>Right now in the States most people are grateful to have any job at all. The company where I have been contracting for 9 months is crap in a thousand ways and most of the employees dislike it intensely. It was kind of OK and then the beheadings of 10% of the staff took a serious toll on morale. When the job market warms up again they will pour out of there in droves.

It's not as bad over here, but my billable H had a range of between a dozen to slightly above 200 per month this century...

>I went for a bike ride this afternoon. My legs felt like logs, lol. I am not in horrible shape for a 53 year old guy but have definitely been out of the exercise habit.

Yupp, steady and challenging job can have bad side effects. Good for you to get out! Get to like the twitches of the following day again, and give yourself at least some time for stretching, better still an H in the sauna.

>And yes, I plan to use whatever downtime there is usefully. The first choice is going to be what to focus on. I have books and study materials on C#, WPF 4, Entity Framework, ASP.NET, ADO.NET (apparently dead so forget that) and need to choose a focus. I know enough C# to be dangerous but the rest are mysteries to me.

ADO.Net is still a great fallback position if you are running into walls of front and middle tier incompatibility. Usually you can pipe into Ado.Net with just a few lines [with the resulting hit on large data sets] but you have at least a workable solution until you ironed out the kinks of the particular approach asked for on the job.

>http://s0.ilike.com/play#Gram+Parsons:In+My+Hour+Of+Darkness:153219:s30803711.8792630.2257504.0.1.75%2Cstd_f98594a45eacaad9298ee3ba164f26cd

Yupp, a dash of country has nice touches. Still, for self-motivation I prefer some shades of glam rock
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCPOVDwPNGc&feature=related
[could not find a a better live version, but the studio one picks me up as well]

So, speaking in precious metals: Hold your Head up

thomas

lCPOVDwPNGc