Status Update

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So again I’m completely unemployed only now my unemployment checks have been reduced to a measly $67 a week which is a significant reduction from the $249 a week that I’ve been getting by on for the last 2 years.

To recap a bit for those that don’t know that $249 a week that I was getting was from when I worked at Google scanning books from Sept 2006 to Sept 2008. Also you can continue to collect unemployment when working (as I have been) if you’re only employed part time.

This $67 a week I’m getting now is based off of how much I made while working at Great America. The math is a bit complicated so I won’t try to explain exactly how it works but you basically get about half of your average paycheck from a particular quarter before taxes from unemployment.

I’m currently living with my dad (82), my younger sister (31), and my nephew/adopted brother (33) who’s the son of one of my half sisters and he also happens to be blind.

My dad has been renting this house for over 14 years. The rent is currently $1735 a month and even if we were too pool all of our incomes it would just barely cover the rent with nothing left over for other expenses like food, water, electricity, etc. My dad was only able to pay our landlord $1000 last month and we don’t have enough for this month let alone what we still owe from last month so our landlord is threatening to evict us and as I see things unless we find a pile of money somewhere I don’t know how we’re going to avoid getting evicted.

That’s as much as I feel like getting into all that right now.

Since I will most likely need to move in the next few months, if anyone happens to know of a cheap place I might be able to live (cheap apartment or someone that needs a roommate) in the bay area I’d really appreciate it.

Also do me a favor and click an Ad or two on my web site, although I don’t get much $ per click but if I get enough to earn me more than $100 I’ll actually get a check which would be nice (especially since I have yet to earn enough from the ads on my site to ever get a check).

Oh yeah and I’d like to apologize to any of my friends that I’ve been a bit distant to lately, I tend to be even more antisocial than normal when I’m depressed or stressed out. I’ve been fairly depressed since my mom passed away and me and my family worsening financial situation over the last year hasn’t help either, so again sorry.

Update to the update Nov 13 2010

My sister moved out this morning.  She’s apparently going to go live near Chicago.  She didn’t say why she’s going there or anything else really.   Granted I didn’t ask her about it either so I guess I can’t complain too much about not knowing anything.   She pretty much just took her clothes and her cat and said we could sell most of her stuff like her bed.

So now on top of trying to find a job and maybe somewhere to live on my own I have to worry about trying to sell a bunch of furniture and other crap we don’t need or wouldn’t have room for when we move.

New Photo’s

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I managed to dislodge the dust inside my camera that was ruining my photos.

See my previous blog post Need a new camera to understand what I’m talking about.

I can see that there is still some dust in there but it doesn’t seem to be seriously affecting the photo’s that I take.

So last Saturday I went to Bootie with Elaine and took some pictures for the first time in about 4 months. Elaine also had me take some pictures of her and Sumomo (her dog) on her new trike after we got home from Bootie.

Here are the Photo’s I uploaded to Flickr

Elaine and her Trike

Bootie June 12th 2010

Goodbye Sweet Brown Nectar

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Anyone that knows me fairly well knows that I love Coca-Cola and that I drink a lot of it. I have for many years averaged about a 2 litter bottle of Coke a day.

A 2 liter bottle of Coca-Cola Classic is about 800 Calories and has a little under 200mg of caffeine.

I’ve recently gotten up to about 185lbs which is the heaviest I’ve ever been and I’d really prefer to be around 150-160. I’ve also learned that caffeine is bad for my A.D.D. since it constricts blood vessels which reduces blood flow in the brain which just makes my A.D.D. even worse over time. This is kind of a problem since caffeine being a stimulant does somewhat help my A.D.D. in the short term but only for a hour or 2 after having some.

So in an attempt to both lose some weight and help my A.D.D. I’m trying to once again stop drinking Coke, or at very least severely limit how much i drink by not keeping any at home.

Since I’ve tried on several occasions before to stop drinking Coke we’ll see how long I’ll manage to last this time without it.

On a somewhat related note I’ve also decided just last week to stop drinking alcohol. I have never been any good at keeping myself from drinking to much when I drink socially and I tend to be rather obnoxious when I’m drunk. My drinking has been causing problems with several of my relationships over the years and just recently may have contributed to losing a friendship with someone that I really cared for.

