Lower your expectations – If you didn’t previously work as a manager, and if you were not previously a CEO of a corporation the chances of you coming in to a new position at this level are virtually non-existent.  Additionally, just because you love to play with computers at home does not necessarily mean you are computer engineer material, at least not yet.  Most importantly, if you are searching for a job without currently having a job then you cannot be picky; at this point any job is better than no job.

Be professional – From the beginning of your search, up until getting hired and beyond; be a professional.  Have a proper resume and cover letter.  Be professional on the phone.  Dress professionally and be confident in your interviews. 

Applying for the job –  Job hunting is very important, and this is another time where having lowered expectations is important.  An entry level position with potential to work your way up is better than collecting unemployment with no future potential.  Use the internet, sites like careerbuilder.com, monster.com, craigslist.org and Google to find leads.  Ask friends and family members if their employers are hiring, or use a temp agency (like Adecco) to get your foot in the door to a new company.   If you have an in-demand skill, look for a headhunter to help place you with a new career. Have a proper resume, it needs to be well written and highlight your relevant experience and success as pertaining to the position you are applying for.  This means have multiple versions of your resume.  Write a cover letter for every position you apply to.  You may apply to hundreds of positions and you may not necessarily need hundreds of different cover letters, but generally your cover letter should be geared to the position you are attempting to obtain.  When you receive a phone call for a potential interview be polite, listen, respond when appropriate – professionalism will secure that interview.

The interview – Know what you are going to say before you arrive, and arrive early and dressed professionally.  Men, get a suit.  If it comes down to choosing two candidates with similar backgrounds and similar interview experiences, the better dressed candidate will walk away with the job.  Be calm, be confident and be yourself.  Most importantly be honest.  If you are unsure about a question, ask for specification don’t fabricate a response.  If you haven’t had experience in a specific field, try to relate it to another and if you can’t do that express your interest and your desire to succeed.  Never discuss salary in an initial interview, unless you all ready have a job or another offer waiting where you can afford to not be offered this position.  When the interview concludes, always shake the interviewer’s hand and thank them for their time and consideration.  If you follow these suggestions, you are going to have great results. 

Negotiating Salary – Congratulations, you’ve done everything right up until this point and you have been offered a position.  Now they are going to tell you what their offer entails and ask if you accept it.  This is very important: If you do not have any other job, accept the job offer as is.  If you can afford to lose this offer, then this is the time where you approach them with realistic requests.  A slightly higher pay, a few extra days of vacation; things of this nature.  Do not ask them for a significantly higher pay amount, do not ask them for another position. 

Additional recommendations – Always have references ready to go, and be prepared to give them on the spot.  That means actually getting permissions to use someone as a reference.  You should have at least 2 professional references, and one personal reference (a lifelong friend, member of your church, a teacher).

Good luck, if you follow these general guidelines I assure you that you will find a job and hopefully a career.  Looking for work does not mean applying to one or two jobs, it means applying to 30, 40 or even 100 positions.  Hiring managers will weed you out.  Remember, if you apply to 30 positions you likely will only hear back on a handful of these applications.  There are many different reasons for this, but don’t be discouraged.  Keep on hunting!

Occupy Wall Street (or Wherever)

Over the past few weeks, this entire occupy movement has been a made a complete mockery of Freedom of Speech (See video below)

It is painfully clear that the vast majority of people in the Occupy movement have no real focus as to what they are there for, what they hope to achieve, or how their presence is going to change anything. People are mad, I get that. I’m mad too. I’m mad that there are people who aren’t willing to work to earn things, complaining that other people can afford stuff. Sure, some people get dealt a better hand in life; but you know what? I don’t care, they don’t affect me. Would it be nice to have a nearly unlimited pile of money or to have everything I want? Sure, but you know what. Basic economics tells us that humans have a limited number of NEEDS and an unlimited number of WANTS. Therefore, since wants are unlimited there is truly no solution. You can be rich, you can have things handed to you, and you will always want more. Where do we draw a line? Simple, you get what you earn.
“We are the 99%” — you are absolutely right, you’re the 99% of America that can vote, make purchases and effect change in better ways than standing around looking like idiots. You’re mad about rich people? Guess what, rich people pay a far higher rate of taxes than you or I pay. Most people who are “Rich” that I know of, that earn around $80,000 a year pay around 35% of that money to taxes! How much do you pay? Check your pay stub some time? Guess what else, when income tax time rolls around they PAY MORE, while the rest of us get free money. YOU ALL READY GET MONEY FROM THE RICH PEOPLE EVERY YEAR WHEN YOU DO YOUR TAX RETURN!
If you want to protest corporations for having an influence on American policies, right on brothers and sisters I am with you now. Okay, so let’s all cancel our cell phone services, turn off our internet, smash our laptops, stop playing video games, make our own clothes and grow our own food. Sound good? No? Then shut up. It is infinitely easy to complain, and whine when you do not sacrifice anything. How much can we devalue ourselves? Do you have any idea how much you are worth to a corporation? Look at advertising. They spend millions to entice you to purchase their products. And you know what, you do it! You go out and buy MacBooks, you buy Coke or Pepsi, you eat at McDonalds, you smoke, you drink. You buy the big name brands, Sony, Apple, Samsung and you shop at places like Walmart. If you stopped doing these things tomorrow, if all of us stopped. Change could happen. Will we do it? Probably not. Let’s all kindly shut the hell up now and go on living. If you want to make changes, do it. I’m all for it. Make changes with your wallets and convince your friends to give up their iPhones too, they probably won’t do it but give it a shot. Vote. Don’t vote for republicans or democrats because they could give two shits about you. Vote for the honest third party guy that stands no chance because he has no big financial backing (Ron Paul anyone?) Lastly, stop asking the government to give you stuff. If you want health care, get a job. If you want money, work for it. If you want anything at all, work for it. This country was built on working. Nothing has changed in over 200 years, aside from a few stupid people with Twitter and YouTube accounts bitching about the “Haves and the have nots”.

Thank you,
Ryan Kenward

Ps.) When the police ask you to leave because you’re all a bunch of filthy bastards living in your own filth and in danger to yourselves, they need to get the place cleaned but you can come back later. GET THE FUCK OUT!  Don’t start shit and say the police are beating you.  The NYPD are honorable men and women and don’t need your shit.

PPS.)  Take a moment to think over these questions.

Do you purchase books from your local book store, or do you go to Amazon.com?  — You probably just supported the corporation, didn’t you?
Do you purchase your electronics from local electronics stores or did you go to Best Buy/Fry’s/Newegg/Etc?  You probably just supported the corporations again… not looking good.
Did you even know there are small local cell phone providers out there that are not AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile?
Do you buy anything at Walmart/Target as opposed to a local grocery store/farm market/etc?

Look people, sure corporations do indeed affect politics, no doubt there.  If there’s an endangered amoeba in an area Walmart wants to build a Super Center, kiss your one celled ass goodbye.  On the contrary, if you’re looking for a job that will give you insurance… maybe that Walmart isn’t so bad.  Oh, did you know they give MILLIONS of dollars a year to charity?  This is true for almost any big corporation.  There are pros and cons to every choice you make.  You need to decide as consumers and Americans what is really important to you.  Do you want to support local business and perhaps be inconvenienced or pay slightly higher costs?  Do you realize that most local businesses can only employ a handful of people, whereas super corporations employ HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people.  Think about it.  Don’t just run with a crowd because your friends think its cool, your idioditic idealistic academic leaders told you that Karl Marx was actually full of great ideas.  If you want to see what communism and socialism are like, then you are more than free to move to China.  I guarantee you won’t like what you find there.  Do you really want your neighbors who work half as hard as you to get the same stuff you have?  Next time you get your pay check, go donate half of it to a homeless man.  He has less than you do, so it is only fair by the Occupy Wall Street logic which so many people blindly support.  There are some good ideas in Occupy Wall Street, but you need to put your time in and actually think about it.  As I said, there are an infinite number of choices.  We are where we are today because THE MAJORITY made choices that let corporations get to where they are at.  I personally have no problem with it, and am happy to purchase an iPhone, or drink a Coke once in a while.  There are so many bigger problems in this nation that are being over shadowed by this stupid “Movement”.  There are two wars going on that are depleting our money and young American lives.  There are people who are crying out for free healthcare, but are not willing to help themselves.  The government of the United States was not designed to give you anything but the ability to carry out your lives in the pursuit of happiness in a nation that protects your basic freedoms.  No where were you promised unemployment pay, or free health care.  THERE ARE NO FREE LUNCHES.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to weird things lately and I figured I’d share my thoughts.

All known ailments to man will be cured via nano technology: My thoughts here are, that with our current rate of advancement with technology; in just a few more decades we will have advanced computers that are so small they we will be able to scale them to the size of a white blood cell which can be pre-programmed to augment the immune system and also detect and destroy cancers as well as even reversing the affects of AIDS and HIV.

Space travel will be possible: When we realize that the object does not need to be propelled through space, yet space needs to be moved around the object.  I believe space time is something that can be manipulated, but our current technologies and scientific theories haven’t quite nailed it down yet.  Think of it like this, you have a coin on a piece of paper with the letter A written on one side and B on the other side.  You can use some sort of force to push the coin from A to B, or you could simply move the paper quickly while the object remains stationary, much like a magician removes a table cloth from underneath the table settings.

Parallel dimensions could be accessible: Energy is visible by observing different frequencies.  I have read elsewhere that each human has their own distinct frequency, if this is true then consider the universe to be a giant radio and each person being a station.  It would theoretically be possible to alter the frequencies to change ones current perception of their own reality.  If every choice you have ever made exists in some multiple world, which could very well be running simultaneously as the one we currently perceive – a change in ones energy could unlock different “worlds”, the key question in my mind is would one remember the previous “world” or would they immediately become a product of their new perception?  Is this naturally occurring way of the universe that we are unable to perceive?

Time travel forward is theoretically possible: Person A remains on earth whilst Person B is blasted into space travelling at the speed of light.  Time is relative, so Person A could have experienced 20 years while Person B will have only perceived a few minutes.  When Person B returns to Earth after travelling at the speed of light for some time, they would find that many years had passed in what had been for them perhaps a few hours.  Going backward in time would probably not be possible though there is little to nothing known about black holes.  If a black hole is a rip in space time, then if one were able to withstand the journey it is possible that going through one could possibly send a person back to an earlier point in space time.

Just some things I have been pondering, not your typically every day thoughts.

So a few years ago I started to watch Iron Chef and I really thought that Alton Brown was pretty cool, much better than the Chairman who I cannot stand.  Then I started to watch Good Eats and thought it was a pretty good show, all of that changed last night.  Perhaps it was because I was sick, but I cannot stand Alton Brown anymore.  When you really watch him, he is utterly annoying on TV.  I glanced around the internet to see if I was alone, and I am not; but I don’t dislike him because I think he is a know-it-all or because he is cheesy.  I can’t watch him because he’s such a spaz.  I can’t stand the way her stammers around his overly worded statements of the obvious.  He just speaks so damn fast, and the stuttering or whatever you want to call it.  Completely drove me nuts and made me turn off the episode.

This reminds me of when I stopped watching Diggnation because I realized I don’t like Alex Albrecht.  He comes across as such a phony and his voice, ugh.  I can’t listen to him for 30+ minutes.  Interestingly enough, I met him at E3 last summer and he was a very down to earth kind of guy.  Even though he was really nice, I still do not watch Diggnation.

Enough ranting for now.