Would mod up if I had points - good analysis, came to say some of the same, and I hope he appreciates your time. Honestly, if I had a stack of 50 resumes and wasn't hiring for something like a game testing position, I'd be done at the "pro gamer" bit - not because of it per se, but because of its prominence.
I've also had recruiters modify a resume given in Word format, so will only send them PDFs (for now, since they're not usually competent to find it, I still have a Word format resume available on my site). One was a material change that claimed experience I did not have; I only heard about it because an interviewer read it to me over the phone, and I told them that was added by the recruiter.
I run qmail for sending/receiving mail (on Gentoo; netqmail package), using maildir, of course. On top of that, I run the Courier IMAP server on my internal network (with TLS encryption). Until a few months ago I used Mutt as a client (console-based), but I've moved to using Roundcube (web-based email), which I initially installed for my wife, and have been happy with it. I also have some automatic filtering to folders via Maildrop (another Courier utility; it looks at a ~/.mailfilter file to route mail).
Roundcube/the IMAP server's search is OK most of the time - I keep my inbox small and move older mail to sub-folders - when I want to do advanced searches or search large mailboxes I log in and grep through folders of interest; this works well with the maildir format with one file per message. Maildir was also quite resilient when I had a HD crash and needed to recover some lost mail (block scan for blocks that look like mail headers found most missing items, and I do better backups now - mail is under ~/.maildir and gets backed up automatically).
I would move older messages to maildir (there are plenty of mbox converters, and almost anything non-proprietary should be convertible to mbox or maildir via existing programs or a short perl script) - even if at some point maildir dies off entirely, which seems unlikely, converting it to another format will always be trivial due to its simplicity and it has the advantages mentioned above of being able to search easily with grep etc.
Oh? It's unfair that you wouldn't have to pay damages for something they couldn't prove you did? Really?
I can't prove that you sold 30,000 unapproved copies of Microsoft Office on the street corner yesterday, so it's OK that you be made to pay as if you did? Or perhaps it's only OK if I can prove you sold one copy?
What are these "books" of which you speak?
They sound a little like "newspapers"—do you know that some companies actually make money from printing out news websites and selling the copy? Astounding, right?
Books for university cost a bundle because they kind of have you over a barrel, so to speak, by specifying a particular book (and sometimes edition), but you can still buy used. But if you're educating yourself, certainly an admirable thing, it'll take you a long time to exhaust the computer science material available for free online.
You may not like it, but recruiters tend to prefer a Word-format resume. (In part, I think, because it's easier for them to remove your contact information so that principals don't contact you directly, and monkey with it in other ways - they can do this with HTML, too, and PDF, but it's more difficult.) I get ideological purity (although given that
Personally, I have a link to both a PDF and a Word (.docx) resume on my site. I used to have a plain text version, but nobody cared, so I yanked it; and I prefer providing PDF to HTML and both are equally accessible these days.
"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs