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Yea, I am going to spend this 'down time' honing my skills as a hacker and see what happens from there. As the old adage goes "the proof is in the pudding" and I currently don't have much in the way of 'pudding' to show prospective employers aside from my degree - guess I need to get to brainstorming.

Oh, and concerning moving: my wife is an accountant here and is clearing 60, so yea, not really an option... luckily she can support my broke-a for now.

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Accountants are needed everywhere, so if you're not emotionally/socially tied to Alabama, maybe you want to become a dual-income couple elsewhere.

If you're trapped in Alabama, edw519 makes good suggestions about personalizing your pitch and ibsulon, below, about broadening your search to 'adjacent' positions that could lead to coding.

To build the kind of rep that could get you remote work, do publicly observable projects, on your own or as part of open-source projects. You might also try doing small freelance jobs via other cities' Craigslist, Rentacoder, Elance, Odesk. (You're competing against some very cheap overseas coders but you've got the language and culture down, a first-world degree, and still live in one of the cheapest areas of the US.)

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