Learn hadoop / lucene / pig / hive / clojure / python / ruby and put your code on github and if you can digest all of these you will get plenty of interesting job offers.
What are ways for someone without access to a Hadoop cluster (and doesn't want to continually pay for, say, Amazon's Elastic Map Reduce) to learn Hadoop/Pig/Hive? I'm a stats/data analysis guy, so I've been wanting to get into big data for a while, but I'm not sure how to progress beyond reading a bunch of tutorials (which I have).
I'm particularly frustrated with brainless Java / .net development jobs.