You would think after six weeks of notices taped to the apartment doors and a final warning taped to the poles around the parking lot, some people would take a hint.  Nope.  Ain't going to happen, baby.  Some of my neighbors wouldn't even take down the notices from their doors, leaving them up there like political posters posted over the old posters left over from the last election on telephone poles.  (For the younger generation, there used to be telephone poles on every street before the utility companies started burying the cables underground, and campaign posters gave way to become websites and viral videos on to the Internet.)  An apartment door covered with paper becomes an eyesore in a hurry.  Half the doors on my section of the floor was like that.

Why do some people leave their cars parked in their old unassigned parking spots without the new permits to be towed away?

Maybe they were on vacation.  A guy at a different apartment complex returned home from India after a six week-vacation to find that his car was towed away for not being moved from its designated parking spot every 72 hours, impounded for 30 days, and crushed as scrape metal to pay the towing fees.  Since he didn't notified the leasing office that he was going on vacation and they weren't able to contact him, his vehicle was presumed to be abandoned and towed away.  Tsk, tsk, you're so out of luck, they told him.  Police told him the same thing.  He told the San Jose Mercury News and everyone in Silicon Valley knew he was out of luck.  This happens all the time in San Francisco without making the papers.

Or maybe they weren't on the lease.  All you need is one legimate person to sign the lease, who turns around to sublease the apartment out to friends or strangers who aren't legal and/or credit worthy to be on the lease.  Needless to say, these unofficial tenants aren't going into the leasing office with their vehicle registration to pick up the new permit.  Changing the parking permits and reassigning parking spots is a good way to flush out these apartments, as well as legitimate tenants who own three or four cars.  Street parking is non-existent around here with students trying to avoid paid parking at San Jose City College, extra cars from the other apartment complexes, permits required for street parking on the residential street, and the nearest public parking lot is a mile away.  If you ever tried driving around a crowded neighborhood to look for a parking spot when visiting a friend, it's a more frustrating experience for someone who lives there.

I once shared an apartment with three Filipino guys when rent prices were crazy in Silicon Valley before the dot com bust blew the rental market to Kingdom Come.  We were all on the lease.  They shared the large room and I was in the smaller room.  The brother who recently arrived from the Phillipines suggested that the big bedroom had enough space for another 20 Filipino guys.  Uh, no.  One, that wouldn't fly with the leasing office. Two, having once slept overnight with 20 guys—some of whom had dinner at Taco Bell—in a small hotel room for a campus ministry retreat in Berkeley, I wasn't going to relive that experience. Three, they never did pony up that Filipino wife that they promised me (probably because I didn't eat the balut).  After so many misadventures with roommates over the years, I'm happy to be living by myself.

Or maybe they were stupid.  A roommate and I had shared an apartment at a complex that had strict parking rules.  He had the only car but we had two assigned parking spots.  One day for lunch he parked his car in the uncovered spot because it was closer to the apartment.  The permit sticker on his car was for the covered spot.  When he got done with lunch, he found out that his car was towed away for being in the wrong spot and it cost him $350 to get his car back.  We also found out that the complex got $150 for every car that was towed away, which would explain why a tow truck came through the complex at 9AM, 12PM and 3PM every day of the week.  On average, two cars a day got towed.

My apartment complex has some 300 odd apartments and 600 odd parking spots.  After the new parking regime went into effect, about 200 parking spots opened up.  The former "visitor" parking spots were mostly empty at night during the week.  Cars without the new permits started showing up over the weekend.  I haven't seen any tow trucks cruising through the complex yet.  That might change once everyone gets used to the new parking regime and the parking spots start filling up again.  I'm not taking any risks.  I had my friend parked at the post office and picked him up to hang out over at my place.  Neither of us can afford to have his car towed.

Although I gave up a parking spot that I had for nearly five years, I liked the new one.  It's further back than the other one, on the end and out of the traffic flow.  Also out of the crossfire of dueling pine trees when they dump pollen during spring.  It's further away from the dumpsters and mailbox.  Multitasking multiple errands requires more walking.  Not that I mind walking.  I saw one person driving their car with one hand out the window to hold the trash bags to drive over to the dumpster.  Now that's plain stupid.

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The initial impression that I gathered from my Twitter feed of writers and webcomic artists was using the iPad for presenting content.  Most writers saw the iPad and the iBookstore as an ebook competitor and what it means for publishing as a whole.  Most webcomic artists saw the iPad as a platform to present their archives or put together 24-page comics at near full-size and in color.  I'm looking at the iPad as a portable writing device and a programming platform.

