Category: Life

I know, I know; when I complete a job application in an Application Tracking System (ATS), I click a checkbox that says “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help me, God” or the slightly less enforceable equivalent that indicates the company will discard my application if its employees discover a falsehood. Ha! I am ahead of the curve, as they discard my applications far before anyone actually looks at them.

But I must confess to you, gentle reader, I sometimes (often) select values that are not truthful, often very early in the process.

Workday, one ATS, makes you create an account with a password (do I save the password? Hell, no; otherwise, I would have several hundred saved Workday passwords in my password manager for accounts into which I will never log in again–and if I do find myself applying, a year or two later, to the same company, I will use the Forgot Password feature and set another strong password I will not seek to remember naturally or artificially). On the second step, your “Profile,” it asks for phone number, address, and whatnot.

And: It often asks “How did you hear about this job?” followed by a drop-down list or nested selector control that has social media sites, job boards, in-person events, and so on. And often not an “Other” to select.

I conduct Google searches on several job boards every day, so I often find jobs hosted in the Workday ATS this way. But it doesn’t let me explain this. So I have to select another value for this required field. I often select Indeed, LinkedIn, or the Corporate Website (which, I guess, is the closest to it). The field is required, and it does not let me select or enter the true answer.

It’s the same with Greenhouse, which has a type-ahead selector for Location (city).

Ah, gentle reader, I live in unincorporated Greene County. I do not live in a city or a town. The zip code resolves to Brookline (or Brookline Station). But the city of Battlefield ends at my farm road, so I am right across the street from Battlefield, Missouri, so I select that one. And if I type my full address, I use Brookline as the city/town (although the zip code covers Battlefield, so one could get mail addressed to Battlefield, MO 65619). So immediately, they can see that difference and think, “Is this guy for real or is he a North Korean who doesn’t know United States geography?”

Not to mention that the Locate me link will probably resolve to Kansas City, Jackson County, or wherever Starlink says I am today.

But too often the ATSes and other parts of the over-the-transom job application/hiring process these days, again, winnow on arbitrary measures and don’t allow for perspective and context. And, boy, mister, after almost thirty years in computers (more if you count programming Commodores and Apples), do I have context and perspective.

You know, in the olden days of the last century, when you were hard-pressed to give someone a gift, you might get them a gift certificate which was a piece of paper with a dollar value on it. The gift giver paid that amount, and the gift recipient could present the gift certificate at the establishment in place of cash. Because the gift certificate was a static thing, the retailer generally gave you change in cash. This was a boon to me in college, as I would buy the cheapest possible thing so I could get the cash because I was putting myself through college (having sacrificed scholarships and grants on the altar of auto-didacticism and skipping classes to read whatever struck my fancy in the college library–it only took one midterm D to scare me straight, but the scholarships were gone anyway). Even McDonald’s had them in books with $1 certificates. Back when $1 would buy you a meal at McDonalds.

At any rate, in the 21st century, as you know, the gift certificate gave way to the gift card which had the amount on it, and when you presented it, the amount you actually spent is taken off of the gift card. That way, retailers are not dishing out that change in cash. In the olden days, the issuers (sometimes the same as the retailers, sometimes not) would then start nibbling at the balance every month to drain some extra profit for themselves. But the government started making noise and might have even legislated or regulated a stop to that. But: They have a new solution.

In those olden days, you could sometimes run a partially or mostly used gift card, and the remaining balance on the card would be applied to your purchase, and you could pay the rest–and let’s be honest, from the time of gift certificates immemorial, they hoped you’d buy more than the amount you were given. But point of sales systems (seemed to) be able to easily drain that balance for you. That’s how I remember it. As so much of what I “remember,” maybe it’s not so.

However, now, the point of sale systems at the shops where I do my marketing don’t do that automatically. You can run gift cards for a certain amount, and if the card has that much, it is debited/applied to your purchase. After a couple of purchases, though, if you’re sort of mindful (the gift card is for $100; this purchase is $67.95; this purchase is $14.07), you end up with a gift card with a balance of a couple dollars and change. Not enough to buy a meal at McDonalds. So you end up with a purse wallet (in my beautiful wife’s case) or a desk basket (in my case) with several (dozen) gift cards with minimal value to them. If you don’t use them, they’re still pure profit to the issuer.

So I check the balance on the cards and write the amount on the card. And then when I hit the grocery store, mostly in the middle of the day when there’s no line, I make Sam or Ashton or the new guys other Sam and Chuck run bunches of gift cards: This one is $2.90. This one is $14.23. And so on.

I mean, we’re not skint, but I do like to not to be part of the laziness profit margin that’s padding Visa and Mastercard executive’s quarterly results. However that value is eventually lost (you cannot nibble at the balance, but I do see the cards have expiration dates like real credit and debit cards; real ones get replaced, but I expect that the gift ones just get applied to quarterly spreadsheets and dashboards somewhere).

Sorry, Sams. Sorry, Ashton. Sorry, Chuck. But when I get into a high dudgeon, sometimes others must suffer peripherally whilst I stick it to some Man.

Springfield finally fielded a Lutheran High School, after at least two attempts while my boys were in the Lutheran elementary and middle school, and it has opened a thrift store to raise funds. So we visited at the end of its first week to provide funds since we’re not paying tuition. It’s a really nicely appointed space, more boutique-looking than most thrift stores, but the prices, at least for media, were pretty good.

