Musical Loose Ends

My NOLA Library CD tour did not end with Norah Jones. I was able to sneak in two last listens before my time ran out:
(1) Actual Sounds + Voices, a 1998 release from Meat Beat Manifesto
(2) The Next Day, the most recent release from David Bowie

Actual Sounds + Voices

Rather than reach for a term like "electronica" or "industrial", I'll characterize Meat Beat Manifesto's output as "abstract beat music that makes liberal use of samples", which is not always the case but that's the description I'm gonna go with. MBM is a band that you find out about from college radio or a video channel or perhaps most importantly word of mouth - you won't hear it on a commercial radio station. (If you have heard MBM on a commercial station, you are welcome to correct me.) I myself was acquainted with MBM in 1989 or 1990 by WKDU, the radio station of Drexel University in Philadelphia, when one night DJ Chris Vecchio played "Strap Down (Part 1)" from Storm the Studio, MBM's debut record, which I subsequently purchased at Third Street Jazz and Rock, which sadly went out of business in the late 1990s.

Fast forward to my time in the Big Easy. From January 2006 to August 2008 - up until the time we were 'swiped' by Hurricane Gustav - I satisfied my listening fix via the CD collection at New Orleans' Main Library, from which I checked out MBM's Subliminal Sandwich in February 2008. Subliminal Sandwich is a sprawling 28-track double CD whose second, more experimental disc contains some seriously mind-blowing music.

That brings us to Actual Sounds + Voices, which I checked out from the Latter Library last July and which is similar in style to the first Subliminal Sandwich disc. My favorite Actual Sounds + Voices track is the eerie "Hail to the Bopp", whose Come [and] join us spoken-word sample may be from Marshall Applewhite of the Heaven's Gate cult, but don't quote me on that. A second highlight is the 11-minute "The Thumb", which comprises
(1-5) five minutes of jazz* and then
(6-8) three minutes of spaciness that could have been written by György Ligeti and then
(9-11) an aggressive groove for the last three minutes.

*"Let Go" also has a jazzy feel: given the free-form nature of many MBM compositions, one could be forgiven for suspecting that, deep down, MBM leader and mainstay Jack Dangers, who plays the clarinet, is a Miles Davis wannabe.

The Next Day

David Bowie has been on the scene for almost fifty years although he hasn't been making music for all of that time. A 10-year gap separates The Next Day and Reality, Bowie's previous studio record, and I believe that Bowie himself was putting out an "I'm retired" vibe for much of the 2000s. Is The Next Day a one-off or is there more to be drawn from the Bowie well? Only time will tell.

On my Blogger profile page I state, My favorite record of all time would probably be Jeff Beck's Wired. However, if I were to choose a favorite set of records it would be the Bowie records running from Station to Station to Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), inclusive; excluding the live Stage, I own all of these records plus Never Let Me Down and Outside. I have heard Young Americans and Let's Dance in their entireties and, like any self-respecting music listener, know Bowie's 1969-1974 hits like the back of my hand. Adding it all up leaves plenty of Bowie territory that I am unfamiliar with.

So what did I think of The Next Day? The Next Day is a modern rock record with as much edge as could be expected from someone in his mid-60s; it's a good record but not as groundbreaking as Bowie's best work (but what is?) - quality-wise it's much closer to Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) than to Let's Dance. Favorite tracks: "The Next Day", "Valentine's Day", and "Dancing Out in Space".

Bowie is one of many artists who got a lot of radio airplay back in the 1970s but have now all but vanished from the airwaves (at least this is so in New Orleans). I will take aim at the dreadful state of FM rock radio in a future post.

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Ah, it was a glorious run, but all good things must come to an end. There were a number of CDs in the Latter stacks that I wanted to get to, but didn't: Reba McEntire's Keep On Loving You, Atoms for Peace's Amok, and Jennifer Hudson's eponymous debut were on my short list of items to check out. C'est la vie.

I am no longer within walking distance of a library but I do now have a broadband Web connection and for the last couple of months I've been wading through the musical archives at Grooveshark.com, which I'll write about when I can get around to it.

Confessions of a Pedestrian

If you've been following the news lately, then you know that New York City's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, intends to take a hard(er) line on jaywalking. I understand why he's doing this, but speaking as a longtime urban pedestrian, I think it's a bad idea - and then some. It's a bad idea because, 'all things being equal', it is in fact safer to jaywalk than it is to walk across a street at an intersection.

