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It’s been at 32 degrees since Monday, and I’ve been cocooning inside the house instead of going out. At least I’m saving money by my passive attitude. My mturk money is up to $145 now, huzzah! but the gains I’ve made online has been offset by my failure to finish a real life job. Never mind. To distract me from the heat and my own inertia, I will just window shop at Homeandbeyond.com and see what new toys this site has to offer. I am overwhelmed by their kitchen and housewares selection. Lots of lovely information arranged so prettily that you forget it’s a True Value site. And nothing like their microfiber cleaning slippers to get me off my chair and have a go at the bathroom, finally. Lookit: aren’t they precious?
All this talk about the economy is stressing me out and making me think second thoughts about going to New York. This vacation is going to be a major expense and will use up all of my savings. It’s a good thing I have a job but it might be a good idea to scare up another source of income. Living in a small community doesn’t make it easy, but I’m glad the internet offers certain opportunities without having to leave the house. With a full-time job, I can’t afford to take on something that will require me to physically report to another office. I just need something that I can do during my spare time.
I toddled off to TechieCrossing today to look for part-time tech jobs. It’s easy enough to search for job opportunities by state. I bookmarked some openings using the Add to My Hotlist option onsite. I also tried looking for jobs by field using the advanced search function. I was surprised that the drop down search function offered to search for jobs for me in non-tech related fields, such as Law and Blue Collar but apparently, clicking on these options will lead me to other Crossing sites that specialize in that particular field. Very very interesting. And convenient.
I haven’t finished my search yet. The site promises 138,222 openings at the moment, with 18,014 new jobs posted in the past 7 days alone. Wish me luck.
Living in an area where the transportation system is erratic at best, I am eager to try out the NY Subway System. I have always been fascinated by trains: they seem to be the most efficient and fastest way to get from one place to the other and they do not involve any exertion on my part. No traffic, no traffic lights, controlled stops, and well-lit rooms that allow uninterrupted reading.
It’s the little touches like these that make me want to take public transportation.
It also makes me wonder if I would make an excellent transit authority. Looking at the job openings over at TransportationCrossing makes me think that it can be a very interesting job. I tried searching for available transportation jobs in New York using their easily navigable search engine and it turned up an opening for a Director of Logistics! In addition to five more pages of opportunities, all dedicated to transportation. Meanwhile, one interesting widget on the lower right hand corner of the TransportationCrossing website was the interactive US map which shows how many jobs are available when you drag your cursor over to the proper state. At least you can anticipate how far you have to move. California, Texas, Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania have the most number of job openings, no doubt because of their size, but the market is quite promising in tiny Massachusetts as well.
Fare:
- Unlimited ride cards:
- 1-Day Fun Pass: $7.50.
- 7-Day Unlimited Ride MetroCard: $25.
- 30-Day Unlimited Ride MetroCard: $81.
Today, I discovered Muxtape and Mixwit, two sites where you can create and share your mixed tapes. Mixwit has a more nostalgic feel to its design: creators can dress up their own cassette tape whose rollers turn realistically as the music plays. Aside from the play and pause and jump forward and back buttons, there is also a tracking button for easy refrain replays. Muxtape only features a list of the songs contained in the mixed tape in aggressively 60 font and a countdown. The Muxtape homepage is also off-putting, what with its discordant radio buttons in clashing colors.
Both websites suffer from a failure to give listeners an idea of the theme of the mixed tape. It would be nice to have an idea of what I’m listening to but it’s impossible. Other than the user names and vague and extremely personal mixed tape titles, it’s almost like Russian roulette. And there is nothing more disappointing than a mixed tape that does not have a sense of narrative.
Willy Loman didn’t have tools like SellingCrossing in his day. If he had access to a similar online jobs database for salesmen like him, would he have felt less pressure and despair? Would he have been amazed at the wealth of opportunities open to him? After all, people will always consume, even in a recession. Businesses will always need salesmen to peddle their products. There is definitely no lack of postings for sales professionals on SellingCrossing. There are almost 2000 job openings posted for today alone, and not all of them are entry-level either. I’m sure Willy, who could sell anything, can find something in any of the 35 key industries being monitored and mined by this site.
What will I do with my Mturk money once I get to New York?
Why, be Wicked, of course.
Except that even for matinee tickets, Broadway is still expensive:
Front Mezzanine: $139.50
Orchestra: $139.50
That’s a lot of transcription jobs right there.
Right now, my challenge is to see if I can use Mturk as the sole source of income for my New York trip. But sometimes Mturk hits can often lead to other money-making opportunities.
Not having a science background, it seems a pity that I can’t take advantage of the opportunities offered by Sciences Crossing. A job database specializing in science jobs, Sciences Crossing offers online profiling and job matching services to people who sign up for a small fee, although the site also offers a free trial.
Right now, the website boasts of information on openings from Kelly Scientific Resources, Manpower Professional, Genentech, Inc. and Pfizer Inc. Apparently, there have been 2,265 new jobs posted for the week, with 377 openings newly posted for the day. If only one of those openings leads to a happy worker, then good for them.
WritersWeekly, a site I frequent for leads on writing markets, is sounding the alarm against an Amazon business decision that will prove detrimental to small printing houses.
In an article, Angela Hoy of WritersWeekly talks about how Amazon is now requiring print on demand (POD) publishers to use Amazon subsidiary BookSurge to print their book orders or else “the ‘buy’ button on their Amazon.com book pages will be ‘turned off.’”
The book information would remain on Amazon, and people could still order the book from resellers (companies that list new and used books in Amazon’s Marketplace section), but customers would not be able to buy the book from Amazon directly, nor qualify for the coveted “free shipping” that Amazon offers.
There have already been complaints about the quality of the products produced by BookSurge, as documented in that site.
Of course, having a major retailer dictate the terms of the sales carried on its website in such a monopolistic manner is that Amazon will always have the final say on pricing, distribution and access to services. PODs have a very small market as it is; how can they hope to negotiate for better rates against a behemoth like Amazon?
My other fear is that this will result in the homogenization of tastes. Amazon is already heavily promoting pap bestsellers and self-help books. Why should it exert additional effort in printing one or two copies of an obscure text that will only have a handful of readers?
I have six months to raise $800 for a New York trip in October. Right now, I have $117.17 earned through Mturk.
Let’s see how fast I can achieve my goal.
Art Lebedev has a story about the role Russia played in the US Declaration of Independence of 1776 and
how one of the pillars of the US national pride happened to wind up in the Kiev archives, and why the document of historical importance was entitled “United States of Жmerinca”
According to him, Timothy Matlack, Assistant to Charles Thomson and noted calligrapher, was assigned with penning the Declaration of Independence prior to it being signed by the members of the US Congress.
Apparently, according to Lebedev, Matlack was actually Tomislav Matlakowski, a native of Kiev and born in a place called Zhmerinca. The theory is that Matlack wrote the title in mixed alphabets, with the Russian character Ж being overlooked for its similarity to the capital Latin letter A.
Lebedev illustrates his story with photos and scans of the original document. It’s worth a look and a grain of salt 
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