Searching for a job in Norway, the saga continues :)

A few days ago i went to the yearly EURES employment fair. Fortunately, Norway was the only country that brought a company with it, which was also looking for engineers ;). I approached the Norwegian representative for NAV (the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Organization) and asked if she could give me some tips on job seeking in Norway and i got a few suggestions that somehow surprised me and which i am posting here in case anybody else is searching for work in the land of the midnight sun.

1. Do not put your picture in your CV. This is done in order to prevent companies from hiring people base on their gender, looks or skin colour. This information totally amazed me, not only because it is so civilized, but also it is totally anti-portuguese. In Portugal there is a general consensus on how the photo on the CV is so important, so any job seeker usually is advised on how he/she should look on the photo, what clothes to wear, etc.

2. When reading a job ad there is usually a phone number and a contact person with whom you should talk to in order to get extra information about the job (e.g. whether or not you qualify for the job, if only people with 5 years of experience should apply, etc.). In Portugal I have never tried to contact anyone before sending an application, nor have I ever talked with someone who did, so this was news to me. 

Who else? ...again

Who else?

The "status quo" of Education in Portugal

"They have between 25 and 30 years old, face nearly four decades of work and half of them have not even studied twelve years. Only Turkey and Mexico are worse than Portugal in the OCDE group."

Of course that we can blame the government but, as i read in a comment to this news:

"There is no government that replaces the parents."

SOE2PDF – freeware to scan and convert documents to PDF

Over time some of us tend to accumulate a lot of books and documents which occupy too much physical space. An easy solution for this problem is of course to scan and convert everything to PDF format. Doing this process using a flatbed scanner is very time consuming and tedious, so many of us turn to scanners that have an Automatic Document Feeder (also known as ADF). Nowadays there are some of these scanners which automatically scan both sides of a page but the price of this kind of devices is somehow expensive for some of us, that is why people who have regular ADF scanners have to scan odd pages first, even pages afterwards, and then join everything together. It is likely that there is some freeware software on the Internet that already does this process, but sometimes we are bombarded with pop-up licensing windows, advertising and some annoying limitations such as scanning a limited number of pages only.

To solve all these problems I developed a simple piece of software named SOE2PDF, entirely freeware, that allows you to scan odd and even pages separately using an Automatic Document Feeder, converting everything to a single PDF document in the end of the process.

You can download it HERE.

You will also need the .NET 2.0 Framework, otherwise the program will not work. You can download it HERE.

I have only tested the software in Windows XP, so if you have any trouble or bug to report, if possible, I’ll be happy to help. There is no installer, just execute the file SOE2PDF.exe to start using the program.

The usage of SOE2PDF is quite simple, just follow the steps indicated in the program window:

1.  Select a scanner (you can also change the picture type and resolution);
2. Scan odd pages;
3. Scan even pages;
4. Generate a PDF document from the scanned pages.

Enjoy!

WTF?

Norway scores again..

I have just found out that recycling in Norway is not only good for Nature but also for your pockets. If you write your name and phone number on a milk carton, you have the chance to win a monetary prize if your milk carton is selected from the pile of cartons in the local recycling plant. Absolutely awesome!

Here in Portugal there is no incentives whatsoever, but let's face it, avoiding extra damage to mother nature is incentive enought.