Resumes are boring.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I doubt I'll be surprising or offending anybody who has looked at more than 10 resumes in the past week. Resumes are dull. It's just a part of what they are. It doesn't mean that the people are dull; they are often fascinating. Even what's in a resume can be interesting. But there's little you can do to make the resume itself interesting. Oh, sure, there are some things -- but most of them are more suited to print media than the web. And there's also a reason resumes are dull. They are made to be similar to each other so that you can easily find out what you want from them. After all, the people in Human Resources don't have time to read your biography, or solve a puzzle, or any one of a hundred interesting things. They just have time to look at your resume.
But I didn't want my resume to get lost in the crowd, because I intend to never get lost in the crowd. I decided about the only thing I could do was color my resume to stand out. But what if the person reading it hates my color choices? or worse, what if they happen to be color-blind to the colors I choose? And what does coloring my resume say about whether or not they should hire me? I had almost talked myself out of it.
Then I had the idea to color it dynamically, randomly. Written in perl, this resume now shows that I do in fact code for fun, and proves that I at least understand the basics of the language (though unfortunately, it doesn't really show all the perl I know). It also demonstrates knowledge of HTML and CSS (and browser compatibility). Fairly obviously it shows my love for color and my light-hearted laid-back good humor (if not my deep and abiding modesty). But most importantly, I think, it captures the fast-paced, ever-changing nature of the world-wide web. If you've ever worked at a dot-com, you probably have had to live through the experience of changing the home page every 4 weeks. So now this one chages itself for you! And if you don't like it -- reload it. It should be fairly easy to find a color set you like. If not, just see the unobtrusive version; or even the plain text. Hope you can find one to enjoy!
A few final notes: this project turned out (as many do) to be a little more challenging than expected. Netscape doesn't deal with elements having background colors very well, in my opinion, and getting this to work on both major browsers took a little finagling. But before that, I was faced with the color-choosing problem. I wanted to pick background colors that would generally be high-contrast. I wanted to pick more than one text color, and have every text color stand out from the page, but not clash. I wanted to have sections of other background colors that were similar to the main background color, but I wanted one section to really stand out -- my name. All of this might have been easy -- except that I wanted to pick the colors randomly, every time, and not just by a slightly randomized formula. So I had to write algorithms for deciding when colors were acceptable. I think it worked out well, but monitors differ a lot, so it might not be quite the same for you. In honor of all the various challenges i had to overcome, I intend to release the source code eventually. But for now, just reload the page, once more.
It's different every time.