Shyzer.com

It doesn’t take long for somebody to hate their job. There’s always that initial honeymoon period, but soon after that fades comes the reality period. The period where you realize just how annoying your co-worker Shelly is or just how much of a complete asshole your boss Jim is or even how much poop a tiny little monkey can produce in a single day. That last one of course having to do mostly with zoo keepers and carnies, because despite my best efforts, I’ve yet to work with a monkey.

And just like that, the bitching commences. People start talking about how much they hate getting out of bed in the morning or how little their paid or how they just wish they could go one day without having their boss chew them out for something as trivial as forgetting to refill the coffee maker. And to all those people out there, I have one thing to say to you:

Become a substitute teacher.

Oh the joys of being a substitute teacher. When I initially signed up for the gig a few months back, I knew it would go one of two ways. On one hand, I’d hate the job since all the kids were hellions who made my day a living nightmare. On the other, the kids would actually listen to me and I’d have a great time. Truth be told, after remembering some of my earlier schooling days, I was fully prepared for the worst and yet to my surprise, it never came, mainly because I figured out how to stay away from it.

Subbing breaks down into three categories: you’ve got the elementary kids, the middle school kids, and the high school kids. To put it plainly, 90% of the troublesome children are in middle school. After subbing a few of those classes, I gave it up. It simply wasn’t worth the effort. It also gave it a newfound respect and appreciation for anybody who can handle kids that age for 180 days a year. It certainly takes a patient person.

No, I decided to focus on elementary and high school kids simply because subbing in those two environments couldn’t be more different. Whenever I get a call for the older kids, I know I’m in for an easy day. The high schools around here have four classes lasting 90 minutes each, a 30 minute study hall, and a 30 minute lunch. Most teachers have at least one planning period a day and add to that my lunch period and we’re already up to 120 minutes of sitting around alone while getting paid.

But what about when I actually have a class? Well, that’s basically just as easy. You see, in high school, the teacher has no idea what qualifications their sub has. It could be a recent college graduate of history or an 80 year old retired banker whose last history class was in 1941. Therefore, in each and every high school class I sub for, I am left one of two orders. Either I show a movie that the teacher has provided or I hand out a packet of worksheets that was left on the desk. That’s it. I then crack open the giant book I brought along with me for the day and count the minutes until the final bell of the day. Sure, sometimes you get a great class of seniors who are smart, funny, and enjoyable to shoot the shit with, but for the most part you get a classroom full of kids who simply are there because they have to be and are likewise counting down the minutes.

But this can grow old quick. Sure, it’s nice to be paid to do practically nothing, but I can’t do that for more than a few days at a time. I quickly grow bored and before you know it, I’m starting to hate my job. Enter the elementary school days. With these kids, there is never any downtime and usually, the teacher has left plenty of material for you to teach. I guess they all rely on the fact that if you didn’t know what nouns and verbs are or if you can’t add 4 and 8, then you honestly have no business subbing. Regardless, with the young’uns, there’s always plenty to do and if you’re lucky, they might even ask you to play with them at recess. If there’s anything I’ve learned lately it’s that I still totally own at kickball.

I try to do 3 or 4 days in an elementary school and 1 day in high school and so far I’ve been pretty fortunate to get basically that. One thing is certain though, I’ve certainly loved what I’ve been doing the past few months. Sadly, the school year is drawing near a close, but with it, maybe I’ll have some time to share some stories I’ve acquired while subbing.

If you want $20 free sent to your Paypal account, check out this post over on Hey, It’s Free! (here’s proof). I’m trying it out right now to see if I can get another $20 with another fake e-bay account I have, but as of yet I’m not sure if that will work or not. Either way though, $20 for 10 minutes worth of my time is a good deal to me.

And as a matter of fact, you all should be reading that site daily now. I know I “launched” it back in August, but in all honesty, I didn’t really update or keep it operational for longer than a week. However, ever since late February, I’ve updated it multiple times daily with posts. I revamped many of the pages and changed the direction of the site from having my referral link peppered all over the site to offering nothing but completely and 100% free items. So, go take a look at Hey, It’s Free and…well, add it to your bookmarks and keep going back to it every day! New posts over there are automatically made every 4ish hours and bring with them information on how to get free samples, money, electronics, food, sex toys - you name it, I post how to get it for free!

The Awesomest Site of the Week award hands down goes to Ask A Ninja.com

It seems like this time every year one actor turns in a performance worthy of 9000 Emmys and a boatload of hot models. Last year it was Terry O’Quinn from LOST with the episode where you-know-who did you-know-what. This time around, it was John C. McGinley who proved himself to be a man amongst boys with his performance in Scrubs these past two episodes. If his portrayal of Dr. Cox wasn’t enough to sway your soul and draw out a few tears, then you are a heartless robot who should never procreate. Seriously, we have enough trouble with robots as it is, we don’t need your soulless robot babies running around next. I’ve been a huge fan of Scrubs ever since season 2 and if NBC doesn’t renew it for next year, it only goes to show how clueless that network truly is. Thankfully, ABC is waiting with open arms and drooling mouths to snatch up Scrubs, so all is well.

And on a side note, I don’t think any show in recent memory has better used obscure music than Scrubs. I have no idea how many songs from my playlist I first discovered from an episode, but suffice to say I think the cream of the crop was the ending song last week from The Fray titled “How To Save A Life,” which you can continently find over on Shyzer Radio.

Nope, your eyes don’t deceive you. Your computer isn’t playing a trick on you and…well, some other stupid little saying that delays the following sentence. Shyzer is back up and running, although to what extent is yet to be determined. I figured two weeks was enough time to keep, as Fellner said, “just a bunch of words and white space” up. We’ll see where I go from here, though.

The most obvious change of course is the new layout. Gone is the clutter and replacing it is clean, crisp, goodness. The radio, webcam, and tagboard are gone, the latter two permanently. The new radio is under the “radio” link and it shouldn’t be much more complicated than that. I bet y’all can guess where the search section is and if you need a few external links to other sites, they’re not hiding anywhere. I’m still not sure if I want to keep comments around or not, so I guess we’ll just see. For now, they’re here, but I might yank them at any moment.

This layout is a first for me in many ways, one of them being using a white background. My past three layouts were all dark (black, black, and dark greenish) and I wanted to liven things up a little with not only some color, but some non-dreary inducing whiteness. When I first sat down to sketch what I wanted the new design to look like, I also knew I wanted a bigger area for my posts. What I hated about the old layout was how there was so much blank space on the right and left hand side of the posts / sidebar. For those of us using a larger resolution on our monitors, it looks like utter crap. I wanted Shyzer to stretch and fit the full length of the page and now, no matter what resolution you use, it does just that. (and Damn you to hell 800*600 people! I had a hell of a time configuring this layout to fit properly and all I can ask is why the hell are there still people out there using 800*600 resolutions!?!?!)

This is also the first layout I’ve coded from the ground up using CSS. In my past layouts, I’ve taken other people’s designs and proceeded to hack, slash, and duct tape them into something I not only better enjoy, but that will also work with the programs I use around here. This is akin to chopping down a redwood and then sawing, chiseling, and chopping your way to a decent kitchen table. But this time I decided to just plant a kitchen table seed and let one grow straight from the ground instead. I finally decided to expand on both my knowledge of CSS and Wordpress and so I bought a kickass CSS book and followed a wonderfully written Wordpress tutorial to get at what you see here. No tables, no images, all CSS and Wordpress codes. And damn am I proud of it.

I’ve still got a little bit of work to do, but that’s just touch up stuff. The sub-heading above (The Beauty of Simplicity) might soon display random quotes every time you load a new page, but I haven’t perfected that code just yet.