[PaulHoule]

In 2000 I was writing chapters for programming books with Wrox Press, I think they could have taken as much as I could have written, but consulting work paid better. I got a job working remote for an MIT MBA and McKinsey alumni developing a chat service aimed at Portuguese speaking markets (esp. Brazil.). I was also spending a lot of time doing activism for the green party and worked as an enumerator for the 2000 census.

The Brazil gig ended and my wife and I decided to have a kid anyway, finding a real job took a while, particularly six months of working to get an academic organization to create a line item to hire me, but I got a job (starting summer 2002) that lasted five years until my whole university had a financial crisis.

For maybe a year after I got hired we had Bay Area refugees showing up in town and hiring them for web development, I think the hype train pulled out of the station by 2003 or so.