Back to the old world order

When we "won" the cold war, we didn't win at all. By bringing China and Russia into capitalist society, we sealed our own doom. History has shown again and again that men gravitate to the feudal system, where a few people own all the resources and the rest of us just try to eek out a living. The rise of the US after WWII was the first time where a middle class was allowed to think they could live like rich people. Even during the Renaissance, the merchant class had no delusions that they were anything other than tools of the rich. But Americans really started believing that anybody could break into the fraternity. Once the dollar is no longer the reserve currency, that delusion will go away and we, the American middle class, will slowly become the lower class. I hope the handful of people who made it into the fraternity enjoy it, because the rest of us are in for nothing but pain as our USD based assets become worth nothing.

Semester is over

As usual, teaching was fun but university politics isn't.

Spring Break

I haven't had to drive from Lewisville to SMU and back this week. What a relief. Instead, I've been in Vista/Eclipse/Maven/JBoss/Spring/Hibernate hell. Vista changes files to read only. Move a file in Eclipse and suddenly errors that aren't errors but won't go away appear. Maven wipes out the file structure of WTP until I figured out which .settings files to edit. JBoss has conflicting xerces and jsf jars. Spring has sprung. It's too much. Something has to give. Hibernate is gone. Too little value added for the pain.

Yesterday I saw a message from a person on LinkedIn who was shocked he was laid off. After all, he was a CCIE. Calm down, dude. Broadcasting panic to the universe is a natural first reaction, but it needs to be squelched. People are hiring but are being inundated with applications. You may have to take less money than you're used to.

Businesses that pay as they go instead of borrowing to operate will come out of this. Check on your customers and see what they need. Ask them if they know anybody who needs it, too. People are still spending money for necessities. Make sure they consider you to be necessary.

From no jobs to two jobs

I stopped blogging when teaching started, but I didn't stop looking for jobs, but my focus changed. I stopped looking at large corporations with big IT packages and started looking at small private businesses that needed web help. I found a company with a good product looking to upgrade to the types of MVC packages I'm familiar with and it's a good fit. So for a while I'll be teaching and working and that's pretty much it. I like having skin in the game. New product will make it because I will it to be so.

I'm on a roll now

So this university uses Blackboard. I can't begin to imagine how many millions of dollars they've spent on installing and maintaining this system, but I know that it's built on the same IT technologies like SAP and PeopleSoft that large corporations spend millions on, too. One instructional designer I know says it's because eLearning was created by the defense department to train fighter pilots and such. Small community colleges and inner-city schools can't afford this bloatware. There are great open source packages like Joomla and Drupal that can be used to build similar sites for next to nothing. It's no wonder large corporations are collapsing under their own weight.

More on education

So, rather than college, how about training? Those guys are out of control, too. A week long class costs $3000? So I take a class and a test and get certified? No, to be certified, you have to take five classes. That's $15,000. So when these recruiters - and there are flocks of them buzzing around the same 3 jobs - say get certified, I have to laugh. I have a masters degree, I've seen the certification materials and have already used these skills in my jobs, and they expect me to pay $15,000 to get a piece of paper that says I know how to do what I already know how to do? Get real.

Education is out of control

I took a part-time teaching job while I look for full-time work and the first week, I had several students ask me if they had to buy the textbook. Que the heck? I did a bit of research and the book bundle costs $250. You can't sell back your old books if they are updating the edition the next year, so there were no used books for them to buy, and no hope of selling theirs at the end of the semester. The books date quickly, so there's no reason to hang on to them, but no way to sell them via the school bookstore. I showed one student how to buy previous editions online. I told them to list them on craigslist and I would tell the next semester's students to look there.

And that's just books. Tuition at this school - by their own numbers - is more than $43,000 a year. So to get a bachelors degree, they either need lots of scholarships, their parents go in debt or they come out deep in debt. It would be different if we taught them how to learn. Then they could learn what they need to on their own for free.