Gainful employment.

I’ve been underposting lately because I’ve been on a job hunt. Hunting for work is work in itself. Plus there’s all the new spam you get, which I ranted about already. I got a job today, and celebrated by using up my Starbucks card. I can afford rent and groceries now. God is good.

But about that job hunt… Today I received an email about a job in San Jose, working for Ameritrade as a financial adviser. Me, a financial adviser? Everything I know about investments is academic. The only things I’ve ever invested in are CDs from my credit union, and U.S. savings bonds. I know a bit about mutual funds and 401(k)s because I once sat with a financial adviser myself; I know a tiny bit about real estate because my parents invested in that. But I am in no position to advise other people about money. (Other than to tell them to get rid of their credit cards, which I did 10 years ago and don’t miss them at all.) And tithe; it’s important to remember that everything ultimately comes from God, not your ability to generate income, or budget what you earn.

Actually, I think the offer was because I stuck a résumé on HotJobs and they’re desperate to find people that won’t demand $50,000 a year fresh out of business school. Doesn’t matter; I would probably become very annoyed with such a job. It’s too close to the temple of Mammon for my comfort.

Amusing comic strip: Good coffee.

The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch.

Mountains of spam.

I had an email address for many years, kwleslie@hotmail.com. It was a useful address, since K.W. Leslie is my name, and kwleslie tends to be my screen name. Unless one of the other K.W. Leslies gets ahold of it first. Oh yes, there are others. There are also a few other Kent Leslies out there; very few people are going to have a name all to themselves unless they have a really unique name, like my cousin Smegma Leslie, who doesn’t exist anyway.

I had to ditch the address because I was slowly but certainly getting buried under a mountain of spam. There were so many people that were willing to refinance my mortgage, sell me Viagra, make my penis bigger, getting me on the ground floor (or at least the 10th floor) of their multi-level marketing scheme, and any number of unsolicited sales. The longer I had the email address, the larger the mountain grew. Eventually I was getting at least 90 spams a day.

This was in the early days of spam filtration, and pretty much the only way to do it was to create a filter for everything that you did or didn’t want in your inbox. Hotmail, at the time, had a limit—I think it was 250—on the number of filters you could create. I ran out of filters pretty fast. I tried making them more generic, blocking entire domain names, but spammers eventually learned to switch around their domain names too, and I just became tired of it.

So I abandoned my address and switched to iWon. They offer prizes for using their site; they have some sweepstakes where you could win a few thousand bucks, maybe even a million. I never won anything from them, but I figured a 0.00000002 percent chance was better than no chance at all. But slowly the spam began to pile up, and it was time to switch again. I bounced to Juno, then back to Hotmail, then back to iWon, and now I’m at Gmail. To date, my Gmail spam consisted of four messages a day in Chinese, which I can’t read. But ever since I stuck my résumé on Monster.com, it’s been filling up with crap.

By the way, Monster.com has thus far turned out to be junk. They have yet to find me a job, but they have managed to put me on at least 20 different spam accounts, and I’ve been contacted by a bunch of other employment websites who want me to put my résumé on their site, presumably to get me a job, but really because they—like Monster.com—wants to be able to say, “We have 10,000 résumés listed!” Of course they do. They’re not getting anyone any jobs. That’s why these sites have 10,000 résumés and only five testimonials. They’re a bunch of résumé graveyards—and shouldn’t the spammers realize that if we’re looking for jobs, we can’t bloody afford to have our penises enlarged?

It’s probably an exercise in futility, but I’ve been hitting all the “unsubscribe” buttons in the spam I’ve thus far received. Those that don’t have them get an email from me that reads, “Stop sending me spam.” It would be great if I could do this automatically; I’ll drop a note to Google about it. Meanwhile I have to keep shoveling out the spam.

Stupid Internet Survey: What’s my perfect major?

What is your perfect major?

You scored as Journalism. You are an aspiring journalist, and you should major in journalism! You are passionate about writing and expressing yourself, and you want the world to understand your beliefs through writing.

Journalism	100%
English	83%
Linguistics	83%
Sociology	83%
Anthropology	75%
Art	67%
Theater	67%
Mathematics	58%
Engineering	50%
Philosophy	50%
Dance	42%
Biology	33%
Chemistry	33%
Psychology	33%

What is your Perfect Major?
created with QuizFarm.com.

