Thursday, January 26, 2012

Hacked, suspended, annoyed

My other blog is currently offline due to some hacker/phisher in Brazil putting phishing sites and sending spam through my site. My web host accused me of violating their anti spam policy and suspended my account. I explained the situation to them and still haven't heard back about getting it reinstated. At this point, I'd rather not use them anymore. My original host was bought out by them and I just somehow ended up with them. I only found out about the phishing site because of someone at CloudFlare sending me a message about it. It's been on there for at most a couple weeks without me knowing.

Another thing is I ended up quitting the part time job I just got because it wasn't giving me any actual web design or development experience. Though I also didn't want to work with the person who hired me anymore. My last week was pretty bad and the following week was much better because I decided quitting would be better than staying. The whole thing with my other blog being down is bad because I'm back in the job market and a professional looking blog is actually pretty useful. Oh well, maybe I should take a break. There are some classes I'd like to start soon that may help me in finding better work.

Monday, January 02, 2012

Finally, a new job!

After more interviews than I care to remember, I finally got a part time web position working on Styles For Less's ecommerce site. Given my slight online shopping addiction, this is a bit of irony. Though they do have good prices and some cute clothes, I'm more interested in selling stuff right now than buying.

Anyways, it's going to be interesting working on a website for a company that I normally associate with retail fashion. I'm no expert in either online or retail fashion stores, so I guess it'll be a good place to learn about those types of businesses. So far, I really only know about the website and haven't even met most people in the company.

I'm currently enrolled in 4 online courses in web programming (ASP, Oracle, Javascript/AJAX, and Web 2.0). I think I should drop the AJAX class because the book looks like it's not so good and perhaps it wouldn't be as good as learning on the job. Anyways, even 3 online classes seems a bit much. Perhaps I should keep them all, but I think it probably would be better to only take 3 max.

Holidays were a bit stressful because of the job search, but spending time with family was nice since my sister was visiting and her kids can be fun to talk to. I didn't see many friends despite being invited to a few parties. Partly because of the job situation and partly because there were conflicts with other events.

At least having part time work will get me both experience and decent pay while leaving me time to do other things like take classes and continue with my own online selling. Having more time is good, but I'm also hoping the whole disability review won't cause me to lose my Social Security. If it does, then I hope I can do well enough at my current job to get full time.