1. Read the ad for comprehension.
2. Read the damn ad again. Pay attention to the job requirements.
3. If the ad says “Fill out the application, do not write ‘See Resume’,” DO THIS. Failing to do this means your application will be branded “NO HISTORY.”
4. Understand that every software application, specific location, environment, operating system, and skill is a KEYWORD.
5. Ensure that EVERY keyword is found somewhere in your experience or SKA list.
6. Understand your application either by a bot or by human with bot-like emotions in HR with one point for each required skill or experience. If those are not evident to a non-expert in your field, you receive a ZERO.
7. Understand the hiring manager (me) cannot elevate your application if required skills are not discernible to a field expert and justifiable to the bot.
8. Before submitting your application, read the job ad AGAIN, SIDE BY SIDE with your application.
9. Do not submit until you have repeated items 1-8.
10. Understand this final thing – I have to interview everyone at or above the score I choose. If I have 50 applicants, with five at each of 10 point levels, and you are an 8, do you really think I am going to interview 15 people just to give you a chance? Probably not.
11. Repeat steps 8 & 9.
12. Submit. Pray. Wait. Despair.

Other Considerations.

A list of people not to include as references. This is an exceedingly short list, so it is not hard avoid:

1. Your family. i.e.:
   1. Your spouse.
   2. Your parent(s) or grands.
   3. Your siblings.
   4. Your parents siblings.

We automatically assume your family will give you a good reference, especially if you owe them money. Just for kicks, if you have an ex-spouse from a badly failed marriage, you can include their contact information just for the sheer entertainment value.

….in which a young novice-to-be is turned away from the convent and told to pay off her student loans before she can take her vows. 

Enter a gaggle of nuns singing :

what do you do with student loans like Maria’s ?
How do you make her say, “I will pay and pay and pay.”
How do you find student loan forgiveness for a nun?

I guess she could become a Presyterian (PCUSA) and get debt forgiveness.

I guess she could also find a sugardaddy or would sugarfather be more appropriate?

And just how many rosaries must you pray to be forgiven $18,000 in student debt?

I could go on (and in my head, I have).

One day in summer  2000 (my 38th summer, Zachary’s ninth), the boy and I spent a marvelous day together on the coast. We got up early, packed the car, and drove to Devil’s Lake, the home of the shortest river in the world. We spent some time there tossing spinners and crankbaits to no avail. Mid-morning we moved on down the coast to Newport and the Yaquina Bay where we fished off the docks.

We had fun pulling up sculpins, perch and the occasional crab. It was a blast. We were on a heavy-duty floating dock about 14 inches above the water always for the bite that would be a bigger fish – a keeper. That never came, but something else did.

We were jigging our lines when a dark fin breached the water less than four feet from the dock. “Zachary. Look! What is that?” “A shark?” “No, look again.” Just then the sea lion’s head broke the surface of the water and we saw that it had cruised by on its side.

The large mammal went by and we continued fishing. I started having difficulty with one of my reels and decided to replace it. I told Zach I was going walk up to the car and swap reels. He said he would be fine and as I was about halfway to the car I heard him shout and turned to see him pull up a nice 7 or 8 inch surf perch. I got to the car, made the switch and started back to find Zach coming up the ramp. His hands were empty and he was noticeably pale and shaken.

“What happened?”

“The sea lion tried to get me. “

“What? Come on, don’t lie to me.”

“I’m serious. He came back and by and I threw the perch to him and he dove after it. Then he came back up and tried to get on the dock.”

There was nothing to do but believe him. The local sea lions had been known to take halibut out of the hands of fishermen as they posed for pictures on the docks.

Well, we went back and fished for a while before taking a break for lunch at the nearest KFC. We continued north to Neskowin and played golf at Hawk’s Creek, a wicked nine-hole course on the coast up into a small valley in the Coastal Range. We had a great time playing, picking up with a local man playing alone. As a threesome we found the course shoe-horned into a valley with a blind par three and some very tight holes with no place to bail out. Our scores were not particularly respectable, but it was fun.

Continuing north, we stopped on the Little Nestucca river and fished again. No fish this time, only a lone harbor seal that zipped back and forth under the water in front of us. Occasionally it would pop up and look at us from what it apparently considered to be a safe distance.

We stopped one last time on the way home. Driving east through the mountains we followed an obvious trout stream. Finally, unable to contain our interest and impatience any longer we stopped on the side of the road. Grabbing our fly rods for the first time that day, we climbed down through the bushes to find ourselves beside a dark pool more than large enough for the two of us to fish as novice fly fishermen. During our vacation in August, Zachary had become offended that certain rivers were closed to him for fishing since he was not a fly fisherman. He had begged me for a fly rod and this was his first time to use it in water.

