SCAM WARNING

My wife was looking for a job on Craigslist, and replied to two different jobs, both of which had a full.name.hr@gmail.com address. Both replied with links to a website with a form to fill out.

After some digging, I found some exhaustive answers regarding the legitimacy of this site and SEVERAL others. Any site in the Career Network appears to be suspect. I did a search, and all of the companies that are mentioned in these articles are related to the same "Destiny Careers" firm.

The moral(s) of the story:

Don't send your resume out to just anybody.

If a job poster replies with a website, and you still don't know who the actual employer is, etc. - stop. Think. Research.

Be careful out there. When using job sites, be sure that you trust the site before leaping - no matter how great the job appears. Getting your life back is a lot harder than having it stolen.

Lovin Linux

How is this for convenient and lazy - Blog Entry Poster.

Right on my desktop, I have an application that took all of about 35 seconds to configure and popped up a box for me to post away to my hearts content.

While I am having my issues with my Laserjet printer, and screwed up my home installation so bad I had to re-install, I am overall very happy with my Linux experience. While I do have an extensive background with Windows desktops (stretching all the way back to when Window was a GUI for DOS), my *nix experience is limited. That said, I have found that there are now GUI tools for most tasks, and the ones that must be completed from the command line are fairly well documented. There are certainly MANY more things I need to discover and learn about the Linux experience, but thus far, I am easily able to access all of my old data, create new documents, surf the Internet and now.......post from my desktop.

Very cool!

The first snow

First snow of the season, and already folks are trying to take a snow day. A little dusting (not even that here in town) is not an excuse.

To gain a little xtra credit, check out my first blog entry.

For fun, I think *humbly* that this is some of my best work.

Vacation's all I ever wanted.......

Miss me?!!?!

Had to leave you a little something to entertain you while I am gone. I wouldn't want you to know -errr, think, that I don't like you guys. If I actually find a hot signal somewhere, I will send you guys some pictures of the fish that I am catching!

How was the scavenger hunt? When we were talking about the legalities and different dilemmas that have been brought about by the Internet that were not dreamed of when some laws were written, let alone 15 years ago, I thought of the MySpace suicide case. Can you image Betsy Ross impersonating a boy and bullying a 15 y.o. Colonial Girl? Laws available today are enforced to the best extent available, but there are some crimes that have yet to be thought of and other misuses of technology that will require more legislation to impose manners and civility on those that have none. Personally, social networking sites scare me the most. Geeks get involved with computers to be anti-social - whose stupid idea was it to get them to socialize!!??

Have fun reading the rest of the blog, and be creative with your own - poetry, music lyrics you wrote, Zoo animal jokes, whatever. I like to draw from my personal experiences (my wife is mortified every time I tell her about my latest entries!) If you have a couple minutes to spare, read "The Scoop" - one of my best (imho)(if you don't know what imho means - look it up!)

Paz

Professor PFunk

Welcome to the world of Blogging

Well, if you have gotten this far, you are ON THE WWW! You now have the ability to share your thoughts on absolutely anything with the whole world. Keep up with this - just entering new blog entries is good practice for computing in general...as you will see, not every post has to be a masterpiece. For a 5-point-bonus on your most recent test grade, send me an e-mail at: professorpfunk@gmail.com and include a link to your personal blog. Only those who follow the instructions exactly will get the extra credit. To send the link, simply select the address of your blog in the top of Internet Explorer, and copy, then paste it into the body of your e-mail. You must log in to your internet e-mail account - there is no mail client configured on the school computers, so feel free to open up multiple Internet Explorer windows to get the job done. Good Luck.

Sitting Room Only

rant...........

This morning, some guy on the train insists on standing right in front of the door - EVEN THOUGH there were OPEN SEATS! I hate that! Sit the hell down -- everytime the conductor came through, he had to move around, swinging his bag.....argh! Then, when we got to some of the more popular center city stops, he stood there blocking people trying to get out of their seats, fouling up the process of getting off for the rest of the people - just being an overall pain in the ass.

SEPTA - if there are open seats, make people SIT DOWN. Standing is a nuisance and a hazzard - there is no reason for a person to stand when seats are available.

P.S. Put more cars on the damn train so that there are ALWAYS seats available. Twice this week, my train has been standing room only - once WAY beyond capacity. Get it right - I am paying for a seat (and a pretty good premium at that), you have a responsibility to make sure there are enough seats for all the riders.

The Family Just Keeps Growing!

Remember young J? Well, he's baaaaack.

As predicted, Sis kicked him out - locked him out of the house to be more precise some time around the last week in January. It was a Wednesday night, and all of the sudden, my mother-in-law is on my back step in a panic. J had called to be picked up from a friend's house because his mother locked him out, and Gram couldn't find it. I took the address, and scooted over to pick him up. We stopped at Targét on the way home and I bought him some fresh skivvies, a couple of T-shirts and a hoodie to get him through the rest of the week. He spent the night with us, and I got him to school the next morning.

Since then, he has been staying at my mother-in-law's house full time - she drives him half way across the county to his school every day, and picks him up every afternoon. (To tell the truth, I am a bit surprised she has stuck with it.) They waited it out to see how long it would take his mother to call and see if he was coming back home. It was almost a week. She then said that if he was going to be a pain in the ass, she didn't really want him back.

So now he has been spending his time at Gram's house. He sleeps in the guest room, has a computer to play on and even gets dinner cooked for him. The problem now is, he's getting lonely. My mother-in-law is not real outgoing, so I don't imagine that they talk much. My bro-in-law works midnights, sleeps all day, then gets up at 8p, takes a shower, fixes his lunch and goes to work. Rinse and repeat.

Thursday night (Valentines day), my mother-in-law made a big lasagne for dinner - so she, and J stayed. Plus my three kids. And my wife. A nice romantic dinner for SEVEN!

J spent the night Friday - he wanted to hang around with the kids. And Saturday. And Sunday. Now he said that he would like Mrs. PFunk to pick him up from school Friday afternoons, so looks like he will be spending his weekends at our house.

Not that I mind that much - they all keep each other busy, and he is mostly helpful. My kids idolize him, so it helps keep them in check. They spent the weekend playing games together on their DS's (I jumped in a little bit too). And since he is spending so much time at our place, and my kids have chores that they do for money, I gave him a chore - Pickin up the poo. So now every week, he does doggy doody duty for a fiver. Money well spent.

We were going to get my daughter a new bed and move hers into the boy's room when Max X got bigger, but now we are accellerating those plans.

I asked my wife last night....how long before someone realizes that J staying with us on weekends doesn't make sense (we live 8 minutes from his school - tops). I give it till the end of March at the latest before he is spending week nights at our house, and I am driving him to school every day.

And who knows what the hell the summer will bring.

Why do I get the feeling that we have picked up yet another pathetic life form? - Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Phantom Menace

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all! Hope everyone enjoyed the time off - time to get back to work.

Here's how my holidays went:

Weekend before xmas - took Max to meet my aunts and cousins. No one was aware that he was even coming, let alone here, so it was a big surprise to everyone. Fortunately, no one was mad at us for keeping it a secret, and they were happy to meet him.

XMas - we had my mother-in-law, brother-in-law and his daughter come over. It was a nice relaxing day. We ate leftovers from the xmas eve dinner we had at my mother-in-law's, so there was just a table full of food to pick from, no cooking and no hassles.

My gift was the last one presented, and I was completely surprised - a lamp. But not just any lamp - a LEG LAMP! and yes, it is right in the middle of our front room window.

Took a couple of days off before returning to work on Friday. Spent most of the day tidying up some papers and going through an online training on HTML (Hypertext Markup Language - it is how web pages are written/designed). This was the first step towards my new education goals.

