Couch potato lifestyle may speed up ageing

You might like to think twice before settling down (yet again) in front of the TV for a relaxing night in.

Being a couch potato in your free time could make you a decade older biologically than someone who is physically active, according to a major study of people’s “chromosomal clocks”.

It’s not necessarily watching TV that can see you age before your years, but any prolonged period of physical inactivity. Office work, blogging, anyone?

Suharto’s Indonesia

A photo essay exploring the life and times of the late Suharto, who was president of Indonesia for over 30 years before being forced out of office in 1998.

Creating The Perfect Portfolio

Or how to make your online portfolio stand out from the other two thousand it is competing for attention with.

People with not much to do may enjoy exploring a portfolio and clicking on hard to find links to see tiny thumbnails of your work, but a busy potential employer will not. Make your portfolio fast, accessible and simple. If you want to show your interactive creativity, it’s best to do it in the portfolio, not on it.

Collis Ta’eed has been on both sides of the process, producing a portfolio to win work with, and evaluating the portfolios of those looking to work with him.

Career decisions: The perfect job fantasy, by Megan Tough.

Some interesting thoughts on the seemingly never ending quest for that holiest of grails, the perfect job.

The truth is there is rarely a single outcome in the search for ideal work. A career is only a part of a lifestyle and a lifestyle encompasses all aspects of our life. Those who consider their career in isolation from the rest of their lives can end up making career decisions that don’t work out.

Taking too much time to consider some of life’s bigger decisions can sometimes be just as bad as leaping into something without any thought or consideration for the consequences.

The more time there is too mull over something however, the more time there is consider other options. To by-pass the hard questions, to find an easy, do nothing, way out.

While Juno, a charmingly affable 16-year-old high school student, may have dived in the deep end a little too soon, it doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do, subject of course to the time, place (and age), being right.

Starship enterprise: the next generation.

There has been talk of commercial space flights and return trips to the Moon for sometime now, but some may be surprised just how close to reality such talk is becoming.

And using a two craft combination paying passengers may able to embark upon sub-orbital journeys by the end of the decade.

THE way Will Whitehorn tells it, the story began in 2003 in Mojave, California, on a visit to Scaled Composites, a company with a reputation for designing and building futuristic and sometimes wacky-looking aircraft. Mr Whitehorn is one of the top brass in Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group; and Virgin Atlantic, Sir Richard’s airline, was sponsoring Global Flyer, a Scaled Composites creation, on a non-stop voyage around the world. On his way out of the factory Mr Whitehorn saw something unusual and asked what it was. Burt Rutan, head of Scaled Composites, told him it was a spaceship. He was building it for another customer, but he couldn’t say any more.

Also featured in the article is an animation showing how the sub-orbital flights will reach “space”, and equally as importantly, return to terra firma.

Progress report on my (overly ambitious) plan to see nine movies this month. To be succinct, I didn’t do too well.

I’ve managed to see:

• American Gangster
• Atonement
• No Country For Old Men
• Juno

Unless I spend all day tomorrow at the movies (not going to happen) I will not see these before January is out:

• Hunting and Gathering
• Lust, Caution
• The Darjeeling Limited
• 2 Days In Paris

And I decided against going to one as I heard some pretty poor reviews:

• The Kite Runner

Maybe I’ll fare better in February. It’s a day longer this year as well…

Shameless self plug I know, but an interview I did for The Pakistani Spectator has just been posted.

There’s also interviews with a number of other bloggers for your reading enjoyment.

Thanks to Ghazala Khan, of The Pakistani Spectator for organising this.

Expand your resume by contracting, by Toby Somerville.

Freelancers looking for work shouldn’t just limit their search avenues to their client base. Contracting can also be a viable option when it comes to keeping the work rolling in.

Having a number of reliable external contractors who can be called upon as and when they are need is a huge advantage to firms, as it gives them extra capacity and the possibility of taking on work that normally, might be beyond their skill set.

Face value.

Should a boss be more than a pretty face, or is a pretty face sufficient?

Dr Ambady and Mr Rule showed 100 undergraduates the faces of the chief executives of the top 25 and the bottom 25 companies in the Fortune 1,000 list. Half the students were asked how good they thought the person they were looking at would be at leading a company and half were asked to rate five personality traits on the basis of the photograph. These traits were competence, dominance, likeability, facial maturity (in other words, did the individual have an adult-looking face or a baby-face) and trustworthiness.

It wasn’t of course so much a case of whether a company leader was good looking as such, but rather how suited they appeared to be for leadership.

And interestingly, a strong correlation was found between the perceptions of the students, whether positive or not, and how well each company was performing, whether profitably or not.