Tonight is the first night I start working again in over a year. I really think people have assumed I’m “on vacation”. That perhaps I’m not exactly “looking hard” for work or that I’m flat out not looking. The stark reality here is that the jobs simply don’t exist. It’s hard to see that unless you’re jobless and struggling, in which case you probably aren’t involving yourself with others all that much and you’re overly involved in your own search for gainful employment. No, I’ve been looking hard for a long time now, not just for jobs that pay the same rate I was making before- but anything. I applied to anything and everything that came my way. Any employer that claimed to be hiring. Anywhere, anyone, for anything- I applied and heard nothing back. I have more rejection emails than I can count. Barack Obama is being lauded now for adding jobs to a forlorn nation. The sad reality is that the jobs being added cannot sustain this country. The government is despotic, I’ve realized that sooner rather than later, and corporations are at the masthead.

Just a couple things. First of all, I may have work lined up soon. Woo! Big hurdle crossed with that one, a lot of time and effort finally paying off. It’s only been a year since I’ve last had gainful employment. Here’s hoping I’m employed soon and from here on. Second, I’ve dumped my contracted cellular provider in favor of one of those cheap services that are typically associated with “burners”. It’s going to get me through the hard times, that’s all that really counts. I need a phone. I won’t have to go without. Lastly, if I get a job soon you shouldn’t expect my blog updates to be as rapidfire as they are now. Life is hectic enough without a job, it’s going to be far more so when I’m working again. I probably won’t want to touch this damn blog, despite the satisfaction I get from updating it. It’s quite possible that I’ll have the time but not the inclination. You never know.

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I’ve been running FreeBSD 9.0 since it was released. Before that, I had been running FreeBSD 8.2. Before that, 8.0 and 7.2 prior. I really enjoy this OS. I think it comes from the enjoyment I got running Gentoo, however I learned most of what I did about POSIX environments thanks to Gentoo breaking all the time. It was definitely not an environment I could maintain. FreeBSD brings the Ports software distribution system to a stable BSD kernel. It’s my favorite operating system, even if I happen to suck somewhat at securing it. I’m still learning, and I’ll continue to learn as I go. The best part, to me, is that pretty much every problem you may encounter is almost readily solved with Google and log watching.

I may or may not be drunk. We’ll get that out of the way first. I realize it’s only 7:15pm, but at least it’s not 8:00am. Nothing’s worse than being piss drunk in the morning, amirite? I dunno, I think every blog gets a drunk post once in a while, I might as well drunk-post. I’m not really that bad off, just a little tipsy. Losing weight has made me a lightweight, which is a little frustrating. I used to brag about being able to drink quite a bit before actually becoming inebriated. No more, as I’m drunk rather easily, and cheaply. Thankfully, I’m not drunk all the time. Once a month is probably the greatest frequency that I’ve been trashed, even in the worst of circumstances. I’m grateful that at least my ability to write isn’t severely hindered after a few drinks. I’d be frustrated if I couldn’t bang out a paragraph that’s readable.

The internet is a bizarre place. It seems to have consumed most of the social interaction we would generally take for granted before the era of Twitter and Facebook. While it did overpower certain roles, it still by no means adequately replaces them all. Job hunting is more painful now than it’s ever been. Job applications are typically riddled with questionaires that take an hour to complete while you typically find that the company won’t call you back. Things are desperate, and it’s not easily remedied. I’m going to be heading to Kinkos to run off at least twenty copies of my resume. I intend to drive everywhere within a twenty mile radius in the hunt for a job, because I have no choice. I’ve applied in person and online for over a year, and the only times I’ve ever been called back have usually involved applications in person, albeit they’ve been incredibly rare no matter what. Things are rough, and I don’t think it’s possible to understand unless you’re actually jobless and struggling. I forecast prostitution to rise significantly once most of the UIA benefits run out for our 10% unemployed. Drug sales and abuse will probably spike as well. All while Obamacare drains what’s left of a once-powerful healthcare empire that’s limping along with minimal staff and overpaid executives. I simply don’t see any plausible fixes in the near or distant future. We have a population that consists primarily of blue collar laborers, who are wholly unable to sustain themselves with blue collar jobs. Hell, I don’t know. Things just look bleak. Neither Obama nor some up-and-coming Republican are going to fix the immense problems we’re already experiencing. Don’t get me started on what’s to come. I just hope the government still has funds to subsidize soup kitchen centers, housing for the homeless, and other programs that will sustain 20% of the population in the next twenty years. If not, there will be many dead.

I’m beginning to wonder if my name is on a blacklist somewhere, prohibiting me from being considered by other companies for employment. It’s starting to appear that way, what with my increasing frequency of applying to jobs. I can’t help but wonder if I’m going to be forced into abject poverty by lack of employment, as I’m already considering routes less traveled for income. Don’t know. One thing I do know is that a job is a precious thing in this current eonomic climate, and I wholly have no intention of telling people online where I’m working. I can’t let anything jeopardize my income, should the day come where I have income.

I might as well lay out what exactly this blog is running. It’s actually just ordinary lighttpd behind cloudflare, with jekyll handling content generation. I also ripped off Google’s own SWF-based mp3 player for streaming mp3’s. I’ve added a decent favicon and added @font-face to the jekyll theme I grabbed. I’m really enjoying the Amazon EC2 + Cloudflare + Jekyll combination. I even have jekyll installed on the EC2 instance serving these pages up, so content generation is as dynamic as I’d like it to be without having to worry about transferring many (if any) files. I enjoy this setup, and I can post blog entries from pretty much anywhere, given my current SSH setup. I can even blog from my phone if I really wanted to. Jekyll kicks ass. Amazon does as well. Blogging has never been so easy.

I’m feeling pretty good right now. My arms and legs are sore, my abs are sore, and my body feels like I’ve just run a marathon, but damn do I feel good. Been taking these energy shots called “Dynapep”. They seem like they’re pretty bad for you, but boy do they get the job done. They also seem to increase libido some, which is probably not good for the survival of my genitals. In any case, though things look grim, I’m going to keep an eye out for opportunity and stay positive. Sometimes that’s all we have in life- the ability to smile even though everything is tumbling down around you. Of course, the Dynapep gives me enough of a rush that I don’t so much care, either. I’ll just keep going on.