Rob the Fiddler

So after all of this not working, I figured I needed another vacation. Actually, I have been working pretty hard getting certifications, applying for jobs and preparing for interviews. Its been kinda frustrating, but the economy is still a little shaky.

I thought a road trip to New Orleans would be nice before it gets all crowded for Mardi Gras. Unfortunatly, as Im writing this, my tooth is kinda acting up and the lymph node under it, in my jaw is visibly swollen. Since the severance benefits stop on Friday, I had to set up an appointment with the dentist and cut this show short. Still, I covered a lot for a day I think. I’m still hoping to see stuff tomorrow before my trip back.

The drive from Dallas is pretty much 8 hours. Lots of cops. The radio station situation is not all that bad if your into Classic Rock. Its Skynyrd Country. Don’t speed.

You don’t really seem to pass a lot of little towns or gas stations. Its not like I-35 from Dallas to Austin. I know just about every rest stop, jerky retailer and roadside oddity like the back of my hand. There are plenty of opportunities to buy cracklins however if your into that kind of thing.

My hotel was just one block north of Bourbon street. Pretty sweet deal at 54 bucks a night, but you have to have to take parking into account. Its not free, and they wanted 25 bucks a night. Its much cheaper outside the quarter, off of Rampart. Deals can be found on CheapTickets.com as well as the visitors center. I got a huge room (well…biggest one on the floor at least).

One of the first things I wanted to do was locate a bottle of Peychaud. Its a locally made bitters that I suppose you can only really buy in New Orleans (or online Im sure). It was easy to find at the stores in the French Quarter. Pretty good stuff. I actually dig bitters and 7 Up. Its supposed to be the key ingredient to Sazerac.

Cari suggested I check out the Acme Oyster Company. The Oyster Po boy was very good.

Mostly spent the rest of the night watching drunks walking up and down Bourbon street.

The last time I was on Bourbon Street, I went with my friends Dan and Alicia. We started at a bar that offered 3 for 1 drinks. That pretty much put an end to the evening quickly. I didn’t want to make that mistake twice. I did try a hurricane…but…eh I cant say it was all that good. I think next time I’ll just stick to the Garden District and visiting the French Quarter during the day. The only thing worse than a street full of drunks are a street full of amateur drunks. The bars were not all that stellar and wanted to spend my calories eating!

The next day I took a guided tour into the St Louis cemetery. I had heard that you don’t want to just wonder around by yourself there. Apparently, the cemetary is next to the housing projects. These are all evacuated however so the locals seemed to indicate that it was not as bad as it used to be. Still, Im glad I got the tour. I learned a lot more about the area and the way folks interacted because of it. I used this Tourgroup. The tour guides name was Lloyd Sensat. Good guide.

Those pics are here

Here is our guide at the crypt of Marie Laveau. Our tour guide also suggested that the best music, bars and food were to be found off of Frenchmens street. I wish I had more time to check that out.

I passed up the usual Cafe Du Monde and had my Biegnets at Cafe Beignet. They tasted just as good to me and I didn’t have the wait in line.

I had an afternoon snack at a place called Coops.
I had a bowl each of “Rabbit and sausage jambalaya” and Gumbo. I think I got the bottom of the pan Jamabalaya becuase it was a little burnt, but still it was very tasty. The Gumbo seemed to have both file and Okra. I thought the two were not mixed. Still, I enjoyed it.

Lots of walking.

Did I capture a Ghost?

Dinner was at the Gumbo Shop. This place was great. It has a nice patio and the food comes out fast!

Played some video poker at Harrah’s. I didn’t win….still gotta look for a job.

Finally I drove down Magazine St through the Garden District at night looking for a place called Zotz. Pretty cool little coffee house. Open 24/7. Free wifi and open computers. My kinda place. Dont listen to the haters.

All in all, a pretty good 24 hours in NOLA.

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!

The Sues were invited to play at the 42nd 2008 International Chili festival in Terlingua this year. It was a BLAST. The pictures are all here.

There are actually two chili festivals held next to each other on the same weekend. Both claim to be the original. One is called “Behind the Store” and the other is “CASI“, the Chili Appreciation Society of America. I’m still not entirely sure of the story behind this, but the “Behind the Store” Tolbert/Fowler one is where we played at. Its smaller, but its the one with the highest musical pedigree. Any die hard fan of Texas Music would love to see the likes of Gary P Nunn, Jerry Jeff Walker, Mark David Manders (or us maybe) at this festival.

