The next person who gets all snobby with me and treats me like crap is going to get blacklisted for life.

You people who have done this know who you are, I'm sure, so this is the only warning you get. I'm sick of being treated like a lowlife piece of scum just because you don't know how to be considerate of others.

My name is Tim. I am a PHP lover. I have no sense of design patterns.

I am at the pinnacle of being pissed off. I have NEVER been this mad before.

Why am I mad? Hahaha...

1) Work (My day job) 1a) Customers 1b) Co-workers 1c) Schedule? What schedule? 2) Work (My business) 2a) Customers 2b) Stupid shit 3) Family 3a) Totally STUPID "to do" lists 3b) Being cussed at for no reason whatsoever 3c) Hearing people piss and moan about shit they can take care of if they'd just SHUT UP and DO SOMETHING

My dad came in my room today after I had bathed the dog and spent 3 hours debugging a search routine, on my day off mind you, only to say "You're going to catch you-know-what when Mom gets home because you didn't do a damned thing all day."

I flipped out, for the second time this week. No, I didn't just sit here and boil in my anger, I jumped up, started throwing things, slammed doors, yelled at the top of my lungs, and somehow blew the end out of my finger. No, I didn't cut or smash my finger... I just happened to look down and see that my hand was soaked in blood. Now my ears are popping like you wouldn't believe, and I'm about ready to scream.

I'm sick of it. I'm sick of all this bullshit. I. Am. Sick. Of. It.

Oh man, if I had a dollar for every time I was told that, or for every time I heard "We found someone with better qualifications", I wouldn't need to work for anyone else.

I went to college to get a degree, albeit an Associate's degree, in computer programming. The #1 reason I went to college was to get that piece of paper that said I knew what I was doing. The #1 reason I picked the college I did was because they supposedly had a 95% placement rate of graduates in the job market. That told me that I wouldn't have a bit of trouble finding work after I graduated.

Well, that was somewhat the right idea. The week before I graduated from school, I met with one of my current customers, The Tobacco Control Partnership of Tippecanoe County, Indiana. That meeting turned into me getting my first big web development job, which has helped a LOT in getting my business rolling.

During that project, and after it, I submitted my resume to several job openings that were posted at the college I graduated from, and that I was so totally qualified for. I went for interviews, I showed my work, I asked the right questions, and yet I have yet to land a job in the computing field, not just the programming field.

A friend told me about another job posting at the school, which had an advertised salary of $15/hr-$20/hr. I don't know what the specifics are of that job, but I do know that I will hear the SAME FRIGGIN' THING if I even attempt it.

I've gotten to the point that I quit trying. I have a day job that gets the bills paid, and I have my own business that is in the computing and programming fields. My business is getting to the point that I need to devote as much time to it as I can, or every thing I've worked so hard to get where it is today will go down the toilet.

Here's the kicker though...

One of my closest friends was in all the same classes I was. He ended up slacking off towards the end of his college career because he had financial situations to worry about. One day, he went to a local factory to apply for a position working on the assembly line, asked if there was any chance at getting a job relating to the IT department, and INSTANTLY landed a job as an MIS.

But here's the thing about this... This friend has always needed to ask me for help with assignments. He's always called me to help him with the type of work that he is doing now. Yet he's the one that got the job, not me.

Anyhow, he's now an RPG coder, making well over $30,000 a year, owns his own house now, and is happy.

Here's me, working 10 hour days for less than $8/hr, working 8 hours on top of it for less than I should even be doing it for.

I get so sick of life sometimes. The person who works hard and knows what they're doing gets kicked in the nuts, while the person who never really took life seriously lands an cushy job.

You know what? Today SUCKED.

I spent the entire morning, dealing with straight-up bullshit around the shop. Some of it was because of lazy, incompetent co-workers, while the rest of it was because of customers who felt the need to chew me out for what someone else told them. I spazzed out at "dude", just because he was the only one around, and told him that he was going to do all the talking today. I think I scared him, because he was doing what he could to stay on my good side all day after that. If you're wondering what the spazzing consisted of, it was me, yelling at the top of my lungs, with a very high level of disgust. Usually, that kind of thing makes a person feel better... I feel the same about it still.

