Working hard, hardly working …

Hello, gang.

My two year old start up went belly up for lack of funds in February, and life has been interesting since, to say the least. It was an open source company/experiment, so the products we created are still available. Everything else about the project is still the same, we’re just not getting paid and we work on it from home on our own time, instead of full-time from a furnished office. You can find out more at the project’s SourceForge pages.

For a few weeks in March, I was consulting locally, doing Java Enterprise Edition development for a software company that makes banking software for credit unions. It’s good to get back to doing Java from the enterprise developer’s perspective. At the start up I mentioned above, I was doing Java from the virtual machine’s perspective, and it’s a whole other world.

After the credit union software work dried up, I started doing some easy web work here and there, setting up simple promotional websites for various people and organizations. It seems everybody down here wants a basic website with at least email newsletter sign-up, and a mini-blog for displaying news about their activities.

Among my clients, there was this one high school senior class, from a nearby well-to-do private school. They wanted a place to promote their activities before and after graduation. They paid upfront for hosting for two years! That’s ridiculous, but it was enough to pay my bills for some months. I’m making a living here, you know, and the customer is always right.

So that brings me to the close of this blog post. This on again off again web work isn’t cutting it. I need to find some permanent work soon (that’s what I meant by “hardly working” above.) I’ve applied to traveling consultant gigs at a few USA companies, and I’ve applied to “regular”, non-traveling IT staff jobs in Pennsylvania. (I have friends and family there, and I worked just outside Philadelphia, before the dot-com bubble burst sent me packing, five years ago.)

Let’s see what’s in store for me next!

Sayonara for now! Take care, y’all!