Rob the Fiddler

I have the fall garden pretty much all planted.  Its still too hot for lettuce and radishes so those go in next month.  Texas has two growing seasons. The summer is so hot that the window to get a good crop smaller than you think. Your fighting between the heat and the impending frost.

This is my first real fall garden.  Usually I have a good start in the spring with a  focus on tomatoes, peppers and basil.   Come around mid July, its just too hot for anything to grow.  I generally leave it alone and if Im lucky, anything that survived yields a little bit in the fall. Mostly its weeds and bermuda though.

JD had a good run last year using the square foot method. Unfortunately, the only real good piece of yard that gets full sun is unsuitable to put even a raised bed on.  Ive tried containers (15 gal totes) but they crack after one season in Texas.

I figured that planters were the way to go. I figured the best way to do this was to just
build one and see how it turned out.  From there, I could adapt the plans to boxes that
I found more suitable. The first one I built was this.

Seemed simple enough.  Just 2×4s and some 2×2.   After getting started I realized it was going to be heavy. Each square is 16.5 inches and its 6 layers deep.  Thats 33 feet of 2×4. Its easily 40 to 50 lbs without the dirt!

But it does look nice.

Next I built a much bigger 3×3 foot planter. I still used 2×4s but only for the framing.
The siding is old fence wood and the bottom was some scrap I found.

I built one more for good measure.  The one in the back is the nice one (heavy).  The one in the front was put together a bit more…um…hastily. They should last several years. I did cut a few corners on the growing medium as far as square foot gardening is concerned. I have TONS of compost. That was free. Instead of spending $12 for 2CU of potting soil, I cut it down with cedar and pine mulch.  it might be too acid..we will see. The beauty of mulch is that its $3 for 2cu.   Il see if that was a good idea.  The vermiculite seemed like a waste.

So the fall crops will be between the new containers…some old pots and the usual beds.

Fall will be

• Green Beans (Contender and pole)
• Tomatoes (natch)
• Beets!  Gonna try it.
• Chard
• Lettuce
• Squash(Patty Pan, Hubbard, Cream of the Crop)
• Cantaloupe (watch out for cantalopracabras!)
• Cucumbers.

This is my first year for  squash and cukes.  I did plant one in the spring but it never grew until July.  Kinda a runt! After I ripped out the radishes and weeds, the poor guy took off!! It actually has a small fruit growing now. I had to perform a little veggie husbandry with a q-tip to get it started.

I hope its a little more productive this time around.

Here are some pics from the Spring.

They look better than they were. Avoid the white ones….too bitter.

Sunflowers were a bit crazy

Kinda surprised the city didn’t call me up on this growth.

The fun suprise was a potato that I just put in a pot. It had sprouted in the kitchen and it
was obvious that it wanted to grow up more than I wanted to eat it.  I just put it in a pot
and in july I had a bunch of baby potatoes Yum.

Best pic of the spring

So its come to my attention that I have not updated things on this site in like…forever.

Good news is that I have a job. I recently was hired with a company called Interlegis.  We do eDiscovery. I was hired on to work on the next generation User Interface.  Its been extremely interesting for me. I really do like GUI work, and the challenges that they have put me against have been keeping  my brain running at 110% since I started. Speed is always a factor in any application, but its even more in this case since it is used by lawyers….who do not come cheap!  These are the things I’ve been working on.

This is my first time working downtown too. That has been interesting.  Im not a big fan of the commute, but at least half of the folks in the company seem to live within a few miles of me (in Plano). We are all in the same boat.  The Dart drops me off right in front of the building.

Its been fun exploring downtown during lunch too.  Im in th West End, so its easy to walk to
the tunnels under the bank building or pop in to House of Blues to say hi to Snakebite.

Finally, it is nice to be part of a team.  During my years at Nortel, I rarely felt like I  was on a “mission critical” team.  My last project at Nortel had a good team feeling. My manager felt it
was important and he was right…still, when Nortel was going wheels off, there was a sense that there was nothing I could about it.

With this new job, the whole company is in one office, and I feel not only that I can make a difference, but that things are hinging as much on my performance as the rest of the team. Sounds cool to me. I can deliver.

So that’s that. If anybody reading this is in the downtown area, let me know. I hope to chronicle my observations on downtown a bit.  So far, its been mostly wandering around the tunnels.  There are plenty of unique food experiences to be had (Treebirds was a neat find).

More to come.

I’m still looking for a job.  I was extremely lucky to have a severance or funemployment as my friend Kirk called it. I am waiting on the results of a few interviews, but at this point I’m not holding my breath.

