What I’m up to

Well, I actually went corporate years ago, but now I’m moving up again in the corporate world. I got hired on full-time at the agency where I’ve been working the last six months. Before this I was making more money than I felt I deserved, and now I’m making even more, plus a whole complex package of benefits.

I also get to do something I love, which is sitting in front of a computer coding fancy little user interfaces and dynamic animations for websites and banner ads.

I used to tell myself that I would never work for a major corporation, and it might seem odd that a devoted anarchist would have his own phone extension and company business card. As much as I complain about how society works I’ve found that making the best of it can build a pretty comfortable life.

I’ve realized in the last half-decade that anarchism isn’t about fighting back against the way the world works. Sometimes you need to deal with it and make the best of it. I don’t believe I’m going to change anyone’s minds by working in a kitchen the rest of my life or make any notable difference by going off the grid though I used to believe that I could.

The more corporate I become and the farther I climb up through the middle-class, the more confident I become that the whole system is skewed and unfair. I see people in the drive-through’s, working twice as hard as I do for a fraction of the pay, doing something that isn’t nearly as fun. I feel bad about that sometimes, like I’m just exploiting society and giving less back than someone who washes dishes… though I suppose you could argue that I am building things that people use and in my own tiny way, I’m pushing the bounds and expectations of technology, but the people making the Wordpress plugins that do so much for this site are doing the same thing to a greater degree, and they’re not paid anything.

Most people in the corporate world are not programmers who actually build something. Instead, their jobs involve pushing money around in one form or another. In an anarchist society, all that time and energy would either be going toward making the world a better place, or toward leisure activities like spending time with family.

I still love the corporate world for my own selfish reasons. Without it I wouldn’t be able to order sushi or fancy espresso whenever I wanted. I suppose that as an anarchist that does make me a hypocrite, but I’ve decided that it’s better to be a hypocrite than to not care. As an anarchist, I would like to see a world where everyone on the planet could order sushi and fancy espresso whenever they want.

I’m just going over my whole Wordpress setup for this site in case anyone is interested or wants to give advice. If you know anything about Wordpress and see me doing something stupid, please go ahead and write a “Hey dumbass” response to this post or my previous post about the wordpress plugins I use.

I use the Inanis Glass theme, basically because I couldn’t find anything better. Most of the free themes look like crap. I’m not a designer by any means, but I know enough to say that most of the wordpress themes I could find just don’t look good, especially for a science-fiction themed website. I did a search for “best SEO wordpress themes” and came up with this site: http://wphacks.com/best-search-engine-optimized-seo-wordpress-themes/ and this one: http://www.seohosting.com/blog/blogging-tips/5-free-seo-wordpress-themes/. Both sites list a bunch of wordpress themes that they claimed were well-optimized for search engine optimization (SEO), but only one or two of the ones listed actually existed when I searched for them in the theme listing in my dashboard.

However, based on their lists of criteria for a good SEO theme, Inanis Glass seemed decent. It’s got the content at the top and seems to come close to validating for properly formatted HTML, though I’m not sure why that’s relevant. I did make a couple changes though, like changing the <H1> tag at the top to show the name of the post instead of the blog title, since I’ve read that’s really important to SEO to have your keyword rich title at the top instead of the site title. I still need to figure out my tagline.

I also almost completely removed the footer where it had a little windows style start menu with search and login features and stuff, as well as some popup menus that didn’t look very good. The pages seem to load a little faster since getting rid of that.

If you have any suggestions for a better theme or other theme-alterations I could make (particularly SEO related), I would greatly appreciate it.

It seems like every day I come across a new reason to be an anarchist.

I’m trying to buy a condo and to apply for a mortgage I need records from the last couple years. In the past I’ve ignorantly assumed that a massive government financial institution like the IRS would keep better track of numbers than a “stoned slacker” like myself, so I haven’t been saving my tax information. In thirty years my credit union has only made one minor mistake. I figured the IRS would be similar.

I requested my W-2s for ’07 and ‘08, and received both transcripts,  each listing one job. In reality, I worked two different jobs in 2008 and three in 2007. (I’m a freelance programmer so moving jobs is normal.) Also, one of the jobs in 2008 gave me two W-2s  because I worked for them at two separate times. Today I spent 40 minutes on the phone with the IRS, and the nice operator told me that they had no records of any of these jobs. She told me my employers never sent the forms, but I find that hard to believe when they had no problem sending the same forms to me.

The scary part is how calm the operator was, as though this was a normal occurance that we just have to put up with. She kind of sounded like she was an Indian outsourcer, which would be ironic, but that’s just speculation. She didn’t offer any avenues of resolution, and didn’t seem to think this was even a problem that needed fixing. I asked her if I was at risk of an audit now, since there’s naturally going to be discrepencies between my spending and income. She didn’t have an answer for that either.

Now, I live in an area with one of the highest crime rates in Seattle and I’ll walk around the streets after midnight with my hood on and my headphones blaring, and being afraid never crosses my mind. This kind of thing, however, scares me. It’s always been one of my greatest fears to be wrongfully convicted of a crime, and to think about how the same system that lost four of my last six jobs is used to prosecute people for tax crimes and money-laundering, sometimes destroying their lives, is just plain terrifying.

Last week I finally decided to jump in and do what I’ve been thinking about for years and rekindle my online writing presence. I looked into a system called MovableType, a content management system (CMS) for running websites. I was attracted to it because it’s open source, which appeals to me since I’m an anarchist and want a system where I know if I see something I don’t like, I can dig into the actual code and change it, like I did for my Android phone when I discovered none of the music players could display my music files the way I wanted them to. Plus open-source is almost always free, which certainly doesn’t hurt.

After a failed installation of Movable Type I discovered that WordPress is also open-source. For some reason I thought it was a hosted solution with a programming interface (API) that you had to plug into. Instead it’s just a big package of files that you put on your server and then do whatever you want with.

I must say, I’ve been quite impressed with WordPress, especially the plugins and their ease of installation. The interface, while a little laggy (probably result of my host), is very straight-forward and easy to use compared to many systems, such as my host, GoDaddy which has the most convoluted website I know of.

I can’t get WordPress to do exactly what I want it to, but it seems I can always find a plugin to get it pretty darn close, and I know that if I have the time, I can improve my CSS and PHP skills and actually dig in and personalize it.

I spent all last weekend playing with WordPress and nearly falling in love with it. Web technology has certainly advanced quite a ways since my old successful days of isellpot.ws, and even though I build internet applications for a living, I’ve never actually worked with this kind of thing before.

Then Monday night I played with Facebook and was not nearly as impressed. I don’t really get Facebook… like what does it actually do? I’m gonna keep at it though.

Tuesday night I explored some website promotions options, specifically automated link submission tools. On their promotion page, Social Bookmarks Demon kept saying how it’s not a spam tool, but then went on and on with all this advice about how to avoid being marked as spam. Haha. I need to be really careful about how I use that kind of software, but if done reasonably and sparingly, I think it could work for me. I guess we’ll see.

Then Wednesday evening I went out around downtown Seattle and looked at Condos… “Gonna buy me a condo… gonna buy me a Cuisinart… get de wall-to-wall carpeting, and de wallet full of credit cards…”

But the night before I started working on this, I got an email from someone on the other side of the planet who remembered my website from years ago and decided to look me up. He said, “your former website, isellpot.ws, was a cornerstone of my teenage-hood.” He’s a professional writer now, which makes it even more flattering.

At the height of that website’s popularity, I had 10,000 visitors per week, until it was ripped out from under me by a domain-name stealing spam-bot. But maybe it was for the best. I just hadn’t been happy with it.

So tonight I read a wonderful story he wrote, then got into reading some of my stuff from my old anarchism/marijuana legalization website. I was surprised at how quickly I could move from a brilliant and moving paragraph into something completely ridiculous and off-putting. I still think there’s some salvageable stuff there and intend to cut it apart, do a little editing and post it in future blog posts, or, if it’s lucky, on a page in the sidebar

Oh, Lord it’s late… I need to get up for work in five hours. Then this weekend I’m back up to my eyeballs in website.

I am revamping my website; gonna get into the social-networking platforms; gonna start promoting my writing; and I’m gonna try and rekindle some of the magic from my old website, but this time I wanna be a little more professional about it