Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

Throughout my career, or rather, my time in various positions of employment, I have been privileged to work for some pretty spectacular people, for some truly great organizations, and despite all of that, there have been times when the first two fingers of one hand are providing encouragement to the team, while the third finger is definitely countering the positive messages with some real ... well, profanity is probably the best way to put it. I am no great leader.  I'm working on that.  I need to focus on my communication skills, and work on keeping the message consistent, and more so, making certain that I don't counter the message I want to project with a message that destroys what I want to accomplish. I say all of that due to my recent experiences.  And I'm not trying to focus blame on any one individual - I am certain that there's more than enough pressure going around to keep everyone on the knife edge of tension.  But it's pretty widely acknowledged that lea...

So when I end my work day, these days, my "commute" starts.  I get up from my "work desk" and use the bathroom, then stagger into the laundry room and sit down at this computer.  My personal machine.   And then I take off the blinders. For pretty much the entire day, I have the television on behind me.  It's usually tuned to one of the all-music-all-the-time channels my cable system offers.  No, not MTV, VH1, or any other video channel.  This is pretty much like radio, except there are no DJs, no commercials, no news breaks, just music. And I keep it on the "classic rock" station.  About a month ago I noticed a change in their playlists.  Where I could count on hearing Baba O'Reilly, that song by the Who that some folks think is titled "Teenage Wasteland" - it's not.  But it's right in the pocket of songs which I love to hear.  I'm a bit of a sucker for music that starts out maybe not softly, but simple - sort of the solo up f...

As ever, I hear some of you muttering, but, well, yeah. The other day, I read an article about the Voyager 1 experiencing some as-yet undetermined issues .  Or, if you're even later than I, as in that link has gone to the dead end also inhabited by the dodo, well, there's a news story about some signal anomalies which are occurring as the Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, sends signals back ... well, give or take some 14.5 billion miles.  Or to put it another way, it takes over 21 1/2 hours from the time Voyager 1 says "beep" and we hear that "beep".   And that is dependent on a couple of things.  First, let's be crystal clear.  If you're fortunate enough to live in a climate where the sun rises and sets on a regular basis - that is, somewhere on the earth, which does pretty much narrow my audience down to a few billion, but to the best of my recollection, that does seem to be a rather exceedingly large majority of all the humans currently known to ...

Not mine, mind you.  But theirs. It is no great secret that, while growing up, I really really wanted a dog.  I wanted a friend, someone who was there, in my corner, for me, and had my back.  Unfortunately, dogs aren't quite that discriminating.  Don't get me wrong - I expect that had I been lucky enough to have a pet, it would have had my back, and those of all of my sisters.  Sad thing was most often, I needed the dog to protect me from the sisters. I am indeed fortunate that none of my siblings ever chose to go into politics, because, well, the stories I could tell.  And the true stories, not the crap they'd trot out.  Such as the time I got neck deep in trouble because one of my sisters kept screwing around while I was trying to close the back window on the family station wagon. For those of you who did not have or never will have the privilege, back in the 1970s or so, there were these pre-minivan vehicles known as Station Wagons.  Take your ...

Yeah, here I am again. No, not a lot of bad news.  There is a little.  My current employer is continuing on in their merry way, and doing well.   I am, however, a bit of a canary in a coal mine for certain things.  I am a fairly loyal person, and I want to basically reduce inefficiency as much as possible.  I recall reading, back in the 90s, that the more complex a job is, the longer it takes someone to go from "trainee" to "productive."  At the time I was working in a rather complicated field, time and attendance systems.  It was a lot of fun, because it combined a couple of fields.  First up there was the whole IT nature.  We were installing software on computers, connecting devices into a network, and then teaching people how to use the software.  All of this on top of knowing how to configure that software to collect an employee's work time events and calculate them for the employee's pay. I will submit that there are very few t...

Or, well, it would if they paid any sort of attention to me...  But here we go.  Technical content ahead. That's right.  However, I do not have a set of graphs and stacks of data.  I only have observations collected over several ... well, twenty or so years of technical experience. So in the interests of full disclosure, yes, my primary home computer is still running on Windows ... uh, well, when I type "VER" on the command line, I get 6.1.7601.  I'm sure that causes more than a few of you to cringe, scream at the walls, and otherwise point a few fingers at me.  That's right.  But before you get all hacked off, I have a few layers of protection which ARE updated, including some self-rolled improvements, such as a wee little trick I learned long ago which literally prevents my computer from reaching out to certain web sites which I find ... well, I'd rather not see traffic from them. It's the olde Hosts file hack.  Yes, my friends, technical conten...

I suppose the title "Be Careful What You Wish For" would be a bit obvious, but there we are.   When I put together that last post, I was concerned that I would appear to be violating HIPAA for any patient I ever dealt with, even though I haven't knowingly dealt with any who were pregnant and in any sort of situation that might need to consider an abortion. But there is the small matter of my own personal history.  I believe it must have been 1974 or so, a year after Roe V. Wade, when we were required to use up our black crayons making black wreaths out of newspaper to bring to a weekly all-school Mass to sadly commemorate the Roe V. Wade decision.   Mind you, in 1974, I was 10 years old for most of it.  And at the then-rather-tender age of ten, I do not recall ever having heard the words rape, incest, abortion, or fetus in any sort of context at all.  I was brainwashed into thinking that abortion was murder, that those who committed abortion should be ...

I suppose I should preface these thoughts with a few disclaimers.  I work in health care, which means a great deal of the personal information that passes in front of my face is subject to this thing called HIPAA - which is, for the lucky folks who don't deal with it (see below) is a prohibition that makes sure I don't run up and down the street screaming out your address, your policy, your diagnosis, your copay, your medical condition, your social security number, your doctor's name, what ever it is that you're taking to keep you healthy, and etc., etc., etc.  Or in other words, pretty much the opposite of the little announcement I used to provide to folks whom I was about to start training on some computer system by simply noting that "hey, look, when you're using your work computer, it is important for you to remember that your employer paid for that computer, and they therefore have the right to see the data you have stored on it, the stuff you send out via...

Well, now that April's done, here's hoping that May brings better weather to my doorstep. It's been a topic on the news of late - the fourth-coldest April on record.  Like we saw four days with the daily high temperature over sixty.  That's not including the one day we got over 70.  Which is far below our average.  And while we haven't seen exceptionally large snowfalls, we had a few.  And it's been bleeping cold and wet. The wet we needed.  We didn't get too close to an average of five feet of snow this winter, but this wet spring has done wonders for the soil which was in a moderate to severe drought at the end of last year.  So we needed it.  But cold, grey springs are not the sort of thing we need around here. And they don't do much for moods, either.  I'm ready for some nice warm spring days, and I'm hoping that lumber prices will come down and I'll be able to finish a few projects.  The biggest right now is the pending "storage loc...