Job #1: get a good paid job

Searching for a job has always made me so depressed because I have a sense that I'm just going to end up working for something that results in me feeling miserable. It's not so much that I hate work; I can take pleasure in the most unapealing of jobs (washing dishes, being a cashier, cleaning), but it's the feeling of working for something that I don't believe in that that gets me down so much. I've yet to get a job working for something I believe in, although I put care into every single job I've had. This must change if I am to maintain my sanity. With this in mind, I am doing a call out to the world to help me find a job that is a good fit for me. I'm committed to doing so. It's time to get my priorities straight, so with this in mind...

Job #1: to get a paid job (I've got lots of non-paid jobs already) that meets one or more of the following criteria:

• is in an IT-related field, especially in a position that challenges my technical knowlege and engages me in figuring out solutions to problems, although I'd accept jobs like data entry and technical support as well
• involves entertaining, teaching, or caring for others, especially young, elderly, and differently abled people
• is in a store, restaurant, or processing facility for healthy food (and preferably veg*n)
• involves talking with people, aside from agressive sales positions. Examples that come to mind are canvasing and table/kiosk demonstrations
• involves writing. Although I don't have any formal experience in writing-related jobs, I think I'm a decent writer. Particularly, I'd love to get paid to write letters and proposals.
• that is in the non-profit sector and particularly that is in the public interest. I'd especially like to get a job working towards the ends of Free Culture, food security, or human/environmental health.

Docin' (re)marks on format

I'm getting really tired of seeing official documents published in a .doc format. These types of documents should be published as pdf. OpenOffice exports documents to pdf, unlike Word. And if you insist on using Word, then you can use PDFCreator to print essentially anything to a PDF file as you would print to your printer.

Porno veggies, get me hot

Today I was invited to an art party out in the boonies on June 24th (if you want to go, contact me). The invitation contained a warning that I must not bring "oddly shaped vegetables" to the party. Being a G-Spoter and all, I was a bit offended by that comment, so I posted this to my flickr account:
These were found in the rather scandalous G-Spot zine that some folks made for the Anarchist Bookfair in Montreal last year. I recently recived an electronic copy, and I'd like to put it up on the net, but I have to bring this decision to the collective in our meeting this Sunday.

Which reminds me, after the meeting I'm going to be spinning fire with some friends this comming Sunday. If you'd like to come, the details are on this flier I made.

Wearing novelty thicker with each day

I've been looking for good staff spinning videos on the net for inspiration, but most of them I see are not very impressive. I've only been practicing for a year, and I've yet to see in real life anyone who's as good as me. That's not to brag, it's just that it's not as popular as poi is; I like how I have the benefit of novelty in this sense. When I think about visual artists or musicians who have been practicing their art for 10 or 20 years, it makes me imagine how mind-blowing this could get if I keep it up. One video that impressed me (but didn't quite blow me away) was this video on Google Video, so far probably the best I've seen (but I know there's more talented staffers out there). On a related note, my friend showed me some crazy hoola-hooping videos from GrooveHoops.

Hit the Play Button

I'm sitting inside on a beautiful morning coding my imaGEneration software (see "My Photos" on the right for some sample results). The goal is to get it GPL'd and eventually integrate it with Inkscape. The fact that I didn't get into Google's Summer of Code for this project has somehow driven me to work on this even more. I guess I just love working for Free. Maybe some day soon I'll get paid to play so I can work for Free.

Currently downloading onto my computer is the movie Elephant's Dreamwhich is :

the world’s first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.

This is going to be a great hit on the Free Culture scene. Which reminds me, the movie Alternative Freedoms will be comming out pretty soon. Also in production is the film Copyright Criminals .

Well, that sun is calling me. I think it's time to go practice my works of play.

Open Source Beer

So, what to show... well, my blood was boiling today, due partially to some major disappointments in my life recently, but I decided to simmer down and keep that to myself.

Today I went to a particularly bubbling GOSLING meeting. It's so nice to have a bunch of experienced Open Source activists meeting every Friday for beers a block away from my house. Even though I'm not a government employee, I'm still very welcome there.

At this meeting I met The Parliment Hillbillies, who do a podcast about political issues in Canada. One of the members spoke of his experience with request for access to information concerning the lack of security checks for the software used for collecting the online census.

Now I'm going to continue working on some projects that are nagging at me.

From LiveJournal to Blogger

Today I decided that the LiveJournal community just wasn't really for me. I'm moving from my account bubblyfool to here. I feel my blogging was just starting to get interesting towards the end, so take a peek at those last posts if you will. I appreciate that LiveJournal is very dedicated to Open Source technologies, but the reason why I joined it in the first place was for the social factor, and I'm just not getting what I want out of it. I recently joined a couple of communities on LiveJournal and browsed around a bit more, searching for some interesting content, but it mostly seems to be innane drivel. I think there's a difference between a "blog" and an "online journal" (though it can be fuzzy). Blogs are more like journalistic (as in "the media") endeavours, more objective, wheras journals are more personal and subjective. There's only a couple of LJ users I read. I find that people who are serious about presenting ideas, events, and organizations are more into blogger.com. So here I am. Not just journaling, but BLOGGING ! Next post I'll have to introduce myself....