Here’s what we got:

I got two albums, Evie Again by Evie (I told my beautiful wife that I am the biggest Evie fan in Springfield, and it might be true, and I’m not that big of an Evie fan) and Crystal Illusions by Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66. I got one DVD, The Bourne Identity, since I got The Bourne Supremacy last year–the thrift store had all three, but I was not sure which I was missing, so I can go back and get The Bourne Ultimatum if I happen to finish these two films sometime soon (unlikely). And I got two books: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Tae Kwon Do, which is timely because I am currently reading The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Karate which I bought in 2022 and because next week, in our BJJ school’s striking class, the instructor is going to show some spin kicks which he said the tae kwon do kids were going to like, and I need to brush up on the spin heel/spin wheel and spin hook kicks to not look silly, and I also got Living the Martial Way which is a former USAF guy writing about something something the ancient Eastern martial arts. I picked it up ’cause it was a buck or two, and it would be far more expensive at ABC Books.

My wife got a puzzle and some cook books, and we also came away with a throw blanket and a skirt (for her), and we spent $29 total. Apparently, they have more records (and other merchandise) than they can display, so I’ll probably visit every once in a while to see what’s new. Of course, even with but these two new records, I’m finding that I am about out of storage space, so I’d better pick up some 2x4s when the heat breaks before the autumn Friends of the Library book sale.

I thought I’d lamented this before, but Microsoft is killing Microsoft Publisher, and because nowadays it’s all by subscription, when they kill it, it will go away and you won’t be able to access your desktop publishing files.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I have been a Microsoft Publisher user for over thirty years. I first ran it on a Windows 3.11 desktop and the St. Louis Artesian transitioned from rubber-cement-at-Kinko’s layout to desktop publishing (remember, briefly, how that was a business type and/or career possibility for about five years in the 1990s until those meddling kids in Illinois built Netscape Navigator?). I also laid out my second chapbook, Deep Blue Shadows on that old Packard Bell. When I was working on a government contract in about 2019 (just or recently in my recounting), I was working with a bunch of ex-military types on a group project in some training exercise or another, and when it came time to build some visual thing, I cracked open Microsoft Publisher instead of PowerPoint–how gauche and unprofessional! And although I’ve only used it for Christmas letters and Winter Reading Challenge forms in recent years, they’re taking away my ability to use something for which I’ve paid, many times, and sorta orphaning decades’ worth of work.

But I’m not here specifically to lament this particular loss or to reiterate that I’m about one Microsoft Account debacle away from quitting Microsoft for good (after over 35 years starting with MS-DOS)–a recent Windows update, probably designed to “improve” my experience by hoovering up more of my information for Microsoft’s purposes, required me to sign into my Office subscription–which, fortunately, worked (and I’m ignoring the email about my Microsoft Entra account needing a new something something different form of multifactor authentication?–I’ll get locked out of that bridge when I get there and onto my Linux box ricky-tick).

No, I am here to wordily say that professional communications are eroding trust in companies and institutions.

“Microsoft is committed to improving your Microsoft 365 subscription.” No, it is not. It is dedicated to increasing profitability in indulging my usage. That’s why we went from building software I could install and use, paying for it once unless you put more features into it and improved it so I would want to buy a newer version or so I would stick with it and buy a later version on later computers. No, instead, Microsoft forced me into a recurring revenue “subscription” model (coming soon, mayhap, to the OS itself, if Microsoft thought it could get away with it). And now it’s “improving” my subscription by taking something away and orphaning my data. No, Microsoft, we know that the improvement is all for you, none for me.

Like when Sam’s Club removed most of the checkout stands “for your convenience.”

The constant drive of the professional communicators and business people to couch the changing terms of their existence to improve their profitability and to meet internal metrics in language of “we’re doing this for you” is really cheesing me off to behavior-altering and not just blog-posting levels. I lose faith in any company and institution that starts taking the “I’m hurting you for your own good” language of an abuser. I know modern business practices, especially at large levels, are all about optimizing and spreadsheeting trendlines going up on daily/monthly/annual reports and real-time dashboards regardless of whether they’re providing value to customer (and I am paying for this, you know, so it should not should not be a matter of “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product”–too damned much of modern business best practices are “You’re paying for it, and you’re the product”)–hang on, I got up a head of ranting steam there and forgot the first part of the sentence was going–never mind, I think I hit both sentence and predicate before getting lost in the parentheticals and asides; have the period here:.

(Note I watermark my writing in such a fashion to indicate it’s not AI-generated, and, brother, if you trust any content based on this blog as training material, you’re lucky with whatever result you get. You deserve it.)

I mean, I have done some marketing writing where I tried to put the best shine on something. I’ve written technical documentation where the steps and procedures route users around bugs. But I don’t know that I’ve ever told the reader/customer that it was all for his or her benefit (how long ago was I writing like this? In the before days where we used “his or her” to be inclusive). Maybe I did. But now that it’s omnipresent and obvious, I am running out of tolerance.

