Jeff Davis

With its acid edge and wicked humor, Jeff Davis's rapid fire depiction of bureaucracy gone wild digs underneath the fingernails of the typical blue collar worker, satirizing both modern day relationships and business life. Specifically, if we can't stand our jobs and families, live for the day to escape Unlucky in love and trapped in a dead-end job, Jack Snaggler thinks his fortune is about to change when he meets a drop-dead gorgeous brunette named Paradise at a local bar.Think again. When a shady fast food chef goes missing and coworkers start mysteriously disappearing, Jack finds himself framed for murder. If he wants to stay alive long enough to ever see Paradise again, he'll first need to escape a conspiracy, that at each turn, involves almost everyone he knows.Part Big Brother, part corporate mindset, part 60's cool, and part dysfunctional love interest. The road to paradise has never been so tainted or hilarious.Living under the umbrella of a politically incorrect and bureaucratic world are Ed Shoemaker, a disgruntled office worker conspiring to off his wife and flee to Fiji; Eileen Klump, a secretary in the throes of menopause who suffers from periodic mental breakdowns between intermittent stays at the local mental facility; along with Lance Sheppard, a would-be entrepreneur who makes his living the good old fashioned way: disability fraud. Regardless of the premise, the book continually punctures the fabric of what's simply funny with a pervasive shadow of underlying truth.Wedged in the chaos, Jack Snaggler fights to stay afloat in a murky pool of corrupt businessmen, trigger-happy feds, sleazy seaside hotel rooms, and incompetent crooks, all the while stomping for the pursuit of true love and happiness. A classic roasting of Middle America, this book is for anyone who has one of those days where the kids just scribbled crayon all over the wall, traffic is bumper to bumper, the boss has you under a microscope, everything is going wrong, and that little voice in the back of your head is screaming, "ENOUGH " Take the first exit ramp off the interstate to the nearest airport and disappear to some deserted island in the South Pacific where they'll never find you.

It is a long journey from the Roaring 20s city of Augusta to the sleepy, coastal community of Jonasport, Maine. And although death never takes a holiday, murder will at times seek a vacation spot. Sgt. Jack Brochu of the Maine State Police had met murder all up and down the Boston Post Road. Secretly, he didn't mind. He enjoyed the interaction with the people he met. Join him as the aging detective is introduced to the young and beautiful Gwendoline Bellevedere.

Co-published with More first-generation students are attending college than ever before, and policy makers agree that increasing their participation in higher education is a matter of priority. Despite this, there is no agreed definition about the term, few institutions can quantify how many first-generation students are enrolled, or mistakenly conflate them with low-income students, and many important dimensions to the first-generation student experience remain poorly documented. Few institutions have in place a clear, well-articulated practice for assisting first-generation students to succeed. Given that first-generation students comprise over 40% of incoming freshmen, increasing their retention and graduation rates can dramatically increase an institution’s overall retention and graduation rates, and enhance its image and desirability. It is clearly in every institution’s self-interest to ensure its first-generation students succeed, to identify and count them, and understand how to support them. This book provides high-level administrators with a plan of action for deans to create the awareness necessary for meaningful long-term change, sets out a campus acclimation process, and provides guidelines for the necessary support structures.At the heart of the book are 14 first-person narratives – by first-generation students spanning freshman to graduate years – that help the reader get to grips with the variety of ethnic and economic categories to which they belong. The book concludes by defining 14 key issues that institutions need to address, and offers a course of action for addressing them. This book is intended for everyone who serves these students – faculty, academic advisors, counselors, student affairs professionals, admissions officers, and administrators – and offers a set of best practices for how two- and four-year institutions can improve the success of their first-generation student populations.An ACPA Publication

HIGHLIGHT Open Source SOA shows readers how to build state-of-the-art SOA applications using freely-available open-source technologies. DESCRIPTION You can build a world-class SOA infrastructure entirely using popular, and mature, open-source applications. Unfortunately, the technical documentation for most open-source projects focuses on a specific product, the big SOA picture. You're left to your own devices to figure out how to cobble together a full solution from the various bits. In other words, unless you already know how Mule and Tuscany work with jBPM, you're stuck. Open Source SOA shows readers how to build an entire SOA application using open-source technologies. It shows readers how to apply key ideas like Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) design and Business Process Management (BPM) and learn the tools and techniques to implement them effectively. To pull everything together, the author describes real-life case studies from his own work to tie together all the principles and practices. These hard-to-find case studies are pure gold for the reader, as most developers keep these trade secrets to themselves. KEY POINTS • Theory—what SOA really represents • Enablers—SOA core technologies • Open-source applications that address the core technology • Best-of-breed open-source solutions • Real-life case studies MARKET INFORMATION SOA is a fact of life for enterprise developers. Open source technologies have caught up with—and in many cases, surpassed—their commercial rivals in terms of power, ease of use, and sophistication. This book shows a Java EE developer how to apply SOA techniques using the best-of-breed open-sources tools.

In addition to suggesting specific yoga exercises for various writing roadblocks . . . this is a substantial writing guide, with lessons in voice, symbol, syntax and dialogue.-Dallas Morning NewsWith wisdom for writers at any level and in any genre, nationally known writing and yoga instructor Jeff Davis shows writers how yoga's principles and practical tools can deepen their writing practice and increase their versatility writers. A grounded guide to the body-mind-imagination connection, this book shows ways for writers to reconnect with their deeper intentions for writing, sustain concentration and confidence when writing, and write with an authentic voice.

"Papa Bear is everything a sports book should be: Passionate, encyclopedic, utterly biased and filled with endearingly anachronistic phrases. . ."--New York Times Book ReviewGranted unprecedented access to George Halas’s formerplayers, friends and associates, author Jeff Davis tells the incredible story of how one man grabbed an outlaw game by the throat, shook it up, and made it into the most popular spectator sport on the planet.

Russell Annabel is one of the most colorful characters ever to set foot in Alaska, this is his story.