Let me begin by getting an acknowledgement out of the way. Crossing a street on foot does require you to pay attention, and if you're not willing to pay attention, then you really shouldn't expect anyone to feel sorry for you if you end up getting hit by a car. Crossing a street should be a 'dedicated' activity: you shouldn't be doing anything else - making a phone call, texting, whatever - while you're doing it.

My argument parallels an observation made by Tom Vanderbilt in a "When Pedestrians Get Mixed Signals" op-ed that was recently published by The New York Times:

I routinely jaywalk across one-way streets with my young daughter in our Brooklyn neighborhood. I do this not as an act of vigilante pedestrianism, but simply because the times we came closest to being hit by cars were when we had the “Walk” signal and a driver attempted to make a turn.

Yes! A fellow veteran of the streets who gets it! As a public service of sorts, allow me to flesh out the preceding blockquote with the following scenario:

(1) You are on the southwestern corner of an intersection and you want to walk across the street from south to north, and you have a green light.

(2) Directly in front of you is a western motorist who has a red light and who wants to make a right turn and go south.

(3) Directly to your right is a one-way flow of traffic that runs from north to south. The western motorist is looking northward, watching the traffic, and is completely oblivious to you, the pedestrian at the intersection. You begin crossing the street. Meanwhile, a brief break in the traffic spurs the motorist to begin turning right.

Folks, I have come exceedingly close to being hit in this exact situation. (If there are any NOLA readers in the audience, this happened to me at the corner of St. Charles and Louisiana in the course of walking from the Exxon corner to the Rite-Aid corner.) So let's say it one more time, <strong>ly: It is simply not true that it is safer to cross at an intersection than it is to jaywalk; show me someone who holds otherwise and I'll show you someone who is not a pedestrian.

The "When Pedestrians Get Mixed Signals" article concludes with a cynical comment on law enforcement's attitude toward pedestrians:

The Los Angeles Police Department may be patrolling on foot in downtown Los Angeles, but it is still looking through the windshield.

It's not just the police, Tom: as long as society in general is looking through the windshield (as you intimate earlier in the article), it should be legal to jaywalk.

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And now for something completely different…Everyone else has commented on Arthur Chu's spectacular run on Jeopardy!, so I thought I would as well, being the loyal Jeopardy! viewer that I am.

Arthur Chu was a formidable contestant, and he played to win, as was certainly his prerogative; there was nothing stopping other contestants from adopting his unorthodox tactics and trying to beat him at his own game. As he worked the board, Chu exuded an air of confident competence, and I enjoyed watching him and rooted for him for that very reason, and I'll miss his presence in tonight's show. (Indeed, I suspect it was his demeanor, vis-à-vis his hopscotch approach to the clues, that actually annoyed his detractors.) However, I knew it was only a matter of time until one or more bad bets knocked him off his throne, as happened last night.

FWIW, I missed Chu's first win because the 28 January episode of Jeopardy! was preempted by President Obama's State of the Union address; why anyone would substitute the latter for the former is beyond my comprehension but evidently the directors at NBC felt differently.

Wired for Speed

I noted last time that my NOLA-to-Vista move did not include any large appliances. However, I did bring with me a large (5' x 28" x 24") desk that I got from a thrift store in Philadelphia for $35 in a real steal of a deal not quite twenty years ago. Shortly after my belongings arrived, I and my father moved my desk into my bedroom, and then I set up my computer.

If you've followed my blogging efforts, then you know that I've been embarrassingly procrastinative about upgrading my dial-up Internet connection to a broadband Internet connection. Now, here in Vista I could continue to access the Web via my EarthLink dial-up service if I really wanted to, but anyone who has gone from dial-up to broadband can tell you that surfing the Web with a dial-up connection is akin to working with one hand tied behind your back, and I have rather had my fill of the dial-up experience, as you can well imagine.

My Intel Core 2 Duo iMac is equipped with an AirPort Extreme card via which I can piggyback on a neighbor's Cox cable Internet connection, but I don't want to do that either. My father himself has an AT&T U-verse DSL Internet connection, however, and I'm thinking, "There's gotta be some way I can hook up my computer to his system, right?"

