(no subject)

I almost wish I was going to Convergence, except for the little details of hating New York City and it being way expensive. The only person I really know well who's going is going with another of his partners, which would sort of leave me at loose ends. *shrug* Oh well. I'll go next year when it's hopefully in Montreal and I'll try to drag electriccat with me. ;)

I managed to sign myself up for a couple of online classes, one on "Intro to XML" and another on "Beginning PHP" (to be followed by "PHP II - The Cool Stuff" when they offer it again). I'm most displeased to find that the XML textbook is coming out with a new edition the last week of the class, and of course you can't wait 5 weeks to get the textbook. Grumble. While I'm doing productive stuff, I should get the NT box working, install IIS (totally patched, thankyew)) and Oracle and if I'm feeling truly inspired put SQL Server someplace as well. As much as I want to not learn it, ASP seems to be the way to go as far as employability goes. On the brighter side, having to buy these books gives me the perfect opportunity to bop down the road and check out Readme dot Doc, an apparently local technical bookstore. Danger! Danger Will Robinson!

That assumes, of course, that I want to do actual development. And to agree to that, I'd have to have some idea of what I want to do when I grow up. I've had mostly a year off now without really working, you'd think I'd have figured this kind of thing out by now. Nope. Well, not true. What I'd like is to continue to loaf and work on contract occasionally, but that's not practical anymore. Not going to get any more of those $60/hour gigs anytime soon, I'm afraid.

I dunno. I've got a fairly broad base of knowledge, but it's not really deep in any one particular area. I can do some HTML (what I know best, but that's not really anything I can base a career on anymore), some CGI/Perl stuff, some Cold Fusion, some web server administration, some Unix system administration, a little NT administration. But I don't do any of them on anything approaching an expert level. Of course I also tend very much to sell myself short when it comes to what I can do, so maybe I'm not as hopeless as I tend to think. Heh. One of C.'s recruiters told him that the mere fact that we wasn't afraid to untar some source code and compile it on a unix box was definitely points in his favor. (Yeah, he can do a lot more than that, he's got da mad skillz.) Hearing that made me realize that perhaps it's not as bad as I think. Now if I could just learn to interview well, I might be okay. I've never in my life gotten a job I had to competitively interview for, they've all either been retail jobs where I just had to show evidence that I had a functioning brain and/or a pulse or a job I was already going to get anyway so long as I wasn't a total freak (in a way that was incompatible with the other total freaks at the company). *sigh*