Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

I thought I'd dip a pinky toe into the whole Blue Sky thing. I passed on an early invite to Blue Sky, because I'd remembered the wretched cesspit Twitter was when I left, a couple years before it became another Musk orifice.  I really didn't want to invest more social media time into something that was going to become toxic waste.  So yeah, I probably missed a few months of things maturing and developing, not that I'd have had the chance to influence much of it.  When Twitter was new, and the number of users was under a million, it seemed like a new challenge that was going to be to form coherent messages within the character limit.  Bluesky sure doesn't have that, which does kind of make it a little less interesting.  With all of those pieces missing, I was interested in seeing what it might be as a counter to the former Twitter. I will tell you that, at this point, I've managed to block a hell of a lot more users than I'm following.  I am not sure if thei...

 Hello, anyone...  I do hope you had a good holiday.  I've been here, just dealing with ...  stuff. A brief timeline of "lately"...  Early October of this year I took the week of my birthday off.  I'd been looking to use up at least two more weeks of vacation this year, as last year my vacation accrual was all messed up.  It kept loading up with more time than I had earned, I thought, when in late 2023, about mid December, I realized that I had used two weeks of vacation, but for some reason I had an extra week.  I was in the process of sending an email to our corporate HR department asking about the error when I thought to look at the manual, and read the part where employees accrue vacation at specific rates, and they change at the beginning of your anniversary year. That is, when you are about to hit your fifth anniversary and change from accruing two weeks of vacation to three weeks of vacation each year, it starts accruing in January.  I...

Well, I suppose it's time to come clean.   Back in October, while I was on my vacation, the rest of my coworkers got some news from our employer.  Don't get me wrong here - I would love to do another 15 years at this organization.  I have been treated very nicely, I love the work I'm doing, I'm good at it, and there is the possibility I might be able to stay.   And I say this because I've found this organization is unlike so many others I've worked with.  They're impressive, technologically, and they listen and do make changes.  I'd be honored to be able to stay. If they chose not to keep me, that's not going to change my opinion.  I'm an adult.  While the situation isn't what I'd like, I have found many people in the organization are just plain old good decent people.  No head games, no dead air, we;re updated regularly on what's happening.   But the notice that my job might go away has me once again tuning up the resume ...