I’m a big fan of Tungle, a meeting site that makes scheduling meetings easier and has kept me from having to play email ping-pong with people to set up interviews for stories I’m working on.

I give my Tungle address to almost everyone I need to schedule an interview with, but lately a few too many people have had difficulty understanding how it works, so I thought I’d offer a quick intro to it. The video above should help, and the company’s website has a lot of great info on how it works.

The main way it saves me time (and time is money as a freelancer) is in setting up meetings without having to go back and forth (and back and forth multiple times) via email or phone calls to find a time that works best. Tungle also works on whatever timezone your computer is in, so if you’re in New York and pick noon, my calendar at my end will say 9 a.m. because I’m on the West Coast. But you won’t know that; you’ll only see your timezone.

I think the site is self-explanatory, but here are the basics:

If you go to my Tungle page or someone elses’s, a calendar will appear where you only have to pick a few dates and times to propose a meeting. You then hit “submit” with the option of including a note to give a phone number to call or other details, and an email is sent to the person you want to meet with.

I’ll then pick one of those times, and you’ll get a confirmation email of the meeting. It syncs with my Google calendar, and can sync with other calendars. You don’t have to join Tungle to set up meetings with me, or give any personal information to the website. Just set up a meeting and go. It shouldn’t take more than a minute to do.

That’s it. Simple and very easy. Try it and let me know what you think.

This video has nothing to do with finding a job, but it’s inspirational for many reasons. Have a happy holiday while enjoying this.

I feel like I’ve won a Bingo game, but not the prize.

The one-year anniversary (birthday?) of my blog, Tales of an Unemployed Dad, came and went on Sept. 11 without any fanfare. I forgot about it until a former Contra Costa Times colleague reminded me of it, sparking my memory that Sept. 11 had some other significance.

It has been a long and adventurous year of writing. The best thing about starting this blog, where I planned to write about my job search while raising a daughter, is that two months after starting it, it helped me land a job at WalletPop, a personal finance Web site that I write and edit at. The part-time work is my Bingo win.

The search for full-time work continues, but the part-time work through AOL is keeping everything afloat. I’m also writing for AOL sites Rented Spaces about rental and real estate issues, and writing Search Engine Optimization for AOL Shopping.

Emma turned 5 last month. She was 4 when I started writing all of this, and I had some apprehension about being home with her most of the time and being a stay-at-home dad. Things have worked out well with all of that, and now that she’s in kindergarten things are improving.

One thing I haven’t figured out yet on this blog is how to eliminate spam. So until I do, I’m turning off comments on any future posts. You can find me via e-mail or at WalletPop.

Let’ s hope the next year of writing and editing gets me to a full-time job. That’s the Bingo prize I want.

A new Web site is born in the Crowe family: Hold the cilantro, please is about a cook (my wife, Kristen) who doesn’t like certain ingredients, such as cilantro, and comes up with tasty recipes nonetheless. She promises to update it with her recipes, cooking tips and I might even convince her to add a cooking video or two.

It’s a new world of reporting, and doing this story taught me a lot.

Tuesday, March 10, is D-Day for the Seattle Post-Intellegencer, when its owner, Hearst Corp. plans to announce if a buyer has been found. If not, it will close the newspaper and according to a story on the P-I’s Web site,  is planning to start an online publication on the day after the final print newspaper is published.

It will become an online news product only, leaving the print version in the dust.

While an announcement hasn’t been made by Hearst yet, Seattlepi.com reports that the company has made offers to some staff to stay on and work for the online edition.

Hearst also owns the San Francisco Chronicle and could make the same move there. It is seeking  job cuts from its union, and without them and the savings the cuts could bring, would either sell the paper or close it.

The story I’m working on for Spot.us about the future of Bay Area journalism, specifically online journalism, is looking at the possibility of online-only news from Bay Area papers. I’ve been trying for about a month to reach someone at the Chronicle for this story, but so far haven’t had any callbacks or replies, other than queries from Phil Bronstein about whether anyone is getting back to me.

The executive editor at the Contra Costa Times, Kevin Keane, has told me that he expects print to stay around at his newspapers because there’s a market for it that is served best by print.

Unless a company is starting from scratch, I expect that newspapers would only be exclusively on the Web as a last resort before closing their doors.  If a buyer can’t be found for the Chronicle, it’s a viable option. It is in Seattle.