An AT&T technician who we'll call "James" set up my father's U-verse system in June 2013. When James was done setting up the system, he didn't give my father a manual therefor but he did leave behind a four-page leaflet containing an AT&T "pledge" - It is my goal to provide the best service experience possible … blah blah blah - and a brief survey and other information. The leaflet's second page features James' work phone number, so I called the number and left a relevant message on his voicemail; my intuition told me that running an Ethernet cable from my computer to the system was all I needed to do, but I thought it would be a good idea to check with him to make sure.

While I was waiting for James to return my call, it occurred to me: Dude, why don't you do some homework on this? Whenever you are having some kind of problem with a computer, you can take it to the bank that someone out there has experienced that exact same problem - there are no new computer problems under the sun. So I went to Google and did a U-verse connect second computer search.

As it happened, I didn't need to get any help from 'someone out there': my search's first page of results linked to a series of articles from AT&T itself addressing my issue. The first of these hits, a "Connecting a computer to your Wi-Fi home network" article, recommended:

Try This First
Once you've switched your wireless to On, have your Wi-Fi Network Name and password (found on the side of your AT&T provided gateway) available to enter into your network connections.

I myself am a big believer in trying the simplest things first. I trotted over to the 2Wire i38HG residential gateway connected to my father's computer and wrote down the SSID and WI-FI KEY values that appeared thereon (below the third bar code). I went back to my computer, opened the Network pane of the System Preferences application, selected the AirPort option in the pane's left-hand menu, and turned AirPort on. Gratifyingly, the SSID value appeared in the pane's Network Name menu; upon selecting the value I was prompted for a password. I entered the WI-FI KEY value into the Password field and clicked the button. Within a few seconds the pane displayed an AirPort is connected … message. Yes!

FYI:
• The second U-verse connect second computer result, a "Connecting Computers to the AT&T U-verse Gateway" .pdf, confirmed that I could indeed interface with the system by Ethernetically connecting my computer to the gateway.
• An i38HG gateway manual Google search led me to a user guide applicable to the system.

James never did return my call - let's hear it for AT&T's award-winning customer service, eh? But all's well that ends well. I now have a DSL connection to the Web; it's not that fast of a connection in absolute terms - AT&T's own High Speed Internet Speed Test page clocks its download speed at about 7.6 megabits per second - but it's waaayyyy faster than dial-up. At long last I can watch YouTube cat videos! ;-)

An elephant remains in the room: What am I gonna do about my EarthLink dial-up account? As of this writing, I am paying $21.95/month for a service I would seem to not be using. However, I am actually getting something for that money:
(1) EarthLink's home.earthlink.net server hosts about 7 MB of external files - demos and images - for my blogs.
(2) Much less importantly, I still use the email part of the service to some extent, although I have now routed most of my email traffic to my apeak02@gmail.com address.

If I were to cancel my EarthLink service, then EarthLink would immediately pull the plug on the home.earthlink.net material, which would leave 'holes' in many of my blog entries, and that would really bum me out, to put it mildly. Given the time and energy it would take to migrate my stuff to another Web hosting service, is it worth it to stay with EarthLink, at least for the short term? Stay tuned.

History in Motion

Moving is always a headache, whether you are moving across the country or overseas or just across town, whether you are moving a lot or just a little bit of stuff.

There is a vast amount of moving information out there and it is not so easy to sift through. An argument can be made that the Web has made the moving process more difficult in that it has greatly enlarged the information haystack; moreover, the Web is not a substitute for speaking with a 'relocation consultant' on the phone. I nevertheless began my own process for moving my belongings from New Orleans to Vista with a long distance movers new orleans (or something like that) Google search.

The moving business has diversified: in addition to the
(A) moving companies that do it all and
(B) doing it all yourself with a U-Haul truck
standard options, there are now
(C) container services that will drive your stuff from Point A to Point B but expect you to load and unload it (e.g., U-Pack) and complementarily
(D) companies that only un/load but don't do any actual moving.
Being a non-motorist and not having anyone to help me on the New Orleans side, I wanted an (A) company.

My quote quest began with Thumbtack, an all-purpose service broker. After I filled out a brief form for my move, Thumbtack initially promised to deliver multiple quotes from pre-screened pros but subsequently put me in touch with a single, not-NOLA-based mover - Turnaround Moving Service in Geismar, LA - that offered me a wildly uncompetitive quote* of $6500, which was a good thing in the sense that it spurred me to get up off my duff and go get a better quote.

