Today, I did a little bit more of what might resemble trolling for job applications. Did I do as much as I "should" have? Probably not, but at least it's better than nothing.

Around midday, I found my myself approaching what felt like a potentially dangerous state, at least in terms of mental thought patterns. It's that feeling where you just want to crawl back into bed, and never wake up again. A disgust and dread at the world in general.

I could almost compare it to the state of Gillian Anderson's character toward the end of The House of Mirth. "So the world hates me, does it? Then I want no part of it. Fuck it. I wish myself to be obliviated from this entire plane of existence." Lie back down, take another nap, and if I'm really lucky, maybe I'll never wake up.

Unemployment sucks.

(The jury is still out on whether unemployment sucks worse than being employed in a well paying job where you spend all day doing tasks which, though often technically interesting, ultimately seem like they are feeding a vapid marketing machine whose thinly veiled goal is the extinction of all that is good and true. Yeah, I'm a babbling nutcase.)

(Oh, and BTW, my current theory: Maybe it's good to alternate, so as not to get too much stuck in one rut or the other. :)

Such feelings of depression are tempered by the realization that I do have some good friends who care about the important things in life. Eeek, too many links in one sentence. (There are also some other friends who I don't have urls to link to right now.)

It also helps to have a paying project, at least for a little while. While that alone is not enough to cover my expenses, it's something.

During the afternoon, I went out to several businesses in the area to inquire about employment possibilities. PC City, but a block from my current residence, seemed like an ideal place. Alas, not hiring right now.

I went to several other areas business. Many replied that they are not currently hiring. An exception was Nick-N-Willy's Pizza. They said that they are looking for some people. So that might be a possibility. I picked up an application, which I shall return tomorrow.

(I still haven't given up on Wild Oats, but with each passing day, I the likelihood of reaching the relevant person before I find something else decreases.)

I also found a very lovely little book and record store down the street, which I had never discovered before. Black & Read. I spend like an hour just wandering around, mostly looking at their extensive section for used cds. When I inquired about employment, they said they are not hiring. Not surprising.

Someone else -- apparently another regular customer -- commented that this would be a really tough place to get a job. They are very selective about who they hire. Based on the people I delt with, I think this would be correct. Intelligent people who know their music and literature well. I bought two used cds from a long-haired, bearded man at the register who was wearing an old Slayer t-shirt.

Yep. I was outclassed. No question. :)

(I know, I know. I'm not supposed to be spending money right now. But this was just too good. I'm going to have to visit that store some more when I'm employed again.)

I returned home, and filled out most of the one job application I had retrieved from Nick-N-Willy's.

As evening began, I set about bringing the server known as Illian up on the Castle Lair's network. Jaeger recently wiped Illian's hard drive and gave it a fresh Woody install. The plan is that it will function as a devel server for the near future.

While I was at it, I decided to bring the Castle Lair's network one step closer to the mythical "Festnet 2.0" compliance. A few IP addresses were switched here and there. (And nobody will notice the difference.)

Another recent discovery. Apparently, the problems with Argo's SBLive sound card appear to be recurring. Sometime last night, the main analog output stopped functioning again. It appears that at random intervals, it just ceases to function. The only thing that brings it back is a reboot.

For a while, I thought that maybe it could even be a kernel driver problem. This evening, this hypothesis was disproven. I tried recompiling the sound driver as a module, in the hope that I could better diagnose and isolate the problem in the future. But this time, even a soft reboot of the kernel did not make it work.

Apparently, in order for the sound card to function properly again, it requires a full power down before reboot. Wierd. So it has to be a hardware problem. If the problem repeats itself, and gets annoying enough, I may go aheard and perform the sound card replacement surgery which had been planned before. (I still have the other sound card sitting on my dresser, which I bought earlier when I thought a replacement would be required. Maybe I was right afterall.)

This evening, while eating frozen pizza, I watched two episodes of Enterprise. Reruns I hadn't seen, which they were playing back to back. I found them both sufficiently enjoyable. (Fallen Hero, followed by Desert Crossing.) I especially liked the second one.

(For what it's worth, I certainly wouldn't want to eat the dinner they had. The essence of the male indeed. When the planet's goverment contacted T'Pal about the "dangerous terrorists" who had lured the Captain and Chief Engineer into the desert, I half expected that tribal leader to try to cut off their balls and feed them to the next "visitors". Was that intentional false foreshadowing, or do I just have a strange mind?)

Maybe that show is finally starting to grow on me.

But the theme music still sucks horribly. Nothing will ever change that. (Unless of course, somebody at Paramount decides to grow a brain and change it to some decent intro music; something more befitting the Star Trek franchise.)

Now, I'm sitting here at Argo, with xmms alternating tracks between the light-hearted pop music of Nelly Furtado, and the hard dance tracks from Lords of Acid. Surprisingly, these two disperate acts go incredibly well together. Back to back. Maybe it wasn't a coincidence that I happened to purchase both discs in the same transaction, somewhere in a city far to the northwest of here.

Alright. I'm gonna do a little playing with apache before I go to bed tonight. I can't believe the month of August is almost over. I predict that tomorrow will be job day. If I have any say in the matter, it will be. Maybe not the best or highest paying job ever, but something.

I dig track 3 from the Expand Your Head album.

Yes, this music is perfect for the children of America. I'm convinced.