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.

Since I keep pretty busy these days, one would assume I’m a fairly interesting person.  Or, so at least I would like to hope that is the case.  I am going to attempt to start using this again to share some of my stories and experiences of my every day life.  Ew, that sentence sounds extremely vain… Not that anyone cares, or that I’m anything special, but yeah…. And now time for something else.
Starting the 14th of next month I will officially begin my culinary education at Le Cordon Bleu in Sacramento.  I am very excited to begin.  I’ve enjoyed cooking since I was a kid, but it took me a long time to realize that is the sort of job that would make me happy.
Meanwhile, I’m still anchored to the USAF – for better or worse (or worse).  Recently passed my fitness test with a 93.8% or something like that, which I suppose is pretty decent.
In March I’ll be going to Boston to attend PAX East, and I am taking a team of 9 to cover the event for Vagary.TV.  I’m looking forward to it, I’ve somehow never been to Boston.  My stay will be short because I don’t want to miss any classes, though I will definitely miss one.
E3 is registration is open, I need to figure out my team this year and hopefully I won’t be limited to 5 slots like last year.  E3 was pretty awesome, and Los Angeles from what I could tell was decent; although I still prefer NYC.  Even Seoul is more interesting IMO.  Los Angeles seemed to have two sides, superficial and dirty.  I’m not really in to either one, but still there is a lot to see there.
Today (or yesterday now) was my 2 year anniversary, holy crap.  We haven’t killed each other yet, and it seems like we’ve got at least 2 more years in us.  Wish I could have done more, unfortunately this month more than ever has been a firm reminder about that whole “money” and “trees” saying.  I was gifted a new Shiba Inu by my wife.  Despite my initial opposition about getting another dog, I’ve been won over.  I’ll get around to posting pictures eventually.
Well, 4 AM – time to call it a day… lets see if I can build up some blogging momentum again.  Apologizes in advance for my incoherent ramblings.
-Ryan

August 20th 2004 was a historical day for internet, it was the date I bought ryankenward.com and decided to force myself upon the masses.  So many things have changed in six years, in my life, the world, and even this site.  If you were to come here 6 years ago you would find me writing crazy little pieces of fiction that I did for fun in my spare time.  Spare time? What the hell is that?!  Now you find a barren wasteland of internet here; from nearly daily posts years back to nearly quarterly posts today.  I’m not sure why I don’t blog anymore.  I guess it could be because I have too many other things going on, or it could be the part where crappy things always seem to happen.   At any rate, here I am writing for probably the last time until October when I suddenly realize I have one of those blog things.

I use wordpress on a daily basis but the context has changed so dramatically.  When I write anything now its usually a review or some sort of administrative tidbit for staff or users of Vagary.TV.

Come to think about it, maybe an even larger part of the reason why I don’t really write like I used to is that I’ve become even more reclusive than ever before.  Not entirely for my own sake but for that of my family.  I guess I don’t feel as comfortable now with just anyone reading my little musings.

Then there’s my real job, which I can’t really say anything about.

So what more is there to write?  Perhaps someday I will find that energy to write interesting or funny things on a regular basis but today certainly doesn’t seem to be that day.  For all of you who have wasted your time reading this, sorry.

I also used to have subscribers, don’t see much of those anymore…
Here are some cool sites though:

www.vagary.tv
www.realmofshadows.us
www.gamebynight.com
www.gameseers.us
www.finalchallenge.net

Woot.

See you next quarter!
~Ryan