Yet Another Perfect Task for CoScripter
4:57pm... more than six hours after I had a light sweet potato porridge and some skimpy fried vegetables, my body and mind are being taken over by an uncontrollable urge for food. I tried to convince myself that I could still hold on to this "mind numbing" task without replenishing my body, then the next second, I discovered yet another perfect task for CoScripter!
So the task I've been working on for the past 20 something minutes is "mind numbing" -- yes, the exact phrase one of Allen Cypher's customers used to describe his/her job of data entry. Though mine task is not a complete data entry task, it does involve quite a bit of manual repetition with minimal things that are of interest to any intelligent minds.
To give a big picture of my work (and life if I have one : p), I'm a PhD. candidate in computer science with a concentration in HCI. This is my final year, a.k.a., the job-hunting year, and the fall career fair is less than two days away. I've been frantically pouring over tips on how to make the best out of career fairs, one of which involves doing your homework before attending (so obvious).
To do my homework, basically I've been doing the followings:
Step A: Look up the job openings of an employer attending the Fall 2012 Career Fair at Oregon State on indeedjobs.com using the keywords "user experience" and "usability".
Step B: Check each employer on myvisajobs.com to see if they sponsor H1B visas.
Step C (requires a human): if the employer that does not satisfy both Step A and B, mark "X" next to their name so I know to skip their booth at the Career Fair later on.
Straightforward right? But sooooo tedious to do!!! It took me 20 minutes to go through 7 out of 29 pages of employers listed.
How long will it take a script to do that? For one thing, I don't really care. I'm fine with it taking up to hours as long as I'm not the one doing the work so I can be freed to engage in something requiring intelligence! For another, it should be without doubt faster than a human.
So, am I ready to move on to a CoScripter script? Sure but the only thing is, I need to get the employers' names into a CoScripter table for the script to iterate over the employers' names. I can't extract the employers' names automatically from the PDF I've been looking at. Luckily, our school has published the list online. CoScripter can extract the list from a web page into its table.
Now onto a CoScripter script!
P.S. I'm sure my fellow (international) students would like to be able to automate a process like this.
So the task I've been working on for the past 20 something minutes is "mind numbing" -- yes, the exact phrase one of Allen Cypher's customers used to describe his/her job of data entry. Though mine task is not a complete data entry task, it does involve quite a bit of manual repetition with minimal things that are of interest to any intelligent minds.
To give a big picture of my work (and life if I have one : p), I'm a PhD. candidate in computer science with a concentration in HCI. This is my final year, a.k.a., the job-hunting year, and the fall career fair is less than two days away. I've been frantically pouring over tips on how to make the best out of career fairs, one of which involves doing your homework before attending (so obvious).
To do my homework, basically I've been doing the followings:
Step A: Look up the job openings of an employer attending the Fall 2012 Career Fair at Oregon State on indeedjobs.com using the keywords "user experience" and "usability".
Step B: Check each employer on myvisajobs.com to see if they sponsor H1B visas.
Step C (requires a human): if the employer that does not satisfy both Step A and B, mark "X" next to their name so I know to skip their booth at the Career Fair later on.
Straightforward right? But sooooo tedious to do!!! It took me 20 minutes to go through 7 out of 29 pages of employers listed.
How long will it take a script to do that? For one thing, I don't really care. I'm fine with it taking up to hours as long as I'm not the one doing the work so I can be freed to engage in something requiring intelligence! For another, it should be without doubt faster than a human.
So, am I ready to move on to a CoScripter script? Sure but the only thing is, I need to get the employers' names into a CoScripter table for the script to iterate over the employers' names. I can't extract the employers' names automatically from the PDF I've been looking at. Luckily, our school has published the list online. CoScripter can extract the list from a web page into its table.
Now onto a CoScripter script!
P.S. I'm sure my fellow (international) students would like to be able to automate a process like this.
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