This post is a huge question that I have asked myself so many times but can never get a solid answer for. This question does not ask for your pity or try to acquire it in some subconscious way. What I want from you is the cold hard truth so that I can better myself.

Well, if you've followed my blog at all, you've seen how I've been searching for jobs for quite some time. I finally have one as a material handler for a distribution center. Before I say much more, I want to say that this is a very hard job. The people that work with me are incredibly strong and agile, along with a strong understanding of the duties of the job. People like this deserve way more admiration than they receive because of the very hard work that they do. This can likewise be said for many jobs, from construction, to law, to science, and what have you.

This is where my question lies, however. All my life I have enjoyed working with computers in ways that a lot of people do not understand, but I will readily explain anything if the question arises. My potential employers do not seem to think I am fit for any computer job that I have applied for (and I have applied for all I have seen). Why can't I get the job?

I first want to list my qualifications. I can type 70+ WPM. I am not sure of my 10-key speed at the moment, but rest assured my fingers know where the keys are. I have decades of experience with Windows and can run the system quite easily without a mouse. If pressed further, I can work within windows without even a monitor, since I am able to use the system by sound alone. If Windows isn't your company's OS, I am certainly not new to linux. With this OS, I have much more control over the computer, but in an attempt to impress those who know what is going on, I will say that I can dual boot linux with any other OS (or tri-boot, or what have you). I was first able to accomplish this with LILO but can do the same with grub, with or without a compiled linux kernel.

Forget booting linux, that's the easy part. Let's make a firewall with it. No problem! I've done that, as well as creating different types of networks through such a machine. I prefer the console to X because of the keystrokes, but if you have a custom X install, I can adapt quickly. Enough of linux, on to Mac. Easiest system ever, really. If you cannot run this, you shouldn't be using a computer. Not much to say, here, other than learning finder.

More: I can spoof, crack, code, network, troubleshoot, and well, anything. If I were to brag, I would say that I know more than enough to take down most networks, but not enough to get hired.

Wut do?

Instead of giving a link to music that seems to fit the mood for today, I'll embed the video. Press play and give it a spin while reading this.

Anyway, still no job. I'm waiting a couple of hours and heading back into town for more application placement. Hey, at least we have the air conditioner fixed, so that's a huge relief! Otherwise, both Kim and I have a lot of electronically placed applications all over the state. If we do not find relief soon, we'll probably be forced to move in with her parents until I can get a job.

Anyway, although I am out of college (temporarily, of course), I am still forcing myself to learn. I'm currently reading C++ How to Program (7th Edition) along with Visual Studio. I'm currently on page 98, learning about validation of data to a class' functions. Fun stuff, huh? Well, this isn't all too new to me, since I've dabbled in this sort of stuff before, but I have learned about the how's and why's of creating and linking headers to the program.

Well, I'm off for now. Wish me luck!

First, let's set the mood for this post. This music certainly seems fitting for the mood. The link is here. Open this in another tab if you will while reading this.

Well, today is the start of a new day. I've put in some IT applications with the Chickasaw Nation, including resume and transcript. I'm very hopeful that I'll hear something from them. This house is really draining me. It just doesn't feel like a home with all of the work that needs to be put into it. As our finances are slowly dwindling away, I can only pray that I will land a job soon enough to save our family.

It doesn't help that I'll be driving in 110+ temps in business attire without an air conditioner, but I'll try my best. There are two computer places in Durant that I have my eye on; hopefully I can snag something that can make use of my skills. If not, I have a couple of IT apps sitting with the Chickasaw nation. I have my hopes up for those.

What skills do I have? Pretty much anything with computers. I started teaching myself typing as a preteen, which I estimate is around 10 - 12. While in school, we were taught on Apple IIe computers. Bad foresight for my school then, huh? While much of my class were busy playing Oregon Trail, I fired up a version of BASIC, but I cannot recall which. I toyed with commands and such, and soon found my way into the directories of the computers network. Here, I found the teachers password, which was funnily enough, "payday." Ask any of my teachers who worked there if you do not believe me.

Since, I have dabbled with other programming languages. Pascal, C++, etc. I delved into linux for a couple of years with slackware being my first real install, but falling in love with debian. I did some amazing things, from logging into IRC from spoofed IPs, which was the funniest thing. The trick was to have an IP that didn't respond to pings. We found several .gov IPs and .mil's that we trolled porn and warez channels. If it did respond to pings, well, we could deal with that with a smurf or fraggle. I was a true script kiddie. I was writing broadcast hunter scripts and had quite the list back then.

