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.

Thanks to Cloudflare and Amazon, I can just sit back and blog all damn day when I have nothing better to do. This is fairly entertaining. It keeps me busy, keeps my mind occupied. If I find myself frustrated, annoyed, or excited, I can express as much to a whole readership of ten people! Hooray!

Seriously though, I’ve learned a ton in the past year. I’ve learned a lot about FreeBSD, the internet, and the role the internet plays in the lives of people who spend most of their time on it. It amazes me that long distance communication can dominate lives over interpersonal interaction. I can’t imagine that. It seems like there would be a definite sincerity lacking to life if the only way you could communicate with someone was via text, voice, or video. It would have to be a motivator for suicide, at least in my perception. I can’t imagine living happily if you’re completely alone, surrounding yourself with online personas that don’t naturally or accurately reflect the people behind them. If you pass up genuine relationships for such things, you’re missing out not just on people, but life itself.

First of all, the situation was as such: I had the opportunity to screw over a certain person living in Florida, and I took it. I stepped on pretty much everyone’s toes to piss off one person that I didn’t deem fit for living. That taco-obsessed fruitcake knows who he is. I don’t apologize for that, because I think anyone and everyone would’ve done the same, and basically continue to do the same. That said, moving on.

Saw this video and loved it. I realize you’ve most likely already watched it before I’ve decided to post it. Still, it’s pretty classic. I can see doing thing myself some day, if necessary.

+1 to this guy.

One of the most useful little tools for information parsing that I’ve used has to be awk. Specifically, awk will allow you to pipe text through it and use the printf() function to format text as you require it to be formatted. It also has a basic scripting language that lends further functionality, making it an ubiquitous tool in the POSIX arsenal. Need to format a list of US States for a Maruku table? Not a problem. Copy / Paste it into a text file and pipe it through this: