Daniel Voyles

So, when I was late with my cellular bill some time ago, it was because I was poor. The bill would come due and I would have to make payment arrangements because we often wasted money or consistently spent more than our income. There are no excuses for that. It’s simple economics (from which politicians could use a refresher course).

Today, however, our income is enough to pay the mobile bill, and the other bills on-time each month. No bubbles, no troubles. However I still pay my mobile bill ‘late’ every month. I mean, it’s not late in the sense that I’m not paying for the services I use in a timely manner, it’s late in the sense that I don’t pay ahead of time for services I may or may not use.

In case you have forgotten (or were never aware), the mobile industry in the United States bills you for services ahead of time. Look at your next statement. The time billed ends in the near future. This is similar to the cable company (and probably satellite). Normally this would not anger me much as I will use the service, and thus will pay the bill (like the cable). Alltel sees fit to start sending threatening texts and making harassing phone calls over 10 days before the service that you are pre-paying for is ended however. 10 days. WTF.

I could understand if it were the 24th (the day after my billing cycle) and they began bugging me, but that is not the case. They have informed me via text that they will be shutting my service off on the 21st if I do not pay my ‘past due’ balance. Again – WTF?

The 21st is still two days before the date my ‘late payment’ will cover. If I’m on a prepay service, fine, just tell me so and let me end my service with no termination fee. Oh hell no, you will prepay and like it Mr. Consumer!

Previously, I stayed with Alltel because of some stupid sense of loyalty – they bought First Cellular and treated us well while downsizing. Then it was because they were the ‘little guy’ after selling out most of their network to Verizon. At this point, they can suck it. As soon as the mood strikes I will be moving to AT&T or one of the lesser carriers. Verizon is out because they are 50% foreign-owned (didn’t know you were sending 1/2 of your money overseas? better check into it), and I figure my cellular dollars may as well make some American executives rich.

Oh, and work gets me discounts with AT&T, so they are the front-runner. Yes, there will be a rape-you-in-the-ass early term fee, but that will be less than continuing my service without the discount, so I still come out ahead.

The following story is true to my best recollection, and happened a couple of years ago.

I  shy away from working on personal computers for one major reason – people who are sue-happy. A PC is a machine, it breaks mechanically as well as by software. Had a woman who asked me to look at a PC, I did, and after I had her reboot, it would not come up. I left, after doing nothing to the PC other than plugging in a USB thumb drive (software tools I commonly use are on the thumb drive).

She told me I had broken it and needed to pay to have it replaced after her ‘friend’ she gets weed from said it was non-repairable. We had a few missed phone calls back and forth, but I offered to pay 1/2 of the repair cost at a neutral shop to be nice. I should point out that she suggested I buy her a ~$1,500 laptop to replace the 5+ year old desktop her weed-buddy said I broke.

Then she contacted the MVPD who told her(according to her message) that I had likely downloaded personal information from her PC using my thumb drive (thanks for that, MVPD), and was a criminal planning to exploit that information. Finally she left me a message that said she had ‘better not find me out anywhere’ and that I should ‘come back by her house because her dogs have something for me’.

Long story short, I’m shying away from doing PC work for anyone other than immediate family. Until I am incorporated and have a much better liability policy, my family cannot afford the risk even though I love helping people.

I won’t mention her company for fear of being sued, but her family runs a local pest control company, beware.

For many years in a row now the Mount Vernon Primary Center has failed to reach the NCLB standards. This leads to an option for us to send our kids to other schools in the area, however the superintendents of the districts have allegedly colluded to not accept students from any of the other’s districts.

Recently, we were also informed that our children are afforded tutoring since the district continues to fail the standardized tests. I have not read up fully on that aspect, but how long can this go on before the government comes in and just shuts them down? I would think not too long.

Not to mention all of the wonderful new tools like smartboards the teachers have, but some don’t even know how to use by their own admission. No doubt these tools were paid for with one of the many, many fundraisers they send home for us to pawn junk off to our friends and family every year. Apparently the fundraising isn’t actually helping much.

However, the majority of teachers I have interacted with are nice and seem to care a great deal about the children they are charged with educating. However, the children must have some desire to learn. That desire to learn starts at home with parents enforcing that skool larnin’s is ipo’tent.

I fear that a chunk of the children are not receiving this reinforcement at home, and thus they do not give a shit about how they do on the standardized testing.

As a result, the rest of the school suffers with a continued failure to meed NCLB standards. This leads to absolutely zero education for our children outside of math, grammar, and spelling. A snippet of music, physical education, and a tiny bit of technology are about it from what I understand.

Now, instead of pinning the failure of the school to meet NCLB standards on one neighborhood school or two, all children must suffer. Those who can afford to do it, send their children to one of the local private schools to avoid the quagmire.

In turn, this leads to the school still receiving the same amount of taxes to operate, but having to educate fewer children. Was this planned? I don’t know. Still, it is the end result.

Still, the facility looks great when businesses or prospective residents take a tour. I feel sorry for them if they are not smart enough to ask for the NCLB results though…

And hell yes I accepted the offer. As of December 7th I will be working for School Center in Carbondale. The drive will suck a little, but the joy of doing what I want every day and being a part of a normal job will be awesome. I miss the routine of going into work, doing my job, and going home. It won’t be that every day, as it is a datacenter, but it’s closer than anything I’ve done recently.

I have to say that I was/am very grateful for the position I have been working for the past month and a half, but this is a great opportunity and it will not be passing me by while I sit there and wave. I am also extremely thankful for my family and friends’ support over the past 6 months while I have been looking for employment, and more recently for better employment.

At least for the next two weeks I get to whistle while I work and look forward to the future instead of wondering if this is my lot in life. I’m excited as can be, but you who know me well know I have one look, so don’t expect me to be jumping around or anything.

