Not shockingly these cases were lead material for ESPN during July. It wasn’t until Stage 15, though, that Sportscenter featured the results of the day’s racing instead of the isolated cases of doping. The sport can’t expect to have a great reputation when America’s leading sports news broadcast is more interested in the 3 riders who doped than in the 185 (189 started the race) who didn’t.

I’ve been following cycling since 2003 and since then I’ve noticed a marked escalation year-to-year in the organization’s battle against the drug culture that emerged in the sport during the 80’s and 90’s. You don’t even have to look outside of the US to find that BOTH American teams, Team Columbia/High Road and Team Garmin-Chipotle (mmm Chipotle, I digress), have both voluntarily joined the Agency for Cycling Ethics who’s doping controls are among the most stringent of any sport in any country.

Cycling’s bad rap will take time to recover from. Along the way the International Cycling Association will run into roadbumps as it finds and subsequently bans those athletes who dare to continue to cheat the sport and their fellow cyclists. Rest assured though, that cycling is among the cleanest sports.

The difference between cycling and other sports is that cycling has admitted it had/has a problem, and the governing organizations are doing everything they can to clean up the sport. I think the American public would be shocked at the sheer number of athletes at all levels of other major sports that are still doping, but haven’t yet and probably won’t be caught because of other sports’ lax stance on doping controls for athletes, both in competition and during the off season. You need not look further than Barry Bonds and Major League Baseball.

All this said, I do understand that people can only be aware of what is reported to them and I don’t fault my friend. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this though and each time it leaves me baffled. I just don’t understand writing cycling off for its issues with drugs - its akin to saying that baseball or football (or any other sport) aren’t sports because of the actions of a minority of players.

You’ve probably also noticed the new theme, designed by Ed Merritt. Its a very clean minimalist design. It’s again inspired me to open up the design I started making months ago.

I should also be posting more in the near future, and continuing the series “Making the Jump” that I started back in January. I’ve got a lot planned for upcoming posts and features for the site. In the meantime check me out on Twitter.

Today’s article is about interviewing. For me this was the first time I was interviewing for a job that required more than a simple 1 page application. In my opinion this is also the stage where people derail the first few years of their career by not putting in the proper effort. Hopefully this article will help you outline some key areas to ensure that you will be ready to put your best foot forward.

Interviewing

• Get Started Early — If your school is anything like OSU you’ll probablybe competing for positions with your classmates. If that’s the case, get a jump on the competition by starting the process early. This can be anything from reviewing your resume (more than that in a in a moment), to researching the local job market or even setting up interviews.
• Revise, Revise, Revise! — Your resume is a statement of who YOU are. It’s your opportunity to put your best face forward. Make sure you highlight projects where you really excelled. This is not your chance to portray yourself as an imaginary super you. Keep the resume completely truthful.
• Use Your Resources — If your Career Center offers a Career Fair, sign up immediately. Its a great chance to see what’s out there and interface with representatives from local and national companies. Career Fairs are your first chance to to make a lasting impression with these companies, so be prepared to present yourself professionally. Also, bring your planner so that you can fill it with interview and informational session times.
• Pare Down Your Choices — There’s no better feeling than having more invitations than you expected. But my advice is to keep your interview schedule manageable. So if you find yourself in this position, start by ranking your offers and only accept as many as you can handle. My magic number was 5. Each offer requires you to do a few hours of background research on each company, and at least 2 possibly 3 interviews per offer. Limiting your choices will allow you to keep the process manageable, and you’ll be better prepared for each interview.
• Do Your Research — there’s no better way to show an employer you’re interested than to know the company. For many employers, mine included, this is a must. Employers want to know that you’ll be a good fit for the company and the company will be a good fit for you. It goes both ways. So, take a look at the company’s mission and see if you fit. It’s better to find out at this stage that it won’t work than to find out once you’ve started.
• Be Yourself — It sounds cliche. But being yourself is the best way for your interviewer to get to know you and judge whether you’ll fit well. Its also easier for you and will keep you calm and collected through the stressful bits of the process. Also, don’t forget your manners. Please, Thank You (send them a quick email thanking them), and Ma’am/Sir go a long way.

Interviewing should not be scary if you’ve done your homework and kept your choices manageable. Obviously your mileage will vary depending on how hard you’ve worked to get to this stage of your career.

In the next part of this Article I’ll be taking a look at how to approach the last few months of school.

Do you have any useful advice for interviewees? Feel free to share in the comments (and register if you haven’t already).

1. Write more
2. Watch less television
3. Attend An Event Apart Chicago
4. Take a step into real, paid freelancing (on my free time obviously)
5. Ride my bikes more, including another 100 miler in May

So, here’s to another year and hopefully at least an opportunity to grow up a little more.

A few days ago a friend tipped me off to Feed 43. This service allows you to scrape a website like Fixed Gear Gallery and create a feed from the site’s source. It takes care of all the backend stuff and even does a pretty nice job of covering up what had been some really nasty regular expressions in my prototypes. And after about an hour of playing I had set up not only the bike feed but also the advertisers feed and review feed. In all these 3 feed will be mixed in order to create the next prototype feed.

The only thing I have left is some testing of the 3 feed to make sure the single feeds work well. Then I will attempt to combine all of them using some sort of feed mixing tool. I’ll be using feedburner to track the feed eventually.

Hopefully Dennis publishes it somewhere on FGG, so that people who won’t go Googling for this can find it too. If you have any requests for additions/updates to the feed feel free to let me know. I thought about pulling in the content from the individual pages, which wouldn’t be hard, but I think it would circumvent part of the quirkiness of the FGG. So, as of now I don’t plan to do much more to it, as the quicklinks are quite enough for the Google Reader Bookmarklet that I use for feed reading.

Feel free to post any thoughts/ideas/suggestions/questions in the comments below.

A little about me:

I currently work for Cardinal Solutions Group as an Enterprise Java Solutions Consultant. I am currently working on a project for Nationwide Financial doing web development. I graduated from The Ohio State University this Spring with a degree in Computer Science and a minor in Business Administration. As a student I worked at the Center For Entrepreneurship as a web content manager and general IT consultant/developer. While there, I developed the first version (very unrefined) of the Business Plan Competition website, which is implemented on top of wordpress. The BPC website will continue to be a pet project of mine, and I hope to pick up work on it in the very near future.

So, there we are. My first post on mikelikesbikes dot com.

In the future I’ll be writing about all things web design, biking (fixed gear, commuting, etc), bonsai, and much more. If you have a Google Reader account or another RSS reader, feel free to subscribe to my blog to get the latest posts right in your reader.