Anyhow, after that stuff cooled down, "dude" was back to his normal crap, and I had to take charge of nearly ALL of the stuff around the shop. I finally started getting on his case and telling him what needed done.

If I had to rate today on a 1-10 scale, 1 being the worst and 10 being the best, today was a -45.

(Yes, it's a new category.)

    return 0; }

Okay, fair enough... But explain this little addition to the true side of the conditional...

       me->DoActivity('JoinIRC');

For those of you non-coders, this should still make sense. Feel free to explain why in the living heck I joined IRC when I despise social interaction right now.

Yesterday, I had to transport a transmission flush machine from the shop here in town to the shop up north. The machine stands about as tall as a small bookshelf, and is about as wide and deep as a microwave oven.

While I was heading down the road (getting less than 15 miles per gallon due to the wind drag), I thought to myself, "I could be doing this for a business, if I only had 2 tanks in the back of my truck..."

That's right, a mobile transmission flush service.

The way the machine works is quite simple. One of the transmission cooler lines is disconnected from the vehicle, and the machine is connected in between the line and where it was removed from. Then, the vehicle is started up, and the pump that is built in to the transmission forces the old fluid out, which pushes against a piston inside the machine. On the other side of that piston, new fluid is pushed back into the car, on the other end of where that fitting was originally attached. On average, 16 quarts of new fluid is purged through the entire transmission system, cleaning over 90% of the garbage out of the torque convertor, valve bodies, and filter screen.

So what would the two tanks be used for? One for new oil to refill the machine, and one for storage of the old oil. All that would be required after that is an able-bodied individual to drive the vehicle, funding for fuel (compensated by the service charge), a reasonable rate schedule, and some good paperwork to release the individual from liability.

1) Customer calls the shop, requesting a service call 2) Individual jumps in the truck and heads to the customer's location 3) Individual hands customer paperwork to fill out 4) Individual connects the machine while the customer reads a "How this procedure works" pamphlet 5) The procedure runs (It normally takes about 20-30 minutes) 6) Individual reconnects the fittings and ensures proper operation and new fluid level 7) Individual shows customer the new fluid level 8) Customer hands Individual $99.95 for the service 9) Individual refills the machine on the customer's property (no mess should be made whatsoever) 10) Individual leaves 11) Go to step 1

I think this could be a very profitable business. It's easy work, reccomended to be done every 40,000 miles by automotive manufacturers, and worth every penny to the customer in the long run.

Who wants to invest?

Lately, my development server has been suffering from a lot of applications crashing. They usually crash with a SIGEV Segfault. It started a week or so ago, and the crashes weren't that frequent.

Now, today, I can't get ANYTHING done, because commands like a simple 'ls' cause a segfault. I can't even 'shutdown -h now' or 'init 0' because the programs involved with those commands are crashing before the shutdown is complete.

I have lots of remote hosts that I can use for my work, so don't bother offering. The issue with those is lost productivity though. I only have about 4 hours to work on my web development stuff each day, and where I'm only on 256Kbps DSL, it takes quite a while to upload, download, and manage files on a remote server. Dual booting into my preferred server OS, Linux, isn't an option for the same reason, only it is the boot times rather than network times.

So now, I have to put together an order for Newegg.com for a cheap but good motherboard, a processor, and some RAM. Why RAM? Because everything I have here is PC100 and PC133, and a new motherboard will take DDR.

Feel free to go click the PayPal "Donate" button on skudd.com. I need it, not for the server, but for living expenses.

Recently, a friend and I were talking about the future of technology and investing. We were throwing around ideas of what would be the hottest and most active markets, until we both agreed that telecommunications (t-comm) was going to be just as prevalent in the future as it is today, and as it was yesterday.

When the telephone first entered the scene, it changed the way the world operated. Rather than waiting days for a message to get to a relative or business associate on the opposite side of the country, you could deliver that message, audibly, in the same amount of time it would take you to dictate it. Today, we are in an ultra dependant state, depending on the telephone technology alone.