AAAAAAAAAAAANNNNDDDD I will get to release this stupid blog back into the wild instead of hiding it like Sloth in The Goonies.

Christ. Apparently I can’t send Amaya or Erich to school with a peanut butter sandwich now because the Primary Center is now a ‘nut-free zone’. I have many wisecracks about that assumption, given this idiotic decision, but I’ll hold them for now.

I know that some people are allergic to nuts, fine. Sucks to be them, especially as a kid, and I agree we should accomodate them as well as is possible. Unfortunately, I also feel that attempting to make an entire school nut-free is idiotic.

This point was made very evident to me tonight. Em sent a note to Erich’s teacher about bringing cupcakes in for his birthday on Wednesday. The teacher sent home a nice little note about how that would be fine and that right after lunch would be a good time. Unfortunately, we must go purchase the special nut-free cupcakes from Kroger or Wal-Mart since the ones on the shelf are made at a plant where they may have been breathed-on by someone who had a peanut butter sandwich 3 months ago.

Yes, I exaggerate, but it’s to make a point. What happens if Erich is allergic to honey? Do we get to ban honey and honey containing products from the school, school lunches, etc.? How about gluten? Gluten is a new hot-button allergy that people are scared of.

I understand that a kid with a bad nut allergy needs to have special accomodations, but damn. There has to be a line drawn somewhere. Perhaps I’ll send him to school with peanut butter cookies.

Well, another school year has begun. The kids are enjoying their time, and I think sissy is taking to the learning better than she had previously. Things are definitely looking up in that department.

The sad part for me is that I’m not going back to school. I have my degree, a few certificates, and no job. Thanks to the state not paying their bills (I love Illinois), my internship-that-would-have-been-full-time-after-graduation has evaporated. Heck, I still haven’t received my pay from the last two weeks of work. It’s only been 3 months, and I’m sure a non-operating company needs the money more than I do.

To this point, I have been to several interviews. One of them I blew by being late (pretty sure) thanks to some construction that started the same day as my interview. No warning from the employer, nothing on Google, and I had actually allowed myself an extra 1/2 hour in travel time to be safe. Ah well, live and learn.

Unfortunately, I still have no employment to show for all of my applying and interviewing. I’m not expecting a miracle living in Mount Vernon, as there aren’t many decent employers. Something would be nice though. I’m almost to the point of shoveling horse stalls. Somebody has to pay the mortgage, and I’m not getting it done with applications or interviews.

There you go. Venting some frustration. I’m not whining, really. Just frustrated that finding employment is so difficult in our area.

El yay. I finally got my AAS degree in the mail today. I now have proof that I spent two years fine-tuning my IT skills with official curriculum. Rend Lake definitely has a great program in my opinion. The instructors go out of their way to help you learn material.

While at RLC I picked up quite a bit of knowledge about networking, VoIP, and LAN/WAN design. While most of my Windows support experience was at my job/internship, that’s normal. Most of IT is basic knowledge with a lot of real world experience thrown into the mix.

It was a strenuous path to keep going sometimes, but well worth the trip. I met a lot of great people in the program too. Most of us are still in contact via the various social networks. Perhaps we can all have a reunion at some point.

I have to say that I’m kind of proud of myself for attaining a degree. Yes, I know an Associate degree isn’t a huge accomplishment, but it’s what I’ve got and I worked hard for it.

Now if I could just get this job thing worked out…

This is a reprint of an article from my Ask a Geek column in the Mount Vernon Register-News. It is written for a general audience, and I hope you like it.

You’re sitting in front of your computer after booting into the operating system and cleaning out your extra startup junk. Now what do you do?

If you are like most people, you either start a web browser or email program. Even if you open a web browser first, most everyone I know goes to check their web-based email. I think that we still get excited at communication with others, even if it’s just letters on a screen. Just like people get excited when they get a package in the mail, we get excited at email from friends and family.

So what do you use for email? There are a great many programs that would like to be your email handler: Outlook Express or Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Opera Mail, and others. Each of these have their positives and negatives. Some are expandable, heavy, light, built-in to browsers (Opera) and everything in between.

Everyone has their own preference about how they like to access their email, and deciding on a client may require you to try out a few different applications before you figure out what is right for you. I’ll give you my opinions and some overviews here, but try them out and see what you like to use.

Outlook Express (Mail in Vista) is the free client that Microsoft includes in Windows. It is effective at downloading your email and keeping together for you. OE is not a grand program by any means, but it will download email from Hotmail (now Live), which is a big plus if you use that service. Otherwise, it is an extremely simple program that does not do much for you.

Outlook is Microsoft’s professional email program, and rightfully so. I am not a fan of giving Microsoft money, but their Outlook software is excellent. Outlook can keep track of your email, mark it for follow-up, keep track of tasks, and archive your email in files so that you can store them however you need. All of this it does out of the box, and many companies make plugins for Outlook so that you can do even more. Put simply, if you have the money, this is an email program that you should check out.

If you don’t have the money to invest in Outlook, I strongly recommend Mozilla Thunderbird (http://mozilla.com) as an alternative. Thunderbird is a free and open-source email program with many add ons that help it be more productive. Out of the box, Thunderbird is a lot like Outlook Express, but it is expandable by the many add ons available. The great thing about this is that you can add in only what you want or need instead of taking it all in a giant lump like with Outlook. Realize that if you take Thunderbird for a spin, it is not quite as polished as Outlook, but Thunderbird 3 is due soon and promises to be much improved.

There are some quick takes on a few email clients. Each of them has their own unique way of handling email, and one may be more suited to your tastes. I would suggest trying them out and finding what is best for you. Let me know what you prefer.