Zach whipped the water for a while before snapping his fly off. While he was retying, I caught a four-inch cutthroat of tremendous beauty and spirit. That was my first time catching a fish with a dry fly and it was delightful! I had owned my rod since I was thirteen – it was a Christmas present from my maternal grandparents. I had never become a fly fisherman but had used it with a spinning reel as an ultralight many times.

That was our day. The day a sea lion tried to eat my son.

Cloud services

It infrastructure sourcing will require staff dedication buy-in be more effective

New shared security infrastructure

Current activities

Preparing transition and disentanglement

Modifying vita structure

Working with(against) customer advisory council

Agency level goals and enterprise level goals…GOAL!!

Transition by June 2019

Create competition within service towers

Dueling Help Desks

Cloud of the week

Competitive procurement waves

Agency participation

Commonwealth is already standardized

Considerations for using the cloud

Security

Contractual

Governance and oversight

Somebody else’s computer.
Somebody else’s computer.
Somebody else’s computer.

It is a small world after all.
No matter how happy it is, there are monsters.
And they will catch you.
And they will eat you.

Sometimes monsters are scaly things, cold of blood,
of teeth and claws,
and unblinking eyes.
Here there be monsters.
And they will catch you.
And they will eat you.

Monsters often walk on two legs,
possessed of killing machines
and tools for rending.
They find places of learning, or dancing,
and just walk in.
Here there be monsters.
And they will catch you.
And they will eat you.

Obsession can be a monster.
As can compulsion.
Envy can be.
Pride, too.
Here there be monsters.
And they will catch you.
And they will eat you.

Monsters are everywhere.
But so are love, kindness, and compassion.

My wife knows about my mistress, as does everyone does that knows me. What she doesn’t understand is my love for this mistress. But then, I don’t understand it either. What I do know is that she makes me to walk in green fields under skies of varying colors. Through gentle breezes and howling winds she knows I’ll pursue her charms…even when the rains pelt me like stones. Each time I am with her she teases me with gentle butterfly kisses. Too often she trashes me for four straight hours and just as I am about to quit her, to leave her, to remove her from my life forever, she lays on me a kiss so powerful, so seductive that she keeps me coming back.

She has corrupted me, perhaps beyond redemption. I’ll steal for her, well not really steal, but I’ll keep back part of my pay or work extra for money that my wife will never see…and I’ll spend it all on her. Green fees. Balls. Clubs. Oh my God, clubs…I have a weakness for wedges and fairway woods, most especially for wedges. I keep looking for that perfect combination of loft, bounce, and shaft characteristics to put me ever closer to the hole.

She has seduced me into club making. I tinker endlessly with my driver to create that perfect lethal weapon that will bring any course to its knees. I have no shame about these things, but I’ll lie in a heartbeat to hide what I’m doing with her. I don’t even think about it, it just happens:

“Where’ve you been?” She asks.

“Nowhere. Shit. No, I was with another woman in a sleazy motel having sex.”

She looks at my shoes, sees the grass. “Don’t lie to me, you weak SOB, you’ve been playing golf again.”

Weak. I am weak. My mistress makes me weak in the knees. Every day I dream about her. I see the shiny white-coated steel clubhead of my driver addressing a snow-white ball in my mind a dozen times a day. I sit in traffic and often daydream about playing golf in such spiritual places as Pebble Beach, St. Andrews, and Bandon Dunes.

I’m damned. I know it to be true. But to play golf, to strike the ball cleanly, to feel the near nothingness of a 90 mile per hour impact of the sweet spot against a highly moveable object and to see the ball soaring like a bird…my God, she makes me weak.

Occasionally, someone will tell me they are thinking about taking up golf. I ask, “Have you ever been the victim in a chronically abusive relationship? If so, did you enjoy it? If you did, then golf is the game for you.”

(Sometimes a second part is needed for clarification. )

The following morning,  the student took his accustomed seat a few paces from the wall facing the rising sun.  The master paced a circuit that kept him always equidistant from the student and the wall.

Before the sun stood overhead, the student finally achieved something akin to enlightenment. “Aha! ” he said. “Teacher I see now that you are diabolical. ”

Swiftly, the master administered a boot to the head, leaving the student a crumpled mess.

“You were almost right there.  But math is still hard, though not quite as hard as my boot.”

One day in front of a wall of stone, sitting at sunrise, the student asked the master, “Teacher, why do you speak thusly to me with stories, rather than address me directly?”

