:Dread Pirate PJ’s House of Hacks and Tricks

Over the last month, I’ve been doing some late late night web work for free for some old college friends. Emphasis on old, ha ha! Hi Nads! Hi Erin!

These friends have been wonderful to me through the years, taking care of me and mine when things went bad, and just being there for me the rest of the time. The least I can do is share server space and bandwidth, and help them out with my mad skillz.

My friend Erin is publishing her own novel, which she has been working on for years. I made a promotional website for her book, and I’ve just finished setting her up with a web store. We’re finally live!

Jane E, Friendless Orphan : a Memoir is a sci-fi novel based on Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre. She basically did a rewrite of a 1800s blockbuster hit chick flick (if there had been blockbuster hit chick flicks in the 1800s, that’s what Jane Eyre would have been.) And in my opinion, my friend Erin turned it into a William Gibson / Bruce Sterling epic, with touches of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brönte romanticism. I did her site late at night in between work, family and sleep, so it isn’t as kick ass as I’d have liked. But I’ll revamp it over the next few weeks.

I’d like to ask for a favor from my readers. Go check out her site, read the novel excerpts, and blog about it.

If you’re interested in buying my friend’s novel AND you’ve blogged about it, I can get you a 5% off discount coupon code to use on her web store. Tell your readers, get them to blog, and not only do they get a 5% discount code too, you get a 10% off discount. (These discounts are sponsored by me. You’ll get your money off, and I will cover my friend’s full price. Everybody wins.)

Help my friend pick up some Google juice, and get some money off on some summer reading (it also would make a great gift for those graduating seniors.) No bloggy, no tickie.

Comment here once you’ve blogged about it. I will also check Technorati trackbacks on this post, to see how the experiment is going, and work out which coupon you’ve earned. It can hardly be called work to write a few paragraphs (specially when you can quote from here and her website), and you get to save some money on some great reading material.

And thanks!

My other friend’s website isn’t so serious, and it literally took me 30 minutes to set up, and it’s not so potentially kick ass because I didn’t write any of the web code. But it’s no less special. Nada Boldly Going Nowhere, is a photo gallery, plain and simple. Maybe someday she’ll get further with the times, and ask me to set her up with a blog. It will be a cooking blog, probably. Or a knitting blog. Or a gardening blog. If we go by 70% of the pictures in her gallery, it will be a kitty porn blog. (Update: she’s put up more pictures, and the ratio of cats to other things has shifted. So it’s now a more heterogeneous mix. Oh well.)

I can’t coerce you to blog about this one, as there are no products for sale involved. But visit the site if you’d like. Blog about it if you want.

At any rate, help me and my friends pick up some Google juice, and I’ll make it worth your while.

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This past Monday, I started a new exciting, but short chapter in my self-employment. A few hours after I had posted my last entry, I received an email from a good friend down here in PR, asking if I was doing contract work.

I am now working on my first for pay Ruby on Rails project. I’ve been learning Rails on my own time and dime for almost a year now. This will be a good opportunity, and good for the résumé. Self-study doesn’t amount for much in a job interview without real work to show for it. This should help me find more Rails work after this project is done.

The skeleton for the project is mostly done, but my friend has run out of steam after working solo on it, part-time, for many months. He has a two-person IT services company to run. His wife does sales, contract negotiation, marketing, chamber of commerce stuff, etc., while he is the only technical employee, servicing many customers, and integrating solutions for new ones.

As good Catholics, they also have three children to take care of, another full-time job.

He has hired me to help finish this new product, over two weeks. Considering he doesn’t have any comments in the code, it’s going extremely well.

I work three days from home and two at the office with my friend. If only my broadband ISP had any decency and the cable modem didn’t loose signal often, everything would be peachy.

Meanwhile, I continue looking for work in the USA. Résumés have been sent out to all traveling consultant companies I know of, and a dozen more have been sent to companies in PA, including my ex-employer from 2001 (the bastards are still around! Ha!)

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Hello, gang.

My two year old start up went belly up for lack of funds in February, and life has been interesting since, to say the least. It was an open source company/experiment, so the products we created are still available. Everything else about the project is still the same, we’re just not getting paid and we work on it from home on our own time, instead of full-time from a furnished office. You can find out more at the project’s SourceForge pages.

For a few weeks in March, I was consulting locally, doing Java Enterprise Edition development for a software company that makes banking software for credit unions. It’s good to get back to doing Java from the enterprise developer’s perspective. At the start up I mentioned above, I was doing Java from the virtual machine’s perspective, and it’s a whole other world.

After the credit union software work dried up, I started doing some easy web work here and there, setting up simple promotional websites for various people and organizations. It seems everybody down here wants a basic website with at least email newsletter sign-up, and a mini-blog for displaying news about their activities.

Among my clients, there was this one high school senior class, from a nearby well-to-do private school. They wanted a place to promote their activities before and after graduation. They paid upfront for hosting for two years! That’s ridiculous, but it was enough to pay my bills for some months. I’m making a living here, you know, and the customer is always right.

So that brings me to the close of this blog post. This on again off again web work isn’t cutting it. I need to find some permanent work soon (that’s what I meant by “hardly working” above.) I’ve applied to traveling consultant gigs at a few USA companies, and I’ve applied to “regular”, non-traveling IT staff jobs in Pennsylvania. (I have friends and family there, and I worked just outside Philadelphia, before the dot-com bubble burst sent me packing, five years ago.)

Let’s see what’s in store for me next!

Sayonara for now! Take care, y’all!

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