Over the mid holiday weekend, I ran into a little trouble. My back went out - WAAAAAAY out. I was on my hands and knees or just lying flat most of the weekend. Came in Monday (New Years Eve) more tilted than the leaning tower of pisa. Fortunately large doses of ibuprofen, ice and stretching have me almost upright today.

New Years Day was football and food. My mother-in-law cooked our family's traditional meal of pork and sourkraut, and I parked on the couch resting my back watching football all day. Unfortunately, I had no idea that the hockey game was being played, and was very sorry I missed it.

I took one more day off, and now am back to work.

This weekend - I am getting some bottles, and can hopefully bottle my first batch of wine. YAY!

Best of luck and lots of health, wealth and happiness to all in the new year. I know I can use it!

First bitching of the new year

Ok, had to post this one below the nice happy new year post that I already wrote.........I signed in to vent, but didn't want to be a miserable s.o.b., so I wrote something nice too.



IOWA - WTF. This has been bothering me for a month. They are one of the smallest states, have very few representatives and electoral votes, and don't even know how to F**king vote right! And yet they are the ones that make or break candidacies (sp?), and set the stage for who will become a nominee down the line. And New Hampster - AARGH. Iowa is 30th nationally in electoral votes (7) and population. New Hampster is 42! Washington state, Tennesee and Minnesota all have more political clout than these two states - COMBINED! By the time the primary race reaches my home state, it will be long over - leaving absolutely no reason to bother leaving the house that day. We need to fix this joke of a system. So many states are left out of the process, so much time, energy and money is wasted, it is no wonder more people vote for the next American Idol than the next American President.

Ok - had to get that off my chest.

Next target - my sister in law.

My sister in law has disassociated herself from her family, like I have from mine, but for totally different reasons. And, while I have cut away from my entire family, "sis" continues to use her brother as a substitute father and babysitter for her children for her own convenience. She won't talk to her mother or sister (although she did call her mother one day to ask if she would watch the infant she tried to hide from her, but that's another story), but she keeps her brother on a string, hanging in the middle, to use whenever she needs something.

Since Halloween, we have seen her son, "J" twice - which is twice more than all of the last year. He is growing up, and seems to being taking more of a middle road with his uncle. He used to glower at me and Mrs. PFunk as though we were evil, but he actually stopped by our house to visit on Halloween and was at my mother-in-law's house on New Years Day. This is why I am taking aim at my sister-in-law.

She has 3 kids, and 3 baby daddies. She was in committed relationships with all, but at some point, you have to stop. She gets no support ($) from J's dad, little from baby daddy #2, and lives with #3. She works constantly - to avoid having to be a parent - and alternates between alchoholism and pill popping. When we asked "J" how long he was staying at Grandmoms, he said that his mother kicked him out (he is 14 - I think).

For his entire life, J has had no stable father figure other than his Unch. He went through a period when he was 10-11 when he was a lying and stealing - just the signs of being a nasty, reclusive kid. Definite columbine candidate. His mother has spent her life trying to buy his love and respect and poisoning him against just about everyone else that is his family. Great Gramma tried her hardest to raise him and protect him while she was alive - she kept me from strangling him more than once. Now, he is a Star Wars nerd, but, seems to be a better overall kid.

J was going home at the end of New Years Day, and heading back to school, and I can't help but wonder - is this going to be the new pattern in his life? Even more so - who is going to end up with him? I just have the feeling that at some point, sis is going to kick him out, and he is not going to want to go back (he already said he wished he could just stay at Unch's). Will Unch and Gram take him in, or will I? I have really struggled with this kid - I hate his father and would beat him on site. He has been alternatively spoiled and insolent with me since he could talk, but now it seems as though his is turning a corner and might actually be a good kid. Will Sis ruin him? Will she keep kicking him out, and turn him right back into a columbine candidate? How will he treat people (women, children) as he becomes an adult based on what he sees at home?

I have struggled with J all his life - and now the struggle will be whether or not we can save him.