Another area that concerned me the most is the fact that I can’t seem memorize the various formulas presented in the study material. I eventually developed a way to remember these formulas by trying to read them like words (sounding like a Klingon). I will explain this in another post if I get around to it. There were also the different theories in motivation and leadership. Again on top of everything else that I have been trying to jam into my noggin’ this was another bang-my-head-on-the-desk item. For this, I also developed a simple system to allow me to remember them better.
On the week of the exam, I received some really good news that got me very excited in a sense which would have been really cool if I received them in any other week, however, the good news and excitement served as a distraction and made it really hard for me to focus on the week which is typically when I do a complete “brain dump” of everything I studied.

At this point, I was basically resigned to the fact that I may not pass the exam.

The exam was a computerized 200 multiple-choice question test hosted by a company called Prometric. The beauty of this type of exam is that you immediately will know whether you pass or fail the exam on the same day. This is much unlike the CISSP and CISM exams, which still use the old-school fill-in-the-bubble-really-good-otherwise-the-machine-will-fail-your-sorry-butt paper exam. That type of exam will take 6 to 8 weeks before you find out the results and YES it is a torture not knowing.

First thing I did as I started to take the exam was to write down all the formulas and the acronyms that I made up to remember the theories in the scratch paper that was provided by the exam proctor. Only to be somewhat disappointed (peeved more like) that out of the 200 questions less than ten asked about the formulas and none asked about the theories.

The exam allows you to mark the questions that you are unsure of the answer. It was complete downer when I had to mark the first 3 questions of the exam. After that, however, I was able to pick-up my stride.

Out of the 200 questions, 25 are what the PMI calls pretest questions. These questions are not graded and used by PMI to test-out some of the questions they will introduce in the future versions of the exam. The questions are spread-out throughout the exam and there is no way of knowing which of the questions are graded and which ones are pretests. Overall, only 175 questions are graded and I need to answer 106 of the graded questions correctly (approximately 60%) to pass. Factoring the 25 non-graded questions and some using some basic math and statistical probability, I figured I can miss 69 question and still pass the exam.

The exam was 4 hours long and I finished it within 2 and a half hours, giving me time to review the questions I marked. At this point I was completely burnt-out and I just wanted to get out of there. As I went through the marked items, I was surprised that I actually marked only a total of 29 questions. So I thought if I get all these questions wrong, what is the probability that I got 40 more questions wrong from the unmarked questions? Pretty low I thought. So instead of reviewing and stress-out over the 29 questions, I trusted my gut and submitted them as my final answers. And after a few it-looks-like-Windows-is-hanging-hour-glass seconds and answering a few survey questions, I got the result that I was waiting for: “Examination Result: PASS”.

Now where is that six pack?

As extracted from the ever-reliable Wikipedia :

Government, commercial and other organizations employ PMP certified project managers in an attempt to improve the success rate of projects in all areas of knowledge, by applying a standardized and evolving set of project management principles as contained in PMI’s PMBOK Guide.

Professionals obtain the credential to verify their proficiency in project management with an internationally accepted certificate. It has proven especially helpful for project managers trying to find jobs or self-employed project managers selling their services to customers.[citation needed]

Many contractors hire certified PMPs to make their bids and proposals more attractive to prospects. Sometimes, IFBs or RFPs require that project managers must be certified PMPs.

In December 2005, the PMP credential was tied for fourth place in CertCities.com’s 10 Hottest Certifications for 2006, and in December 2008, it was number 7 of ZDNet’s 10 best IT certifications.

I also found an article from About.com that list PMP as the highest paying certifications in the tech industry. Now if I could only put that article into reality for myself, it will be awesome considering I now hold two of the top four certifications listed in that article (the other being Certified Information Systems Security Professional or CISSP).

In any case as I did with my previous cert “conquests” (CISSP and CISM), I bypassed paying for the expensive training and opted to go the hard way, actually hitting the books and doing self-study the best way I know how. There were several factors that made it a little bit more difficult for me to focus this time around. I won’t talk about those factors in this entry as I don’t have any illusions or interest of being in a reality show . However, suffice it is to say that I was actually a little bit worried that I may not pass this one on the first try as I did in the other two.

To add to this is the fact that even though I have been using and somewhat familiar with various project management principles for quite some time, there are quite a number of concepts and terminologies in the PMI’s Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) that was very new to me. Another key challenge was the way the PMBOK is intended to be learned. Much unlike the CISSP’s Common Body of Knowledge, wherein one can learn each of the 10 domains independently, the PMBOK is a methodology, whose knowledge areas are interdependent and with process groups that follow a particular road-map and relationships and have independent processes that within themselves have separate elements that inter-relate with other processes.

So aside from simply remembering terms and what-have-you, to effectively master the PMBOK, one must be able to understand how each of the knowledge areas, process groups, processes and elements (process input/output and tools and techniques) inter-relate and which one comes first. Needless to say it was a doozy.

