One of those days where I felt like doing nothing, and it was mission accomplished. I was in the shop and went through a ton of job listings. All the good writing jobs are in India. There are so many near-writing jobs that it takes time to sift through the garbage. Around a quarter of the listings are for non-paid “student” positions. That hasn’t changed, it is just updated and put on the Internet. Real writers don’t work for free.But sometimes I think I’m working for free, especially these house calls. If things don’t go right, such as a broken modem, they don’t want to pay. I’ve concluded that there will be no more house calls except for $100 paid for defined work. That means I get $100 to show up and look. What happened is I took a computer into the shop on a $40 call, fixed it, and got back out there to find a problem in the phone line. Customer is not happy, I’ve made three trips and the thing still does not work.
Mitch emailed about the script we’ve been discussing, the Internet timer. Same as myself, he is not sure how to make it run on a computer. I’ve decided to look into that further so I’ll be at the book store tonight (it is late afternoon now). Again, most of the books lack directions on how to make the code work on your computer. For example, my PHP book has one sentence that says something to the effect that you need MySQL and Apache to make it run. No clear step-by-step instructions.
Don’t make light of this situation. I went through two entire college computer degrees that never once mentioned the techniques of programming for a PC, and upon questioning, none of my classmates or instructors had any idea about that, either. The assumption is you would write for mainframes. Right now, I could write you computer code to do just about anything but I could not make it run on this computer. I know about compilers and editors and paths. I don’t know how to use them to make a program run.
Also, I reread my old texts and notes about SQL, and except for minor elements, it has not changed much in decades. I’m going to polish up that a bit, since I regularly see good paying jobs for SQL people. This is more for myself than for any serious plan to work database for a living. One thing about reading the ads, they want qualifications on specific software packages that I’ve never heard of. My training has always been big picture. For example, I know BASIC like an expert, but hardly know anything about Visual Basic, a Microsoft product, derived from but not compatible with its parent.
Broward Community College is looking for adult educators, which I have 17 years experience at. It pays just $20 per hour, but it is for evenings and Saturdays. I’ll sound it out early next week. I’m leery of colleges, however, because they always have some kind of strange hiring quirks that they never mention in the ad. Like heavy travel requirements, or background credit checks. I don’t do travel, I don’t use credit. Of course, I’ve never asked a college where they would want me to travel, either. Check back later.
I have news, but not that interesting. Over to Borders, I find out the coffee shop is torn down for renovation. No coffee. Ruined my Saturday. There was a babe on staff that felt my pain and brought me a chair. Whence I read up on SQL and it has not changed much since I first saw it used in dBase. One quick brush-up and I’ll have it. What I won’t have is any experience using SQL in a production environment. I did find a fantastic book on PHP but the paperback was $40 which I didn’t have on me.
Now hold on, I did get a firm piece of information. Remember my quest for facts about how much ebook authors make. I found some stats on the average manufacturing cost of books from printing to sale. Simple novels cost $8, books with pictures cost $14 and full color illustrated books around $27. But I finally found out what an author makes. It is $1.50 per book. If you had a bestseller (10,000 copies) that means you’d make $15,000. A lousy fifteen G’s for all that work.