So I’m going to have to learn to cope with my anxiety in social situations, because for me drinking is just a bad way to deal with that anxiety.

Need a new camera

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I noticed some pictures that I had taken with my Canon PowerShot SD750 a couple of weeks ago had some dark spots on them like you would get if there was a hair or dust on the lens.  After cleaning the lens I realized that the hair or whatever was inside the lens or possibly on the sensor.  So there isn’t really anything I can do to fix this and as a result I probably won’t be taking many pictures till I can afford to get a new camera.

I took a picture of my wall zoomed in all the way since it’s more noticeable when zoomed in to show what I’m talking about.

 

Anyways if I could I would really like to get this camera

Canon PowerShot S95
10 MP Digital Camera with 3.8x Wide Angle Optical Image Stabilized Zoom
3.0-Inch inch LCD

It’s only a little bit bigger than my current camera so I would still be able to carry it around in the front pocket of my jeans. It also has better image quality and much better low light performance which considering most of the pictures I’ve taken over the years have been in dark clubs that’s big deal to me.

While out for a walk

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This morning I went for a walk around this access road that runs around the foothills near my house.  I ended up wandering up a trail and found this strange thing

Here’s where this is at on google maps
Also the view was quite nice, to bad the camera on my phone kind of sucks.
The buildings in the distance are downtown San Jose.

The Silly Reasons I Don’t Use Firefox

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One of the main reasons I don’t use Firefox and still use Internet Explorer has to do with how Firefox deals with drop down lists in web pages.  Drop down lists are often used on web forums to navigate to different sub forums.

Here you can see in Internet Explorer that items above and below the currently selected item are displayed meaning you’re less likely to have to  to scroll up and down if what you want is a few items down on the list.

In Firefox once you have moved to the middle of the list the currently selected item is at the bottom forcing you so scroll down to select lower items.

Since I spend a fair amount of my time on the Internet reading web forums and I use these drop down lists as my primary method of navigation though web forums this small difference really annoys me.

The other small thing I don’t like about Firefox is that the bookmark menu will close if I middle click to open the page in a new tab.  In Internet Explorer the menu stays open when middle clicking allowing me to open many pages quickly.  While I can do this in Firefox by opening the bookmarks side bar, I don’t like doing that as much since the side bar is a bit cluttered and I have to manually close it once I’m done opening pages.

So those are the admittedly silly reasons I still use IE, if it weren’t for those minor dislikes I would be using Firefox as it is an overall better browser.

Update July 1st, 2009

Firefox 3.5 was just released yesterday, and while it’s fairly awesome I’m still sticking with Internet Explorer for the reasons mentioned above.  Also as strange as it may sound to most, I actually (mostly) like the layout of the interface in Internet Explorer.

Update March 8th, 2010

I’m giving Google’s Chrome browser a try as my preferred secondary browser now that AdBlock is available for it.  Also I’m trying out LastPass as a replacement for Ai Roboform since it supports IE, Firefox, and Chrome since Roboform only supports IE and Firefox also because Roboform caused some minor graphical corruption in IE’s tab bar when it was setup to work properly with Firefox.

So far my only major complaint with LastPass is that it has crashed a few times in Chrome.

Unfortunately Chrome has the same favorites menu and drop down list behavior as Firefox that I mentioned which it preventing me from using it as my main browser.

New Web Host and Blog

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I’ve moved my web site to a new web host. I had been using tripod for the last 4 years, and while they’ve served me well, I wanted more control over my site and I wanted to use WordPress to create a blog which I couldn’t do on tripod.

So now I’m using Bluehost.com as my web host. Unfortunately I had some problems with transferring my domain name so my web site was down for about a week, but that is all sorted out now.

Since I’ve only just gotten WordPress installed and running on my site I haven’t gotten around to changing the template to match my site better or add navigation back to the rest of my site. So I’m going to have to learn a bit of PHP and how to work with WordPress before I can do that.

Once I get my blog set up the way I want it I plan to post a bit more often than I have been and maybe even start writing some mini product reviews and tech oriented opinion columns.