I love the smell of scams in the morning

[unixronin]

So here I am, looking again at listings for part-time work-from-home to bring in a little extra money.  The past six years or so have convinced me that I'm unemployable full-time for anything I'm physically capable of doing at this point¹ (I could probably get hired to work retail at, say, Home Depot, but my knees and left foot would never stand it).  And it seems there's basically three types of jobs listed if you're looking to work from home:

1. Telemarketing.  'Nuff said.

   (I'd almost sooner mug old ladies.)

2. Unspecified get-rich-quick promises using all the pyramid-scam buzzwords.

   (Sub-category:  Unspecified get-rich-quick promises using all the pyramid-scam buzzwords plus a liberal showering of "Christian" and "Mentor" and the like, to take advantage of the pious who think that if it's Christian it must be honest, because surely no fellow Christian would ever try to cheat them... right?)

3. And "Get paid to take surveys on your computer."  I have a hard time believing there's significant money in that.  The sites I've looked at so far, it seems that to sign up, you have to agree to be spammed, opt in to a bunch of marketing crap, and sometimes even sign up for online college courses.  Can you say "just another scam"?  Sure you can.

Once again, I find myself wondering about a home-based PC repair business.  "The PC Doctor makes house calls!"  With places like Best Buy charging $70-$80 just to examine and diagnose a problem, there almost has to be a way to undercut them on repairs, and there may be money in support too.  (With the number of cheap-crap white-box PCs on the market stuffed full of lowest-bidder parts, there's probably little chance of making money building machines; anyone who knows enough to understand why it's worth using better-quality components probably knows enough to build their own.)

But how does one get started...?

[1]  Well, unless I were willing to uproot everyone again and move back to California.  Which I'm not.  It'd be chancing everything on a roll of the dice, and we'd be back into apartment-rental hell for the foreseeable future.

Comments

[genuine-snark.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, C++ is kind of limited too, now.

Application programming is C++ in Unix (Qt/KDE, varies for GNOME), but it's Objective C on Mac, .NET (usually C# or Managed C++, somewhat different) on Windows, Java or web-based for cross-platform.

Database/Enterprise stuff is either the same, or 4GL of some kind (Delphi or more esoteric tools). Nowadays, a lot of it is web-based intranet.

Test Automation, like I do, is either based on an API or reflection-scheme in the language of the app it automates, based around a proprietary language, or--for a couple of test systems--based on more general scripting languages like python or tcl.

Systems programming is pretty specialized. So's compiler or driver programming (another C possibility I forgot) or embedded.

Not saying it's impossible or anything, just probably not a short-term plan. If you were truly interested in coding, best bet's to find some open-source project you like and hitch up. That way, you'll get some practice and possibly some visibility.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I've been meaning to get back to work on Bacula, but before I can do that, I have to get up to date with the current version of Bacula, and I can't really do that until I get a complete OS reinstall done on babylon5 and get rid of all the legacy cruft and bitrot, and I haven't really been getting anywhere doing that...

It'd be easier if I had a 2.6 kernel on babylon5, because then I could effectively build a new install in a chroot environment until I get it usable... but I'm still running 2.4 because I can't easily upgrade to 2.6 without changing a lot of how the system is set up.

What I really need is another machine to install on. Much easier and less brain-hurty than trying to do a major upgrade-in-place on a machine you can't really afford downtime on.

[theonetruejim.livejournal.com]

Have you tried Usermode Linux? I used it to play around with virtual hosting on a 2.4.20 box

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I can't honestly say I've ever even heard of Usermode Linux.

Actually, what I probably need is something like VMWare. Do a Gentoo install in a virtual machine, wait until I've gotten everything nailed down, then save the important configs and do the install for real.

[theonetruejim.livejournal.com]

http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/

It's a relatively painless way to mess around with multiple different Linux distros without having to reinstall. It's a bit of a pain to manage, but no more so than VMWare, and it's a good deal less resource intensive.

The only problem I've had with it so far is setting up X under it, but I think that's more of a learning issue than a real limitation.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The documentation on that project is terrible. I've been looking through both the old and the new sites and still can't find out basic things like "must I use that specific kernel", "how do I install an arbitrary Linux distribution from scratch under UML", "CAN I install an arbitrary Linux distribution from scratch under UML", etc, etc.

(Of course, mere minutes after stating that, I find - I think - the information I was looking for.)

[unix-jedi.livejournal.com]

I like VMWare but also check out VirtualBox. We've got some guys playing with that with great success.