PITY ME! PITY ME DAMMIT!

I haven't been able to get a job (and not for lack of trying, as I have had no less than four interviews, but there really is very little in the way of real job search engines for students). Despite my money being incredibly tight and Mom pressuring me to get some sort of job if only for the work experience.

The battery on my laptop is virtually nonexistent, thanks to, from what I have read, being seemingly designed for obsolescence.

I can't put it on standby or hibernate if just about anything is open, lest it fail to do so and force me to completely shut down, which defeats the purpose of putting it on standby or hibernate.

(If I could change standby or hibernate in any way, I would make it so there is always a way to get out of it right up until it actually finishes entering standby or hibernate, or alternately, until the "Preparing to hibernate" screen disappears. Barring that, I would make it so that Windows inserts a marker the instant it's done saving the computer's state to disk; the next time Windows boots up, you have the option of loading from that marker, so if something goes wrong and you have to turn off the computer, you can recover from the marker anyway. If it doesn't detect the marker, you know the problem came before Windows finished saving the state of the computer, and the end of any escape should come after the marker has been saved. But for reasons I describe below, I now suspect the real problem may be the fact that Windows turns off the keyboard and mouse at all.)

I have no real internet connection, not even one I can steal from inside the house, so I have to run outside a few paces to get anything done online if I don't want to run about seven blocks (a 10-15 minute walk) to the library. That includes every single night I post the strip.

Which requires the use of my nonexistent battery.

On Saturday I was told I was being kicked out of the library until Thursday because I had been in the library late on Wednesday, the result of my laptop going into a coughing fit (as I described in my Savidge v. Obama post) and me not wanting to take it away from an Internet connection.

So for the next three days I'm going to have to spend some of my precious, sparse dough to use the Internet at a cafe. And walk for a longer distance.

I have a ridiculous backlog of posts I need to get written. My usual Tuesday webcomic post will probably be late this week.

And then last night I head outside to use the Internet, in the act of trying to post the strip, just trying to verify that the strip actually got posted before I created the page (Freehostia's new file manager is a bit unacceptably slow and had a bug when I tried to post something, but the word is it should be fixed when I reboot), and as I head in the computer starts going on hibernate.

It's slow enough in doing so that I can plug it back in and hit Esc a lot and get it to stop hibernating, but my jubilation is short-lived. My touchpad and keyboard stop working.

And they don't come back when the computer mostly ends its latest coughing fit. Among other things, this causes me to lose two of the posts in my backlog (as well as my planned challenge to my "exclusion" from the library). One of them wasn't going to get posted until after my Truth Court announcement anyway, and required a lot of expansion, but the other is time-sensitive, was all but finished, and is due to be posted at the end of this week. And it presages more posts that will add to my backlog.

It's enough to cause me, an agnostic-athiest, to want to start screaming at the heavens. WHY ME! WHY SHOULD ALL THESE PROBLEMS STRIKE ME! WHY HATH THOU NOT BLESSED ME WITH WORK ETHIC SO I COULD GET A JOB! WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe I can answer part of that question, actually. One reason I haven't been working as hard as I probably should at finding a job is that I've spent so much time on Da Blog.

In some sense, Da Blog has been my job this summer, so I might as well make money off it.

So effective immediately, advertising is coming to Da Blog, courtesy Project Wonderful. (I also applied to have advertising on Sandsday and the web site in general, but the latter was rejected for "lack of content", and I want to have a uniform look across the web site, which means no ads on one part if there aren't ads on the other part. On the other hand, I also have such a breadth of stuff on the web site that I'd like to be able to split it up across several "sites", but I don't really know how to work that. I could put a horizontal ad space below the strip instead of in the sidebar as I was intending...)

PW essentially uses an auction model for ad space; you stipulate the most you're willing to pay per day, for how long, and how much you're willing to pay total. Because you're charged by the second if your ad is the high bid (and you're only charged just enough to beat the second-highest bid - so if you're the only bid you get advertising for free), you could say you're willing to pay less than you were willing to pay per day. Ads aren't served up semi-randomly like Google Adsense, which means I can screen the ads, so no porn ads or anything like that. My income isn't dependent on people clicking on the ads, which makes it easier to make money (and recognizes that just having people be able to see the ad is valuable). And if I make, say, ten dollars in Project Wonderful, that's ten dollars more than I would see with the equivalent level of activity in Google Adsense, where I wouldn't be able to see one red cent until I made $100.

There will be two ads on Da Blog, at least to start: one "premier" ad at the very top of Da Blog and also appearing on the RSS feed, and one "standard" in the sidebar. For the first week, the ad space will advertise the ability to advertise if there are no bids; if there still aren't any bids after a week I'll put up something of my own. If you're really interested in advertising for the long haul, subscribe to the new "advertising" label and stay up to date on traffic spikes and changes in the ad model. As soon as I clear the backlog of posts I'll have a short FAQ on the web site for people wishing to advertise.

I would ask you to donate to me to fund anything to help my situation (I'M REDUCED TO BEGGING DAMMIT!) - a new battery, perhaps, or books for my upcoming return to school - but I have heard a LOT of bad things about PayPal and I don't know of any competition for it.