Sunday, January 28, 2024
On Friday, January 26, 2024 I began taking the remaining continuing education courses I need to renew my real estate license. Refer to the earlier post on this topic.
The first course, Fair Housing- DL/Diversity:
Your Kaleidoscope of Clients- that I began working on Friday morning and
continued into the evening. There was a lot of material offered and I checked almost every link.
This was my first time taking a course with The CE Shop, so I am going to admit there was a bit more overhead associated with this course.
The other issue I ran into- dealt with research into gender labels and their exact meanings. Unfortunately one of the questions I missed was because I still do not understand how everything is being defined.
In my defense, I would like to suggest that not all definitions on gender labels appear to be the same.
The following graphic shows my Certificate of Completion for the Fair Housing- DL/Diversity: Your Kaleidoscope of Clients and the score I received on the final exam.
When I began taking the final, I noticed I had 1000 chances to pass the final exam. I passed the first time with the 85 score, however, had no opportunity to up the score with subsequent retries. I was also a little surprised about how long it took me to complete the course and final exam.
The second course taken this weekend (all day Saturday), Ethics-D DL/Maryland Real Estate Code of Ethics was a long course. A lot of emphasis was put on the Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice of The National Association of Realtors®. I had the NAR PDF link in one of my browsers all day and probably should credit a correct answer on the final exam to this fact.
The following graphic shows my certificate of completion and the passing score of 95 for the ethics course.
The following illustration shows the remaining courses I will take hopefully this week to satisfy my continuing education requirements.
If you are like me and your first real estate license renewal is approaching, and you also need continuing education course credits, I would not wait until the last minute. Those who have renewed their licenses at least once, probably know this.
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
I power the applications and tools I develop for online consumption using a myriad of different Application Program Interfaces (APIs) from different sources.
One of the more popular pages on the WiredPages News Service is the Employment Guide.
Listed below are the APIs and XML feeds used on the WiredPages Employment Guide.
- CareerOneStop APIs
- Jobs Board
- Occupation Wage Data
- FRED® API
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Unemployment Rate
- U.S. Employment and Training Administration, Initial Claims
- FRED Per Capita Personal Income By State
- FRED Military Employment Stats Graph
- Google Career News Info
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics -JOLTS XML Feed
On January 27 & 28, 2024 the CareerOneStop API site will be down for maintenance so the two applications (Jobs Board, Occupation Wage Data) on the Employment page that use the corresponding CareerOneStop APIs will also be unavailable.
What does FRED stand for? Federal Reserve Economic Data.
In addition, certain areas of the FRED site will be down for maintenance on Friday, January 26, 2024 which will affect different graphs on not only the Employment page, but several other WiredPages that use FRED graphs and/or the FRED API. The WiredPages Business & Markets page also relies heavily on FRED data.
Upcoming downtime notices from different resources used on WiredPages.
Saturday, January 20, 2024
In February, it will be two years since I took the Maryland and National real estate exams- which were required to obtain my Maryland Real Estate Salespersons License.
As noted in the image above- showing my license pocket card, my license expires on April 21, 2024.
I plan on renewing the license even though I signed up as a referral agent (also means a fully licensed real estate salesperson) and have never had any sales.
In Maryland, licensed real estate salespersons must complete continuing education requirements to maintain their licenses.
The following illustration shows the continuing education requirements for Maryland agents (salespersons) and associate brokers who were licensed before October 1, 2023.
In 2022, after becoming a licensed agent I searched for online courses to ensure all of my educational requirements were taken care of by the time of my renewal date (April 21, 2024). I found some free courses and my brokerage offered a couple.
Noted below, the Maryland Real Estate Commission's (MREC) records of the coursework I completed in 2022, which counts as continuing education credits towards my license renewal.
So why did I not complete the continuing education requirements before now (or the not-to-distant future)? Busy and I found all of the free courses I was going to find.
One free course I signed up for- required in-person attendance at a site in Northern Virginia and I had to cancel at the last minute. The other courses I took in 2022 were virtual.
So on January 2, 2024, I pulled out my credit card and signed up with The CE Shop to take the remaining courses I need for license renewal.
Your question: "So today is January 20, 2024 and you still have not opened any of the courses you have paid for?" My Response: You would not believe the many things that have happened since January 2, 2024. Mostly to do with my sites and the new year, but there have been one or two other issues I have had to deal with.
I hope to complete the continuing education coursework I need for license renewal by the end of the first week in February, given no other distractions.
Monday, January 08, 2024
In November 2023, I obtained a JSON formatted data file containing the 2020
CIA World Factbook.
The World Factbook data I maintain in my local development environment is a MySQL database from 2013.
When I first downloaded the 2013 data it was stored as a MySQL compressed (GZ) database file. I did not want to maintain all of the data in my local development environment so I went through each table, only extracting and importing the data I wanted to use with my application.
Though I completed work on the JDBC Java Servlet for the World Factbook Quick Reference Tool sometime ago, the amount of work I had to do to get the data I wanted was no minor task. Therefore, I never installed the online version of the application fearing those with access to my servers would want to use the data elsewhere.
The following video, produced in August 2022 demonstrates the World Factbook Quick Reference Tool running in my local developmental environment starting about 1:21 minutes into the video.
Because the CIA World Factbook data I am using for demonstration purposes is now over 10 years old and I have more recent data in my possession, I decided to install the World Factbook Quick Reference Tool on the WiredPages Reference page.
I have some minor cleanup work on the servlet and I also need to upload the custom World Factbook database to my site, however I think I will have it up and running by the time I finish this evening. It is about 4:20 PM my time and I have one or two other minor chores to take care of before I complete work on this project.
