Okay, the first week or two of being unemployed were kind of nice. Accomplished a few menial tasks around the house, put in the outside faucet, and generally played housewife.
Now I’m 1.5 months into this experience, and I’m tired of it. I want employment. Better yet, I want to employ myself. I’m still scouring Monster.com, HotJobs, classifieds, and everyone I know, but I can’t find anything around here that I fit or that provides anywhere near the income I had.
I’m feeling good about my resume and my abilities though. If/when something pops-up, I will be able to present myself well. My experience and ability to learn new things will help me in my ever-elusive pursuit. Just have to convince interviewers of that fact.
Heck, I taught myself the ins and outs of GSM phone service. I busted my hump and they created a position for me, so I must have done something right. Bernard took me under his wing and kicked me in the right direction while I was feeling my way around Linux and “adminning”.
I’ve taken an advert out in the Sentinel to test the waters for PC service. We’ll see how many more calls I get on that in the next few days. That would be awesome to do for a living, but we’ll see how it goes.
- At Marion Hyundai. They’re very professional. #
- No waiting room. Just sitting outside on the ground. #
- Had an appointment for a week, but walk-ins are going before me. Kinda miffed over that. #
- Even a bench would be nice. #
- Apparently, there IS a waiting area that no one mentioned or pointed out. #
- Car is still sitting outside an hour after my ‘appointment’. Am I asking for too much expecting service near that time? #
- Still not even inside a bay two hours after my appointment. No word from anyone either. #
- Shoulda brought my laptop. They have wireless, and I bet it isn’t protected. Coulda at least surfed the net. #
- Three. Damn. Hours. Still hasn’t moved. #
- Leaving Marion. Pretty ticked. #
Last night I installed a new plugin that is supposed to track visitors, search engine hits, search engine spiders, and lots of other useless information that’s only of interest to me probably.
Well, I just checked it and it shows some cool information (it’s cool to me anyway).
To begin, somebody else is searching for me. My name anyway. I know, there are other people with the same name, but it’s just weird to see another search for “me”.
Search engines seem to like me, especially Yahoo. They hit my site 81 times over the course of today. Google was right behind, and MSN brought up the rear. The good news for me is that I am the top result on all of the engines. In real-world terms it doesn’t mean much, but personally I enjoy it.
Another stat that I find cool is that I do have ~140 unique visitors. That confirms the information I was getting from the server at my hosting provider. I enjoyed thinking that there were so many people reading the junk I put on here, but I was never fully trusting. Now, I have verification.
Generally, though, my totals for any one month keep maxing out at about 2100 unique visitors. If everyone gave $1/month, I could do this for a living and probably get more and better content. I had never thought about it like that, but the math is there. Think about it, loyal readers.
😉
Unfortunately, 90% of you are using Windows while viewing my site. I don’t hate Windows, but I do think people should check out the alternatives. Heck, even try a Mac if it turns your crank. Just don’t give up the freedom of choice to Microsoft and Billy Gates.
Some of you may have noticed posts titled “Dan’s Twitter Updates for xxxxx”. Those are short little updates done from my phone via text message. Twitter is a nifty website/service where people and their friends can send one text to Twitter and have it go to everyone who subscribes to their updates. It’s convenient because you can know what your friends are doing and they can know what you’re up to lately. It was really designed for interesting people and club-types, but it’s useful.
Finally, I would like to plead with you loyal readers to subscribe to my RSS feed however is convenient for you. For all of you there is the benefit of it automatically pulling down the feed so you don’t have to come to my site, and it helps me show that people are regularly reading my material. Plus, when you use an RSS reader you can subscribe to a whole bunch of feeds and categorize them so you can track every one without having to go to each site to check for new stories or articles.
In today’s Mount Vernon Sentinel, my advertisement for a startup PC service business begins running. Granted, it is a soft start, but I don’t want to dive in headfirst and hit concrete.
There are multiple repair/installation shops in town and all are doing well. As a matter of fact, a couple are expanding. In my favor – I have no overhead, I am my own boss, hours are what I make them, I will be much cheaper than any of the other shops currently in operation, I don’t treat people like idiots when they ask PC questions.
Hopefully I will at least be able to help a few clients secure their PC’s and perhaps clean them or help them stay clean of malicious code.
Please pray for my endeavor and hope my phone blows up with phone calls.
Oh, customers@danvoyles.us if you want to refer anyone.
🙂