Its a strange time. The economy is in the toilet and my job prospects look bleaker and bleaker. At the same time, we are at the cusp of an incredible change. Obama swears in tomorrow. I believe!

So, I play fiddle…and find myself in fairly rednecky parts of Texas from time to time.  In late November I was in the middle of Texas during the peak of deer season at a bar where EVERYBODY was wearing khaki or camo or some kind of combo of the two. While waiting to play my set, I overheard a group talking about our President elect.  It was about 10 minutes of jokes really.  Most were rehashes of jokes that had been floating around forever involving watermelons and food stamps and whatever. The interesting thing was when they ran out of jokes to tell…the redneckiest, whitest (except for his teeth) and hickiest of the lot said “You know…to be honest….I voted for the guy and I think he really can do something about this fucked up shit.”  Several of them all nodded in agreement and acknowledged that they had voted for Obama as well.  Maybe some of them did vote for him, maybe they didn’t. Who knows, but I feel that there was a bit of solidarity and hope for our nation at that point. Pretty amazing considering the proximity to Crawford, Tx! I Believe.

I So I’m pretty positive for the most part. Unfortunately, Nortel has declared bankruptcy so those severance. In my case, its was pretty close to being up anyway.  Not a big deal except for the rather abrupt stopping of medical benefits. I don’t have any medical issues that are a problem…I’m just kinda accident prone. Thank God that’s not a pre-existing condition.

What sucks are the poor folks still at Nortel who will NOT see a severance at all. If your really interested, a pretty good discussion can be found at www.allaboutnortel.com. I know a few people that were just laid off before Christmas and they will not see a severance at all. Considering all that, my timing was optimal. The prospect of a severance was the only thing keeping folks on board.  Now that there is zero incentive to stick around, you can bet the best and brightest of the bunch will be jumping ship. I seriously lucked out.

I feel that I used my time off wisely. I gained two Java certifications.  SCJP and SCWCD.  I had hoped that this would give me an edge in my search. I’ve been happy with my progress so far. It has helped keep me on  my toes and I have tons of info at my fingertips. Im a quick study. I’ve never been modest about that, and I feel like I’m at the top of my game right now in respect to my coding/designer skills.  I got SCWCD in 6 weeks. And all that over the holidays. It is kinda addictive really. Its just a matter of learning stuff…something I’m good at.

I feel like I could write a whole blog on the interviews I’ve had. But…ya know…that’s one of those things that you cant really blog about these days without it coming back to bite you.  Remember kids, the Internet is forever.  That picture of you and the donkey lady CAN and WILL resurface twenty years from now. Emails get forwarded, pictures get reposted and google caching lasts longer than you think.  My only tips are to use Google extensively.  If your going to interview for a job that requires Swing, Google: “Swing interview Questions”.  Don’t be surprised when you hear the exact same questions in an interview. OK, at least ACT surprised.

Concerning the job market, the pool of jobs gets smaller and smaller. Thousands of folks are getting laid off and there are maybe dozens of jobs on the market.  So I’m at a crossroads at figuring what kind of tech I should acquire next and that’s where I’m at.

What next?  The two obvious J2EE paths are Web services and EJB.  I’m leaning towards EJB. I hear the web services is a lot of work and to be honest, the cert is a little out of date. Other areas are Struts, Spring and Hibernate. In order to learn those, my best bet would be to pretty much make my own site from scratch. This is a Wordpress site with a few PHP customizations that I did because I could.  Not enough to base a resume on.

Maybe I should start giving Violin lessons.

I just passed my SCWCD (Sun Certified Web Component Designer) test with an 86%. So thats two certifications under my belt. This certifies that I know JSP, servlets, custom tags, EL and a smattering of OO patterns. It was a pretty brutal test. I spent about 7 weeks preparing for it…and we are talking long study sessions and tons of exercises. There are books to help you out, but for the most part, it is self directed study.

Was it worth it? Well…maybe. I now have a very good idea of how they work and could probably do ok in a job interview. The material REALLY helped in my last interview with SWA. Im still waiting on the results for that.

The big thing is that I can put it on my resume. This is a big deal in the tech world. ALL resumes are searched, scanned, sorted and trashed E-lec-tron-ically with search engines. With the job market like it is, an employer just has to search for all the suitable resumes by keyword.  Since many JAVA jobs need JSP, they just trash the resumes that don’t have those keywords before even looking at them. It doesn’t matter if you have the PERFECT resume…if you don’t have those critical keywords, nary a human eye will gaze upon it.

