The Job Market

As many of you may know, I am searching for a new job after being laid off from my last one. I do odd jobs here and there just to keep my head above water, and I’ve started my own business. It will be awhile before my business is profitable enough to pay the bills, so I need something to fill in the void until then. This is where the fun begins…

I went old-school at first and looked in the local paper. Not much there for us educated, old farts. If I was 16 then maybe. So, I decided to embrace technology and went online. I visited many sites, from Craigslist to Yahoo Jobs. What I discovered was that about 85% of the jobs listed on these sites are either scams, military, or just plain crap. Now, I have nothing against the military, as I am a Veteran. But, I have no desire to go back to it at my age.

So, after sorting through various listings I might find one or two that look promising. Out of those, one is asking for my life history of personal details to be emailed to them for consideration. However, their ad does not name the company or a contact person. No phone number is listed either, and the reply email address is usually a gmail account. Not going to happen! I might as well hand them my bank account and credit cards too! I’ve been a victim of ID theft…once, as a result of my ex-fiance…and I’m still dealing with it. Of course, if someone did steal my ID again they would give it back the next day! :)

I guess my next step is to go old, old-school and start going door to door at the local businesses. Or…maybe trade the car in for a small RV, find a spot by the lake, and call it a day.

I’m not sure how bad it is in other countries, but in my neck of the woods the lights are getting dim. Sure, the President keeps saying it’s getting better and new jobs are being created. But, the new jobs are either temporary or minimum wage. Neither of which will support my family. So, I guess it’s time to get creative…

The Beast Lives!

I spent about five hours repairing and rebuilding my main PC (the beast) today. I had to replace the top fans and because three stupid screws I had to remove the motherboard. Which also meant removing all the crap attached to it and in the way. I didn’t put those three screws back in. :) After I got it all pieced back together I flashed the BIOS and the firmware for my optical drive. The system finally booted normally and all worked well. My keyboard and mouse were once again behaving. My optical drive now reads all discs again. It also is now able to burn discs again as well.

I’ve learned my lesson. I will go back to reading the forums before testing a new OS. I will stay away from PC-BSD for a long time. The only remaining issue is that I broke the power switch taking off the top cover, so now I have to start my PC by touching the two wires together. lol  No worries though, a new power switch in on order. :)

Hopefully, my troubles with PCs are finally over…

The Fun Continues…

As I posted in the comments to my “Fun Weekend” post. I was too quick to praise PC-BSD! Thanks to PC-BSD, my main system is FUBAR! Everything was great until I tried to burn a CD with k3b. The k3b app started out fine, recognized my drive and started to burn the disc. Then it started kicking out some input / output errors and eventually crashed. The whole system locked up and my only option was a reboot. Upon rebooting, my optical drive was no longer recognized and my keyboard, mouse, and hard drives were acting strange. Further investigation revealed that my BIOS settings had changed completely. I was not a happy camper! I was up till 3am fighting with it and finally had to sleep. I had to get up early this morning to meet with a client and now I am back home attempting to revive the beast that is my PC. I’ve got the optical drive reading discs now, but it still refuses to burn discs of any type / brand. My BIOS is still acting funny as well.

It’s one thing for an OS to screw and wipe out your partitions, but to more or less alter hardware is too much! I read some posts on the PC-BSD forums and other places on the ‘net and found I am not the only one to have experienced this. This wasn’t a Alpha, Beta, or even a RC release. This was 8.0 final, the supposedly stable and ready for prime time use release! Normally, I will browse the forums of any new Linux distro before I even download it, much less install it. However, I had used BSD in the past (not PC-BSD) and it was rock solid so I just installed it. I will not make that mistake again!

So, today I will most likely have to put Windows back on my system (only for a brief moment) so that I can flash the firmware for my optical drive and flash my BIOS. Hopefully, that will fix things. If not, I will expect a check in the mail from PC-BSD for a new motherboard and optical drive! :) My new fans came today, so I needed to strip the machine down anyways. So, I should get to that. I will update my progress later.

Bottom line, for now I would avoid PC-BSD at all costs!!! I’m a fan of BSD, but after this I won’t be messing with it for a long time. All these problems lately (not just BSD, but Linux and other OS’s as well) have got me thinking it would be better for me to just go back to pen and paper! I mean, I thought the computer was supposed to make our lives better and easier? So, what happened with that?