*I indicated on the form that my move was for a studio apartment (the smallest choice) but the form did not contain a comment box for providing more detail; Turnaround probably assumed that my move included several large appliances (a refrigerator, an oven, a dishwasher), which was not the case.

CORRECTION: I rechecked with Thumbtack and its long-distance moving form does in fact include an Anything else the mover should know? comment box, in which I didn't enter anything, so evidently I'm to blame for what happened. The moral of the story: The more details you provide to the mover, the more accurate your moving quote is going to be.

BTW, Yelp did not prove that helpful in my long distance movers new orleans search, which is not so surprising given that Yelp's focus is local businesses vis-à-vis interstate ones; however, Yelp did at least enable me to weed out various we-don't-go-outside-of-Louisiana businesses that were not suitable for my move.

On the right side(s) of the Google search pages were a series of ads for discount 'movers' that, like Thumbtack, don't do any moving themselves but instead serve as intermediaries between movees and actual moving companies. I submitted move information to at least two** of these outfits: Budget Van Lines and OrbitzMoving.com (**I seem to recall also doing so at either GetMove.com or GotMovers.com but I just can't remember). Budget Van Lines responded directly to me with a $1333.50 quote. Meanwhile, I received emails or phone calls from five companies (presumably) contracting for OrbitzMoving.com:

(1-2) Allied Van Lines and North American Van Lines wanted to actually come to my apartment and look over my stuff, and would not give me a quote without doing that.

(3-4) Cross Country Movers and Global Transportation offered me quotes in the neighborhood of $1100.

(5) World Wide Van Lines sent me a not to exceed moving quote of $5,599.95.

At the time that I had to make a decision, I had a Global Transportation 'email trail' - an introductory letter and a binding estimate contract of sorts - whereas Cross Country Movers hadn't sent me any emails at all, so I went with Global Transportation for my move.

Departure

Global Transportation itself did not move my belongings but rather subcontracted the job to Chico and the Men, a Slidell-based moving company.

A three-person Chico team - two dedicated movers and a paperwork guy who helped the movers a bit - showed up slightly late on the day of the move. The two movers put me at ease; as I watched them it was clear to me that they knew what they were doing. In contrast, the paperwork guy seemed to be going by the seat of his pants:
(1) He asked me to input address and/or credit card data - data that I had given to my Global Transportation contact and that he should have had on hand - into a number of forms.
(2) He asked me for a photo ID and seemed confused when I handed him my passport; he called up a superior to ensure that a passport was an acceptable form of ID (it was). He then told me that I would have to send photocopies of (a) my passport photo and (b-c) the front and back of my credit card to Chico's headquarters before Chico would ship my goods.
(3) He finally told me that it would take at least three weeks to deliver my shipment whereas Global Transportation's binding estimate email had said I would get it in 5-14 business days.

I felt a sense of great relief as the moving truck drove away. "At long last I am getting out of New Orleans," I thought.

Connecting timeline

• My belongings were carted away on 10 December.

• I left New Orleans by train on 11 December and arrived in California on 13 December.

• The aforediscussed photo/credit card photocopies were obtained and then faxed back to Slidell on 14 December.

• On 29 December I got a call from a Chico employee: "Your shipment will arrive in 5-7 days; a day before the delivery the movers will call you to give you a heads-up."

Arrival

On 4 January a mover called me with the news that
(a) my belongings would be delivered the next day but
(b) they were sitting in a massive truck that could not be driven to my precise location and
(c) they would have to be transferred to a smaller U-Haul truck for delivery, which would require an additional $300 cash payment.
It crossed my mind that he was lying about the truck business, but at that point I was eager to get the whole thing over with so I said, "OK, let's do it." Had I known this would happen I would have chosen Cross Country Movers for my move.

(In retrospect there were two Global Transportation minor red flags that might also have steered me to Cross Country Movers:
(1) Global Transportation was difficult to get through to on the phone.
(2) Global Transportation's introductory letter email concluded with a www.globaltn.net Web site URL that points to a "This Web page is parked for FREE, courtesy of GoDaddy.com" page.
Maybe these were relevant considerations, maybe not.)

At about 10:15 the following morning the mover - one guy - arrived with the U-Haul truck, in which my belongings were commingled with someone else's belongings; he would have given me the whole lot had I not said, "Hold it, this other stuff isn't mine." After my items were unloaded, I handed the mover the $300 and signed off on an inventory sheet, and that was that.

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I'll write more about my 'new life' in California as time permits.

Choo-Choo

The task at hand: Get myself from New Orleans to Vista, California in North San Diego County. Toward this end I ordinarily would take a plane from New Orleans to San Diego, but my father said to me, I can't pick you up at the San Diego airport; he is 87 and does what he can to keep his freeway driving to a minimum.

Just southwest of Vista is Carlsbad, California, which has an airport. However, a one-way flight from New Orleans to Carlsbad runs about $350 - about $100 more than a corresponding flight to San Diego - and I was hoping for something cheaper.

What about non-airplane possibilities? I wasn't in any sort of rush, so why not take a train - I hadn't ridden any kind of train in almost twenty years - or even a bus*? Both Amtrak and Greyhound could take me to Oceanside, California, just northwest of Vista and at which my father said he would be willing to meet me. Figuring that train travel would be more comfortable (or at least less uncomfortable) than bus travel, I booked a NOLA-to-Oceanside Amtrak trip for $191.

(*Bus fans, did you catch the AP's recent "New breed of buses draws Thanksgiving travelers" article? Unfortunately, neither Megabus, BoltBus, nor Wanderu could be used for the trip I wanted to make.)

Getting to New Orleans' Amtrak/Greyhound station was no more difficult than taking the St. Charles Streetcar to Lee Circle and then walking a few blocks downtown - no $35 cab ride to the airport required. Gratifyingly, at the station I wasn't subjected to any TSA-type degradation: I wasn't groped or irradiated but merely had to show a photo ID to an agent in order to print out my ticket, and I can deal with that.

Trip specifics

My trip had two legs:
(1) I traveled from New Orleans to Los Angeles on a Sunset Limited train and
(2) from Los Angeles to Oceanside on a Pacific Surfliner train.
This is the most direct Amtrak route from New Orleans to Southern California - the total trip time is just over two days - and also the cheapest, and its only departure days are Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday (wildly circuitous and much more expensive alternative routes are available on other days of the week).

Scenery

In Louisiana and East Texas we saw mile after mile of bare tree 'forest', and in West Texas and New Mexico we saw mile after mile of tumbleweed country - not exactly postcard photo material, shall we say. I did get a nice view of the Pacific Ocean toward the end of the Pacific Surfliner leg, however.

Food

The Sunset Limited train features a dining car and a lounge car. Price-wise you would expect train food to be marked up in a major way as train passengers are a captive audience of sorts, and it is: you, too, can pay $2.25 for a 12-oz can of Coke. It was my original intention to not eat anything during my trip, but I gave in:
(1) On the first day I bought a $1.25 apple and a reasonably good $2 cup of coffee from the lounge car.
(2) On the second day in the dining car I had a $7.50 scrambled eggs breakfast comprising two scrambled eggs, a portion of roasted potatoes, a small whole-wheat biscuit, and two cups of weak coffee.

A welcome respite from food captivity occurred at the El Paso station, at which the conductor exhorted us to get off the train and avail ourselves of the homemade burritos sold by Juanita the Burrito Lady. I duly snagged two of Juanita's green chili/potato/ground beef burritos - muy bien! - this was definitely the highlight of the trip.

Overall comfort level

Not bad; still, two days is a long time to spend in transit for a somewhat fidgety person such as myself. I don't regret traveling by rail but I'm not so sure I wouldn't fly if I could do it all over again.

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Getting my person to Vista was relatively easy. Getting my belongings to Vista was another kettle of fish - I'll tell you about it in the next post.

Escape from New Orleans

My long 'tour of duty' in New Orleans has come to an end. Financial hardship has compelled me to leave the Big Easy and travel to the West Coast to temporarily live with my father in Southern California. If I recall correctly, however, this sort of thing happened to Syd Barrett and also to Lou Reed at one point, so I don't feel so bad and would seem to be in pretty good company, eh?

During my 18+ years in the Crescent City I lived in two different apartments, each of which was highly problematic in its own way. The latter of these apartments was situated in New Orleans' Touro neighborhood, a good location in many respects; however, it was plagued by a noisy environment that made getting a good night's sleep a hit-or-miss affair. Obstacles to that good night's sleep included
(a) the tenant directly above me who frantically tramped back and forth on Hurricane Katrina-weakened floorboards at all hours of the night,
(b) the Touro Infirmary's delivery trucks, which made loud beeping noises at 5 AM several days a week, and
(c) the tenant to my right who would come in at 12-2 AM and turn on his TV cranked to a loud volume (maybe you can sleep through TV audio, I can't).
As an ultralight sleeper, I'm really glad to be out of there.

Is there anything about New Orleans that I'll miss? I won't miss the long, numbing summers. I won't miss having to deal with the hurricane thing every year. And I definitely won't miss Mardi Gras.

"C'mon, anything?" OK, I'll miss the Latter Library and its CD collection. I'll miss the local cuisine to an extent; interestingly, some of the stores at my new location carry Zatarain's products. I'll miss drinking coffee at the CC's at Loyola University. Above all, I as a non-motorist will miss the mobility that living in a relatively large city afforded me. ("Isn't it time you got a driver's license?" Yeah, I really should put that on my to-do list, shouldn't I?)

Now then: How did I get from New Orleans to Southern California? We'll get into that next time.

Have It Our Way

It's been over a month since I announced to the world that I need to get a job and asked for help toward this end, and to date I haven't gotten a single response. I haven't even attracted any 'hate mail' ("You shlub, do you really think anyone cares about you and your blog?"), employment spam, or scammers - man, I must creep people out or something. Maybe I should have just begged for money; that's what everyone else would have done.

What next? Using the Web as an employment resource is a bit overwhelming, and it is easy for a person in my position to succumb to 'Internet Information Overload'. I figured the next most basic thing to do would be to post my résumé at some job board sites. Accordingly, I gave my résumé a thorough overhaul as I hadn't touched it since 2003:
(1) I subtracted several sections (e.g., Graduate School Teaching Experience, Publications) that struck me as either outdated or irrelevant to the work I am hoping to find;
(2) I reordered the remaining content and
(3) prepended to that content a Current Work section that briefly discusses my blogging work; and
(4) I inserted a position-specifying "headline" (but not a "branding statement" nor a "professional profile") between my contact information and the Current Work section.

Using this type="text/plain" résumé at QuintCareers.com as a stylistic model, my updated résumé looks approximately like:

ANDREW PEAK

Here's how you contact me, here's where I live…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
TECHNICAL WRITER * WEB CODER
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
CURRENT WORK
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Blogger, reptile7's JavaScript blog: http://reptile7.blogspot.com/
More stuff relating to my technical blog…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PREVIOUS PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Visiting Professor of (Organic) Chemistry, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA
1995-1999, Spring and Summer 2000, Summer 2001 (B6 Session), 2003-2004

...

~~~~~~~~~~
EDUCATION
~~~~~~~~~~
Here's where I went to college and what I specialized in…

Between you and me, I view my résumé as a cold, sterile document that does a poor job of representing who I am (if you do want a good representation of who I am, then you should read my (other) blog, of course). Moreover, I am acutely aware that only a tiny minority (as in < 5%) of job placements occur via Web job boards. But onward we forge. "If nothing else, we can see what happens - think of it as an anthropology experiment of sorts," I said to myself.

The Resources sector of Mojo40.com recommends the Indeed.com job board - This aggregates all the other jobs boards so no need to go anywhere else - so I went there first. Using a password generated by the code discussed in this post, I set up an Indeed.com account and attempted to upload my résumé as a .txt file via the file select (<input type="file">) control provided on Indeed.com's "Post your resume" page. Annoyingly, Indeed.com did not upload my résumé as is: it subtracted the headline and the Current Work section and outputted an "Indeed Resume" stating that I was still a Visiting Professor at Tulane University, with which I parted ways almost ten years ago (vide supra). I deleted the file-upload résumé and then built a new résumé using Indeed.com's "from scratch" option.

The Indeed Resume section of Indeed.com's FAQs page(s) sports a Why is your resume parsing not completely accurate? question. Indeed.com responds:

We're currently looking into ways in which we can improve the resume conversion process. In the meantime, try uploading a Word Document instead of a PDF. We find that Word Documents are converted much better.

Why are you converting résumés at all, Indeed.com? Why, indeed?

In sum, be prepared for some 'transmogrification' if you upload your résumé at Indeed.com. Moving on, I'll tell you about the free résumé critique that the aforementioned QuintCareers.com did for me in our next episode.