So I have gone ahead and done it. I sent the $36 to gain an 'arpa' membership at sdf.org.

I do not expect to be a heavy user, but I do plan to be a regular user here. I also have a zero-price account on Shellmix. I plan  
on using it less often than this one.

For now, though, I need to concentrate on the larger issues. I have less than a week left to re-apply for my job, or I will be 
unemployed no later than 2012-12-31. Even after re-applying, I still need to find a replacement, since I am an intermittent
(work-when-we-need-you) employee.

I have noticed that both Dallas/FtWorth and KansasCity areas have loads of database administrator and database SQL programmer 
positions, especially for Oracle, but also MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SAPDB (which was known as MaxDB for a while). Unfortunately, in  
my employment, I do not get to interact with databases, except for filing Remedy tickets when a problem affects one of the
organization's applications. Oh, and I've seen a number of MySQL and LAMP openings in the San Diego area.

I was hoping to be able to run MySQL, PostgreSQL, and FirebirdSQL instances locally, so I could learn about them on my own, but the
age and condition of the hardware here makes that quite impossible.

On my main desktop, if I have Chromium open for a couple of days, it bloats up so badly that the only fix is a hard reboot. Firefox    
is better. It usually must be killed after five days. Opera must be killed after 2-3 days. Neither of them takes down the whole    
computer the way that Chromium does. (Before you ask, yes, I used to use Google Chrome. It had the same problem on 64-bit Linux.)  
The laptop isn't quite as badly affected, but I still must regularly kill applications in order to keep it going. It has been six years
since the last replacement round, so it is definitely time for newer, more capable hardware.

EDIT: 
Perhaps I can re-learn some Perl now that I have somewhere to use it. I took a class or two in college, but I have not used it since.