Continued in Yeah Boy! I passed the PMP Exam… (Part 2)

I don’t know if you’ve heard of David Pogue, New Technology Columnist for NyTimes.Com. His website is aptly named: DavidPogue.com. I first got turned on to him (no he did not turn me on ) when he did the keynote for a marketing conference I attended in Las Vegas about 2 years ago. The man has proven that he had the gift for writing, the gift of gab, he delivers his stuff in a very down-to-earth and funny fashion (both in text and in speech) and as he demonstrated in that keynote speech, he got musical skills, too. He explained that Music was actually his major in college and becoming one of the most recognized and respected tech reviewer in the web today is quite a feat indeed.

But that is not what earned him the Yeah Boy from me this week. The Yeah Boy was due to an article he wrote in New York times entitled: Free Speech (Recognition).

Okay, the Yeah Boy was not from his little joke about Palm and Dragon Naturally Speaking or his review of the iPhone App from Nuance (Dragon), but rather from this little snippet:

If you look at the reviews for this app on the iTunes store, though, you’ll be astonished–there are over 1,000 one-star reviews! What’s going on? They’re not judging the app on its design or effectiveness, that’s for sure.

Instead, people are freaked out by that “your audio is converted by Nuance’s servers” part. They think this is a privacy violation. They fear that someone at Nuance might listen in to the audio. (Nuance says nope, it’s just a bunch of computers, maintained in a secure facility, and the audio and transcriptions are not saved.)

They’re also alarmed by the welcome screen’s note that the names in your address book are uploaded to Nuance, too. Eeks! Nuance will know the names of the people we know!

This piqued my attention, because of two reasons, (1) I was just reading a whole bunch of stuff about Facebook and Privacy last night and how freaked out some people were about how Facebook is very intrusive to their privacy and have been described as a tyrannical big brother (not the exact words, but essentially that’s how I took it), and (2) This sounded so familiar and I just can’t put my finger on it, and then….

OK, first of all, this business of your audio being sent to Nuance for transcription rings a very familiar bell. Remember the Gmail brouhaha? When Gmail debuted, it offered a fantastic e-mail account, paid for by small text ads on the side whose subjects are matched to the e-mail contents.

At the time, everyone was hysterical about the supposed privacy violation: Google will be reading my e-mail! Of course, no humans were looking at your e-mail. It was just a bunch of servers analyzing keywords. Today, everybody’s forgotten all about it. But now the issue rises again with Dragon Dictation.

As for the names in your Contacts: they’re sent to Nuance so that the app will recognize the names when you dictate them. No other information (phone numbers, e-mail, addresses, etc.) is transmitted.

Ahhh. Yes. The “Gmail brouhaha.” Whatever happened to that concern? And is Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail any different? How about your DSL or cable e-mail? How about that e-mail address that your company is hosting on that $7.99/month webhost? Hmmmm…. Are they more benign than the evil people at Google? Anyway, Mr. Pogue continues:

What I don’t understand is: Why don’t these same people worry that Verizon or AT&T is listening in to their cellphone calls every single day? Why don’t they worry that MasterCard is peeking into their buying habits? How do they know Microsoft and Apple aren’t slurping down private documents off the hard drive and laughing their heads off?

I mean, if you’re gonna be paranoid, at least be rational about it.

Uhmmmm…. So… How’d you like them apples? Folks unless you become a hermit and move to the top of Everest or dive and hide into the deep trenches of the Marianas or simply disappear from the face of the planet, have a name change and have plastic surgery and stop using every single modern ammenities i.e. the Grocery Store, Your Credit Card and what-have-you altogether, you’ve already either knowingly or unknowingly given up your privacy for someone else to control in some form or another. How do you differentiate which of these companies are benign and which are malicious? I sure can’t think of one specific answer or can’t see any silver bullet solution. Simply put this is the price we all pay for the convenience inter-connectivity provides us.

The main driving force on how privacy is handled in the Internet does not really rely on the law (seriously regulators and policy makers are light years behind with what is happening) nor that it truly relies on the so-called Privacy Policy of the company or the third party audits that some of them are supposed to go  through (see Trust-e). It all comes down to TRUST and to you. It all comes down to whether you will trust a certain company or organization to handle your private information properly. It is up to you if you will trust a company with the Trust-e logo, or Nuance, or Apple or Facebook or Google and trust them that they will respect the privacy settings that you set-forth in your account and trust them not to snoop into your private conversations… If you don’t trust them, well don’t use them, but really don’t be a doomsday prophet about another company when you can’t even tell if the system you are now using actually is truly secure and trustworthy…

So log on, resistance is futile… And Mr. Pogue, YEAH BOY!!!

Yah Suck of the Week.

