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How do you get that job you really want? Well, it helps to be qualified—academic background, training, experience in the field—they all go into it. Interviewing well helps too. After all, you can't sell yourself and your qualifications if you don't show them what you've got. But how do you get that interview? Do your homework, do your networking, keep your ear to the ground. And once you're zeroing-in on where you want to interview, you need to let the hiring authorities know you're looking for them. Here's where a good resume comes in.

A resume, no matter how good, will never get you a job. What it will do, however, is get you an interview. Once you're in the door and talking with them face-to-face, you can impress them with your grasp of the important issues that face their company, and let them know how you are uniquely qualified to help them solve their problems.

Instant Resume Templates has dozens of resume templates for you to download, customize, and send off to potential employers. They're all available as DOC files, so you can customize them with Microsoft Word or any other tool that can edit DOC files. With resumes designed for professional, business, or academic settings, there's sure to be one that will help you to land that job. Whether it's basic resumes, chronological resumes, or even informal resumes, all you need to do is to download one of the templates, fill it in with your information and qualifications, and send it off to your next employer. It's not time to open the Champagne just yet, but who knows…

Instant Resume Templates is a free service. You can grab the templates with any web browser, and edit them with a Microsoft Word-compatible word processing program.

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Planet eBook is a great way to grab electronic versions of many works of classic literature. They've got dozens of great works of literature that you can download for free. These volumes are items that the copyright has lapsed on (George Orwell's 1984), or works that are in the public domain (Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol). they run the gamut from Grimms Fairy Tales and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche.

All of these eBooks are free to download and use in whatever way you see fit, as long as you don't make any changes to then and you don't charge anybody for using them. Read them yourselves, share them with friends, burn them to CD, print them and distribute them to your English Lit class, just go nuts with these selections. There is no sign-up required to download any of the titles, and if you've got a suggestion for additional books to publish, they're more than eager to hear from you. They've got a mailing list, so you can be notified when new volumes are added to their library.

Planet eBook is a free service. All titles are downloaded as PDF files, so you need Adobe Reader or any other tool that can open and read PDF files.

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When you're trying to visualize pieces of a whole, nothing brings it all together like a good old pie chart. Whether it's kids in a classroom, or dollars in your portfolio, a pie chart helps you to visualize how how big a share a segment is of a whole thing. Boys in a class? Dollars in stocks? Put it in a pie chart and you'll see what's happening.

Making a pie chart used to require that you run Excel or some other spreadsheet program. That may be fine if you already own the tool, and you don't mind the work involved in setting your data up, but for simple, one-off charts, it's kind of involved.

Instant Pie Charts makes it easy to design and complete just the pie chart you need. Choose from 2- or 3-dimensional charts and pick a size. You can then enter as many, or as few, segments as you need to tell your story. Choose your colors, add your titles, and you're good to go. You can use your custom pie chart in Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, or really anywhere that you can paste an image. Want to include it in a web page? Copy the URL for the completed chart and insert it into an image tag on your site, and now the whole world can see what you've done.

Instant Pie Charts is a free online service. You access it in your web browser, so it's compatible with just about every platform and operating system out there.

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When it comes to typing, are you a "hunt-and-peck" kind of guy (or gal), or do you enter text with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine? Either way, keyboarding is an essential skill, and one at which you probably can improve—after all, Mavis Beacon has made quite a name for herself. But how about speeding up your typing without adding to her retirement fund? (Don't worry, she's not a real person.)

TypingWeb has a free online typing tutor that you can use to improve your skills, and speed up your typing. You can start off with a quick typing test to see just how your current skill level stacks up, and then begin on a series of lessons to speed you up and save you time and effort in keyboarding. Building on your test results, lessons are customized to focus on your weaker areas, helping to build your speed and confidence over time.

There are also lessons for Dvorak keyboards and 10-Key data entry; for non-US users, there is support for different keyboard layouts as well.

TypingWeb is a free online service. It should be compatible with most systems using a modern web browser.

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RSS feeds are a great way to keep up with your favorite websites and blogs. Webmasters generate a feed that you can subscribe to, and you'll get the latest updates and changes from the site. Assuming, of course, that the site you're interested in generates a feed. If not, you're out of luck—or at least used to be.

Page2RSS is a service that watches pages for you, and when it sees a change, it lets you know. You don't have to register or anything; to create your own "feed", you just type the URL you want to monitor into the box and hit the button. It returns a link that you can then paste into your feed reader, and now whenever there are changes to the subject page, you'll be the first to know about it. Or you can make it even easier by dragging the "Add to Page2RSS" link to your browser's toolbar; now you can add feeds for any page you come across while you're surfing.

Page2RSS is a free service that should be compatible with all systems running a modern Web browser.