And, gentle reader, have you noted that I’ve posted some business-related posts here lately (and recycled a post from Microsoft’s LinkedIn). That’s because Microsoft’s LinkedIn is improving my user experience by throttling things I post there. So why provide that outlet with free content when I can post it here and get a slightly smaller audience? For whom do I work anyway? For you, gentle reader, for you. And my own narcissism.

Okay, maybe debacle is overstating it for a clickbaity alliterative headline. But.

So the church has been throwing more potlucks of late, which means a couple per year. And I’ve started to notice that some staples of potlucks have started to get a little thin. Not hotdish; we’re a little south for that, and I’ve not seen that much ever. Things like deviled eggs and creamy potato salad. I guess the old German and Polish Lutherans are passing away and taking these delicacies with them. So I guess I have to be the old German lady now.

Our church was having a potluck this spring, and a couple of weeks ahead of it, I bought two dozen eggs to try some recipes. I went to the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, the one with the red gingham cover for the basics. I’ve hard-cooked eggs in the oven on various Whole 30 months in the past, and I’ve done it to have a quick peel-and-eat meal other times as well, so I loaded up a mini-muffin tray and cooked them. I had boughten several different types of mustards (yellow, Dijon, horseradish) to try out–the recipe size uses six eggs, so I could try three different types of mustard and an alternative recipe which uses creamy Italian dressing and Parmesan cheese.

So I mixed up four different sets of six eggs/12 halves with each formula and sampled them, inviting my family to do the same. I rather favored the Italian deviled eggs–maybe it’s the cheese.

But: I was taken ill that week. The eggs. I thought. I somehow made bad eggs. Maybe they were too old. Maybe I didn’t cook them long enough. Maybe I overloaded them with red pepper. But I could not subject the aging population of the church to this. I could kill someone. (Which is why I have a spoonful or slice of whatever I bring to the potluck–so if anyone gets ill from what I’ve made, I get ill too.)

But: My beautiful wife was also taken ill that week. And she does not like eggs. Or mayonnaise. Or mustard. I think the only parts of the deviled eggs she likes are the vinegar and red pepper (and the Italian dressing and Parmesan, although that’s odd–creamy Italian dressing is almost mustard, but a little thinner I guess). So maybe it wasn’t the eggs.

Church had another potluck last weekend, and I had almost three dozen eggs in the refrigerator (I’ve been rolling through them, hard cooking them mostly, because one day, someday, I swore I would make deviled eggs for the potluck). But I chickened out and went with the standby apple pie, and I cut up a couple of cantaloupes from the garden (which represents the bulk of the harvest at Nogglestead in 2026).

But earlier this week, I hard cooked the oldest of the eggs and deviled them. I was low on mayonnaise (the accursed squeeze bottles let you trade the convenience of the squeeze bottle at the cost of not being able to get the last couple of ounces from within it because the neck is not big enough for a knife), so I mixed in some ranch dressing, and…. they were all right.

So today, I’ve hard-cooked the other two dozen (jumbo, because I hope they’d prove sturdier throughout the bedeviling process). I’ll bedevil a dozen and probably just eat the other as-are.

But, someday, I’ll feel comfortable enough and get good enough to bring some to church. Or I will get really good at them and not want to share.

The movie? There’s Something About Mary. The bit in the movie? That 7-Minute Abs was going to trounce 8-Minute Abs:

Inspired by the headline: 10 Fitness gym to close Springfield location

The gag? I was going to say that 9Round Fitness won out.

Except: It looks as though the 9Round in Springfield is no more (“Temporarily Closed” it says on Google Maps, but the 9Round Web site no longer lists a location in Springfield.

Maybe F45, which was almost across the street from 9Round, ate their lunches as it seems to be open. When it opened in like 2018, I thought F45 meant something political. Kind of like the new and always busy Burn Boot Camp by the Sam’s Club, the first thing in The Ridge development by the realtor who pulled his six-year-old from my little league team in a huff because he had big baseball plans for the lad and the four-year-olds on the team would keep the boy from The Show–sorry, I was not going on a list of all the successful realtors and real estate developers I know in Springfield cannot stand me, I was talking about Burn Boot Camp, and I was going to say: When I drove by signs pointing to it in the back of the empty lots, I thought it said “Bum Boot Camp.”

Given that the area had a couple of homeless encampments nearby, I wondered exactly what that was. Poor kerning is the answer.

At any rate, well, that’s a long way to go for a gag. But here at MfBJN, we go that extra mile for you.

Maybe I’m just cynical, but whenever I see that a job posting seeks people who are “continually learning,” I think that the companies are looking for candidates/employees who strive not for learning but for ways to make themselves more valuable to the company.

When I was working for a government contracting company, the company had an initiative for people to learn a no-code/low-code tool called Pega. The company set up working/study groups for employees who wanted to get the certification. BUT: You could not go through any of the learning modules on company time. That’s billing time, employee, and if you’re not making billable hours for the company, you’re worthless. Many people were excited to get certified in Pega, which is one of those technologies which solely exist because different departments in the government have bought it at some point. So Pega certification is mostly irrelevant in the real world, and it’s most likely becoming less relevant as time passes and the new hotness (AI!) comes along to soak up all the government contracting money. I started a bit of the program, and then I realized how daft the technology was, and I tailed off on it.

