I currently work at a small little (well, not small small, but just not a chain store of any kind) retail store. No, not saying what store and where (I’m not stupid), but it sells home decor stuff and bedding, but after 2008, along with actual merchandise, the owner acquired shit from like those liquidation people (stores have a bunch of shit people don’t buy for a reason, yet there are companies that buy off stuff from them and re-sell to dumbasses. These “seconds” aren’t always bad (such as the extra random fabric he got, or some decent mirrors, etc), but when it just random stuff thrown into boxes, you’re talking broken stuff, half-emptied bottles, or just completely leaked chemicals that got on everything, so nothing is even sell-able. The store has gone down the toilet. Now of course, it’s going out of business, since people with money decided to not buy stuff, causing people trying to work for a living, to either get laid off or have their hours cut (thanks, BTW).

Of course, we get these people who say, “oh, I’m so sorry you’re going out of business,” or even, “I like coming in here to look around,” which makes me want to say, “yeah, well, looking around doesn’t pay the bills.” It’s bad enough that I have been working in retail (and I know I’m not the only one who has to put up with the stupidity of customers, found a great little site nicely called Retail-Sucks.com). But what sucks, is that we’re going out of business, and it was decided months after he opened a similar, yet much smaller, and more beachier, store, only about a 15min drive from the “main” store. They did well in the summer, but, in the off-season, saw a few days where they did even make any money (had some sales, but more returns). They’re staying open. Now, it’s spring-time, and we’ve been going out of business for about 4 months now, and they have only just started to pick up decent numbers, yet he’s not hiring any extra help. I feel sorry for them, working 50-60 hours in a week, because there are only 2 full-timers there, and 2 part-timers. While at our store, there’s 4 of us full-timers, and 2 part-timers (one of which has really low hours, and the other who has to go pee a lot, seriously). We have a manager who doesn’t always show up on time, and another who talks on the phone A LOT (mostly on her own cell phone). The other one sometimes uses the store phone, and has to take a cig break at least every hour. Not saying I’ve always came into work on time (5-15 min late, not a morning person), but I take no breaks, and lately, with business seeing some busy days, I sometimes don’t even get a lunch break, and if I do, it’s 10-15 min, just enough to eat a sandwich.

But back to what is sucking, and that is trying to find a job. I’m trying to look for higher paying jobs, or at least those similar to what I make now (~20,000 a year), but come up empty. The problem, there are TOO MANY damn restaurants now in the area, not that many places to shop, so staying away from restaurant jobs (which I’m reluctant to go back to) and finding a possible retail store where I may do some of the same stuff I do now, is hard. So, as for higher paying jobs, I’ve been looking into government jobs, but experience is a factor (I have an Associates in Internet Technologies, so I was looking at some tech jobs, but typically, that doesn’t seem to be enough).

I thought of maybe adding an ad to this blog, but if anyone actually views this and clicked on it, it wouldn’t be enough (though still, I’ve considered LinkShare, since they do the affiliate links with iTunes). I hate ads, but I may need to start monetizing this blog (the main site has some affiliate links, as does this blog already, from Zazzle, but I am having a hard time thinking of something truly original for a design to go on shirts and mugs that people may actually want to buy). If I can finish writing my story ideas, I thought of seeing if I have a writing future, but, as evidence of this blog, I don’t think I’m much of a writer.

Come to think of it, I don’t know what it is I’m really good at, except for watching a bunch of different TV shows, but I feel there are enough TV bloggers out there, and I think I’ve been real good about lessening TV talk on this blog. Although, I’ve been using this blog less and less now.

Oh well, felt the need to vent a little, plus my arm is tired and I need to finish Legend of the Seeker from my beautiful DVR that makes it possible for me to watch the amount of shows I do.

Oh, did I mention that job sites like Monster and HotJobs are useless, since I live in a tech-challenged county that are least likely to post job openings online.

Bye-bye the old ?p=123, hello easy to see, read, and understand, very much simplistic post-name.  I took a leap into updating WordPress, again, thanks to a great little plug-in (Dean’s Permalink Migration plug-in, and it seems to be working great) to prevent bad 404 errors on previous posts, I have went for a more search engine friendly permalink structure.

Info on WordPress Permalinks

I have worked on a new design of a wolf howling at the moon. Not the greatest, I’m still getting used to digital art. I’m really thinking it’ll be best for me to hand draw, scan, and work over top that or something. I don’t know. Uploaded the file anyway, and created a shirt based on it, and a small print.

Aloof Wolf Print by awesomelyaloof
Browse other Howling Posters

I’ve been tinkering with my WordPress installation every now and then, mainly with minimizing spam comments. Several are difficult to figure as spam, while most others were downright obvious. I hate moderating them, but I also hate known spam bots “commenting” with huge amounts of text in the comment field. So, until I look at an comments in the spam queue in order to delete it, at least now, there won’t be any comments for 200 characters. Thanks to Greg’s Comment Length Limiter Plugin for WordPress. I’m gonna try it out for a while, but still looking to edit the comment form itself, maybe removing the URL field if I see it as too much of a problem. (Most comments seem to be made to just promote their own site, even if there is a legitimate comment that actually relates to the post, if that makes any sense). I really don’t want to enable an Captcha plugins, that will be a last resort.

I just spent about two hours or so joining a few fanlistings (I have a long list of those I’m in process of joining, mostly all TV related, of course), while looking for some more to join later. I have this weird system set up, where I have, in my Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar, a folder for Fanlistings Joined, then a Need Join folder. Each one is separated into TV, Movie, Music, Etc, and Fanlistings Joined as the Pending folder (recently joined but not yet approved), and Need Join has the Ready to Join (which I will work on maybe next week, or if I get approved of about 4-5 more soon, I can quickly join and add the buttons to my site).

Of course, my site itself (www.awesomely-aloof.net), has the Joined listings pages separated into very simple categories (I don’t feel like separating them anymore with specifics), so they are just either TV, Movies, Music, Actors/Actresses, or Misc, although, I feel like I’m gonna have to split up the TV one, ’cause it’s getting mighty large. Then the home page has the little icons on the side, which I don’t want to take up the whole thing, but I don’t want to take off any I haven’t been approved of yet, ’cause having them right on the front makes it easier to find initially. I wish I just took the time to set up Enthusiast or something, but that’s more of a whole Collective kind of thing, and right now I only own two fanlistings (one for the band Tantric, the other for the song ‘Until the End’ by Breaking Benjamin, and I use BellaBuffs for those (BTW, feel free to join if you like, you don’t need a website, just an email)), for the most part, I just have an addiction to joining listings (I don’t know why, I just do).

Anyway, I’m keeping this post short, since it’s more of a rambling, and I am tired, ’cause a useful PHP script like Enthusiast would probably make the whole joining easier (and keep up with the codes too, I think, or maybe the CodeSort would have to be added?). I don’t know, don’t care.

So here’s to fanlistings, keeping up with people’s love of whatever is out there.

I’ve been wanting to utilize one of those Print-on-Demand stores (you know Zazzle, Cafepress, etc). I decided to just take a swing at it and made a quick Zazzle account and made two products that use an image I quickly made when just playing around with shapes and layers in Photoshop. I thought it looked semi-cool and could see it as a neat little item, such as a mug or mousepad.

Here is the link to go right to my Gallery page, or just check them out with the little sidebar item I added to this blog. http://www.zazzle.com/awesomelyaloof