So, whats to stop me from just putting on those things on paper. Integrity. I feel that my resume needs to reflect who I am. I would never put a skill down that I didn’t feel good about. There are a few that I have not used for a while…like LDAP, or C++, but I know it well enough to get back to the swing of things quickly.

I did find a trick to get by the robots. I do NOT have a problem with the following strategy.

So you are getting kicked out of the pool because you dont have SOA, Soap, JAX, and the like. You know enough to interview, but your resume is not getting the right hands.  This certification process is GOLDEN.  Just put in your resume that you are studying for the next certification that covers those keywords.

In progress: SCDJWS Certification: SOA, SOAP, JAX and whatever.

The robots will let you pass and you have a better chance that human eyes will decide your fate.

So, its time to update the resume.  In fact…if your on Monster and all of those boards, I found that just refreshing the resume helps.  Change your statement, reorder your skills…anything. Fools the robots.

Come on out and see the Ghoultown show at the Doublewide tonight. Friday, Nov 21st! Good times.

I had the chance to play on their latest album. Drink with the living dead!

I love sitting in for a song or two when I have time. Playing something different helps exercise my chops and Ghoultown is different to say the least. Dark, twangy…I always had a hard time describing what they do. Kinda like a cross between a Morricone Spaghetti Western score and the Misfits. Gothabilly?..who knows…its always a good time high energy set. Ill be sitting in for night of the living dead and one more song.

Chris from Zoviet records made the stuff I played sound really sweet.

Basically, with me…..Ill record with anybody for a song or two. If its a considerable contribution to the project, then I might consider asking for a little gas money but playing on a song or two only makes
me a better studio player. I always practice the heck outta whatever I can. Im not particularly the cleanest player, but there is a certain rough twang that I can add. Im consistant too. Generally, my first take will be about the same as my fifth. I will have about two or three ideas of how I think it will sound and if they trash all the efforts..its no skin off of my back. Whatever. I dont have an ego at all about it.

With Ghoultown I felt bad that I was a few minutes late getting to the studio. Still, it took longer to set up the mics than my recording. I was in and out in less than 20 minutes. Chris did some cool splicing and dicing with the fiddle riffs sprinkling some shuffles in parts that never even called for it.  Its on their myspace

So, come on out. The cover is CHEAP. Like 5 bucks. The Skeletons are opening.

I passed the SCJP 1.5 (Sun Certified Java Programmer) test today.

Yippee!

It is THE certification for the Java language. (At least java1.5) Not sure yet if that alone will help me in my job search, but I do feel that it was worth the effort. I have been programming in Java for 8 years and there were still a few things that I had never come across before researching all the required objectives.

The hardest part is that a majority of the test seems to be on Java syntax and API knowledge. At work, I use Eclipse as an IDE. This is sort of like using Microsoft Word to write a paper. You don’t have to worry as much about grammar and spelling when the computer can check it for you. With the right plugins and hotkeys, the code almost seems to write itself . The engineer in me just puts a best effort at what I want the code to do and the computer fills in the blanks with suggested API calls and compiler error fixes. The futurist in me says its only going to get BETTER.

So much nicer than the days where you wrote in VI on a terminal and it took the compiler 2 minutes to tell you that you forgot a semicolon!!!

Study hints:

Javaranch

mnemonics! HashMap <-> put (); Flashcards!!!

Also….copy the code to you computer and run it over and over. Particularly the thread stuff.

To practice notifyAll(), I made an example involving ELVIS. Guess what I called the method that invoked notifyAll(). Ok…it was hasLeftTheBuilding(); Again…this stuff pretty much writes itself. As good code should.

Seriously, rerun all code examples on your computer and go over them with a fine tooth comb. The probability that a code snippet that you run across on the internet is ACTUALLY on the test is higher than you think. Some of the snippets looked REALLY familiar.

Write code…threads, regex and generics.  Do it! If you dont do it..you didn’t do it.

What does it mean? It does look good on a resume. The most important part is that I can communicate my ideas better using the actual terms for things rather than technically incorrect terms like “doohickey”, “thingamabob” and “foo”.

(my spell checker says that doohicky is really doohickey.  Pbbbt!)

I also can use the Sun Logo on my blog and resume…after I get permission. Best 300 bucks ever spent.

I suppose I’ll have to wait to post it though because you need to login/register blah blah blah.

In the meantime, Ill use this as my “I’m Bona Fide” logo.

I have prospects. Im a keeper!