Don't you love it when you get spam messages like this in your e-mail? Or better yet, remember when pitchman Matthew Lesko would appear on television telling you about all of the free money you can get from the Federal government.? Well sit back and read while I tell you about an incredible deal on FREE IT training from the United States Government. Yes I said FREE!

Disclaimer: This of course only applies if you are in the United States legally. So for my friends across the pond, my apologies in advance.

Some of you may know that my first career was in procurement for the Federal government. I was a buyer for the Naval Air Systems Command, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), I negotiated contracts and grants for systems software maintenance on the TOMAHAWK Cruise Missiles Project, aircraft retrofits for the Model E-2C airframe, diaherral disease research in Bangladesh, the creation of a joint vaccine revolving fund for children in developing countries with UNICEF, the privatization of the cattle breeding industry in Poland, and global climate change research.

I left the comfortable womb of Government service in 1999, spending the last ten years as an IT consultant. With the economy in shambles and needing to get back to work to support my family, one of the options I am looking at is going back to work in the Federal government. But here is the rub. I have been out of line procurement for over 12-13 years. In a conversation with the head of procurement for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), I was told that I might have a lot of changes to catch up with to be effective.

One of the biggest changes has been the move to standardize and professionalize the education and training requirements to hold a warrant as a contracting officer. Although I held an unlimited warrant with the EPA, meaning I could sign contracts up to a zillion dollars if they existed, this is no guarantee I could do the same today. The new standards took effect after I left, and course names/content had changed, Since I was not in the position in 2000, I was not automatically grandfathered.

So I needed to do some research on what the new requirements are, and how my old training courses would translate. For those who like to be numb, this is what my training looked like:

Management of Defense Acquisition Contracts (Basic) - 4 Weeks
Management of Defense Acquisition Contracts (Advanced) - 3 Weeks
Government Contract Law (Basic) - 2-3 weeks
Government Contract Law (Advanced) - 1-2 weeks
Contracts Negotiation Workshop - 2 weeks
Defense Cost and Price Analysis - 2 -3 Weeks
Federal Appropriation Law - 1 Week

and the list goes on.

But how could I find out if these classes would translate? If not, how could I update my training with zero budget in this time of unemployment?

What I found is something that blew my mind. And as an added bonus, I easily racked up 35 continuing professional education hours, which will apply to my continuing education requirements to remain a Certified Information Systems Auditor.

And what I found may also help you, especially if you are a business partner that does or wants to do business with the U.S. Government. It may also help you if you want to broaden your information technology career from a project/program management side.

Coming next...The Source for Free Training

Yes, I know all of you have your servers in a secure, locked facility. But what can happen when key systems are not secure? Just ask ESPN's Kenny Mayne when he tries to have a little fun at work.

Updated at 12:48 PM, July 1, 2009 - Apparantly Keith Brooks could not view this in the UK because YouTube is blocked there. So I have replaced the YouTube video with a version from the ESPN site. Hopefully this works better.



Enjoy!

Provocative headline eh? Well the answer is yes, I did find out that I was part of an Emmy award winning broadcast this past weekend. I don't get a statue, but I can get a plaque and/or certificate. It would be kind of funny to introduce myself as an Emmy-award winning Notes Developer/Admin, but only if I let my ego get in the way, And I would never do that, would I?:-)

But back to the more important stuff. It has been about 100 days since my job was eliminated, and I have been trying to stay busy while looking for full-time work. I have completed a couple of projects that are keeping us afloat financially for now:

Ye Olde Domino Mail template Customization

I have been working with a customer with the customization of the IBM Lotus Notes Mail database template to flag messages for migration to a document archiving system. The coding work is about 99% done, but we are in a holding pattern. The third-party archiving solution we are trying to integrate with has been a performance dog that users will never use at current speeds. So until the vendor addresses this issue, the code cannot be rolled out for final testing.

And of course one of the network administrators at the client site learned a valuable lesson: Do NOT decide to move files on a System I integrated file system (IFS) during the day, and if you must move data, do NOT move the IBM Lotus Domino data directory. It is a testament to the rock-solid engineering of the System I that Domino did not crash when he did this. It just timed out on people.

ACT! for Notes Hell

I have tweeted before about being in an ACT! for Notes piece of hell, working with one of the worst user-interfaces imaginable, and undocumented, hidden back-end code. This had a big impact on a project involving the migration of ACT! for Notes Databases from 27 or so individual CRM databases into 13 new databases. This was a huge challenge because of messy data issues (i.e. inconsistency, missing data, incomplete records). In order to get things clean and make future migrations much less painful, I worked with the customer to re-engineer the data management process.

One of the big issues early on was that the customer had to get the correct server installed. They had a messaging server installed, but were licensed for Enterprise. The customer remedied this over a weekend so that we could leverage Domino Enterprise Connectivity Services (DECS) to pull data from J.D. Edwards. Using this and a combination of agents, all customer data now comes from J.D. Edwards, including changes.

The sales force can no longer create customer profile records in the individual databases. By using the agents, we make sure the information is correct and pass down a unique key that becomes associated with the Customer profile and any children documents. This will ensure that future data migrations will be automated and near immediate.



I also just finished a 35-hour on-line class from the Defense Acquisition University. It is actually pretty interesting, and I will post more on that later.

Tags: J.D. Edwards, IBM Lotus Domino, IBM Lotus Notes, Domino Enterprise Connectivity Services (DECS), Act! for Notes

I have been wondering if and when the economic downturn would hit me directly. Today it did, totally blindsiding me.

So needless to say, I am now on the market for work doing development, administration, process controls, or whatever is a good fit.

I love Fridays!

It is that time of the year known as March Madness. Once again, I am offering up the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament Television Broadcast Schedule as a IBM Lotus Domino powered database. Once the tournament is over, I can start to look into presenting this data next year via portal styled pages, oops I meant to say XPages;-).

The schedule is available over on Eye on Sports Media. The data can be viewed by school, conference. seed, region, game location, and assigned broadcast talent. The women's tournament schedule will be available later this week, as the invites are being announced tonight.