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Some folks are just never on time. No matter how hard they try, they just can't pull it off. Now whether this is a sign of some deep-seated pathology, or just a lack of good planning isn't for discussion here, but there are some tricks that the chronically late have resorted to to try to get place on time.

One of the favorites is that of setting the clock ahead. Whether it's just a few minutes, or maybe a hour or more, the theory has it that once you set the clock ahead, you will forget that you did. Now when you are running ten minutes late on the clock, you may well be right on time in the real world.

The Procrastinator's Clock takes an interesting twist on this principle. Instead of running a set ten minutes ahead or so, it actually varies in how fast it runs. It's guaranteed to run up to 15 minutes fast, but that value isn't a constant. With a clock like this, you know that at any given moment, it may be a quarter hour ahead, or it may be dead on accurate—and you'll never know which. If you weren't neurotic enough about getting there on time, now you can add the further uncertainty of not really knowing what time it is. Heck, it may be easier to just be on time.

The author suggests that this tool is offered in the spirit of Chindogu, "…the Japanese art of creating almost useless objects." If you're not on time, or maybe if you are, you'll want to give this a spin.

Procrastinator's Clock is an online service. It should be compatible with most systems running a modern Web browser.

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GE's slogan "Imagination At Work" gives a name to their little online tool ImaginationCubed. You can let your imagination run wild on their virtual whiteboard. Included are tools to draw, stamp, add text, and more. Change background and foreground colors and line width to make your little sketches your own. Clear and Undo functions make it easy to fine-tune your doodles. There's even a built-in recorder that allows you to replay the drawing that you just performed, so that you can watch your picture be re-created. You can save your handiwork for future reference, or email it to somebody else to share your inspiration.

ImaginationCubed is a free online application. It should run on most systems with a modern web browser. It requires that you have Flash installed on your machine, and you'll have better results with a broadband Internet connection.

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It's not all about the money, but money is certainly a big concern for us all. Budgeting, bill paying, cash flow, there's a lot to keep track of. You can sit at a high desk with a green eyeshade and a quill pen, or you can use automation to help make it all more manageable.

There are a bunch of programs out there to help you stay on top of your financial issues. Mint is a tool that may fit the bill for you in this regard.

Mint is a free online service that interacts with many banks, credit card companies, and investment accounts. It can automatically go out and grab the latest information for each of your accounts, so that you can look at your entire financial situation all at once, rather than having to spend half an hour logging on to a dozen different web sites to get your latest information. It's clever enough to categorize your spending, so that you'll know where you money is going without having to create a budget and spending hours trying to see how it all fits together. If you decide you do want to start budgeting, Mint will tell you what you've spent historically in different areas. It can notify you when you go over budget, or when other significant events happen, like low balances in your bank accounts, getting close to credit card limits, or even large transactions, like salary or tax refund deposits.

Mint should be compatible with most modern web browsers, so almost everybody should be able to use it.

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Stuff happens. Generally it happens over time. Sometimes understanding a topic requires that you see just how things have changed over time—they've gotten better, they've gotten worse, they've gotten bigger, and so forth. A biography, a history book, even a class schedule are timelines of a sort.

Dipity is like Wikipedia for timelines. It bills itself as "…the easiest way to make and share interactive timelines about the people and things you care about." If you've got something you're interested in, and it happened over time, you can build and share a timeline of it. The rise and fall of Mesoamerican culture, the history of UFO sightings, Monty Python episodes—they're all fair game.

Timelines can have creators, editors, and fans, so you can create a timeline, collaborate with others in fleshing it out, and then share it with the world. Along with text, you can also incorporate images, links to other Web locations, Google maps, YouTube videos, and more. In addition, you can embed timelines in your web pages, so that your Mesoamerican ethnography site will include the timeline along with all the pictures of pyramids.

Dipity is a free online service. It should be compatible with most modern web browsers.

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Stikkit is an online tool that helps you organize all the disparate bits and pieces that make up your life. It's like having a pile of little sticky notes, only better. You can create a stikkit for anything you're interested in keeping track of, like people, events, and ideas. It's clever enough to figure out whether you're typing in a note, a calendar item, or contact information, and categorizes your stikkit accordingly.

You can log in and add or edit your stikkits, but the real savings is when you add a bookmark to your browser. Now whenever you need to take a note or look a something you've already written, it's just a quick click away. It's really helpful if you're taking notes while you browse the web—open a new stikkit and it's automatically populated with the title and URL of your current page.

You can share your stikkits with others, so that you can collaborate and all be on the same page. You can add to your notes via email as well. Each stikkit comes with a discrete email address. Send your note an email and the body of your message becomes a part of the stikkit.

Stikkit is a free online service. It should be compatible with most modern Web browsers.

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