Since mylast entry RLXTechnologies has folded, leaving me (yet again) on the job hunt. They aren't actually shut down but they cut 80% of the staff. The hardware guys up in Portland got picked up by intel, so I've been told. I'm not sure how manyfrom my group are left but I think they're all there. At least they said they were keeping the software group in order to reform the company into a software company. My guess is they're trying to sell it off to one of the blade makers. With IBM and HP already having their own blade management software, it would appear dell would be the likely target. But that's purely speculation. I'm outta there, and have no inside scoops for anyone.

Interestingly enough, some recruiter – who claimed they had exclusive rights for recruiting for the storage division – contacted me in early January to say Dell was interested in talking to all the RLX folks. I bet. I told her they probably weren't interested in me since they fired me back in the early 90's, along with about 200 other engineers. Michael didn't want investors to think he was having a layoff, so he forced people out over a three month span. Nasty tactics. So I probably won't work for Dell again. It wouldn't be right, what with me considering Michael Dell to be the antichrist and all that.

But this does present the option of finally getting out of the high tech desert of Houston and into someplace where jobs are more plentiful. Austin is one possibility. Colorado and Washington are others. Washington seems to have lots of linux jobs open – even jobs specifically asking for “open source Developers”. Must be some of the MS millionaires bailing for better trails. My family and I would prefer Colorado. It's drier than Houston (a swimming pool is drier than Houston) and the mountains and clear air are hard to resist.

So far I've had quite a few inquiries from recruiters but only one real interview – a phone screening from amazon. That one caught me off guard because it was a second interview. The first was over two months ago and I was left with the impression that I wasn't a fit for their needs. Turns out I was being screened for some other group. The interviewer didn't even know what group or what the job duties would be. How can you screen for that? Anyway, it didn't go well. I'm rather beligerent when asked to write a fibonaci sequence function over the phone. Seems a waste unless I know its being used for something useful.

I've had direct contacts from a couple of companies in California, but we decided against California when we looked at housing prices. It's ridiculous. To get even close to what we can get here or even Colorado I'd have at least at two hour commute each way to work. It's just not worth it. So the search continues.

One the brighter side of things, I've got the go ahead from a publisher to start work on my next book. Won't say what it will be on but will say it's right up my alley. As soon as the contracts are all signed and I get the okay from them I'll have more to say about the book.

writing is keeping me busy when I'm not hunting through Monster, Dice or Hot Jobs. I put out two articles for the first issue of Tux. That should be out sometime in February. I'm also still pumping out articles for linux format. Writing should keep me very busy for the next year.

Minimyth kind of went in a different direction. I was the official build maintainer for that up until the holidays. I got busy (see above) and the original author did too. When I got back to it earlier this week I discovered he'd switched to another build system based on GAR. Wish he would have told me. Ah well. That's probably a better overall build system though at the moment I haven't figured out how to build small pieces instead of the whole thing (which takes many hours to complete – even more than myoriginal build). It would be nice to do “make kernel” or “make mythtv” or similar but I'm not sure you can do that yet. The good thing about the gar build is that it does a complete cross compile of the environment so technically it could be extended to build for any platform and not just the epia M boards.

I finally got the articles section of my web site working. It's a set of php scripts. By making the content dynamic it allows me to upload the articles almost verbatim from how I originally wrote them. That includes the pseudo-markup I use that tells the magazines where titles, images, and sidebars go. It wasn't hard to put together the scripts. I just need the time. Something I seem to have lots of these days. sigh.

Speaking of PHP, I had a consultation today with a guy here in The Woodlands about a project he's putting together for his company. He wanted some help getting organized , trying to decide if PHP/mysql was the best solution. It was a good meeting, though I'm not sure I helped him solve that question. I did pass on his needs to some folks at RLX – one to the HR lady because he said he was looking for some salespeople and one to one of the guys who may still be at RLX. I thought me might be able to do some side contract work for this guy. The development work isn't really up my alley – too much database stuff. But I may help him do some architecting of the larger, scaled up system across multiple servers.

That's the update for now. Back to the writing biz – it's paying (part of ) the bills for now.