The master acknowledged the question with a raised eyebrow and together they contemplated the turning of morning into day as is their wont. When their master finally spoke, he said, “Why, I always speak to you in a way that you are the focus of all I say, no matter where we are relative to each other. It is simply a matter of squaring the material with reality and adding the distance that measure of what you are ignorant.”

As the sun began set upon the student and the teacher, the student said, “Ahh, so no matter where I am, you are always the same distance from me and the wall.”

“Which is why sometimes speak to the wall. It needs no explanation of math.”

President Jones runs a company (Fit-Ed) that sells five-year health and fitness programs as part of America’s “Get Fit and Save Money” initiative.  Each plan can be partially subsidized with federal grants based on family need.  There is even a federal loan program for those that don’t have adequate cash flow or financial discipline to afford the programs. Unfortunately, the Feds have put in place performance metrics requiring at least a 60% Program Completion rate to continue to allow customers of a given company to access the federal subsidies and loans.

At a recent meeting of the CEO and vice presidents:

“Folks, we are sucking wind. We have a 44% Program Completion Rate and no one can tell me why. We simply don’t have a market to exist without the subsidies. We need a solution.”

VP Operations: “Sir, what do you want us to do? We have optimized our recruiting as best we can, but our business model won’t support upgraded facilities with bigger pools, saunas, and all the luxuries.”

“What do you mean we’ve optimized recruiting the best we can?’

VP Operations: “It’s like this. Everyone wants fancy facilities, especially pools and saunas, and family water features. But the localities where we have boxes don’t have family incomes to support those things. We would need a larger population of wealthy families. And let’s face it, wealthy families are those that most likely to exercise and stick with a program. Poor people, well, they are just too busy being poor. Nearly 80% of our market is receiving the subsidies or loans.We’ve targeted recruitment as best we can, the wealthier population has a greater number of options and is more willing to travel to exercise.”

CIO: “You know, maybe this is a data problem. The metric is all wrong.”

CEO: “Tell me more.”

CIO: “Well, maybe our failures aren’t really failures. Maybe they just leave us for our competitors.”

CEO: “Sounds like a failure to me.”

CIO: “Is it? From a a business perspective, from our business perspective, it certainly is. But this federal program is about getting Americans fit. So does it really matter *where* that occurs as long as it happens? If we could find a way to track our customers, we could add those that go to other programs to the numerator and argue that it is a better, more complete measure of success.”

CEO: “Damn. I like that. Let’s make that happen.”

VP HR: “Sir, wouldn’t this be terribly misleading? Wouldn’t we be taking credit for another company’s success? After all, these clients left us.”

CEO: “I don’t give a rat’s ass. We need to survive. Besides, who’s to say we don’t deserve credit for the fact some of clients are more successful elsewhere.”

Yesterday I shot a 94 for 18 holes of golf. This is only notable because because it is the first time since starting to play this crazy game that I broke a 100.

Unfortunately, I can’t get too excited since it was a much shorter and easier course than my home course. Easier to the point that it actually caused my handicap index to trend back upwards four-tenths of stroke. Golf can suck like that.  You can do what feels to be really well, only to find out that what you did wasn’t nearly good enough, in fact, it wasn’t even up to your usual performance.

It was however good enough to outscore the guys I was playing with who generally outscore me. I don’t actually pay much attention to that, but they do. I’m focused on learning to play again and am playing against myself and the course. Everyone else is really incidental. My biggest problem with golf has always been the mental game.

Last weekend I had an 18-hole playing lesson with my instructor. My son was along as well. A 25-handicapper playing alongside a playing and teaching professional really is playing a different game. The opportunity for instruction on course management and to watch him play close up was invaluable. It was also a very intense four hours on a Saturday.

I’ve also a spent the last two weeks reading the first two of four books by Dr. Bob Rotella that I have inserted into my reading list. Grappling with impatience and the Luke Skywalker Problem:

Yoda: Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away…to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.

Staying the moment. Moving on from the previous moment, especially when it was a failed shot. I’ve always had difficulty dumping the past. I think it is about time I learned.

In fact, that is pretty much what happened yesterday. Jay has done a tremendous job helping me build a repeating good swing. It’s not where we want it yet, but it is worlds different. So I was able to trust my swing and stay in the moment, because the failures were failures and almost always immediately understandable. “I screwed up. Move on.” Further, his method of instruction has not only helped me to accept the fact that bad shots will happen and I don’t need to beat myself up about it, but also to rely on routine to make things work.

So, good, positive teaching is priceless.

And raw numbers don’t always tell the truth. It’s difficult.