Tag Archives: virginia

The Chicken and The Egg

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To quote Chicken Run:

Nick: Here’s a thought. Why don’t we get an egg and start our own chicken farm? That way we’d have all the eggs we could eat.
Fetcher: Right. We’ll need a chicken, then.
Nick: No… no, we’ll need an egg. You have the egg first, that’s where you get the chicken from.
Fetcher: No, that’s cobblers. If you don’t have a chicken, where are you going to get the egg?
Nick: From the chicken that comes from the egg.
Fetcher: Yeah, but you have to have an egg to have a chicken.
Nick: Yeah, but you’ve got to get the chicken first to get the egg, and then you get the egg… to get the chicken out of…
Fetcher: Hang on, let’s go over this again.

Once again, I have a predicament. I came to a small realization today, and that is I have no formal qualifications or certifications in IT, and while I am getting interviews with my current skill-set and experience, I still come out underneath in terms of finding a position to utilize them in.

So I was looking around at A+ and wondering what it would take to become certified. I found a couple of “free” online tests that would allow me to see if I could (in theory) pass the exams. Turns out that with a little training it wouldn’t be all that hard. The reason I say “free” is because it asked me for contact information, and I knew as soon as I clicked “submit” that I’d get a marketing call asking if I’m interested. Turns out I am! But once again we have a chicken-egg scenario.

The organization in question have a (limited time) offer whereby if I am unemployed they can take off 40% of the cost of the program, taking it from $1000 down to $601 (so.. 39.9%?). They also offer the possibility of an interest-free and non-credit-checked payment plan, and have testimonials of specific people who got jobs within a few days of signing up to take the class (simply based on the prospect that they would have the certification within X days).

Once again my problem is having a job with which to fund such a proposition, and requiring the certification that it would provide in order to land said job.

Clearly I need to sit down and reanalyze our options, and maybe drive up to food lion or something for an application there. I just feel bad (and worried in terms of resume) about holding short-term jobs while trying to get “the big one.” At the same time, I can’t just sit around doing nothing while waiting for it either.

Update on the Job Front

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To those of you who have been praying for Kelly and I with my job search, thank you! I have an update and an addition to this request, but it requires a little background so bear with me!

I live near Harrisonburg in Virginia, about 100 miles from DC via Interstates. In November I interviewed for a job near Dulles in the DC Metro Area and was offered it but I turned it down because a) at the time I had a part time job, b) it was working 5pm-1am and c) it was paying $36k/yr maximum. C wasn’t so bad, but B was the big killer, as I’m married and my wife works 9:30-6 and we would never see each other except on weekends.

On Friday I got signed up with a staffing agency and did a days work (one day assignment) yesterday, but future assignments aren’t incredibly hopeful based on the number of people they need to assign work to and the amount of work their clients have.

Today I talked with a lady who goes to my church who tipped me off about 2 positions with an insurance company and was also going to make calls to the Sheriffs office and the Courts (she’s worked for them before and knows people) to see if they have a need for an IT worker.

I also got an email from the company in Northern Virginia to say they had another opening from 7am-3pm, this time offering a $36k base salary with up to $6k in bonuses.

This seems, on the surface, like a no-brainer, except that for it to work several things need to fall into place, and this is what I’m asking for prayer for.

If this is what I am meant to do and where I am supposed to be, I am going to need to either get a car loan and find a car (not likely to happen because I have $0 for deposit and fairly bad credit), or find someone willing to lend me a car for a month until the first pay check comes in and my wife and I can sort our financial life out. I’m also going to need to find a room in Northern Virginia within 15 minutes or so of Dulles for when I am on call around one week a month, and again we have $0.

It is a rather bleak outlook at this point, but I believe that if this is the door that God is opening then the means to pass through it will also be shown to us shortly, and that if this is not the way then the door will be closed and I’ll continue down the hallway of life looking for the next door that is wide open (or slightly ajar..)

Yesterday Was a Long Day

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Wow. 8 hours is a long time to spend alone in a car.

I misreported on facebook via twitter that I had driven for 6 hours and gone 260 miles during my work day yesterday, while I visited 18 convenience stores on a list that had me testing (as part of the training program, rather than getting people in serious trouble) whether I would be carded when trying to buy tobacco products.

Unfortunately my tired brain was incapable of basic time-math and thought that 11am-7pm was 6 hours. No, it’s 8. I am aware of this now. My first stop was at 11:10am and the last one was at 5:10pm, but then required a nearly 2 hour drive from West Virginia over US-33 back to Harrisonburg and up to Broadway. This involved a near miss with a deer (a couple had run in front of me, and one stopped short of running into the side of the car while I was doing ~ 55mph), and several near misses with 25mph turns over 33, which when they said “25mph” actually meant “You should probably do 25mph, not the 40mph that you could do one the 25mph turns further down the mountain..” It was on these that I really felt the vibration of the brakes that really needs to be looked at soon, as well as the transmission error light that has been coming up for a couple of weeks. I really hope that is just a faulty sensor that needs replacing and not a serious transmission issue, but who knows. I’m about 75% sure that the vibration issue is a warped brake disc on the front left wheel, but it is too cold to try looking at it and even then there is no guarantee that I could spot it. With our luck recently, if the car breaks it is probably an indication that we are about to get a job or something to keep us barely-floating still, rather than providing a useful means to dig ourselves out of this hole we are in.

In better news, and still on the job front, I’ve been talking to a lady from church who knows a lot of people (IE: companies/organizations) who are or may be in need of IT people. She gave me one set of contact info and was going to call around today and tonight and give me another call to let me know if she came up with anything. It really seems to be a case of not so much what you know (although it certainly helps!) but who you know.

Spawning in the Game

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Someone should write a song entitled “Spawning in the Game” to the tune of “Singing in the Rain.” Maybe it’s too cheesy? Maybe not.

I’ve been playing BF2 for a couple of days now, since re-discovering the game (I was bored with Command and Conquer with myself, wanted to find some new people to socialize with online). I’ve mostly been playing with the guys at ISI, the Iron Sharpens Iron Christian Clan.

I’m still looking for people to LAN with, and possibly some games to buy when funds become available for such, so if you’re a PC gamer who plays BF1942, BF:V, BF2, and live in the Augusta/Rockingham/Shenandoah county areas of Virginia (or know someone who does!), maybe you should drop me a comment!

Looking For Networking

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I’ve been playing a lot of BattleField 2 the last couple of days, since discovering the 1.5 patch. It’s a whole lot of fun, and while I’ve had a lot of fun playing random strangers online, I’m looking for some more local people to LAN with. If you know anyone in the Harrisonburg/Rockingham County area of Virginia who plays Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Vietnam, Battlefield 2, a relevant mod for any of these, or any of the games in Command and Conquer’s First Decade, leave me a comment and we’ll look into hooking up.

I’m not looking for competition gaming, what I’d like is a group of cool people who happen to enjoy playing games. It’d be really nice to find some of my friends were secret LANners, but I’m not sure I see that happening 😉

It Has Been a While!

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Wow, I keep realizing how long it has been since I wrote an entry here. Most things remain the same. I still don’t have a full time job, although I interviewed with a county school system earlier this week and also applied to a year-round resort, both IT positions. I also have another 3 jobs to apply for this afternoon (hopefully) that are also IT and not terribly far away.

I’ve done some work on my monitoring systems for my servers. Over the last few months I’ve developed several methods for providing close to real-time outage-notifications and misc. monitoring for the three servers I administrate. The system I currently have primarily does two things: Service unavailable notifications via Twitter, Email and Txt message (via email), and corresponding “It’s available again” messages, and system monitoring using an Eggdrop IRC bot for each server with basic commands.

I’d like to expand this system at some point in the future, by migrating the system monitoring system from Eggdrop to a Perl bot. This would allow it to be more portable, and hopefully have a smaller footprint on the server it runs on. It would be nice to have IRC-based announcements for server-up/server-down as well as more minor alerts, like high CPU usage, high RAM usage, high hard disk partition usage, etc. We’ll see how that goes at some point in the future.

In more interesting news, I believe we have pretty much finished our Christmas shopping. All of our box to New Zealand items have been bought, and we are waiting for 3 of them to ship or arrive by mail. All but one (I believe) of the remaining items have been wrapped, and they’re all sitting in a corner of our room waiting for everything else to be ready to go. We’re just waiting for 2 items to arrive (apparently they were mailed recently), and another to be mailed. I checked yesterday and it was still pending.

I recently provided a redesign for a fan-site, I’ll try and post screenshots later. I’m also working on upgrading/updating the Infinitley-aLive website, and moving away from WordPress. I’m undecided yet as to whether I’ll use SilverStripe (as on http://chris.i-al.net/) or if I’ll build my own fully customized CMS for it. Having been looking at CodeIgniter, it may be a fun first-project for a CodeIgniter site.

Lastly, if you find yourself in need of some web-design or web-programming, or a shell account for almost anything, or just basic webhosting, leave me a comment or something. I am happy to work with your budget so long as it fits mine, I’m happy to work for the testimonial and for a reference for my resume if I feel a need to use it, and you’re happy to provide the details I need. I accept paypal, and cash or check if you wish to meet locally. Also, if I can’t do something I’ll let you know quickly, and if I can I’ll point in the direction of people who are able to fulfill your requirements.

Silence is Golden

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At least, that’s what they tell me. I haven’t posted for a while, and I don’t really have a whole lot to say.

I’ve been whining recently about trying to find work, I’m still looking for a full-time IT job while I continue to apply for anything I see in a two-hour radius from where I live.

I applied recently for an IT position via fax, because the organization’s mail server wasn’t accepting emails. This amused me. I also forwarded messages I’d printed with the error messages so they could look into fixing it.

Yesterday and today I worked high ropes, yesterday with a church retreat from in/near DC, and today with a bunch of kids from DC’s Public Schools. A few funny things were said, but the one that stood out was a girl yesterday who said the 3 places she wanted to visit before she died were Argentina, Australia and Alabama. On querying her wish to visit Alabama, she explained her desire to visit “The South” and drink “Real” sweet tea. I tried (in vain) to suggest she could get real sweet tea just by visiting this far south in Virginia, but she wouldn’t have any of it. The only place, in her mind, where she could get such a delicacy was if she went to a “Real” southern state like Alabama.

I had a great time, today I got to try out the new gloves I got for doing ropes work with (and they were amazing!), and had a good laugh or two with some really cool people.

The other day I set up a new website on a domain that has been empty for a few weeks, www.awesomechristians.net is now a quote board for amusing or moving quotes from Christian chat rooms all over. Not necessarily UCCN, or even IRC. They can be from Yahoo! or anywhere else for all it matters!

Tonight is a thanksgiving dinner at church, and tomorrow morning Kelly and I leave to house-sit for two weeks! I’m sure many photos will abound.

Would Someone Hire Me Already?

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I’m really not liking living here. It sounds wrong, it mostly is, I love this area and the people that I’m close to, but I hate a series of specific circumstances. I can’t seem to get a job I want to (or can) have long term. Harrisonburg is fairly void of IT opportunities. That is, all the IT jobs are taken, and there didn’t seem to be all that many to begin with. No-one is expanding, so the chances of any opening any time soon are fairly flat. In DC there are hundreds of openings, but of the 10% that I might be qualified for, almost all of them require either a security clearance, a US Citizenship, or both. I have neither.

I’m keeping an open mind about it, so far I’m finding on average 1 job a day to apply for somewhere, and while I’m yet to be contacted by any possible employers, I’m continuing to look – mostly because I can’t stay working part time forever.

I have a small list of places I regularly check (usually every day, or every other day), starting locally and working my way out.

  • Eastern Mennonite Univerity
  • James Madison University
  • Rockingham Memorial Hospital
  • Rockingham County Public Schools
  • Harrisonburg City Schools
  • Rackspace (Locations in Blacksburg and in NoVa)
  • Craigslist (Harrisonburg, Charlottesville, Winchester, DC, Roanoke, Lynchburg, Blacksburg)
  • University of Virginia
  • Virginia Tech

I also check several school districts around the area every week or so, checking county and city school systems around as far as Charlottesville, Roanoke, Winchester/DC, etc, and I just added Carillion, the hospital in Roanoke to my list of places to regularly check (thanks Lauren).

If you’re a hiring manager, I can send a resume as required, but I have two years professional IT experience between basic and advanced experience working with PC’s, Servers, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Mac OS X, Windows Server 2000 and 2003, Linux as a desktop and server, web technologies and networking, computer hardware, Active Directory, Novell Netware, have worked on a service desk, and can usually learn things quickly. I also have around 10 years experience in a non-professional environment just playing with stuff and learning things at home or while working on friends/family computers. I’d like to study, but I need to get my family to a point where we are self-sufficient with enough spare cash-flow to fund such an educational venture.

