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 ...

I found a rather interesting article on CNN that does discuss a little bit of what I do for my day job.  I suppose the world being the world today, I should note here that anything I say here has absolutely nothing to do with my employer.  I'm not authorized to speak for them, I sure as hell am not speaking for them, and my opinions here are backed up with the last six years doing the job. The article lays out a little bit of what is happening in corner of the insurance industry that I'm in.  I deal with incredibly simple therapies, compared to most medical services.  I have nothing to do with surgery, diagnosis, or any sort of time-critical life-saving operations.  In most cases I am seeing the records of patients who are being released from a hospital after a stay to discover what ails them, and specialists at those hospitals will order and interpret the results of tests, and using their experience, write prescriptions for therapies that will keep patients al...

That's me. As in today, I've learned that I should not attempt to go into the HTML edit level on this tool. Ironic, isn't it? 25 years ago I started this whole process by editing my HTML directly in Notepad... But thou shalt not do it here.  I was blathering on in the draft I don't dare go back into about woodworking.  I had stumbled into yet another chance to make a  cooper-topped chest, this time I'm working backwards.  With the chest I made for my son's wedding, I started with the lid, then tried to build a box while avoiding plywood.  This time, I downsized rather significantly.  The current chest will be about 19" wide by 14" front-to-back.  It looks like the eventual height will be around 15 or 16 inches tall, once I finish that lid.   This time, I went in trying to apply math.  There's a way to calculate this lid, and I don't know it.  What I did do, though, was approach it from left field.  I looked at the angles....

I do exist, I am still here, I am juggling bowling balls, chain saws, and small nuclear devices... Not honestly, no, but there are a few things which I need to sit on and not say anything about for a while, because, well, it will affect my financial future.  So I am still working, and I'm working to keep working. Which is to say that something occurred to me the other day.  And it was one of those "oh, hey, remember when that..."  happened sort of moment.  When you get to be my age, that can happen a lot.  A small event or an occurrence reminds you of a past time where something happened and you ... well, reminisce. In my particular case I stumbled across some old records.  Not the flat vinyl things, but some information I had.  I learned a fairly long time ago that computers are, generally, reliable until they aren't.  That is, you may be using a tool for a rather long period of time, when all of a sudden it stops.  And then you think about ...

Today would have been my father's 102nd Birthday.  Or our combined 60th attempt to get through two birthday cakes in one week. I am familiar with that.  My daughter, our first child, was born the day after I was - well, with thirty years difference.  My son, our second child, followed five weeks and three years later. For much of my youth I was a little bit of my father's mini-me.  We had similar interests, enjoying technology and gadgets, and how things worked.  Where I benefited probably the very most was from his wisdom when it came to health care.  Not that my father's parents did not care about health care, but that my father had a fair amount of experience with the inadequate health care of the time.  Being born in 1922 meant that he had to survive a heck of a lot.  He lived through polio, a disease which is usually referred to as "eliminated" though it pops up regularly around the world. For those who have never seen a polio case up close o...