this the Euromillions Euro Lottery has put an e-lottery system into operation.

With the Euromillions Euro lottery, one draw is held every month. Three months a year see bigger draws promising even grander prizes. The three special lotteries occur in January, summer, and around Christmas; these are, in order, El Nio, San Ildefonso and Elgordo (which translates to “the Fat One”).

Unlike other lottery systems, the El Gordo Lottery uses balls sporting five digits apiece ranging from 00,000 to 84,999. During the draw a ball is drawn from a bowl to determine the winning ticket while a second is pulled out of the second bowl to find the prize value.

The e-lottery system can guarantee a prize for every participant. You will automatically be sorted into a team follwing your buy into the Elgordo Lottery syndicate. Each team is assigned a number from zero to nine when the drawing is made, the last digit of the winning number determines which team receives the money. The money is divided evenly among the team members. Before the next lottery, the syndicate takes subscriptions once again and the e-lottery continues.

Making The Most Of E-Lottery: Why You Should Go For It

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Every one of us knows how spam impacts us. Every day we either get a ton of spam - or if we’re fairly well protected by spam filters - only a few pieces.

Like a large number of people, I don’t use any spam filters. Ah. You think I’m insane. But wait. My problem is that I get a lot of email from marketing types which I want to receive. And the spam filtering software is not very sensitive to my needs. Even white-listing doesn’t always work. So, I prefer to get all that spam and just delete it.

Now this solution can work for me despite the time it takes to delete my daily overdose of spam. However, at the enterprise level, it’s a whole different story. If you have a relatively large internal network with even a modest number of email users, you’re looking at a major problem. And the more users you have, the worse the problem is.

Sure, you can put up software on the mail server. Works, kind of. But pretty soon you may find you need to upgrade the mail server. And that’s after you already put it on a stand-alone machine.

Rather than continuing to buy ever more expensive software to run on a machine that keeps needing to be upgraded, you might want to think about a dedicated anti spam appliance.

To give you some idea of what’s possible let’s take a look at Barracuda Networks dedicated anti spam appliance. All you need to do is put this baby in front of your mail server. I say baby, advisedly because this one will learn by doing and by training provided by your users.

Dean Drako, CEO of Barracuda Networks said, “Bayesian filtering is still one of the most accurate defenses against spam. The new plug-ins allow users to directly train the Bayesian filter, making the Barracuda Spam Firewall even more accurate based on the users individual email preferences. Viruses and other threats can infect the network quickly if they are not stopped at the network edge. With Intent Analysis our customers have an advantage over these threats because the Barracuda Spam Firewall is able to block them real time. Consequently we have consistently been a first responder when some of the most malicious virus attacks have hit, saving our customers from potentially devastating damage to their networks.”

This is one beautiful little machine. A Barracuda Spam Firewall can support from 1,000 to 30,000 active users. It can usually be installed in less than five minutes and receives automatic hourly updates for new forms of spam and viruses. It has a 10 layer defense system beyond the use of open source anti spam and anti virus solutions: denial of service and security protection, IP block list, rate control, virus check with archive decompression, proprietary virus check, user specified rules, spam fingerprint check, Intent Analysis, spam rule-based scoring, and Bayesian analysis. Plus it also does both inbound and outbound email filtering with the inclusion of sophisticated outbound email filtering techniques (just in case you’ve got a spam zombie on board or somebody’s got an infected PC).

However, it isn’t exactly cheap. Still, when you consider the time, bandwidth, user frustration and potential hardware upgrade costs, the price may look a lot more reasonable. You can check it out at http://www.barracudanetworks.com/

If you are in the market for an anti-spam appliance, the Barracuda Spam Firewall isn’t your only choice. The impact of spam on internet businesses - even those who primarily use it for just email - is so great that a simple search for “anti spam appliance” will find you a number of alternatives to examine. Even McAfee is getting into the anti spam hardware game.

I’m hoping that it won’t be too long before I can pick up a Bayesian multi-level anti spam, anti virus firewall appliance for my home PC that keeps me safe and cuts my need to delete without deep-sixing the email I want or costing me more than I can afford. I suspect it’s on the way.

Copyright 2005 Richard Keir

Richard writes in a variety of areas involving eBusiness and the internet. For more on spam visit http://anti-spam.werkz.org and for general eCommerce go to http://building-ecommerce-websites.com