I got away from that malicious lifestyle though. Now, I play games, mostly, when I'm not having fun with my wife and kids or finding work. I can troubleshoot almost any piece of hardware or software that I come across, even if I'm not familiar with it. Security penetration is still high in my interests, so you may see me in the security tubes from time to time. I'd really like to get to business and learn some C++, but my job is pretty much going to have to do that with me. I really need a steady job that will allow for college hours. When I was with DISH, you can see my grades drop at the end because of my overtime and extra requirements.

I would like my next job to blend with my degree so that I learn and grow at the same time. It doesn't hurt to be hopeful, but perhaps it will happen, and maybe today will be that day. Wish me luck in the heat!

Would anybody care to hear from me again? It has been so long that I hardly remember what or why I was working on this. The humdrum of life is back in effect. It is scorchingly hot outside, yet I am due to start working for DirecTV soon. On one hand, I want the work. On the other, I want to go back to college and finish my degree, which is my true love (my great wife stands first, of course, but my tongue doesn't seem to poetically inclined enough to grace her presence with how I really feel).

Business Information Systems, that is something I enjoy. I live and breathe computers and know them almost too much. Those who know me well know that I know much, but none know how much. The sandwich restaurant that a friend and I took control of the keyboard and mouse of, the security feeds we saw... Yet, I am afraid that I don't know enough about computers to impress my employers.

I have struggled with this for years. I have labored to find somebody to learn from, one who enjoyed being taught as much as I enjoy teaching what I have learned. Of course, I found nobody. I made many friends, but I'm still the shell of what I could have been.

I did have a rather complicated dream recently though. It was quite spectacular, but I can remember little of it. I remember enough to hold a very loose mental diagram, and this diagram showed me just how pathetic I really am. It was my own demon, something that has tormented me for years. However, I began a critical examination of what this demon really was. What else could such a demon do but make me feel less about myself? This was his one and only job, and he has failed.

I've learned that I am kind, and sincere, and love others more than myself. Sometimes I cannot display this like I would like to and dread feeling this way. I am just me, though, like you are just you. Letting myself dwell on it for so long is only hurting myself.

So, tonight, I throw off this armor of sorrow that I have worn for so long and now put on an armor of righteousness, truth, and humility. I will try to explain later.

Now, my rants of life, one after another.

Many people know to treat one another as they would want to treat themselves, but they choose not to. Why?

People steal from you, slack off, force their work upon you, degrade you... The list can go on and on, but for the purposes of this post, I'd like to ask why? In short, I think I know why. It can be answered in another question, why not? If you don't get caught, why not steal $5 from somebody else? If you don't get caught, why not slack off and be unproductive? If you don't get caught, why not put extra load on others? As for degradation... Degrading others would somehow give them a sense of power, but why do you need this power?

Questions answering questions isn't how I like to explain myself, so I would like to go deeper. Most of the untaught in our lives lead lives where they cannot see the values of effort, strength, intellect, or dedication. Most of us are taught that things will get done regardless. Regardless is the perfect word for this; they completely "disregard" others. They don't understand that people with higher values, morals, and beliefs, can do their actions better, faster, stronger, whatever. Then they complain their life is going nowhere... Shame, shame.

Of course there is always somebody better, faster, and stronger, but they wouldn't have got there without pushing their limits, which is what you fail to do.

As for myself, I am more than happy with my life right now. I am working very hard daily at a factory, pushing myself to learn more and more every day. I am helping myself to become the better person. The better, faster, stronger person. I am losing weight, becoming more limber, sleeping less, more social, more Christian.

I hope this puts a point in your mind as to where my life is heading.

I've been playing World of Warcraft, lately. The game is great, but I don't think it's worth the $14.99/month that they're asking for it. I mean, you've already paid the $19.99 for the game, right? $12.99 or lower would be a better price, in my opinion. I'm playing a level 16 Gnome Mage right now, and I must say that it can be quite addicting.