Its 600 miles from Dallas. A LONG trip. It took us 10 hours to get there (with a few stops). The landscape is beautiful. I wish I had more time to explore on my own. In the meantime, here is a good description of the area I dug up on the interwebs.

DPS was out in full force for the weekend. I was told (and let me tell you, the campground had no lack of storytellers) that 40% of the force was out on the roads. Another report was that all the rookies patrol the roads as training. In any case, they were doing a zero tolerance sweep of ANYBODY on the road. If you were as much as 1 mile over the limit you would get a ticket. We did see a lot of cops on the road. If the intent was to keep folks in the campgrounds…..it worked.

We rolled into camp at Dusk on Thursday and set up tents and Friday we took a road trip to Lajitas.

Most accounts of Lajitas up until a few years ago usually included words like “sleepy”, “hole” and were told with a stinky expression. A goo Its most notable figure after the days of Pancho Villa was the Mayor Clay Henry. Clay Henry is a goat…a beer drinking goat. For a while you could buy a 6 pack and throw down with the mayor.

Apparently things have changed because the town totally bought up in 2003 and turned into a resort. The sleepy town has been turned into what looks like a movie set.

These are actually luxury accommodations behind all of the facades.

Clay Henry was hidden away in “Rehab” as it was no longer politically correct to feed beer to goats. That and PETA threatened to sue.

We came back and mooched around the campground for samples of ribs, chicken, brisket and beans. Those were the competitions for Friday. Plenty of food was provided by the “fire in the hole” boys camping on the “hill”. The Cowboy Breakfast was stellar.

The gig with the Tejas Brothers went well. The crowd danced and yelled and had a great time. It was Halloween night too, so several folks were in costume.

Saturday was the Chili competition. Cooks were up at the crack of dawn a chopping and a cooking. Turn in was at noon.

After turn in, you wander around all the campsites and sample the chili. There is also a presentation aspect to this with all kinds of wacky booths.

Here is Mark David Manders in some kinda zen/chili pose. He had actually asked for a shot of tequila, but got a bowl of red instead.

One thing I noticed was that many folks had custom painted gas stoves.

This distinctive style is painted by Wendell Rankin. I saw at least a dozen stoves across the campground that he had painted. I suppose its the chili equivalent of a rodeo belt buckle.

We were hoping to take a trip to Boquillas. Its a small border town whose economy was dependent on tourists. To get there, you paid a guy to canoe you across the Rio (a 40 ft trip) and then you got a donkey ride into town. It was a good stop for float trips too. Now its pretty much shut down due to heightened security.

Instead, I took a quick trip to the Terlingua ghost town too and checked out the cemetery. The week before, some friends had a skull decorating party. Seemed a fitting place to leave one behind as the next day was the Day of the Dead.

Sat night I played with Mark David Manders and pretty much crashed straight to sleep when we were done. It was nice to hear all the laughing, music and campground noise throughout the night.

Sunday we packed up and faced the long drive home. We had lunch at the Edelweiss Brewery in Alpine, Texas. Surprisingly, I didn’t try the beer. Had a long drive ahead so Ill have to revisit that sometime. The burgers were excellent.

The rest of the band decided to take 67 on the way home. Its a more direct way home, but is potentially slower. The most interesting parts start well past San Angelo and it would be dark by the time I got to that, so I opted to take 20. Besides, on the way down I saw some interesting things in Coyanosa that I wanted to revisit.

I suppose interesting to me is Cotton fields, Chili fields, Pumpkin patches and a fruit stand all in one “no stop light” town. I had never seen chilies growing in a field before. I love growing them, but my plants were never as productive as these. The cotton was all over the place. You know its cotton season when the roads are lined with loose cotton.

The fruit stand had the strangest gourds I have ever seen. To bad nobody was tending the stand. I would have bought one of these. I did stock up on a half dozen topo chicos next door to drink on the way home.

West Texas…looks like this for miles and miles.

I made a quick stop in Midland too. Its a strange city in the middle of nowhere. On the weekend it looks like a ghost town (kinda like Downtown dallas). Nothing was open as far as I could tell downtown. Creepy. I did stop at a drive through Paleta store that was located close to the freeway.

Dallas needs this:

Good times. The Sues plan on going next year….playing or not.