* I lost my job on September 25, 2009.

* I applied for Unemployment Insurance on September 25, 2009.

* I received one official form to fill out, asking me questions such as “have you looked for work” and wondering if I was too sick to have worked. This form was to correspond with the week of September 27th through October 3rd, 2009, and also for the week of October 4th through 10th, 2009.

* I was instructed to mail my form in on October 11th, 2009, which was impossible, because October 11th was a Sunday. No mail is picked up or delivered on Sundays. It was followed by October 12th, 2009, which was a Monday, but also was a Federal Holiday (Columbus Day). No mail can be picked up or delivered on Federal Holidays. This means my official form was picked up Tuesday, October 13th, 2009, instead.

* I have NEVER received any of these important forms since that first one. NONE!

* I got a part time, ten hour a week job starting October 27th, 2009. Despite many attempts searching the EDD website, and countless attempts to actually speak with someone from the EDD on the phone, I have not been able to reach them. If they bothered to continue to mail me forms each week, I would be more than happy to indicate on those forms that I have obtained part time employment. I cannot do this if I never get sent any more forms.

* I had my official telephone interview on October 28th, 2009. The person I spoke with waited until after the two hour assigned time that I was supposed to be available to call me. Once I got him on the phone, I was given perhaps ten minutes to speak with him. I got questioned about how I lost my last job, and we went over this again and again. I was instructed to fax him a copy of the letter I got from the school district that informed me my job was over. This EDD man hung up the phone before I could even say one word about having finally gotten a part time job.

* Right now, as I write this blog, it has been 37 days since I applied for Unemployment Insurance. In this time, I have received exactly zero checks, for exactly zero dollars and zero cents.

We don’t have cable. Sure, it was part of the plan to get cable after we moved to California. But financial conditions conspired against us, and we’ve just never been able to afford it. Fortunately, not long after we got here, on-demand TV over the Internet was just starting to mature. Back in 2007, my sister gave us an old Medion computer she no longer needed. We were incredibly lucky that the computer’s video card included a composite video-out port so it could be connected directly to our TV. After adding a Wi-Fi card to the Medion, we were able to stream shows from sites like hulu (which was still in beta at the time). It worked well for awhile. But eventually, the video card stopped working with the TV. I gave the Medion away (to Andy Melton – I wonder if he’s still using it?) and, being an Apple enthusiast, decided to replace it with a used G4 tower. I performed some upgrades on the G4 to make it as powerful as possible. But its performance was always inconsistent. I blame it on the fact that the machine is just too old to handle streaming video over Wi-Fi. (I still have the G4 and have been trying to sell it.) From there, I moved on to using the PlayOn server software to stream online video to my XBox 360. And PlayOn isn’t a bad solution. But, like the G4, it tends to be inconsistent. Especially with hulu. (I really do like PlayOn, and I think it’s got great potential, and I’m not entirely giving up on it, yet.) Really, the best way to get online video on to a TV at this point is to have a good, fairly modern computer connected directly to the set. Late last summer, we purchased an ASUS EEE PC Netbook, as Jen was in the market for a laptop. It dawned on me a couple weeks ago that we could probably use the Netbook to do the video streaming. The challenge would lie in getting it connected. The Netbook has a standard VGA-out port, and our eight-year old Toshiba TV only has composite video and S-video inputs. Some type of signal conversion would be necessary to make it work. Some quick googling turned up a converter box on Amazon that I thought would work. I placed an order, and the converter arrived a few days later. Last night, I got the converter, the laptop and all of the cables together to get it hooked up.
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Today’s weigh-in, not
the results I expected
feels like I’ve lost weight

A couple days before Halloween/2006, I recorded this song called “Halloween Is Awesome.” I did it for fun, but also as a way to try and get some promotion for Hyper Nonsense. Since Hyper Nonsense has ended, I’ve decided to make this page the official home of “Halloween Is Awesome.” You can see a (mostly) complete list of all of the places that the song had been played on the Hyper Nonsense site. I’ll keep track of any future plays on this page.

Don’t worry, he didn’t steal it. He’s “Legit”.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you might remember me mentioning a site called CalJOBS. This is the site that the government strongly encourages people to sign up for when they first apply for Unemployment Insurance. This is the job site that, so far, has produced the least amount of jobs for me to apply for.

Thanks to “Savage”, a friend who left me a comment on this blog, I became aware of another small, teeny, tiny problem with CalJOBS.

Check this out. The government has shut down the CalJOBS website because “A glitch discovered on Cal Jobs website could be at risk for identity theft.” Apparently, “a man” was on CalJOBS, and he accidently came across this “glitch” that, oops!, allowed him to view other people’s information through the CalJOBS site. Seems the state of California shut down the site after that.

Here’s a fun quote from the article: “While there’s no evidence that anyone has had their identity stolen, consumer counselors say that it’s a good idea to look over your credit report, just in case.” Doesn’t that just make you feel all safe and secure? Unemployed people desperately seeking financial help from the US Government don’t have enough problems, it seems. No, we also have to worry about if some nefarious person decided to use the private information they “accidently” found on this site to ruin our credit ratings, or, potentially steal our identities, in addition to every other worry we all are facing.

I went to the CalJOBS website today, just to see if it was still down. It was. There is no indication about when, or if, it will return. It is just “temporarily unavailable” because “of a few isolated cases of unauthorized access to posted résumé information.”

The CalJOBS site claims that “Such access was available to a limited number of résumé postings and did not compromise confidential information contained in the system such as Social Security numbers.” So, in other words, if you happened to put your resume on CalJOBS, don’t worry, they didn’t accidently give out your social security number. Just your name, home address, telephone number, cell phone number, and a list of places you used to work at. Nothing important, really. Not anything that could cause you harm.

Right now, I am very glad that I never got around to posting a resume on CalJOBS. I might have posted one, if, you know, I found any job listings there that I was both qualified for and interested in, but that didn’t happen. I’m still very nervous, though, after hearing this news. If the state run job listing website was unwittingly giving random strangers access to people’s personal information, and everybody who signed up there also had to go online to sign up for Unemployment Insurance….. how do I know that some stranger doesn’t have all my personal information right now?

Thanks, State of California, for being incompetent, and giving me more to stress out about!

Here’s my most recent contribution to Nathan Lott’s Rental Reviews podcast. Comments welcome here.