Blogs on Lenwood

220 Applications & 1 Offer: Insights from my job search

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:27:58 -0600

Last year I was out of work for 8 months. During that time I submitted 220 applications. Most went nowhere. The job I got? I thought I bombed. Here’s the story.

I was laid off from IBM in Oct 2024, and hired by the University of Texas at Austin in May 2025. I thought I’d take a minute to reflect on my process and share some numbers. This is not intended as advice, but while I was searching I was keenly interested in what was working for others, so I’m sharing with that in mind.

Smoked Chicken

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 14:00:03 +0000

I got a smoker as a gift recently, so this summer has been fun with trying new recipes. Over the next few months I’ll post recipes that we’ve enjoyed. This one is for smoked chicken.

Dry Rub

¼ cup brown sugar
¼ cup sweet paprika
3 tbsp kosher salt
1 tbsp ground pepper
1 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp onion powder
1 tbsp chili powder
1 tbsp cayenne pepper

This makes a lot of rub, so either save it for later (trust me, you’re going to want to make this again) or cut these amounts in half. Also, don’t worry about the chili & cayenne, the flavor wasn’t hot.

Predicting Baseball Game Attendance With R

Tue, 10 Feb 2015 20:50:45 -0600

All of my code for this project is available on GitHub, MLB-Attendance. I’ve organized my code in sequential files so that they’re easy to follow.

Gathering the Data

Greg at yhat shows how to scrape the data from Baseball-Reference. Since web scraping makes it easy to grab a lot of data quickly I thought I’d try it. So, I wrote code to scrape game data for all 30 teams through name changes & relocations over the past 25 years, 1990 - 2014. My code for this is in 1-scrapeData.R. It isn’t very pretty, if team names hadn’t changed it would be more succinct. Still, you’ll end up with a file per team, which makes it an easy starting point.

Forgiveness

Thu, 08 May 2014 01:17:19 +0000

I recently blogged about the possibility of forgiveness as an event. As it happens, I’ve also come across notes that I wrote on this subject a couple of years ago. Here they are with only minor edits for readability.

Forgiveness is something that I’ve struggled with quite a bit as an adult. I’m generally an easy going guy, so many offenses roll off of me. It takes a lot to get me angry, but when I get really get angry it can take years to push through. If I were to run into a particular former boss, or an ex-girlfriend I probably wouldn’t come across as easy going. There are a couple of things that are helpful for me to keep in mind though. I do have to remind myself of these things.

Turn Around

Tue, 25 Mar 2014 13:53:55 +0000

Last week I read something that has challenged my thinking. I have had a pamphlet called How to be Free From Bitterness for at least 15 years. A friend called me last week, we were talking about forgiveness so I decided to review this to see if it would be worth sharing. The entire pamphlet is awesome. It covers general forgiveness, relationships with parents, controlling your tongue, and more. I definitely recommend it if you’re struggling with forgiveness. One aspect of it has stuck with me.

Parenting

Tue, 09 Jul 2013 02:13:27 +0000

My wife & I are having our first child, our little girl is due soon. We’re both pretty excited. I feel pretty fortunate to be a parent after a few years in adulthood. I’ve been around long enough to learn a few things that make life easier or more enjoyable. For the past few weeks I’ve been journaling what I’d like to teach her, and I look forward to passing these nuggets along. By the way, these are as much reminders for myself as they are things to pass on. Here they are, in no particular order.

Gene Kranz

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:24:13 -0600

Tonight Gene Kranz, the famed NASA mission controller played by Ed Harris in Apollo 13, came to speak at UT and I was able to make it. I went with low expectations because I didn’t know much about him other than what I had seen in the movie, and just wow. This man is awesome. The speech was really inspiring and gave me renewed pride in being an engineer and being an American. It was that kind of speech.

My Oma

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:39:40 +0000

A week and a half ago my grandma, whom I have always referred to as “Oma” (the German word for grandma), passed away in her sleep. She was 93 years old. I feel pretty fortunate to have had her in my life as long as I did, she was truly one of the most beautiful and loving people I’ve ever met.

During her memorial, my family asked if I would give the eulogy for her. I’m quite honored to get to share my view of Oma and the relationship that we shared, so of course I said yes. Since then a few family members have asked me for my notes on what I said, so I’m posting it here. Liz encouraged me to talk about Oma’s character, and I agreed.

Autumn Life

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 21:31:04 -0600

fall semester is going well. its hard to believe that its almost over. physics has been tough, but i’ve learned a lot. vector calculus is actually pretty cool. hey, i’m an engineer, what’d you expect me to say? its amazing to me that we have the ability to calculate volumes and surface areas and distances in such an abbreviated way. integrals really do work!

i’ve spent much time on halo 2 over the past two weeks. i’ve been anticipating this release for months. bungie did such a good job creating halo that i honestly doubted whether or not halo 2 would live up to the hype. i have to say that they delivered, the first release pales in comparison. new storyline, new weapons, new music, the ability to carry two guns… its awesome! i’m not interested in the first one anymore. i haven’t yet completed the campaign, but i believe that i’m close. last night steve & i logged into xbox live for the first time and went head to head against the world. most of the time we both got stomped, but we did get to participate in a couple of beautiful slaughters.