New project to begin mid-August

I decided this morning that I’m going to start a new project when I get back from vacation.

I’m going to update my resume on DICE, CareerBuilder, and Monster.com, and for the next 30 days, track online how many job opportunities show up in my Inbox (I’ll try to specify that I don’t want to take phone calls, just Emails), and keep a running counter of:

• how many jobs are actually relevant to my skills
• how many opportunities have been sent to me by automated means that don’t reflect my current skills
• opportunities that are quite obviously out of my geographic area despite my relocation disclaimer

It’s only been 24 hours since I updated my resume at CareerBuilder, and I’ve had 249 hits on my resume (prospective employers who have looked had my resume that showed up when doing searches), and have had a handful of Emails showing up which are clearly outside of my realm of desirable jobs (becoming a sales agent for Farmer’s Insurance, or opening a magazine franchise store), or people that have automated an Email to me based on keywords alone (Oooh, he says .NET in his resume, let’s send him this job offer — without reading my summary paragraph that I want to learn .NET).

It’s a little bit funny, in an ironic sense, how automated the whole system is, and how ill-prepared a lot of these recruiters are that are contacting me. Granted, I’m severely limiting my opportunities based on my current location and inability to relocate (we’d have to pay almost $15k to buy out the remainder of our apartment lease plus termination fees), but in the past 24 hours I’ve had exactly TWO opportunities look promising, one of which later turned out to be in an area of Los Angeles that would take me two hours to get to, in each direction. Bleh.

So, check back for the running counter on my "resume update" posts in August.

Aside from all of this, I’ve decided that I’m long overdue for getting Mono running on Gentoo at home to jump into some .NET projects, and fiddle with Tomcat/Ant to learn about some J2EE/JSP. I certainly can’t afford a windoze server and all of the development tools for Microsoft’s .NET platform, plus buying a copy of Struts or BEAlogic/Websphere to get into J2EE. I’ve started really second-guessing myself over staying in PHP for so long. Yeah, I’ve got a decade of experience in LAMP development, but 90% of the jobs out there are .NET/J2EE. Plus, I’d probably double, if not triple, the amount I charge per hour if I knew both .NET/J2EE.