Ah, gentle reader: You might know I am a continual learner. I just finished a course on Ancient Egypt. I’ve started an audio course on Ancient Greek Philosophy. I’ve picked up the Durants’ The Life of Greece again (and I’ve actually reached the spot covered by the audio course for a little reinforcement and seeing how the names are spelled). I read poetry, philosophy, biographies of poets, and oh so many pieces of genre fiction. And although this might make me more interesting (but probably not) and it might give me broader perspective to apply to business problems (it does), that’s not what they meant.

I dunno why I post on LinkedIn these days. It has limited my reach to a few and then doesn’t bother to tell me if people respond. Maybe that will increase my desperation for algorithmic approval engagement.

At any rate, I recently wrote a bit about an experience I had with a recent job application which required a thoughtful, non-boilerplate cover letter answering questions posted in the job application–only to autoreject me because I failed on one of the “knockout” questions. These delightful things are ways to automatically reject resumes for arbitrary job-based reasons.

At any rate, here it is:

---

Career coaches often encourage job seekers to customize their resumes and to write focused cover letters even when an application doesn’t require it. I don’t think so.

I recently applied to an ecommerce QA Lead job for an ecommerce company which had a strange ask: Create a single cover letter+resume file, answer a series of questions, and explain your experience testing ecommerce Web sites. Do you have ecommerce experience? Oh, boy, mister, do I!

I went on at length, more than 2-3 sentences, about experience I have with ecommerce sites. I’ve handled tourist attractions which not only offered tickets and t-shirts but allowed room bookings with catering options (but the site did not have a sandbox, so testing stopped at the checkout step). I’ve handled user-posting storefronts where users post items and both pay and get paid. I’ve handled sites where content writers get paid affiliate fees on purchases, so you not only test the checkout through the process with the payment handler but that content writers get the appropriate fees credited to their account.

One of the questions was “What are the last three books you read?” Aw, yeah, right in my wheelhouse. At the time, the three were The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, The Law of Gun Barrel City by O.C. Marler, and River City P.I. by James R. Wilder. Since then, I’ve also completed The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, A Hereditary Book on the Art of War by Yagyū Munenori, and That Dunbar Boy by Jean Gould.

I didn’t spend two hours on the cover letter–probably just over an hour writing two pages answering the eight questions thoughtfully. I uploaded it into the application tracking system, and the next page had a series of questions, including The Knockout Question.

All of them were, probably, but this one had a yes or no answer to a presumed requirement which was not mentioned on the job board posting nor the job posting on the ATS. I answered honestly, and I was rejected in less time than I took in crafting the letter.

It makes sense to write personal cover letters for jobs for which your network connections recommend you and sometimes if the job is really for you, but job seekers have to balance the time required for each against the very real probability that the effort will be futile and the extra work will be unread.

---

Mostly, I just wanted to create a meme.

Bandit’s Naughty Dog Adventure.

I mentioned Bandit last year; he was a puppy with too much energy to be left in a trailer all day whilst we were at school and when my sainted mother was at work.

But the inspiration for this game came from a casino commercial that came on in our hockey-watching days: A little terrier mix is walking down the street, getting into trouble, and when the dog catcher throws him into the back of the animal control van, there are two poodles there, and the message is that the dog, like casino attendees, would be lucky?

At any rate, at some point, I started jotting down a treatment for a television series based on the concept of a naughty dog called The Naughty Dog Show. I didn’t get beyond a couple pages of notes on it, but here, decades later, is a little LLM-developed game.

From Lileks today recounting a previous communal living arrangement:

One night my roommate, a very normal fellow who was also an absolute weed fiend and once put the phone books in a trash can, put a target on the can, and stood in his closet at the far end of the dorm room and fired his rifle at the target, was making tea, and put one of those immerser coils into water.

Not the weed fiend part, but:

One summer weekend when we were visiting from Missouri, my father wanted to take us shooting, probably down at the quarry where we would some other time go. But: His wife had taken the checkbook, perhaps to thwart his plans. This was in the days before ATMs were common (in Milwaukee, they were called Tyme machines, and to have access to one cost a touch of money itself). The way to get cash on the weekends would be to go to a store where they knew you, in his case West Side Liquor, and write a check to CASH, and they would give you money out of the till. But you had to be a really good customer, and my father was.

So: He took an old cardboard Tide laundry detergent box, stuffed it with newspaper, and got out an old .22 rifle–the bent one? Perhaps. Perhaps it was not bent yet. At any rate, he moved some furniture from the wall in the room in the refinished basement which would later become my bedroom during my college years, took position at the bar all the short way across the small house, and told us we would aim for the dot over the i in the brand name. He fired one round and then went to look at the Tide box. He’d hit that tittle, all right, and the bullet had passed through the Tide box completely and embedded in the wood paneling of the wall behind. It was the only round fired that day.

Man, the past was a different place, ainna? Growing up in the working class and with a father who was rather fond of his beer. I mean, I was there, and I can hardly recount it because…. Who does that? Well, not me, not now.

