Let's admit it. My job search has been, in all honesty, a joke. I am not motivated. I'm not even sure I want to be. Why would I? "Oh yes, please let me be motivated to go out and supplicate potential vampir^H^H^H^H^H^H employers, so I can be even more underpaid, overworked, and emotionally drained than before, as I piddle away more of life's moments on menial trivialities."

I've been getting burned enough. I don't want to get burned again. It's just easier to sit at the computer and engage in wishful thinking.

I'll get over it.

In the meantime, I've been doing bits and pieces of work on buildmeasite. I've been helping my dad with his computer as he tries to get his "business" going. I've been learning Java. The Core API, Servlets, JSP, Beans, Tomcat. The more I learn, the more I realize how much there is that I don't know.

Short term future events, in reverse chronological order (farthest in the future gets listed first):

Next Wednesday, one of my mom's old friends will be coming to visit from out of town. She will be staying overnight for several days, during which the two of them will undoubtedly have a romp of a time. Good for them. My mom needs to have some fun.

But for me, this has "awkward" written all over it. I'm thinking I'll probably endeavor to make myself as scarce as possible for the duration. I might even unroll my sleeping bag over here and dad's place.

For the Nth time, I wish I was earning enough income to rent my own place again. (Strangely, this hasn't motivated me to run out and fill out job applications at every fast food joint in the area, mostly because I know from experience that they don't pay well enough for even a single person to live and pay rent working full time. King Soopers paid better than many of them, and that still wouldn't have been enough to pay rent, gas, groceries, etc.)

On the brighter side, next Tuesday, I have a concert ticket (purchased last month, when I was expecting everything to be wonderful and rosy at the newspaper job) to see Queensryche and Dream Theater. Rule! I expect it to be an awesome show. How could you go wrong with both of those two bands?

On Sunday, I will be helping Jaeger and Kiesa move into their new place. It's about time those two had something go their way. I am eager to see their new habitat. (As will Jaeger himself, last I heard, since he has so far seen about as little of it in the first person as I have.) It will likely be a fun event. I might even get some exercise, which wouldn't hurt either.

Saturday.... I find myself contemplating the thought of getting involved in the Howard Dean campaign personally. In meatspace. *gasp*

When I first heard Howard Dean speak on Charlie Rose a few months ago, I was impressed with his candor, especially while so many other democrats were playing yes-man to the fuhrer^H^H^H^H^H^H president as he plunged the country into a senseless war.

I've been impressed with Dean's online campaign as well. (I suspect that the deanforamerica.com front page gets its design revamped even more often than buildmeasite.com.) His campaign staff's blog is also cool. Light years ahead of the largely static web content from previous candidates. And of course, were it not for the ease with which one can find information on the Dean site about getting involved in the campaign at any given locality, I probably wouldn't even be aware that there is a gathering this Saturday to hand out flyers in Boulder at the farmer's market, for which 6 other people have already registered. :)

That said, I have some reservations as of yet. Reading Dean's stance on many of the issues, I find that I am, at this point, largely in agreement with him on the issues that are mentioned. Especially encouraging is the position that civil liberties must be taken into account when planning any "homeland security" measures.

What I'm not so certain about are the issues that aren't given mention. What about the drug war? Is he for it or against it? The page doesn't say. Even if I disagree with his position -- whatever it is -- that wouldn't necessarily lose my vote. I would like to know what he thinks about it. (At this point in history, I think it would be unrealistic to expect a presidential candidate to run on a platform of repealing our country's failed drug policies.)

Other issues near and dear to my heart: Internet censorship. The DMCA. If Howard Dean had been president when the CIPA was passed, would he have signed it? Would he have exercised veto power? We don't know, because no comment has been given. That's the kind of thing that makes me nervous. As much as I want to support the Howard Dean campaign, I've been disillusioned so many times in the past by other "inspiring" politicians who got elected and then went and did something profoundly stupid.

(That said, I'd still be tempted to support Dean even if he couldn't promise not to sign something crazy like that. Why? Because right now, the worst president ever to grace the country since the beginning of my lifetime occupies the White House. A remedy is desperately needed. When your leg is being sawed off at the knee, you don't have time to worry about a mosquito bite on your arm.)

Dean's guest blog on Larry Lessig's site this week is simultaniously gratifying, and somewhat disappointing. The very fact that he is clued in enough to be blogging on Larry Lessig's site is a very promising sign. The slightly disappointing part is that he has been able to say so little, due apparently to an extremely busy schedule. Not that I can really blame him. I can't imagine the demands involved at the head of a hyped-to-the-sky presidential campaign.

Also, in a strange way, I find it encouraging that on the blog, he makes an honest statement when he says that he doesn't yet know enough about the DMCA to make a clear policy statement. (Hopefully, his campaign staff, many of whom appear to be quite sharp, based on their online statements, will also help advise with that.) It's an unfortunate fact that most politicians are so out of touch with Internet issues and culture that they may not even know what's going on, even if it was congress itself that passed the law. At least Howard Dean admits it when he doesn't know.

So yeah, at this point, I'm leaning toward going and checking it out. Participate in the campaign in person. Ten years ago, I would never have imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be campaigning for a Democrat. Life does strange things.

Tomorrow, I'm going to give my mom a ride to work while her car is in the shop. That means I'll need to get up in the morning. Predictably as clockwork, my schedule has gradually been slipping toward staying up later and later at night, and getting up later each morning. Tomorrow morning could bring a bit of a jolt to that.

Yesterday, I upgraded Argo's kernel, as well as doing a big apt-get upgrade. Now postgres version always brings fun migration issues. Soon, when I migrate my data over to the new schema, I'll be ditching all this large object crap for good. Yay.

And then there's the as-of-yet vaporware Bitscape's Lounge Java implementation. It'll happen one of these days.

To bed with me. Out.