chipotle | Before-Coffee Status Report (Reply)

In no particular order:

I’m doing subcontracting work as an editor/proofer for a little bit. Good: the hourly rate is nothing to sneeze at. Bad: I’m unlikely to see any of that money before August. Ugly: cleaning up Microsoft Word documents with complex formatting is nearly always an ordeal.
Merely having a throwaway “studying Ruby on Rails” line on my résumé caused someone to ask me if I could apply for a “Senior Ruby on Rails” developer position. Hmm.
If a contracting company I talked to this week gets awarded a specific government contract, I may be brought on as a web guy. All very “outlook hazy, ask again later” at this point, but it’s a good thought.
Speaking of Ruby on Rails, I’m still plodding through Agile Web Development with Rails, the second edition. I wasn’t kidding, I really am studying it. Maybe eventually I’ll have a project to go along with it. I’m thinking of writing a weblog engine because, you know, there’s just not enough of those out there. (Well, okay, I’m thinking of it because I don’t like most of the weblog engines out there.)

And on a more general level: no, I still don’t know what to do with my life. That’s too much to ask for in a week, I guess; I’m finding I can’t just say, “It’s time for hard decisions, so I’m going to take $tough_road now.” I suppose I’m mostly just hoping to stay stable enough to keep chewing on it for a while, rather than having my direction forced on me again.