As I might have mentioned, I am working through a stack of old Ideals magazines which I have accrued from book sales or have rediscovered in my chairside magazine rack as my liminal before-bed reading. It has often, but not always, been my habit to read just a little bit in my bedroom here at Nogglestead for a little bit before turning in. For a while, I had a large lamp on the bedside table, and I read the Bible, part of the Book of Mormon, and some nonfiction there. That was years ago; since, we have moved things around, and I can’t actually think which lamp it would have been–certainly not the blocker project lamp, which is actually on my to-do list for finally finishing up after a decade, although I might have to repaint it from scratch. But this time, I’ll know that acrylic paints dry in hours, not days, so I will move faster on it. When I get around to it. Someday.

At any rate, after the bedroom makeover or remakeover or whatever happened to that lamp, we’ve moved a chair in the corner, we received a lamp with a bad switch when my mother-in-law moved one of her recentish moves; in 2023, probably, Nico swapped out the switch to a kind that she would not have wanted, so it ended up by that red spinning chair.

So I’ve been reading poetry there at night, chapbooks, college literary magazines, complete collections, and so on. I winnowed the stack of literary magazines to just Ideals, though, as I was not looking for a lot of prose right before bed. Just light verse where I could read a couple and leave off.

These particular issues are from the 1980s mostly, and I have a preponderance of Mother’s Day issues because they made great gifts apparently. They stretch from their final years in Milwaukee and beyond to the first couple of years in Nashville. We see some editorial shifts over the years; some issues have recipes, prose, travel items, and “reader submissions” where readers submitted poetry, and those published got $10 (which is more than most poets make today on publication). But, sometimes, they feature something else: Pages torn from the magazine.

Ah, gentle reader, do you remember an era when people would tear poems out of their magazines or their newspapers and put them on their refrigerator or on their bedroom mirrors? I think I came at the end of that era–it was something the preceding generation(s) did, and although I might have done it once or twice, it’s not a regular thing. Of course, I suppose that could be partially because newspapers and magazines do not regularly publish poetry these days. The same people who regularly interacted with nice, serviceable, lightweight poetry probably also dabbled in it.

But not me. Although I can discard a lot of magazines which I’d rather keep from current subscriptions (First Things and New Oxford Review come to mind), I cannot mar a copy of a literary magazine or Ideals. I have a lot of former textbooks with highlighting, underlining, and marginalia, but my “dialoguing with the text” days did not extend past college where the professors really insisted on it. I received an embossing tool for Christmas a couple years ago (maybe a decade, but not so long ago when you’ve gathered several decades in memory), but I have not stamped my monogram into any books. Nacho cheese dust is a different matter, I admit.

I have always kind of thought that I was just a caretaker for these books and magazine, that I was holding onto them for the next generation. I’m not sure that my boys will want them, although the oldest is starting to read again. He recently asked if we had a copy of Summa Theologiae–of course I do (on the to-read shelves). When the youngest was in fourth grade, he boasted that whatever book his teacher mentioned reading we already had (although this was no longer true when they went to public high school and some of their reading became more current topically). Wouldn’t it be nice if they retained some or all of this library to have that same opportunity for their children? If they have children. If they read.

Ah, but likely not. I won’t be marking, discarding, or donating my books during my lifetime (unlike some reified potential in the garage and maybe, soon, my closet). Well, except for those duplicates I find and put on the free book cart at church.

As to my poems, I suppose it would be pretty to think someone would tear my work out of a magazine for their mirror, but that’s…. Unlikely. My latest publication appearance was in an online university literary magazine (still up in 2026 but maybe not in 2027). Not a peppy little uplifting poem to brighten one’s every morning. Well, maybe one of the two is. But. I guess the best I can hope for is that someone reads them at all.

I guess I need to make a checklist of Ideals magazines that I can use out in the wild to see if I’m buying the same ones over and over again (which happens). Maybe something to mark whether an issue is missing pages so I can look for a more complete copy. That would require two things: One, organizing my collection (not too bad now since it’s only a stack about 12 inches tall, the equivalent of a modern branch library’s philosophy section when you strip out the Buddhism. Two, I need to finish my upcoming game and build an app for just such a thing. Maybe next week.

I thought it looked like an interesting job: QA Automation Lead with lots of eCommerce experience. Jeez Louise, I have all sorts of flavors of that. So I applied.

But the job had a wrinkle: It wanted me to write a cover letter answering questions like the most challenging thing in my life and how I overcame it, something something, and the last three books I read.

Oh, yeah. I was all on that. I listed The Space Trilogy, The Law of Gun Barrel City, and River City, P.I., the James R. Wilder book I just bought and whose review is forthcoming, and in looking back at the blog here, I see that I’ve forgotten To Rise Again At A Decent Hour.

Which happens. I was working from my spreadsheet list, and I’d failed to enter the title in the annual total. Sometimes, when I get to the end of the year total and start building the Year in Reading post, I’ll find that I wrote a report for a book that I didn’t put in the annual list, or I’ll have put something in the list which I failed to write a book report on. The latter is less likely, though, as completed books end up on the desk for a cover scan and a book report (sometimes sitting on them for a week or more, as the latest Wilder book indicates–I finished it on July 25 and have yet to write the report for it. In my defense, it’s sitting on the scanner glass, so it’s a little out of sight.

So: I have made a mistake which will undoubtedly result in my rejection. I kid! I kid! Because I’m probably already laid low by a “knockout” question.