First off, for the record, I have never really been a Microsoft Hater despite how many techies out there who live and survive at bashing Microsoft. I’ve always thought that Microsoft is good at what they do and what they’ve done is to provide a good majority of us with a simple way to work with computers. Really who among you can write a bash command faster than I could right-click for the properties of the document? Nuff-said…

Then the common attack of MS-bashers  is the security flaws of its products. Well, the answer to that really if you look at the big picture is that being that MS controls the PC and the Server Market, they are a big target and any flaw is noticed fast since it affects a whole bunch of people and organizations. We don’t see this with other products like Linux or Unix or Apple because it only affects a few and low bang-for-the-buck for the hackers. A little geek tour for you folks and visit the National Vulnerability Database, which is the main repository for reporting flaws and vulnerabilities of every major software out there. If you do some searches you will notice that you will find about as much if not more vulnerabilities on Linux and other OS than that of Windows. Okay enough of that.

Last point is usability and cost. MAC really I am a fan, but damn you are expensive. Linux, yes you are cheap, but damn you are a pain to set-up. Moving forward…

So after all that why do I give Microsoft a Yah Suck! Well first I still could not get over Vista. Really that OS gave me Windows ME flashbacks and still is. But I guess, they now have Windows 7, which I got a chance to place with the beta version and Yes in my view Windows 7 Beta performed a whole lot better than my current version of Vista.

But Vista is old news. What made me give them a Yah Suck is what I discovered this week.

Really Mr. Ballmer with all the money Microsoft has, you can’t put some resources to clean-up what could be a very useful resource for your user base? Dude, simply put, YAH SUCK!!!

Anyway…

This week’s Yeah Boy! (should have been last week, but who’s tracking?)…

Efren Peñaflorida and the rest of the 10 CNN 2009 Heroes. Their stories are simply the true silver lining in the dark clouds that has been laying over our dear planet. Efren Peñaflorida was named the CNN Hero of the Year, but even though I am truly proud of this man from my home country, I can easily say that any of the other 9 folks recognized in this event are equally deserving.

My hat’s off to these heroes: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cnn.heroes/archive09/index.html

What else is there to say but YEAH BOY!!!

This week’s Yah Suck, well there are so many choices:

1. The publicity-craving-I-want-my-15-minutes-of-fame-damn-the-fucking-security-and-dignity-of-our-nation  Salahi’s… I saw an interview of these Whitehouse party crashers and they said: “This event has totally ruined our lives.” Well, if you weren’t so egotistically-inept did you ever think that you will get away with breaching the security of the home of the President of the United States? You crash the party of celebrities, you are bound to get sued for tresspassing, and you wonder why you are getting so much flack for crashing the Whitehouse? You are not only STOOPID, but also YAH SUCK!!!

2. The 3 Secret Service officers who failed to follow protocol and let the Salahi’s talk their way into the Whitehouse…. Dude, dude, DUDE!!! YAH SUCK!!!

3.Tiger Woods… Dude, sorry but you got caught, so YAH SUCK!!!

4. The Lamestream Media who thrive in sensationalizing the “imperfections” of celebrities… Seriously, don’t you have other more real-earth-changing/shattering news to cover than to waste 15 minutes of the news hour on a man who despite what many claims is also human and bound to make really bad decisions just like the rest of us… I know that he is a celebrity and that if he is ever caught peeing in public, its news… BUT CHEEZE-WHIZ-CRY-ME, HE IS NOT THE ONLY NEWS!!! We are still fighting 2 wars, our economy is actually showing a little bit of life, our healthcare is in the hands of a few inept well-insured politicians, people are doing great things despite all odds and you will devote so much time of your news segment on some man’s infidelity? YAH SUCK!!!

5. The Network Gremlins I had to battle most of the week and particularly early this morning. Just gotta put this in because seriously it has been a pain… To all Network Gremlins out there who ruins IT Geeks day by causing havoc for no apparent or explanable reason, YAH SUCK!!!

Every Friday, I’ll try to rant and rave on random items I run into in the course of the week…

So here we go:

YEAH BOY OF THE WEEK

Hail to the PACMAN. Yeah boy to the home boy… Manny Pacquaio, a man who not only put pride into the hearts of his countrymen, but also put my city of birth from the southern tip of the Philippines in the global map… For the non-boxing fans or for those who live under a rock, Pacquaio, a.k.a. PACMAN made history last Saturday (Nov. 14) after he turned his opponent’s (Miguel Cotto) face into mush.  He is now officially the only septuple (seven weight) world champion in boxing history.

YEAH BOY SPECIAL MENTION

Even though his faced was turned to what looked like an overripe tomato, Miguel Cotto was a very good sport from the beginning til the end. Good sportmanship it goes a very long way especially in terms of RESPECT & CRED, sometimes even more than a ring, belt or trophy… HEAR THAT LEBRON JAMES? –> I know old news, but as a die hard baskeball fan, stuff like this sticks…

YAH SUCK! OF THE WEEK

Thief gets trapped, drops trousers
(00:36) Rough Cut

NOTE: Natural sound only – no reporter narration

Nov 17 – A thief gets himself stuck in a tiny window while trying to break into a supermarket in Almancil, southern Portugal. He even dropped his trousers in an effort to wriggle free.

According to police, the slim 22-year-old Romanian man had spent about 11 hours stuck in the window, including the two hours it took police and the fire brigade to get him out.

Uhhhmmmm…. Uh-huh… You so funny, YAH SUCK!!!