Actually, my major was journalism, once upon a time. But I think I should have scored higher on philosophy and psychology.

So, if you personally are wondering what you should major in, you could take this quiz. I personally recommend that you try a more scientific career aptitude test; I took one in high school and found it useful. It actually helped nudge me into journalism.

Registering to vote.

Why I’m now a Democrat. (And not just ’cause I live in Santa Cruz.)

In all the time I’ve lived in Santa Cruz County, I’ve never registered to vote here. I’ve usually been going to school, and so I’ve thought of myself as a resident of Solano County, and voted there. (Except for the times I didn’t, because I didn’t order an absentee ballot.) But since I’m gonna be living here, I suppose I’m gonna be voting here, so I need to get a voter registration, hold my nose, and register Democratic.

I really don’t want to register Democratic, but I look at it this way.

I need to be a member of one of the two main parties. It’s either Democratic or Republican. Nothing against the Greens or the Libertarians or the Peace and Freedomers (though maybe something against those idiots in the Reform party), but they have no chance. They never back viable candidates. It would be one thing if they could just get behind someone who had a snowball’s chance, develop some halfway decent funding, and make a plausible run for it; but they never do. The only third party that’s had any success in the past 50 years is the Reform party, and that’s only because the party doesn’t stand for a bloody thing; the party only exists to elect whatever guy manages to seize control of it for the current election. And Pat Buchanan shouldn’t be elected to anything. Everyone who voted for him should be deported to some land where they can build a giant fence around themselves so that nobody else gets in and disrupts their internal trade, English-only policies, and the inevitable inbreeding that comes from a whites-only population. There’s some open space in Antarctica, I believe.

Side rant aside, I want to be able to vote in the primary elections for someone who might actually get elected. So that limits me to the two major parties. That means I either join the Democrats, who are incompetent; or the Republicans, who are hypocrites. And since I have less and less patience for hypocrites all the time, it’s gonna have to be the Democrats.

This after a lifetime of being Republican. Hey, what can I tell you; I like the platform. I like the idea of shrinking the federal government, lowering taxes, fiscal responsibility, and the like. It’s just that the Republicans don’t do that.

When the Republicans took control of the Congress in 1995, they said, “Elect us and we’ll finally have the power to do something about all the corruption.” They forgot power corrupts. So now they’re corrupt. And they’ll stay that way until we finally vote Democrats back in and corrupt that party all over again. And then I’ll probably switch back because I’ll get tired of the Democrat hypocrites.

Most of the political types I know are single-issue voters who vote Republican because the Republicans are against abortion. “Single-issue suckers,” I call them. Republicans may speak against abortion, but their social policies actually encourage more of them by stigmatizing unwed pregnancies, removing funding from “welfare queens,” and keeping kids ignorant about reproduction because “it’s the parents’ job to tell them about sex.” (If parents were actually doing that job, they might have a point.) But I’ve already ranted about abortion, so that’s enough of that. Republicans have never made abortion illegal; they’ve never made any serious attempt to create an amendment banning it; they just pay the issue lip service and say they’re “pro-life” (even though they’re often pro-death penalty) just so they can make nice with the Christian Right. More hypocrisy. At least the Democrats are consistent—they believe in abortion and the death penalty, and in many cases euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Death to everyone! But save the whales.

As I said, I’ve been a lifelong Republican, so this oughta horrify a lot of people who knew me. Particularly the people from the Solano College Republicans, a few family members, the entire city of Dixon…. I suppose I’m just getting more liberal in my old age.

Update, 12/9/2024: And now I’ve been a Democrat for 19 years, ’cause the Republicans didn’t get any better. Instead they turned into the Reform party.

Ready in and out of season...

It was about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday when I was asked to preach Wednesday night. Fortunately, I tend to have a small batch of mini-sermons pre-prepared, so I pulled out two of them, combined them, spliced in a rant about the frequent abuse of the word “religion” (which I ranted about here) and there ya go. With how fast I usually talk, I had a nice 15-minute sermon.