What is a knockout question? Silly person who is not job hunting at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. A knockout question is where you answer honestly a question like “Do you have three years experience in Python?” or “Have you built a test suite from scratch using AI?” It’s a simple switch that lands you in a reject pile without any context or discussion. No, I don’t have three years in Python, but I have experience in numerous languages and some noodling in Python (building a functional API using Flask, setting up a test suite and writing beginning tests in a proof of concept). But, no: To eliminate the great mass of applications that frictionless applications have made possible, they knock out applicants based on meaningless binaries. Which is just as well as HR assistants screening applicants don’t know what those things mean either.

I actually got that second one, “Have you built a test suite from scratch using AI?” this week. It was the third step of the process: The first was the application, the second was the 50 question test with word analogies, spatial reasoning, math, and whatnot–they never tell me the score of those which is a damned shame, because I would be pretty proud of the results each time. But step 3 was three knockout questions, the third of which was one of the “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you love AI? Answer 11 or higher.” questions. To be honest, it’s more work than you need because most of the modern frameworks scaffold up a project for you pretty easily, and you’re not going to get a lot out of LLMs which lack awareness of your application unless you, I dunno, share login credentials with them which seems like a bad idea. And last year, I worked on a project where my manager used AI to scaffold up a project he did not understand and could not troubleshoot when I tried running the project on Windows (he’s a Mac, and so on). I troubleshot to the limits of LLM capability, or at least I stopped when ChatGPT said, “Okay, we’re going to have to rewrite Playwright…..” The ultimate solution was to run it in PowerShell instead of using the command line because of the different ways dependencies were resolved, or something. You see, I could answer intelligently why not, but it’s a boolean. True or false, and false is buh-bye. I said no and clicked submit, and the next screen said After careful consideration, nah, bro. Well, not exactly, but the “careful consideration” was not.

At any rate, the knockout question after the hour’s effort of cover letter was: Are you in Canada?

The posting on the job board said Remote – Worldwide. The posting in the Application Tracking System (the winner by knockout!) said Colombia. The application asked if I was in Canada. Was it a knockout question? Who knows? I have not been rejected yet, but it might be their policy only to hit the No button after hiring someone (After careful consideration…..) or not at all.

But I guess I will find out. Or not.

So many of the “career coaches” on LinkedIn and whatnot offer the same advice: Tailor your resumes for each job. Research the companies you’re applying to. Write targeted cover letters every time. Which might have made sense in the old days, but now you’re just wasting more time on jobs whose automated processes are seeking to winnow out the greatest number of applications they can for arbitrary reasons. So, nah. I’ll do it sometimes, and I’ll do the assessments sometimes if they’re fun practice tests for if I ever decide to take the Mensa test. But two hour screen-sharing camera on coding exercise video recording? Nah. Feesa etho.

At any rate, I did find the discrepancy in my book accounting, and I am pleased to say that I’m at 54 books for the year. But it’s almost August. I’d better fall upon some art monographs and poetry chapbooks, stat.

Well, there is more to the story than that.

So when I run errands in town, I reach out to my mother-in-law, 84-years-old and living independently not far from church, to ask if she needs anything from the market or to see if she wants me to do anything for her while I’m in town. In this regard, “in town” can mean in any town because she does not want to be a burden on us, so any time I’m going anywhere that does not involve a gi or a shower afterwards, I ask if she needs anything.

I was actually headed to the “eastern” part of Springfield (which is now the middle part of Springfield in some parts of Springfield these days). Barnes and Noble and Staples on Glenstone Avenue. So I asked her if I could pick her up a copy of the latest issue of Metal Hammer while I was out. She demurred.

I was disappointed with my visit to Barnes and Noble. I was looking for a book on the CompTIA Network+ certification, and I circled the store a couple of times before finding that the computer books section has shrunk to about 24 inches on a single shelf–almost as small as a public library’s philosophy section–and the selection had books on the Security+ and A+ certifications, but not the one I was looking for. The store did not have a copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning which I had noticed on my mother-in-law’s table on Sunday, and I have seen/heard it mentioned several times “recently,” so I hoped to score my own copy. Too soon, too soon, my mother-in-law’s copy will be available to us, but I’ll let the oldest have it if he’s still reading (and if he’s over the fashionable anti-zionism of the current day). I also considered buying a copy of Writers Digest to price its advertising in case I want to spend a couple bucks promoting Wunyo Submission Tracker the old fashioned way. So: No Network+, no Frankl, but it did have the most recent Writers Digest. For $10. Instead of buying just the magazine, I flipped through its last pages and found little in the way of classified ads.

And no Metal Hammer magazine, either. The music section was given over to special edition collectible collector’s issues for individual artists, which I guess can have a longer shelf life than a regular magazine.

So, later in the evening, I texted my mother-in-law that I could not have gotten Metal Hammer for her after all. And she responded that she thought I was referring to an actual magazine, and….

Ah, gentle reader, I have been holding out on you.

I have mentioned that books tend to accumulate on the little table beside my chair; however, at some point, I got a little magazine holder, probably to “refinish” it, and placed it back there. And that, gentle reader, is where magazines go for decades. I am pretty sure that I have worked through most of the magazines that I picked up (at that same Barnes and Noble) when I was first publishing John Donnelly’s Gold so I could send review copies (one, Suspense magazine, reviewed it). I have a couple of crossword puzzle books which had been my sainted mother’s. And I had a copy of Metal Hammer magazine from some years ago:

That’s the December 2019 issue.

