Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

I did mention this to my wife, but a week ago last Saturday, February 15th, marked the 37 anniversary of the date upon which I offered up to my wife the ever so romantic proposal to marry me.  I do suppose that whole thing demands context... So we met in the fall of 1987.  I had attended the wedding of some friends and watched the Minnesota Twins win a World Series.  I had also run a business selling and building lofts for students at the university I attended.  The business came about through sheer dumb luck, as I believe it's called, because a good friend of mine and I broke the unwritten rules.   That's a much quicker story - we decided we were going to improve our upcoming dorm rooms by building better lofts.  The rooms we had obtained, on the third floor of Benet Hall at St. Johns, were, like most dorm rooms, quite small.  These rooms were eight feet wide, fifteen feet long, and twelve feet tall.  Each room was dual occupancy, so as you ...

Well, it's been a month, or so.  I've been working on resumes, and otherwise trying to avoid the news.  As someone who wants to be a good leader, I can say there are quite a few bad examples in the world, and the best thing for me to do is to simply note that a lot of what's being done is not how people who wish to be known as good leaders behave. So that's enough about that now. As a kid, I can recall the summer of 1972 when most of the cartoons I WAS allowed to watch during the day were pre-empted because someone was holding some sort of hearing about a fellow who had done things that I gathered he shouldn't have done.  Turns out that the fellow who was doing bad things was the president, Richard Nixon.  For some reason, other members of his own party, which was a quite different Republican party, had decided they weren't going to turn a blind eye. I also recall rather vividly a Saturday Morning back when I was 5.  I was allowed to go out to the living room, w...

I learned a long time ago there are things I can control, I can do something about, or things that are going to happen, and all I can do is focus on what I can affect. So of late, I've been working on looking for and applying for jobs.  I've used a lot of web sites over the years, and there are some that are really useful, and some that sure look like they might want to be some day when they figure out what it is they want to do.  Linked-In certainly seems like the second type.   My challenge is, with well over two decades of IT experience, my resume leans that way.  Which does mean that I've got a great deal of experience testing things, finding the one comma or minor detail that seriously affects a very long line of other operations.  For example, one task I was given at a new job was figuring out why a particular operation worked sometimes, and didn't at others.  I often joke that there are some problems that are "location problems."  That is, ...

 As both of my regular readers know, I've known I've been diabetic since August of 2008.   Over that time, I've developed a routine that gets me through the day. Initially I would start my day with finger-sticks.  That is, I'd deliberately poke the tip of one of my fingers with a tool that made it bleed, then put a drop of that blood onto a test strip - a little piece of plastic and other things, I'm sure, which, when stuffed into a meter, would tell me a number that represented the amount of glucose in my blood.  I'd look for a number above 100, below 120.  I say "above 100" because if it drops below 100, I can start feeling it.   As a kid, there were times where I would skip supper in the evening.  It usually had something to do with what we were having for dinner.  It's not that my mother was a bad cook - she definitely was not - but there were times when I didn't like what we were having, and the rule in our house was that you ate wh...

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 ...