Z

I am mainly going to be updating a myspace page now since it seems easier to keep up to date
http://profile.myspace.com/zogren

I may try to double post blog entries if I can find an easy way to do that

Interviews, Interviews and more Interviews.  I'm getting a lot of calls from "headhunters" and a few from actual companies. I have an interview with PeopleSoft today and am still waiting to hear back from a consulting company where I had two phone interviews and a half day of in person interviews. Friday I have to figure out how to get out to Pacheco for an interview at a bank (for a Java support and development position); I guess if I get that job I will eventually have to get a car since via public transport it looks like it will take over 2 hours each way.

Ive been trying to ramp back up on my Java skills and look at new things like endpoint interfaces for webservices in the new EJB spec and XDoclet which lets you have your ant acripts create your depolyment descriptors from JavaDoc style comments in the code.

I havnt been doing as much work with Indybay lately. It seems like more people are finding it and posting some pretty good content, but there is also a lot of pretty crazy stuff...

I have pretty much given up on finding part-time work so everything I'm looking at is full-time with at least six months comittment. The most promising interview I had, I think I blew by telling the managers that I plan on returning to school in a year or two if I can't have a flexible schedule that would allow me to take math classes at Berkeley.

Most positions Im looking at are J2EE/Struts/Oracle webservice type jobs; some are six month contracts with hourly consulting companies and some are full-time jobs. I had a promising interview with a consulting company that sounds a lot like Lante (where I used to work for years) but I havent heard back so I'm not sure what to think. Not having worked at a paying job in a year seems to be a big deal especially with the recruiters calling me. I have been building sample applications to ramp back up on my CMP entity bean skills and learn how to use Hibernate. I'm also fooling around with Swing apps since one job interview may have a Swing frontend and an EJB based backend. None of this stuff is particualy hard but expecially with recuiters they want someone who won't need any rampup time, which seems pretty unrealistic since setting up a clients development environment and getting familiar with the legacy code is going to require a few weeks of rampup time even if you have been working with similar systems at your previous job.

I may start working on Indybay code again if I feel like there isnt much more to learn with the newer Java technologies I need to review (although it may be good to memorize design pattern names and practice UML diagraming too). The calendar code needs to be reworked and people also seem to want a better user admin system.... Its all PHP/MySQL so it wont help much with any jobs Im interviewing for :(

Well, school is out and I'm now looking for a job for the summer and perhaps even for the next few years. I didn't get into UC Berkeley's math graduate program, so next year I may again be taking graduate classes through concurrent enrollment if I can find a part-time job. Otherwise I may have to take a full-time job for a few years to save up money to take classes again.

I haven't had a lot of time to help with the Indybay site lately. There have been a few updates on the Iraq and Palestine pages I have helped with and I took some pictures at a protest last week but I need a little bit of a break now that school is out (and aside from spending time looking for a job, I moved into a new apartment and have to spend some time fixing it up).

I've been doing a lot of work on the Indybay Iraq and Afghanistan pages.

I aded two new blurbs to the Indybay site one on Iraq and one on the California Youth Authority(CYA). I also posted a bunch of stuff on Moqtada al-Sadr since it seems like he will be the major story in Iraq soon.

Wow, mahtin took some good pictures from an abortion rights protest last night ( 1 2 ). I couldnt make it since I had class until 5PM. Today I had to buy a book from Codys for one of my math classes since they were out at the used bookstores and the textbook places (and I tried to order it used from Amazon but the used bookstore ran out so my order got cancelled). It cost over $120 for the one book. Maybe I will need to start working part-time before this summer. I am living off savings from a software job I had for 6 years and while I almost have enough to hold out until next year, it is probably good not to run out since grad school looks like it may not be self-supporting anymore.

In more depressing news, Salam Pax's website is having issues; Raed may not write anymore. I really liked his political opinions on that site :(