What I need the most was a mobile replacement for my aging Mac mini (PPC) that has grown long in the tooth since the hard drive was killed last summer by killer dust bunnies after nearly five years of continuous use.  I need Pages (wordprocessing) from iWork for writing.  Check.  I need a virtual and physical keyboard support.  Check.  The price had to be less than a replacement Mac mini (Intel).  Check.

Ding-ding-ding! We got a winner!

As a writer, I can load up the iPad with my files and go anywhere to work with my manuscripts. Maybe the iPad will wean me away from yellow notepads and pens to finally embrace the paperless office.  Or someone will introduced a yellow notepad app with superb handwriting recognition.  Or, if the iPad ends up like my iPod Touch, it'll make a great paperweight Kindle reader.

I'm also looking for a new programming platform.  If I had the time, money and motivation when the iPhone first came out, I might've gotten in early on the app store craze and become an instant millionaire.  I haven't been enchanted by either the iPhone or Touch to jump on the bandwagon since then.  The one thing that I learned about being successful at anything is finding a niche that no one else wants and run with it.  I see opportunities to make to create applications that take advantage of the new iPad features.

I recently started reviewing the C programming language and plan to learn Objective-C programming language and the iPhone/iPad SDK.  My first applications will be similar to the Joomla! modules that I have done to pull pictures from various Twitter-based picture sharing websites.  If you look at Apple app store, you will find plenty of applications to upload pictures to these websites.  None, however, will pull pictures from those websites, present them in a slide show, and enable a user to set a picture as the wallpaper.

A more ambitious application is a kid-friendly turtle graphics with the LOGO programming language.  Why resurrect a near dead programming language on the iPad?

• There's nothing like that available in the Apple app store.
• The perfect opportunity to create a virtual version of Big Trak programmable tank that I loved as a kid, which, unbeknown to me at the time, was a physical version of the LOGO turtle.  (When Big Trak is reintroduced this year, I'm planning to get one and may casually steal the keypad interface for my own application.)
• The Berkeley LOGO (UCBLOGO) is a freeware interpreter with C source code that I can use in my own application without having to reinvent the wheel.
• The iPad is the perfect platform for an application of this nature.

When I get this application done, there are several more ideas I would like to pursue.  Once upon a time, I wanted to be a game programmer.  The iPad might be my ticket — especially if I become an instant millionaire.

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My unemployment check arrived a few days late with an automatic 13-week extension of benefits.  I'll be celebrating my one year anniversary of being laid off from my desktop support job in three weeks.  I'm starting to go stir crazy from being at home.  I told a recruiter to submit my resume for a position that pays $5 per hour less than what I was making at my last job.  While I'm not thrilled to be making only an extra $500 per month above my current budget if I got that job, recruiters look at you funny if you been out of work for more than a year.  Unlike the last time I took a year off from work, I don't have my mother's death from breast cancer and finishing school as an understandable reason.

I recently spoke to a recruiter who thought I sent him an outdated resume because my last job listed was in February 2009.  I told him that's correct and he wanted to know what was wrong with me.  That was a very awkward conversation.  Although I had talked to three or four recruiters a week and had three or four interviews per month, the recruiter didn't understand why I haven't gotten a job yet.  I then had to explain that the economy is in the toilet, Silicon Valley has a 12% unemployment rate, and for every job I interviewed for that were at least five better qualified candidates being considered.  (A survey by JuJu reported that San Jose is second easiest place to get a job with 2.5 people per advertised job, which suggest to me that someone was munching on magic mushrooms while crunching the numbers.)  When recruiters start to forget why the economy is in the toilet like clueless Wall Street bankers, that's something to worry about.

When the recruiter asked what I did with my free time, I told him that I was working on my novel.  From the sound of his voice, I think he drew a negative conclusion that I was a basket case and quickly ended the call.  With eight short stories, one essay and one poem accepted for publication, I'm not going to hide the fact that I'm a writer.  That's my real job even though rejection slips and contribution copies doesn't pay the bills.  My other job is supposed to pay the bills.  Unlike a lot of other unemployed workers, I'm not writing unemployment lit.  If I said "ceramics" instead of "writing," that might've been a safer answer.  Everyone understands ceramics.  Some people regard writing as a form of mental masturbation.

Surprisingly, no recruiter has mentioned technical writing as a job.  I'll never be a technical writer since that will suck the life out of being a fiction writer when I'm not at work.  When I spent six years as a video game tester, I stopped playing video games at home.  When I worked at The Old Spaghetti Factory for three years and had spaghetti for dinner every night, I didn't eat spaghetti for the next seven years.  Which is why I like desktop or help desk support jobs since it doesn't infringe on my personal life.  Some recruiters don't understand why I won't work more than 40 hours a week to make bucket loads of money.

My novel is one reason why I want to get back into a job.  I wrote two-third of a 700-page rough draft behind the steering wheel of my car during my one-hour lunch breaks.  When you have a regular spot at the same time everyday for writing, you can get a lot of stuff done.  I'm now revising four chapters per week for the second draft.  Having the discipline that comes from being behind the steering wheel would be a great help.  My wide open schedule from being unemployed doesn't make that discipline any easier.  As much as I love to write, revising can be a serious grind sometimes.  The one thing I'm not trying to do is finish, shop and sell my novel before my unemployment benefits run out for good.  The odds are long and I don't like the idea of being a starving artist.

I started studying for the Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP) to improve my job prospects.  I also picked up "C: All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies" by Dan Gookin to refresh my programming skills.  I took C++ for object-oriented programming in college but I never mastered the language.  PHP is the only language I continued to use after college for my website.   After I familiarize myself with C, I plan to study Objective-C (a programming language for the Mac that derived from C and influenced by Smalltalk) and iPhone development.  Combining an ACSP with Mac programming should open up many more job opportunities, especially if I end up at Apple.

Now I don't plan on developing iPhone applications (not yet because Apple requires a $99 per year fee for their developer program), which is a popular cottage industry for unemployed Silicon Valley workers.  I didn't have the resources to get in early on the iPhone apps craze a few years ago.  With Apple rumored to be announcing a new tablet computer and releasing iPhone 4.0 SDK next week, I'm waiting to see what the new features are to determine if I want to develop software for that platform.

What I'm looking for is niche potential to develop something that no one else has done before and/or very unique (e.g., Hawk Sketchbook #1 by the artist of AppleGeeks that just came out).  My Joomla! modules were developed because no one else had a module to pull pictures from a Twitter-based picture sharing website.  If you search for TwitPic, TwitGoo or TweetPhoto on the Joomla! Extensions Directory, the only photo sharing extensions you will find are mine.  I'm sensing an opportunity to expand my programming portfolio.

When you're unemployed, sometimes the best opportunities are the ones you make.

Updated 2010/01/22 @ 11:30AM - Silicon Valley now has an unemployment rate of 11.5 percent for December 2009.  The JuJu survery of 2.5 people per advertised job for San Jose is a mushroom-inspired fantasy.

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Tom Campbell is reportedly planning to switch from running for California governor to running for U.S. senator this year.  That changes a predictable state election year into something more dynamic by making an interesting governor's race boring and a boring senate race interesting.  This is both disappointing and exciting.

Disappointing because Campbell was the only candidate who talked about reforming the budget process as the centerpiece of his campaign.  Neither Meg Whitman nor Steve Poizner on the Republican side, or the undeclared Jerry Brown on the Democrat side, will talk about reforming the budget process.  They all want to talk about what they're going to do rather than talk about how they're going to do it.  Unless the budget process is reformed, nothing will get done in Sacramento.  Campbell is willing to acknowledge the pink elephant in the room that everyone else wants to avoid since they're afraid of being trampled to death by the special interests even though it's killing the state.  Unlike his opponents, Campbell doesn't have the personal wealth to buy his way into the election.  Now I don't want to vote for anyone in the governor's race since it'll be a choice of the lessor evil.

Exciting because Campbell will be running against two relatively unknown Republican candidates, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and and state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore of Irvine, and, if he wins the Republican nomination in June despite the tea baggers, he will be a serious threat to incumbent Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer.  Campbell is no right-wing nut job like the other Republican candidates and has moderate positions similar to Boxer that makes it harder for her to dismiss him as such.  I won't know until Election Day for which candidate I'll vote for since I'm waiting to see who represents the issues better.

On a related note, a job recruiter contacted me for an I.T. support position in a local office for a candidate running for governor.  While making $90,000 USD for nine months work would be great, I quickly determined that the job would require sacrificing my life at the political alter for a candidate I wasn't going to vote for and couldn't see myself remaining apolitical even for that much money.