Consider the number of people you see on a daily basis, holding a cellular telephone to their ear. These people range in age from 8 years old, all the way up to 80 years old. One of my sister's friends from church has a young (about 10 years old, I would guess) daughter, and I remember seeing her walking around the coffee house we were at, talking to someone on the cell phone. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I see customers coming through the oil change shop every day, blathering away to some poor individual on the other end -- the receiving party is likely to be on a wired phone connection -- unable to get away from the wretched device.

Yet there's another kind of communication we've all become victim to: E-Mail. Every morning, I find myself powering on my monitor before I even get out of the bedroom to get something to drink, just to see if any new messages have come through. Sure, I am trying to run a business, keep in touch with friends, and stay up to date on the latest price of...Viagra?! Who sent that?! E-Mail is just as bad as the telephone, though, if not worse. In my field of business, the first thing I ask any potential customer, requesting information from me, is what their e-mail address is. It is very uncommon to come in contact with anyone who doesn't have an e-mail address, just like a telephone number. Even my grandmother has an e-mail account, and actively uses it!

Of course, there are many many many other t-comm technologies at the average person's disposal: Television, radio, satellite television, and now even satellite radio, all of which we can't live without.

So what's left? What is the next big step? What will we become dependant on tomorrow? How dependant will we become on it? Whatever the answers are, I'm ready, and I'm willing to put some money into it.

Today, the big craze is "Voice over Internet Protocol", or "VoIP". Companies like Vonage, Packet8, and Skype are exploding on the scene, taking over where the "Bells" left off, and doing it at a much lower rate. You could probably argue that they are trespassing on the copper-phone-line companies' property, stealing their customers with their own equipment, but I can guarantee you that there will be major changes come as a result. The FCC has even started to consider adapting regulations and laws for this new technology. That's a big sign -- Start investing!

So rather than sit back and think, "What's a good, lucrative market to put my money into?", head for the budding technologies. Head over to some technology-based news websites, read what's new, and get ready to put money into what you can. Heck, if you're ambitious enough, you could probably even help those technologies grow by starting a business with them!

Whatever you're considering, I can guarantee you that the telecommunications market is going to continue to be a strong player in the business world, so take advantage of it!

I was just browsing a gaming forum, and I was greeted by an advertisement for True.com, a matchmaking service.

This ad was claiming that "True Love" was available from their site, and they used a rather superficial image to depict "love":

The banner ad

(Note: This image may offend some, but it depicts absolutely no nudity or sexual behavior. You have been warned.)

How is a female's body, between the head and knees, a representation of "true love"? Gah! Stupid world.

• Popular on the alternative radio stations in the late 90's
• Used in an automotive commercial around the same time (not sure which company, but I think it was Mazda)
• The only words I remember are "oooh"
• There was a pretty cool guitar riff after the "oooh"

The lyrics go something like this: "oooh oooh oooh oooh oooh ooooooooh guitar riff"

Any ideas?

Tomorrow, on my day off, I have to go cover for a guy for 4 hours.

What. Joy.

Oh wait, it's just my flesh burning.

"Dude" and "Other Dude" are both out this week. "Dude" has taken the week as vacation. "Other Dude" has been suspended (possibly for good) for various reasons.

So today, it was me and "Guy", the new guy. Guy knows his stuff and is a very hard worker, so the day went rather well in that sense. The problem was the customers...

Around 11:30, I went to get my lunch (a salad) from the pizza joint just across the way from the shop. When I got back, before I poured the dressing on the salad, I told Guy that as soon as I did a car would pull up. I was right.

From then on, there was car after car after car, and at one point we had 3 waiting outside with 2 inside. I think the rush stopped around 5:00.

Overall, I believe we had 29 or 30 cars, brought in over $950 in sales, and even got the shop cleaned up and half the weekly "to do" list done.

The word around the boss is that there are going to be 3 positions opening up in the company. No, not new positions... EXISTING positions.

If anyone near me is reading this and is looking for work, you know where I work, so come in and talk to the boss.

A really enticing message told me to give these people my personal information, including my SSN, Credit/Debit card number, PIN, mother's maiden name, mailing address, age, etc.

I got kinda rude with my responses (pdf).

Another product of boredom