Sure, she talks about HR and Recruiting, but Laurie Ruettiman is a great writer. You should follow her blog, because it’s great career advice, even if she doesn’t follow it herself.

Here’s one of her posts stolen, lock, stock and barrel. It’s a good read.

My best career advice from 2012. Summarized for your enjoyment.

• Don’t let a job define you.
• Don’t be too good for work.
• Your personal life and your professional life are different. Guard that.
• Don’t sulk when good things happen to other people.
• Mediocrity at work is okay.
• Money talks.
• You are responsible for your own engagement.
• Work is not your family.
• The best way to get a job is to have a job.
• For every one hour you spend on the internet, spend six in the real world.
• Don’t spread office gossip unless it’s true.
• People notice if you don’t wash your hands.
• Save your money and work less.
• It’s better to smell good than look good.
• Your boss doesn’t have it out for you. Your coworkers do.
• If you fear being fired, it’s too late.
• You are not George Carlin. Tamp down those jokes.
• If you wonder if that skirt is too short, it is.
• When someone asks how you’re doing, it is a formality. Don’t answer honestly.
• You can say no to team building, wellness programs and forced fun.

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First World Problems has got you covered.

Here’s the list:

• Safeway is a whole 10 minutes away, but I really need twinkies.
• My house’s mood lighting doesn’t match all of my moods.
• I need to use both of my hands to unplug my $400 cell phone
• Skateboards look cool, but using my legs is strenuous.
• I order too much stuff on Amazon and keep missing deliveries.
• I can’t be fucked to wait in line for the new iPhone 5.
• Shopping around for a shirt that fits me properly would mean I’d have to leave my couch.
• No matter how hard I try, I cannot find a way to share and discover amazing images!
• Excel Functions? I’m still looking for a technical co-founder.
• My social networking sites are too social.
• I just have too many social networks for me to keep track of.
• If I call a cab, I’d have to actually talk to someone, and yellow really clashes with my shoes.
• There are moments when I don’t know what celebrities all my friends are endorsing.
• Not all of my friends know what I think about everything all the time.
• I’m nostalgic for an era before I was born.
• I feel weird not looking at a monitor constantly.
• My friends owe me money, but cash is such a hassle.
• My iPhone alarm goes off right in the best part of my sexy dreams.
• Using keys to open the door to my house is really time consuming.
• Autocomplete doesn’t work for adding new contacts, but typing whole words takes effort.
• Everyone on Reddit is too mean to me.
• I want to blog, but I don’t want to type anything.
• I have $36.
• I need a number to validate my existence.
• I need entertainment, but deciding which link to click is difficult.
• I mentioned I liked conspiracies so now I’m on a treasure hunt across the internet.
• My watch doesn’t have a touchscreen.

First World Problems also has the answers.

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This is the Official UX Drinking Game Shindig for No Reason.

It’s free except for the booze.

This isn’t affiliated at all with anyone, but it’s an excuse to get together. Meet up with other designers and have a drink for all the reasons we need to drink.

Hosted by myself, curator of the UX Drinking Game. The first five attendees in San Francisco that show me they have downloaded the iPhone app will get a free drink. The back area will be reserved. This will probably be one of the last times it’s held in San Francisco — I’m moving to Seattle.

San Francisco, California

Hosted by UsabilityCounts
Tony Nik’s
1534 Stockton Street
San Francisco, California
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Dallas, Texas

Los Angeles, California

Hosted by NatalieSun
Copa d’Oro
217 Broadway
Santa Monica, CA 90401
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Washington, DC

Hosted by DUQE
Details coming soon.

Facebook

London, England

Hosted by WorldOfKnight
The Rake
14a Winchester Walk
Borough Market SE1 9AG, United Kingdom
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Tel Aviv, Israel

Hosted by TomerSharon
Google Israel
98 Yigal Alon
Tel Aviv, Israel
EventBrite | Map

Other cities coming soon. Shoot me a note if you’re interested in hosting in your town.

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I was happy enough to contribute my festive cheer over at UXMas. The story, The UX Portfolio: Telling Your Story, was great fun.

Here’s an excerpt:

Tell One or Two Big Stories

There should be at least one or two projects that you can tell a user experience story about, from inception to release. This means showing off some actual project deliverables—for instance:

• the user research you performed
• the actors and personas you developed
• the user stories you wrote

It also means talking about the project. For example:

• the process you followed to come up with user goals
• the assumptions you made, and how you validated them
• your design considerations

Explaining the full lifecycle illustrates how you think, and gives your audience a more complete picture. Lynn Teo, CXO at McCann Erickson, covers this process extremely well in her presentation, Portfolios Matter: Building the Portfolio to Win the Job.

Once you’ve set the scene, it’s time to play your trump card: demonstrate the only deliverable that truly matters—the final product.

When talking about my portfolio, I frequently talk about Jobvite because we were able to achieve the full lifecycle on that project. However I also talk about a small business called Bob The Chiropractor, because it’s big story about a small business. It’s a project that demonstrates how, even with limited resources, you can achieve great things.

No project is too small to illustrate the big idea.

Cheers.

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This is a cool little site for UX Professionals — UXmas is a joint effort from the teams at Thirst Studios & UX Mastery, with delightful illustrations provided by Supereight Studio. One of the best of first three days is about credit cards — most sites collect too much credit card information, and that increases friction. Here’s the tip:

Credit card type can be deduced from the card number.

That’s right. If you know the credit card number, you can work out whether it is a MasterCard, Visa, American Express etc etc.

Thanks go to the international standard ISO/IEC 7812, which defines the structure of numbers on identification cards, including credit cards (read more in the officialdocumentation). The first six digits of a card number are the issuer identifier number (IIN), which identifies the organisation that issued the card.

For the purposes of online payment, you currently mostly only need to use the first two digits to work out what type of credit card the user has, as follows:

• Visa: first digit is “4”
• MasterCard: first digits is a “5” and second digit is “1”, “2”, “3”, “4” or “5”.
• American Express: first digit is a “3” and second digit is “4” or “7”.
• Diners Club: first digit is a “3” and second digit is “6” or “8”.
• Japan Credit Bureau (JCB): first digit is a “3” and second digit is a “5”.
• Discover: card number begins with “6011” or “65”.

What does all this mean for our online form?

You don’t need to ask the user what type of card they are using.

Read on…

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