I'm not cynical enough as a writer to think I could use that experience to write a bestselling political book.  With two novels and two short story collections on deck for this year, I simply don't have the time to chase after another writing project.  I require a full time job that pays the bills without interfering with my writing life.  If that means passing up a job with bucket loads of money, so be it.  If anything that the Great Recession has taught me in the last year, it's the ability to live on substantially less.

I did pick up "Mac OS X Support Essentials v10.6: A Guide to Supporting and Troubleshooting Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard" by Kevin M. White to start studying for the Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP) certification.  For the last few months, every recruiter has been calling me about technical support jobs requiring Mac skills and most were for working at Apple.  (One recruiter who called about a "well know company in Cupertino" flat out refused to tell me the company name but hung up in a hurry when I told him that Apple doesn't consider me to be "genius-level" for their direct hire positions.)  Although I'm a Mac user at home for the last five years, my certifications and work experience is with PCs.  Earning an Apple certification should make it easier for me to feel confident about getting a new job that requires Mac skills.

Updated 2010/01/13 @ 12:45PM - The switch is now official and the San Jose Mercury News editorial sums it up nicely.  Another recruiter at a different recruiting compnay called me about that political I.T. support job in Curpertino.  Does anyone in the Tom Campbell campaign want to offer me a similar PAID position?

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When I went out yesterday to run errands, I noticed immediately that there was something wrong with my car.  The radio antenna was gone, leaving behind the naked screw mount and rubber gasket.   Nothing else was missing.  The windows were intact.  The factory radio with the country music cassette tape stuck inside was still there.  All the empty plastic water bottles that would draw a small fortune for a homeless recyclable collector still on the floor behind the front seats.  Only the radio antenna was gone.

Without the antenna, my radio reception disappeared when ever I drove under a metal roof or concrete overpass, and become scratchy when driving under a power line.  Very annoying.  Unlike my Dad's truck radio that gets two stations (country and talk), my car radio only gets one station (talk a la KGO Radio).  Silicon Valley haven't had a decent country radio station since the venerable KEEN went off the air in 1992 because the land underneath that radio antenna was worth more than the radio station.  Picking up a new radio antenna was added to my list of errands.

I went to Fry's Electronics and Best Buy but they didn't have any simple screw-on radio antenna, which was surprising considering how much custom audio equipment they sell for cars.  When I worked at the Old Spaghetti Factory in downtown San Jose during the mid-1990's, the assistant kitchen manager showed off his two 18-inch speakers, the power amp and a half-dozen car batteries that filled up the trunk of his 1975 muscle car.  That combination alone cost more than what the car was worth.  He cranked up at the volume of a Mexican mariachi band.  At the time I lived a mile away from the restaurant and I could still hear the music playing when I got home at 1:00AM.

I ended up getting a plain silver antenna at Kragen Auto Parts for $16.  My original antenna was similar to that but in black.  I wasn't happy with the color or the price.  Antennas weren't a designer item like everything else for cars these days.  I was more concern about the antenna mount being exposed to the elements that would lead to a corrosion problem with the trunk lid if I didn't get a replacement antenna.  I got enough problems with the car without having that.

After attaching the new antenna, I took a close look at the parking stall next to my car.  No car has parked there for the last three years.  I found cigarette butts on the left and right sides of the stall.  For the past few months, I been finding empty beer bottles and take out trash around my car.  On a few weekend afternoons, I found a car load of teenage gang bangers hanging out and probably waiting for a friend who lived in Building M.  I filled out an incident report at the apartment complex office, and was reassured by the managers that security would keep an out for that empty parking stall at night.

Gang bangers been trying to get into the complex for a while now since nearby apartment complexes been overrun by rival gang bangers.  I often see them driving by in their 1970's era cars—cool gang bangers drive souped up Honda Civics—in front of the complex, flashing their gang signs to people who don't care about them.  The complex management has maintained high standards for people moving in, cleans up the gang graffiti the day after it appears, and run out trouble tenants when they become a nuisance.  There's an informal neighborhood watch since everyone watches what's going on from their balconies and from inside the buildings.

A few hours later, while making a cell phone call from my balcony, I noticed a car load of teenage gang bangers pulling into the parking stall next to my car.  One of them even got out to buy ice cream from a passing vendor.  I couldn't believe my luck.  After getting the license plate number and description of the car, I went down to the office.  One of the managers called the security company and the other manager ran off the gang bangers with a stern lecture.

Did these gang bangers steal my car antenna?  Maybe, maybe not.  However, since they had all four doors opened wide with cigarettes in hand, they probably did leave behind the butts in the stall the last time they were here.

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