Human Costs of a Bad Economy

I have been traveling around the country for the past 90 days through the Midwest, the east coast and the south and staying in a lot of hotels.  Most recently my hotel in Daytona Beach.

Now my hotel is right on the ocean.  In fact my balcony faces the ocean and the pool.  All in all not a bad place that I got for $32.50 a night.  Now Daytona Beach is a resort town.  All most all of the business here comes from the tourists.  With the state of the economy there are virtually no tourists around, the hotels and restaurants are getting almost no business.  Ditto for the tourist shops.  You can almost watch them close all up and down Atlantic Boulevard.

As a geek I make pretty good money.  As a matter of fact I probably make more then any of the cooks, house keepers or shopkeepers around here.  it is sad when you hear some have cut back on hours to less then 20 hours a week.  I mean they already don't make that much and now they make half of that and most of them are not that well off.

You can only hope it gets better soon for all of us.

Sunny Florida

Well, I am the second elgant coder to be outside of the Boise, Id area.  I have moved to Florida and am currently camped in a hotel on Ormond Beach. 

Although I enjoyed my 10 years in Boise it was time to move on.  After being riffed off from Micron I was pretty much at ends as to what was keeping me in Boise.  I had originally moved there in 1997 to be around my mom.  After she died in 2003 there was little keeping me in Boise except for momentum.  I had no real reason to change.  Micron's layoffs gave me a good reason to think about moving on.

I have always wanted to see a shuttle launch and wanted to be around a ocean again.  So with those two criteria Florida was really the only choice.   I spent two months driving across America seeing family I had not caught up with in years.  In addition I spent some time just seeing the country.  Something I have wanted to do for years.  I traveled 9000 miles in 60 days and went from one end of the country to the other.  A great trip for me and the cat (although I am not sure the cat would agree :-)).  I will be posting some blog entries about the trip over the next few weeks.

For now I am planning on staying on Florida for a while.  I will start looking for full time work next week.  I am excited about the change and looking forward to some new challenges.