Time Management

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I’m trying to make the best use of my morning time before I go to work rather than sleeping all day, in theory it will help me when it is time to leave my 2:30-5:30 job for full time work.

This morning I took Crash with me and went to Food Lion and bought breakfast stuff, lunch stuff, and some drinks. Breakfast will last most of the week, lunch stuff all week (with some to spare) and the drinks should last until next pay day. I filled up the truck, which should last two weeks unless I have to go somewhere much other than work, and after breakfast and lunch I took Crash on a walk.

Tonight I applied for another job, this time in Christiansburg, as an entry level help desk analyst. The pay is crap (for an IT job), but it’s better than what Kelly makes full time, and we always said that another job with similar pay would be enough to get ourselves off the ground.

We’re working on getting Crash to behave without needing a leash on, and today he hung out with me for about half an hour without a tether while I was grilling, and tonight stayed within hearing distance on the walk inside. He is still tethered and crated while we’re not around to watch him, naturally ;-).

Hopefully tomorrow I will get up and have breakfast, followed by an hour or two of programming on my current web-project, I also need to make a bunch of sandwiches to go in the fridge for the rest of the week. I’ll also continue to keep my eyes open on the various Craigslist pages and maybe checking out CareerBuilder and the other job site rounds, JMU, EMU, RMH, JenzaBar, DNR, etc.

But that is tomorrow, and tonight it is getting late, thus I shall sleep. Goodnight, world.

I Want…

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…to change the image of cheap internet hosting. I can’t see it happening. What I would love to do would be to run a small business supplying cheap webhosting for websites and IRC and Shoutcast and Teamspeak and VPSs and Dedicated servers and so on and so forth, meanwhile providing quality 24 hour phone and email support for a low monthly fee. I’d like to do that. I think that is what the internet would like. But it isn’t going to happen any time soon. Why? Because I don’t have the upfront money to pay for the first server, which itself would probably only be able to supply websites for example. And even if I did, I would probably not be able to afford long-term payments if only one or two people bought accounts – not much motivation to have people calling me at 3 in the morning because their website is running slow.

The sad truth is that small internet businesses are not very profitable. In order to make any money, you need a minimum amount of resources and get a large number of customers using them in order to pay for a) the resources being used already, and b) more resources.

I was crunching numbers a few months ago with the prospect of starting a VPS company, but in order to get going, I was needing around $240 a month for the server just to get it up and running, and then I needed 24 people paying $10 a month before it would break even. With that kind of package, I’d only have another 6 packages available on that server before I’d need a second one, and then I’m back to finding $180 a month until that one reaches a break-even point. Once I had 6 servers running, there would be enough profit from 6 full servers to fund a 7th without anything coming out of my own pocket, by which point I would be serving around 180 customers. The seventh server is what would be the turning point in the business. And somewhere in all of this I’d need to have found 180 people that want VPSs with the crappy support that I’d be able to provide on my own, meaning I’d probably need to pay for advertising of some description, and possibly provide some web-designing services of some kind. Keeping in mind also, that none of those numbers were taking taxes or any other mandatory expenses into consideration, so it would probably be the 8th server that was making money. Around the 10th server (Read: 300 customers) I’d be able to afford to visit a mobile communications store and lease unto myself a cell phone and a wireless data-card to provide support anywhere. I’d also be able to lease a VoIP account for the business and accept incoming phone calls for support. I would have undoubtedly branched out by this point, and be providing other services using similar hardware such as website hosting, but hosting more people per-server at a lower cost per-customer. I’d be reselling dedicated servers, probably looking at the viability of buying my own hardware and co-locating it.

And that is where it gets depressing. Maybe I need to just do it? Maybe I need to save the money and put a real plan together, put the time into it and make it work. Maybe I need to find a business partner who I can trust. Maybe I need to give it up already. I know I need to study the business side of it to find out how much that would cost before going further with the viability of the pure technical numbers. I know I need to study further, and make decisions regarding placing multiple service types on the same servers, such as ShoutCast hosting alongside TeamSpeak hosting – probably not a good plan. The same idea applies to mixing VPS plans on the same hardware, as it isn’t entirely fair to cram whatever will fit on a server on whatever is available at the time, at the same time I can’t afford to run 3 servers with 3 plans until they’re paying for themselves.

So I shall return to my silent pondering of greatness that will likely not come. I will continue to come up with ideas that may never see fruition. And I will proceed to consider possibilities to make money as well as a name for myself in the internet community.