You see, the magazines languish down there because I do not read magazines there; I read books in that chair. I read magazines in the chair in the parlor or the rocking chair on the front porch. I haven’t actually put magazines down there in years, either, so they’re just…. languishing.

I sent the photo to my mother-in-law, and I then looked at what else I have in the magazine holder.

Two issues of Ideals magazine.

Which is good; I’ve been reading old copies of this magazine that I’ve gathered at book sales as my liminal bedtime reading in the bedroom. However, I found that I had seven different Mother’s Day issues, and months of paeans to idealized mothers was kinda wearing on me. My sainted mother kept a roof over our heads and food in the kitchen, but she was never to my recollection anything like the mothers in these poems. So it will be good to interleave some other holidays. As it stands, I actually have an Ideals Christmas collection beside the reading chair–I started it, what, in 2024 as a possible “Christmas” book for Christmas time, but it’s two hundred pages of prose telling, basically, the exact same idealized paean Christmas in my youth story. So clearly I bogged down on it.

So for fun, I texted my mother-in-law that the Metal Hammer magazine was in with two old (and they’re older, not 1980s) issues of Ideals.

“Wow! Mom loved them.” she replied.

Her mother, born in, what, 1910? loved Ideals. And she, my mother-in-law, more into literary fiction and Viktor Frankl, does not.

Ah, gentle reader. I have to recalibrate my terms. Now that I am getting to grandfather age (my grandmothers and mother would have been grandmothers by this numeral), what I’ve previously called “grandmother poetry” should now be called “great-grandmother poetry.”

Ay, me.

Robert Stacy McCain, who is now just The McCain, says as an aside in a post about the current Madison mayhem and its cause célèbre:

If you fell on hard times, would you become homeless? Almost certainly not, because you have friends and family who would take you in until you got back on your feet.

Ah, gentle reader. That is not true for all people, and I don’t wonder if it’s not an increasing number of people.

I’ve run just this simulation for myself in my mind; as you know, I am currently “between contracts” and have been without full-time work in my field for almost two years now (but only contractless for a couple of months). I am not especially close to anyone in my family except, almost by my almost-monthly letters to my grandmother who is now on hospice care. I’d thought I could bunk with my brother, but he’s on an income so fixed he cannot do any extra driving to meet me in Hartville or Houston when I’m taking one of my regional trips (kinda suspended currently because he has inspired me, and because I have martial arts classes scheduled almost every day). If my beautiful wife decided to boot her unemployed husband who lays about doing martial arts classes, taking care of the house, and developing twee little apps that sometimes sell, and once in a while multiple copies…. Yeah, if she kicks me to the curb, I will be fluxxed.

Not good to dwell on the scenarios; I can only do my best, and if it happens, I can only do my best.

Ah, enough of that. Let me read some Lileks to cheer up.

Twice yesterday I read about old soda vending machines that were chests where you slid the glass bottles in slots.

First, Lileks on his Substack:

It would be my most specific pop memory for years, until I found myself working down South as a seed salesman for Northrup King in the summer of 1979. I drove the highways and backroads in an unairconditioned van, stopping at small towns and suburban grocery stores, taking orders and picking up the wire racks they no longer needed. In one hamlet I pulled over for gas. Blazing day. There was one of the old pop coolers, the chest type where you’d slide the bottle down a metal trench line to an opening. They had Nehi. I’d never had a Nehi. I’d only heard of it from M*A*S*H, as it was Radar O’Reilly’s favorite beverage. Well, when in Rome, Georgia, etc. Popped the cap on the bottle opener, and took a sip.

The second was in River City P.I..

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of these devices before, but I read about them twice today.

In case you’re wondering, here’s kinda what they looked like:

Another thing for me to consider collecting and fixing up, but I’m not doing so much of those things these days, so probably not. I have a garage to clean and a couple of nigh-thirty-year-old refinishing projects to handle first.

Well, it wasn’t that good in terms of purchases, but perhaps that’s actually better for me. James R. Wilder was coming for an early book signing–both in that he’s usually here in December and because the signing was at 10:00am. I took my oldest, who wanted to stop for lunch and go to the Ross department stores in town (both of them) as well. But with a belly full of sushi and vegetable egg fu yung, he kinda demurred on going to both locations of the department store–especially as the southeast location was a zoo. But we stopped by Relics, briefly, in a search for a gift for my mother-in-law’s upcoming birthday (not for my beautiful wife, whose birthday is a week later–I have her covered pretty well, no Facebook-advertised catchkes involved).

Here’s what I got:

I got:

• The new Wilder book, River City P.I., which takes place far later than the other Harbison mysteries and focuses on a relative of Chet Harbison, the main character of the other books, who becomes a part-time investigator in Cape Girardeau. I managed to only talk to Wilder for a couple of minutes, and I sold him a copy of John Donnelly’s Gold. I’m pretty sure my best sales tactic is to jam authors whose books I buy at ABC Books–I think Mr. C. also bought a copy. Also, he mentioned his cover guy does the covers and layouts for his books for $400, which hopefully means that he’s selling hundreds of copies of each book. Good on ‘im.
• The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. Yes, gentle reader, I have bought this book from ABC Books and have already read it. But this is a really pretty book, only $7.95 for a hard copy with a pretty dust jacket. So I will read it again.

