Bitter Tea? Add Sweetener!

...picking up from my November, 2008, post... Last fall during the heady moments following President Obama's rise from campaign trail challenger to president-elect, I felt no bitterness. I still don't, but I might have some cause to sour in the coming months: I'm now part of the 10% of unemployed US workers.

Yes, the axeman came for me. But having been telecommuting frequently while at my last employment, being laid off and at home all day doesn't feel much different except that now I get to pursue my own technical passion projects instead of my former employer's fire drills du jour. I'm sure I'll feel differently once my wallet's emphatic thinness registers in my forebrain, but for now, I'm looking forward to geeking out for a few weeks while I ramp up the job search for my next technologist gig.

So, what to do with my time in the short term? I'm an enterprise software technologist who's been concentrating on the Microsoft technology stack for the past seven years. That's after I had been working in the Oracle and Java enterprise software camp for the previous seven years. One thing's clear: I'll be refreshing my long-dormant Java, Python, Oracle, and LAMP skills on whatever projects I pick.

First things first: I need to get myself sorted and back into a technical frame of mind. For the past few weeks I've been attending primarily to various household chores that were perpetually "on hold" during my active employment. I finally completed the spring cleaning that I began last fall (!). Lugged a fireproof safe into the house and reorganized the stacks of family files. Added a 3 TB NAS onto the home network. Converted an unused alcove in the basement into an efficient storage area. Erected strategically-placed Metro shelving. Kicked up my workouts a notch or two. These are all fine and necessary for the sanity and comfort of me and mine, but these aren't activities that are helping me hone my enterprise software skills.

Couple of things I'm doing to kickstart my geekfest:

1. I'm retooling an old workstation to use as a VM host. (Maybe I should have included the installation of solar panels as one of my post-layoff activities to help offset the electric bills my home computer lab generates.) I'll load this up with various Linux VMs for development and staging activities.
2. Researching my options on virtual private server hosting so that I have a place to put any worthwhile Web services I create. I'd like to eventually move the Gryphons Lair vanity site to the VPS from its current web hosting platform. So far, I've looked at GoDaddy, 1&1, Verio, Network Solutions, and Amazon AWS. I will also consider a self-hosted solution, just putting one of my LAMP VMs into my network's DMZ. Now that the Google App Engine has Java support, I'll also be looking into that as a service host.

Now I just need to find a suitable technical project. One thing that my wife (pragmatically) suggested was a service to make it easier for parents to evaluate and select schools for their children. That's a weighty task, but I can certainly chip away at some of the easier logistical issues at play when comparing schools.

She also suggested that I provide access to the service via a mobile app, preferably on the iPhone. Well, I don't have a Mac development environment, so that's out for now. I've applied for a Palm Pre SDK, so I'm willing to try that out at some point. But for now, I have a date with Google Android! Kudos to Google for making it easy for developers to play in their sandbox.

More updates to come as I build out the infrastructure for my headfirst dive back into Java. Gettin' my geek on!