smartfart's Journal: Unemployed and broke :-(

Whelp, I lost my job a month and a half ago. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I was working for an ambulance chaser, and I'm certainly happy to be away from that scene, but on the other hand I'm dead broke.

I've been trying to rustle up some business selling PCs. An interesting angle I've come up with is a site I've been working on for a while now, a church directory portal for the New Orleans metro area. It's a LAMP site that's pretty useful, in my opinion, if you happen to be a churchgoer in New Orleans. If the site gets any kind of traffic, hopefully I'll get some click-through business from it. If nothing else, it's an opportunity to improve my PHP skills.

Another thing I've been doing is studying like mad to take a couple of the CompTia certification tests. I've always downed certs, but I figured out that the stuff that's covered on the I-Net+ test is the same stuff that I've been doing for 4 years now as a linux sysadmin. For the price of a book, a couple of months' reading it to make sure I fill in any knowledge gaps, and $185 (gaa...) for the test, I too can have a piece of paper to wave around in front of interviewers. The Network+ exam is my next planned conquest, and hopefully I can knock both of them out by summer's end. LPI (now that is a worthy goal, IMHO) by the end of the year, anyone?