heh, and the last shall be first....
On the technical advice. Yes. I have done each of the items you listed. I also run an extremely clean machine with no extraneous background processes running and very light disk usage. (Part of my 59 years on site ('82-'03) were spent building PC's, as well as networks and network servers.)
As far as the first part of your post, well Bubba, you opened the door to way more information than you wanted!
I would *love* a job. You got one? I'll send you the resume, it'll amaze you. You just ignore those 9 years I spent in prison for first degree murder and armed robbery, it was a long time ago ('72-81), water under the bridge and all that!
Let's not worry about my health too much either! Even though the heart attack wiped out 45% of my heart muscle tissue and lowered my ejection fraction (The amount of blood leaving the heart on each beat.) from 98% to 16% I have in the intervening 5 years raised it all the way back up to 22%!!! The defibrillator works fine, as do the 11 stents placed to keep blood flowing to the heart. I can still handle a telephone and a keyboard within my 10 lb weight restriction.
As far as the "West Virginia grin" goes, just put me in a closed office where no one can see the long term effects of meth; no one will care as long as I keep my mouth closed and the mustache and beard long!
Don't worry about me being 59 either.... Even if you can get a younger person I'm a cool troll to have around the office!
The bankruptcy closed almost 14 years ago, so it is nothing to worry about either!
Seriously bro I am probably about the most unemployable cowboy you are ever gonna meet. I do hustle odd change here and there by pet sitting for friends with cats, but folks don't vacation like they did 4 years ago. There are a *ton* of things I could do that would produce money with little or no physical effort, but 9 years in prison makes you very dangerous or very docile. I chose not to be dangerous.
While I dislike the fact that my record is still held against me 30 years after I got out of prison I also understand an employer's concerns here. I know that I am not a danger to anyone, but there is absolutely no way to prove that short of my eventual demise without having hurt anyone. Any employer who does not feel a smidgen of concern for his current employees is a bad manager; if they show no concern for their potential liability they are bad businessmen. What are you gonna do with that? Not so much is my assessment.
Prior to 9/11 I spent nearly 2 decades developing a comprehensive skill set that left me in network security work for state government and fortune 100 companies. I was a fair dinkum white hat hacker. However, in the post 9/11 world everyone who works in computer / network security gets a background criminal check. My old trick of just not answering the "Have you been convicted" question no longer works. (I was called on it several time over the years, answered truthfully and was not hired. Every job I had in field started with me ignoring that question and some personnel geek failing to notice I had ignored it.)
Skeezy Ratty Troll