At Relics, I stopped at the new record booth with the jazz records I found earlier this month, and I looked through the last part of the alphabet. I got Tell It Like It Is by Stacy Rowles with Jimmy Rowles. It’s a woman playing trumpet. I cannot get in trouble buying an album like that. I didn’t find the gift I was looking for, so I might be back or prowling other venues this week.

So, thirty bucks and another forty for a buffet lunch. And some of the rapidly diminishing time with my oldest son. Which is worth more, even though I am unlikely to remember this particular excursion.

So my beautiful wife and I watched a couple of Network+ Certification training videos on Thursday night.

She is accumulating a number of certification letter sets behind her name on LinkedIn, and she’s brushing up on her network skills which she is light on (she’s got lots of process stuff and actually taught a community college section of the A+ Certification preparation). Me, I got an A+ certification around the turn of the century, so old that it’s no longer recognized (the new program has requirements to do the continuing education thing and to recertify periodically, but I got mine in the olden days, before the certification-as-a-service and everything-is-a-rental-or-subscription world took hold. Since I’m between contracts, I’m thinking of maybe getting a couple of these low-level, inexpensive (only $400 for the exam–cheep!) so I can apply for starting cable-puller jobs and not get hired for those because I’m old. Or, mostly because I have the time and I’ve historically been a good test taker. The intro streaming classes we watched were under 10 minutes each and were kind of a review–when I got my A+ certification in 2000, I was taking community college classes of my own, scattered among hardware and networking and different programming languages.

So, to watch the videos: Apparently, we have free access to a Dion Training course hosted on Udemy because our library offers Udemy classes for free. So my wife could watch them on her iPad. And I pointed out we could stream them on the big television using the Roku and the iPad’s sharing (but you cannot do this with football games, gentle reader, as I learned several years ago). So she did a proof of concept a week ago, and on Thursday was a little flustered because she did not remember what nested-app-and-menu-path on the iPad and what nested-app-and-menu-path made this work. After only a few minutes but demonstrating the dread that it was not possible or she would never find it, we watched 40 minutes of intro to how the course (a $300 course on Udemy, I guess) and explanation of the exam (following this course and watching a couple hours of the day, I could be Network+ certified in thirty days–wow!).

Yesterday, on Facebook, I get:

An ad for the training company.

It was my wife’s iPad, my wife’s library account, and her free or subsidized login to Udemy, but the Roku account is in my name/email address. So I think I can know it was the Roku. Either parsing the content of the video or reading the metadata and selling it to Facebook to present me with those relevant ads.

But, ah, how used to it we are getting! How normal it seems!

And: I think I quipped somewhere, probably on Facebook, that it’s nice that Facebook shows us people’s birthdays on their birthdays, but we could really use some advance notice to buy cards or presents. Well! My Facebook feed is full of Chinese catchkes and t-shirts in the weeks leading up to my wife’s birthday. So, good? Although I’m unlikely to click through ads and buy from shops of unknown provenance these days. But they’re good for gift ideas: SHE LIKES CATS. Which is my knowledge which trained Facebook to give me this valuable insight.

Tech. Meh. I should maybe become a shepherd. I saw a house on one of my regular driving routes has new tight fences and baby goats. I wonder if they’re hiring.

In the past, it took several days to get my apps through the Microsoft Store process. This one went through in an hour.

It’s basically a little app to track your writing submissions to magazines and whatnot. After I transitioned from a notebook to an Excel spreadsheet in 2020, I’ve found it a little challenging to know what I have that’s available for submitting and to see where I’ve submitted things. This app makes it easy and warns you if you try to submit something to a place a second time, if you try to submit something that’s been published elsewhere, and if you try to submit something somewhere before it’s been accepted or rejected elsewhere.

Of course, now the trick will be to use it myself and to separate the database I use from a test database if I have to build and test it again.

Whenever Lileks posts an entry Main Streets: Remnants of the American Downtown, I like to check to see if I’ve been there before.

And I have:

• Berryville, Arkansas in 2021 and 2024–and remember to carry cash, because a couple of places on the square, including the book store, did not take credit cards into the 2020s
   
• Sarcoxie, Missouri (which he posts about today). Sarcoxie is the exit you take off of I44 if you’re going to a middle school basketball game in Avilla, Missouri, which we did a couple of times. You can take US96 due west, or you can take I44 southwest and get off at Sarcoxie and then take US37 north. They take about the same amount of time due to the higher speeds but greater distance via I44. A couple times, though, when going the I44 route, we stopped in Sarcoxie. Sarcoxie is one of those pseudopod towns where the big highway runs outside of the existing town, so the town annexes land to reach out to an interstate interchange. We’ve eaten at the gas station Subway more than once. One time, we went south into town itself and could not find somewhere to eat, so we probably ended up at the gas station Subway again.

I definitely have better chances in southern Missouri than Wisconsin because I’ve had more time to wander in a car down here, but if he picks a distant suburb of Milwaukee, I might have a chance. Although many of them do not have the traditional downtowns because they’ve grown up later.