I purchased a new video card recently. The nVidia 7600 GT for $115 was a great buy and it works excellent. If I want to turn this system into a true gaming machine, I need 1.5GB more RAM and a good SATA setup. RAM is getting amazingly cheap, so for another $60 or so I could get another gigabyte. I only have 512MB now, but it works good enough to at least play World of Warcraft, but the newer games can really choke. Take The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, for instance. I get great video quality, but when I'm in large areas with lots of textures to load into memory, the hard drive starts to get a little overworked.

Aside from games, I'm ordering the medical transcriptioning program from Careerstep for almost $1,600. It'll be a 4 month full time course, so wish me luck. This should be a lot nicer than than PCDI, who I would never recommend for ANY type of study.

On a final note, be sure to check out my MySpace page. Leave a comment there, too, if you want. Peace!

Hello once again, everybody. This post going to be about my new job. I'm working for T-Mobile at an outsourcer. I'm actually still in training (starting my 3rd week), which is in a classroom environment. At the beginning of next week, I'm going to get on the phones for the first time. I'll actually be in a department called GMA, which is where people go right after training to receive additional help for a few weeks before being put on the real production floor.

I've actually been doing very well there. I'm among the top of the class because of the speed at which I can find the policies and procedures, and with my computer background, their database is very easy to navigate. I would say that there are things I would change to make the call flow and support much easier and faster, but I'm still new, so nobody would actually listen to me.

I get this same runaround at any job that I'm at. I can enhance and secure their networks, but apparently they don't want it. For example, their network is so unsecure now that I am running a telnet server at my home and telnetting into it from work. From there, I can go outbound to ANYTHING. My class loves me for it, because we chat to each other through this server while in class, which includes getting the answers for tests. I also have outbound FTP access and the ability to browse their internal Windows network (with write access, nonetheless).

Honestly, it just makes you feel like nobody appreciates your abilities. Regardless, I know that my skills could be put to much better use off of the phones. I won't let my ego get to my head, though; I realize I'm new and should first have to "prove" myself.

Well, beyond that, I've made several new friends there and have been invited to their house a couple of times. I've also invited a couple of people to my apartment as well. For the first time in a long time I feel like I have a social life again, at least where I don't have to drive 2 hours on the weekends to see my old friends. It's definitely a good change from staying at home alone for the past 15 months.

The pay there is good, too, along with benefits. You start at $7.50/hr for training, then you get $8.50 after training. Depending on your call scores, if you can score higher than 3 (on a 1 to 5 scale), you'll make $9.50 for the month. They also offer optional overtime at times, so if you're making $9.50/hr when you take the overtime, your next check is going to be really fat. As for the benefits, I don't really care about them because I'm already completely covered on everything through Kim's job.

Oh yes, my birthday was yesterday. I'm on a new computer now (from my Dad), and I'm loving it. It wasn't a big party or anything. In fact, my parents both came to stay the night Saturday night, so you can count getting drunk for my birthday out. It was nice to see them, though, so it was worth it.

Who'd have guessed a new post? No, this blog isn't dead, nor will it ever be. Anyway, just a few updates.

First, we've moved. What fun that was. We're in a great apartment, but I'm not too fond of the manager. For some reason, we've had problems here for upward of 3 months, yet they haven't been fixed yet (and by problem, I don't mean complex). First, our stove is screwed up, then there's the fact that all of our electrical outlets are loose. There's more problems, these are just the 2 major ones. They should have easily been fixed in the 3 months we've been here (and yes, they ARE in our work-order).

Second, Kim and I both have jobs now, and we've hired a babysitter to come to our house to babysit while we're away. I think she's done a great job so far, as does Kim. I haven't been away from Elise for 15 months now, so it feels very awkward to suddenly have only a couple of hours a day with her (if even that).

Third, we're working on owning a house, but to do this, we have to both fix our credit. We've gone to a credit counselor already, who is looking through both of our credit reports to start setting up a consolidated payment with them. Ouch, it's a tough job, because my credit is so horrible. I still owe bills from my first real girlfriend, which was years ago, for some jewelry.

Anyway, I hope you all keep revisiting my site. The 1,435 unique hits to this site kinda makes me feel good, like I'm actually giving something back to this world for once.

Oh yeah, I thought I should mention this... If you know me, then you'll understand the complete oddity of it. I found myself the organizer of a political rally for an anti-Bush thing. Believe me, President Bush is a liar on every front and has abused his power for personal gain. Just watch Loose Change for proof on this. Being "famous" isn't a good thing at all; it comes with too many responsibilities.

