June dawns damp and dreary.

Over the long weekend, I have made some decisions about next steps. Of greatest significance, I think, I plan to spend the next couple of months concentrating on technical education. For this month, anyway, I will take courses through the DBM online service. They have several courses on Perl and XML. ACM also provides a good catalog of online courses. I'll also be exploring options at nearby colleges, including schools as far away as UMass Amherst. Again, I'll focus mostly on hands-on technical education. Depending on my next job, I'll consider degree programs at a later time.

If I was retired, there's no question that I'd purse a graduate degree, Master's or Ph. D., in American history and related fields. So, why the technical education now? For one, I need to have a better understanding of some key technologies if I'm going to be successful in my next job. For another, it's interesting stuff. I'm not going to transform myself into in a Java developer with a few courses; it's doubtful that I could become one, irrespective of the amount of study that I took. No, I want better technical understanding and the ability to write small utility applications to help automate selected tasks. For example, I'd like to be able to write a program that would read my iTunes music library and produce different output formats. I was never a great programmer. In fact, it was a struggle to be adequate. If, however, I can read code more easily and write a little, I could have an easier time of it in my next job.