With my current job I barely get all my bills paid. I need at least a part time position to supplement my income. Referrals from coworkers never pan out. I’ve gone into all the businesses that are located around where I live. I even applied at Target, had all the skills they were looking for, yet they told me that they were looking for somebody different. The only thing I can figure out why Target didn’t offer me a position was because I am 42 years old. It is almost as if they would rather hire somebody who won’t last like somebody just out of high school.

Craigslist is free and companies post jobs over there all the time but the problem I find with Craigslist is there are a lot of postings of junk, scams, and biz op’s. You end up having to weed through 10 junk ads just to get to one that is real. Most of these jobs give no phone number just either a fax number or email address to reply to. If your ;local McDonald’s put a wanted ad in the classifieds locally or hung up a sign then when applying your app will be 1 amongst maybe a thousand others.

This seems to be the concensus with all companies who post a wanted ad on sites like Careerbuilder, Monster, and Yahoo Hotjobs. It takes months before you ever hear back from any of these companies and I want a job now not 3 months down the road. I’ve tried just call companies in the Yellow Pages but it’s September here in Florida and a lot of these companies tell me they will have nothing until the season starts sometime in October.

Is there something wrong with me? Why can’t I seem to get another job? Do I need to go back through some sort of schooling? I have prior Student Loans so without having to apply for more loans how would I even pay for more schooling? My wife just started one of those small colleges that is all over the internet for Medical Assistant training. The total cost of the entire 2 year program is almost $20,000 not to mention the loss of income because while she is going to school she can’t afford the time to work a full time job.

My father paid for my brothers to go through school but I was one of the lucky ones who was told to raise the money myself and if and when I graduate my father would think about reimbursing me. When he was working his income was too great for me to qualify for any financial aid. At least 20 years ago schooling was a lot more affordable. I purposely did not claim my kids as deductions when I filed my yearly taxes thinking this would help them qualify for financial aid. It turns out that these days whether or not you declare your kids on taxes if they are under 24 years of age they are automatically look upon as your liability.

What about the idea of learning new skills on my own? I can find a lot of information online if I could just find some place where I could take the exams and learn all the material on my own I should be able to save a small fortune. I know a lot about computers but yet I don’t have any of the certifications. I know everything the certificates tell employers you know. Is there a place where I can just take the exams rather than have to go to school to learn things I already know. I’ve taken the online tests for these cert’s and passed them all with flying colors. Where do I go from here?

This is what Web hosting is today. They promise enormous amounts of web space, unlimited bandwidth and a whole bunch of other things that nobody will ever use. How many of us have a site that needs over 1 gig of space or how about 10+ gigs of bandwidth each month. Then they offer us the ability to host all of our sites under one account, unlimited MYSQL databases, unlimited email accounts, scripts, blogs, and a host of other things that most people will never use unless maybe we are all the size of a walmart or something. They all promise us everything under the sun these days but when it comes time for us to get these things they disappear very quickly and we have to submit a ticket that somebody in India might answer

Why are we paying for more than we’ll ever use. We want hosting in the US with good tech support, live chat, and somebody locally that will answer our tickets that we submit. Have you ever noticed how you will pay to get a Joomla site setup for you or how about for Wordpress. Why are we consistently paying for so much when we only need so little. Does anybody ever have requirements like these? I don’t even think WalMart needs this kind of bandwidth or ebspace. Last Xmas I maybe had a requirement of 25 gigs of bandwidth and all the other months were way less than 1 gig. The ideal hosting solution would be one where you only pay for what you need at a time. I always make sure they are local companies, in the USA, with a phone number, live chat support and tech support that isn’t in some country like India.

Why should we be paying for things that none will ever use. A good host only needs to have good training videos Why do these hosting companies offer so much, they realize that 99% of their customers will never need this much. I recently saw one hosting company offering 750 gigs of space and unlimited bandwidth. All of my sites combined don’t get anywhere near 750 gigs or exceed using 1 gig of bandwidth per month. If I needed this kind of space I garnet that the hosting company would tell me to go elsewhere. Yhe over promising of space is just a marketing technique. Hell I have recolor hosting with my providor that I will never need, all I need are just add on domains. My son has a video site and he doesn’t need more than just 60 gigs of space. Most hosting companies in the US do not allow video or streaming audio. From now on I will be hosting with companies like 1hostguy where I will only pay for what I need. They offer Cpanel, Fantastico, and Wordpress and Jooml;a what more could I ask for?

My wife, whenever she needs to keep something safe, always says she is putting it into a safe place so that it will be there when she needs it again. Unfortunately she can never remember where the safe place is when she needs whatever she put into that safe place. She one time pounded a nail into the frame around the door so she could hang her car keys there. For a year she forgot about that nail and she had to get a duplicate of her car keys. They were hanging on that nail for an entire year undisturbed.

We are always finding tidbits of information when we scour newspapers and books. Information that we need to save. Where do we put this information so that we’ll always be able to find it when we needs it? I have tried creating special folders in my Windows Explorer and then copying and pasting this information into documents and saving them in the folder I created but I don’t use MS Word so I cannot just double click on a document and it opens. Instead I need to open my Openoffice and then choose file, open, and point to the exact file I want to open. This just takes too much of my time.

I could print out all the documents I need and then assemble all these documents in a file folder which I could store in a special drawer of my desk. Weren’t we told that computers were supposed to eliminate all this need for paper? Seems like we have a lot more of it these days.

Don’t you hate in when you realize that the solution has been right in front of you the entire time? I used to store a lot of information in my CRM software like Act or Goldmine but there is a much easier way that also will cost a lot less. We all have Email software like either Outlook or Outlook Express, correct? I am sure that other Email applications will allow us to do the same thing. In your email application choose create a new email. In the subject line you can paste the info that you want to keep track of. If there isn’t enough room in the subject then just put the majority of the information in the email body. Then choose File, Then Save As, and save this email as a draft.

You can even save photos this way by just putting the photo in the body of an email and then saving it as a draft which will then allow you to access everything by just going to your Drafts folder. I put so much in this folder, phone messages, pictures, notes, etc… Once every month or so I go back to this folder and delete anything I no longer need saves.

This simple Drafts folder is so simplistic yet it helps me to store and retrieve so much.

In the early days you had to know how to do board level repair like changing resistors and capacitors in order to repair a computer. These days with plug and play everything has changed drastically. You used to need a degree or some formalized training in electronics in order to do repair. Can you imagine having to go to school for 2 years or more just so you would be able to repair a computer?

I have been using, repairing and programming computers since the seventies. I had to learn a lot of this stuff through specialized schooling and training. I did also learn a lot through trial and error. Nowadays even ordinary housewives can learn very easily how to upgrade and repair computers because almost everything is plug and play. Some instructions are still needed though so that you do everything correctly.

I’ve bought many computers over the years for friends and family but the one thing I have learned is never buy a computer for somebody who does not know how to use and repair them. Giving tech support for these gifts has made me realize how people like Bill Gates, and Michael Dell have made a lot of their money.

A past friend of mine used to sell how to videos on Ebay that taught complete novices how to build computers and do common upgrades. These videos were relatively inexpensive when compares to what somebody might pay a computer repair shop to fix their computer. I have spent a great deal of time looking over all the do it yourself computer repair courses that are out there on the Web and I have put a link to the best one on my home page.

Someday I hope to also find a similar course for car repair and TV’s and VCR’s. A good site that I found that gives some basic knowledge is the site titled “howstuffworks.” or even the site “about”. Another site that I am a subscriber of is “newbie club” . All of their instruction is text based but they do provide some great information.

Now a word of caution before anybody buys any do it yourself guides is to allow others to repair things like printers and monitors. With computers you’ll learn how to replace memory, add new drives or upgrade video cards but with items like memory you will need to know the difference between parity and nonparity memory. Now if you don’t want to learn the do it yourself thing you can always just stick with upgrades that connect via the USB port. I don’t think this will ever work for memory but who knows.

Here’s a couple of freebies that won’t cost you any money at all. Get a copy of “Spybot search and destroy” and “Ad-Aware SE”. For virus control I’ve always had great luck with AVG Free Edition. Antivirus should be run almost daily, the best time would be at like 3am. For the fist two you should use each one weekly. With Windows activate the free firewall. With everything you do always make a backup of the way things were.. I know some people who have had great luck with an app like Norton Ghost.

When you start doing repair and upgrades keep a journal of what exactly is done each time to your system. This will save a lot of your time in the future. Never use white out on your computer monitor which will save you from becoming the butt end of a lot of jokes.

All the internet marketers are telling us to build our sites in Wordpress but have you ever tried to configure a Wordpress site? At least with Google’s Blogger there are some great training screenshots and videos of how to do everything step by step. Every marketer that I get email from is always offering some Wordpress thingamajig. Even on the Wordpress site you can find some great plugins and themes but the one thing that is lacking the most is some sort of instructions of how to use these plugins or themes.

I have used Fantastico which comes with my hosting to install and configure Wordpress on all of my sites. The Wordpress manual is like reading one of those manuals that Microsoft gives you with their products. Great if you are some boring intellectual but not for the every day common person. These marketers are also all talking about web video being a great new trend but then why don’t more of them offer some step by step Wordpress videos?

I have used the Web to do extensive research on how to videos and the best ones I have found are from companies who you never would have thought would have provided this stuff. Microsoft has some great Free video trainings for all of their Visual products like VB, VC, and Visual Studio.

I just visited the Wordpress site, very little help, no instructions for installing optional pluggins or themes, no video how to’s used Drupal and Joomla and they are so much more than just a blog plus they had a lot of great help both in documentation plus a forum where you can talk to other users.

The advantage for people who install Wordpress is the fact that every time you make a post Wordpress automatically pings a bunch of sites. Other blogs all have an add on module that will do this pinging but for some reason every marketer says that Wordpress does it better. Plus Wordpress has fields for tags, keywords and trackback’s that are all with the basic features.

Wordpress or somebody who knows Wordpress needs to come out with a video that teaches you everything in one day. The could then call it Wordpress in one day video instructions. The best video tutorials I have seen on Wordpress do not come from these Internet Marketers. I should say not from the over hyped marketers. If somebody is selling something regardless of whether or not they make a living online they are still a marketer of some sort.

Most of the information I have obtained from these marketers who make their living online are always missing something. I think they do this on purpose though. Some web hosting companies offer some basic video tutorials which you get free as a hosting customer. If you really want to find some good videos that will give you everything you want to know in a day of less then I suggest you do a search for “Wordpress in a day”. Or “Wordpress in one day”.

Wordpress can create a nice blog site for you but you just have to learn it first. Look at the theme I now have on my site. This was a free Wordpress theme that I got directly from the Wordpress site. Installing it took a little bit of trial and error though since I could not find any instructions on how to do so.