Some charismatic Christians I know are quite offended at the idea of pre-prepped sermons; they believe that when you have some last-minute preaching to do, you should expect the Holy Spirit to drop something into your mind and wing it. It comes from a sloppy and out-of-context interpretation of Matthew 10.16-20:

Look, I’m sending all of you out like sheep into the middle of wolves. Become discreet, like snakes; yet simple, like doves; but be on your guard against people. For they will hand all of you over to their councils, and flog all of you in their synagogues. Before rulers, even kings, they will bring all of you because of me, and all of you will testify to them and the gentiles. Yet when they hand all of you over, don’t worry about what you’ll say, for at that moment you’ll be given what you’ll say. For it isn’t you speaking, but your Father’s Spirit speaking through all of you.

And since I wasn’t witnessing under duress, nor prophesying (I know non-charismatics say that preaching is prophesying, but they don’t know what they’re talking about), but teaching a lesson, it seems fairly stupid to get up there and wing it. Besides, if I didn't think the subject was important, I'd pick a different subject and preach on that.

I used to go to a church where the pastor would chuck his sermon and preach out of his ass. I know that’s a rather crude way of describing it, but when a man is preaching crap, that’s probably one of the more accurate ways of putting it. He’d get up in front of the congregation, start jabbering, and presume it was good stuff because he could say it so forcefully and get enough of the congregation to say Amen to it. Sometimes he’d actually prepare a sermon, then chuck it because “the Spirit told me I should preach on this instead.” This sounds nice and spiritual, but really means he wasn’t listening to God all week, and now that he’s finally listening to his Lord, he doesn’t have the patience to sit down and meditate on God’s word before he presents it to the church.

Totally unacceptable, yet no one had the nerve to call him on it. I think it was just another example of people blaming their bad behavior on God, who did after all inspire St. Paul to tell a pastor be diligent so that he could handle the scriptures without embarrassing himself, unlike the jibbering idiots in his church. [2 Timothy 2.15-16]

Back from vacation.

Went to Vacaville to visit the family for Christmas. I just got back to Santa Cruz yesterday. As you may or may not have noticed, I didn’t post anything. That’s because I was really on vacation. No blogging and ranting either. (Part of this is because there’s only dial-up at Mom's house, so there’s not much point to be on the internet anyway.)

The family is well. I got a little tired of Kerry telling me five times a day, “I’m getting married!” (because she’s getting married; like the gossips at Bethany University haven’t told you by now). I got an espresso machine, which I’m happy about. I broke my iPod’s screen, which I’m not happy about. The nephews and niece and niece-on-the-way are all getting bigger. Vacaville got flooded on Xmas Eve, so that annoyed a lot of the locals (especially those who were told by the city that they didn’t live in flood zones, so they didn’t have flood insurance, so now they want the city to pay for the property damage). And I got to spend a little time in South Lake Tahoe because of the family’s now-annual pilgrimage to the snow, where I managed to get some books read. ’Twas fun.

Now I’m back, and there’s a whole slew of things I have to get done for the new year.

None of them are resolutions, because I don’t make resolutions for the new year. I make them throughout the year. I find it easier to stick to them that way. No, the new things for the new year are the result of my not going back to school this Spring, so that means I need to acquire two very important things:

• An income.
• Shelter.

Shelter will be available Thursday. I just need to find the income to cover it.

I spent all the live-long morning poking around the internet for jobs. Job hunting is not fun, especially since I haven’t gone job hunting since 1994 and I have to get back into “sell-your-qualifications mode.” Nearly all of my previous jobs have been the result of knowing someone who had a job available; God bless networking and nepotism. But now I have to go get one cold.

The internet sucks for job hunts. There are too many companies that list jobs, and you have to go to every single one of them because not every company can afford to list jobs on every single one of them. (Plus, there are a lot of companies that figure posting job offers on their own websites is plenty of publicity.) All of them charge to post jobs; some of them charge to post résumés; and all of them offer tons of jobs in San José, but very little in Santa Cruz.

Exactly what’s the point of putting together a résumé anymore when nobody actually wants it? Everyone has an application form, and you have to fill that out—frequently with data from your résumé, but they don’t actually want your résumé. They want their form. I hate filling out forms. But such is the job hunt.

If anyone in the Santa Cruz area is hiring, let me know. My résumé is on Monster.com, among other places. I won’t do piracy, porn, or jobs that require a uniform; and if you don’t have to wear a tie to work, that’d be nice.