A new post. Surprised? Well, lately, I've been downloading a lot of music. I've got 1.59GB of songs so far, which is 346 tracks on 39 different albums. I'm shooting for a little over 4GB so that I can burn it to a DVD. My main goal is to get the complete discography of Aphex Twin (and his aliases). I'll then release everything as a torrent, so be sure to join it! So far I have:

• Afx

1. Analogue Bubblebath 1 through 5
2. Analord 1 through 11

• Aphex Twin

1. 26 Mixes for Cash
2. Caustic Window
3. Classics
4. Come to Daddy
5. Drukqs
6. Girl-Boy EP
7. Hangable Auto Bulb
8. I Care Because You Do
9. Melodies From Mars
10. Richard D. James Album
11. Selected Ambient Works 85 - 92
12. Selected Ambient Works, Vol. 2
13. Surfing on Sine Waves
14. Ventolin
15. Windowlicker
16. Words & Music

I'm missing a few albums, and a couple of songs from those albums. You can view his complete discography at http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/hunaphextwin/discography.html. If you can give me any albums that I don't already have, I'll love you forever! We can trade songs by any means (FTP, Hamachi, You Send It, IRC, Soulseek, Torrents, etc.) By the way, I prefer that all my music is in 128KBps format, in the ARTIST\ALBUM\TRACK# SONGTITLE format, but if you don't know how to do that, don't worry, I can do it myself. Resampling from higher bitrates to 128KBps is pretty simple, just use Advanced MP3 Converter, located here. I then use Media Monkey to edit my ID3 tags and organize the files, then moreTunes for some final ID3 touches. The result is a nice directory structure of sorted MP3's at a decent bitrate, especially if you like to burn them to CD so that you can listen to them with your MP3 player.

You can contact me many ways. On IRC, I'm on with the nick BlkFury. My AIM name is BlkFury80, my MSN account name is jfox1980@gmail.com, and I also use Google Talk, under jfox1980@gmail.com. By the way, if you need a gmail account of your own (with over 2,713MB and growing), just leave a comment here or contact me with the other ways I mentioned and I'll set you up.

Otherwise, the music I also have is:

• Boards of Canada - The Campfire Headphase
• Daft Punk - Homework
• DHT - Listen to Your Heart
• Halo_Gen - Halo_Gen
• Kindzadza - Waves From Outer Space
• Massive Attack - Mezzanine

Not a bad collection, huh? I've also found a new P2P file sharing program that you may be interested in. It's not near as good as the current torrent system, and it does put you in a queue, but it's worth a try, since it can find hard-to-get songs. It is located at http://www.slsknet.org/. The current version is 157 test 8, and can quickly be downloaded here. If you want to have a look at my music, just browse the user BlkFury.

Other than that, not much is new. My ISP, Communicomm, is still as worthless as ever. The BBB case that I filed against them is finally over, and they've received a bad ranking. You can view the results here. It basically says that they have an "unsatisfactory record" because "Company failed to respond to the BBB or to the consumer to resolve the issues." If you've been following my blog, you'll find that that isn't all too surprising. I've been trying to get ahold of the manager over the billing department by phone, but all I ever get is voicemail. I've sent her numerous e-mails about the downtime that I've been having, but she hasn't responded once. What else can I do?

Here's a link featuring a great shockwave flash video of Albert Hoffman. I hope you enjoy it!
http://www.nata2.info/humor/flash/flashback.swf. The music playing the the background is DMT by Shpongle. That's some more music I need to get.

Oh yes, a picture of me. Here's the best one I can find:

Later, folks!

Here's a picture showing a test that I'm running to show how badly our internet connection is with Communicomm.


As you can see (you may need to click on the image to show the full size), there are a lot of failed packets. The test has been running for almost 3 hours, and almost half of that time, the internet was unaccessible. Also, you can note that the average response time for the data that does actually get through is high.

So, take my advice. If you have the choice between Communicomm and another ISP, choose the other. With Communicomm, we've had nothing but bad customer support, high prices, excessive downtime, low bandwidth, and filtered packets (see the post several days ago). Cox Communications is an excellent cable internet provider. If you have them in your area, go with them. I've used them for twice as long as I've used Communicomm when I lived in TX, and I can't remember more than 5 minutes of downtime. I can't say that their customer service is better though, because I've never actually had to use it. That's a good thing, though, heh.