The goal of a part-time job is simple: To make money. But for the unemployed, there is a lot more to working at a part-time job than just making some money.

There’s the hope that it will lead to a full-time job. That the CEO will see what a great job you’re doing and will fall in love with your work and will hire you at a better wage than the job you were laid off from.

And with that full-time job come all of the things, for better or worse, that full-time employees get that part-time or contract employees don’t: Health care benefits, paid vacation, sick days, an office, etc.

 That’s what I’m after. Mainly for the health care benefits, which are extraordinarily high if not partly financed by an employer. But also because I don’t want to be what government officials who track such things call me — underemployed. In other words, I was unemployed, but found part-time work and still seek full-time work. I’m no longer technically unemployed, but underemployed.

So in my quest to keep money coming in, I’ve taken on numerous jobs that I’ve written about many times in this blog. My goal has always been, and is especially now, eight months after being laid off, to turn one of my part-time jobs into full-time work.

I enjoy a lot of being a freelance writer/editor, such as making my own hours. But a lot of those hours are exactly that — a lot of hours. Today I’ve been writing, calling, e-mailing and many other work-related things since 8:30 a.m. and won’t be done until 11 p.m. or so. I took a lunch break and from about 5-9 p.m. to take care of my daughter. It’s getting exhausting.

When I started working as a personal finance blogger at WalletPop in November, and later for writing Search Engine Optimization articles for AOL’s shopping Web site, my ultimate goal was for AOL to hire me as a full-time editor. I haven’t worked for them for too long, so I don’t expect that to happen soon.

The same for Spot.us, a journalism Web site that takes small donations to pay for news stories. I’m hoping my work there will be seen and I’ll be contacted to either write more, or help other journalists get their stories online.

Broadcasting my work was also a goal of writing press releases for Moving Arts Dance and writing and editing the quarterly newsletter for the city of San Ramon.

I don’t hide the fact that I have ulterior motives for all of the part-time work I do. Getting paid is an obvious motivator. I look at these jobs as a tryout for employers, to show them how well I can do the job.

Next week I have two more tryouts. One is writing press releases and doing some public relations for an auditing firm, and another is writing some stories for an engineering firm. I expect both to be interesting freelance work, and I can understand why employers want freelancers or contractors: No overhead to pay, no benefits and minimal hassle. Just write a check and be done with them.

I’m giving myself another month of being underemployed and doing everything I can to get full-time work before I look for other ways to get there. If these part-time jobs can’t get me there, then there has to be another way.

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About the only good part of being unemployed is making your schedule your own. You’re a freelancer, in a sense, and you don’t have to be at work at 8 a.m. and out the door at 5 p.m. Your time is yours. There’s also the constant fear that time is running out because money is running out, and you have to find a job soon, so you spend every waking minute looking, networking and doing some work on the side to pay the bills.

My schedule is becoming a little clearer lately this week, in relation to my daughter, age 4. We’re signing her up for kindergarten, and I’m a little melancholy about it because while it won’t be until August when she starts school, from now until then I’m looking forward to and partly dreading seeing the hourglass drain and for her schooling to start. She’s now in her second year of preschool, which is a great thing by itself, and adding two more mornings of classtime can only help everyone in the family.

Part of me doesn’t want to see that time come so quickly. She’s not going off to college, to be sure, but she’s starting school and it’s one of life’s firsts that won’t be the same for either of us. From then until she’s graduated from college, probably for the next 18 years, she’ll have homework. And then after that she’ll have a job and won’t be able to take a break until she gets a vacation.  In other words, kindergarten is just the start of a life of continuous work — homework and work, until she retires. It’s all a lot of fun, but the chance to do nothing but play and be a kid, simply a kid without a care in the world, is slipping away.

And while I’m keeping busy looking for fulltime work, and networking, and Twittering, and writing for little pay at many part-time jobs, I see this on the horizon for us. She has free time, and so do I. The two are merging for awhile, even with the job hunt in overdrive.

Talesofanunemployeddad.blogspot.com has moved here to its new home at aaroncrowe.net. Continue coming here for the latest on assistance for the unemployed, and to check out what I’m doing in the search for full-time work.

The adventure of being unemployed and looking for work continues. One of the part-time jobs I have is freelancing for Spot.us, and the pitch for my latest story is below: