Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

Been a bit, and we've had a fair amount of stuff occur around here. Right up at the top, yes, I have another new job.  This is a good one, which starts next week.  It's a work from home job, pays more than the job which laid me off in January, and a job which I know how to do well.  It's also going to be a reunion with some former co-workers, so I'm looking forward to that.  I'm NOT looking forward to letting go of the Grocery store job I just got, but it's not something I am going to be able to do.  The physical demands of running around on concrete floors and dealing with 300-400 degree ovens and fryers just aren't something I can do at this time.  No, it's not the work, it's my body's reaction.   I was not aware of one thing which is a bit of a major issue.  I am an old fat man who takes blood pressure control medication.  This does mean I am also wearing what are called "compression socks".  These are basically knee-high socks w...

I'm starting a new job.  It's not one that's going to require what my previous job did, but that's OK.  Sometimes it's not about the work you do, but the income you have that will allow you to continue to maintain a few luxuries, like eating, living indoors, and staying sane.   My previous position was seated, which is yes, a joke.  I've had some jobs that involved sitting some of the time.  When in IT, I learned very early on that when I was supporting other people, it was my job to be visible.  Not just walking past someone's cube, but doing it slowly, stopping by, and, if their work permits, say Hi.  Not just because I'm that outgoing, which I'm not, but because I learned that there are quite a few people like me who might deal with a small annoying problem with a work-around they've figured out, but there may be an easier solution. One person whom I would regularly pass by and pass the time of day eventually mentioned an annoyance.  When ...

Thirty years ago I was a young father.  I had a one-and-a-half year old daughter, I'd been married for four and a half years, and the day was pretty bright, with clear skies.  I'd gotten up at 4 am and gotten into my car, drove three hours south to LaCrosse, Wisconsin.  I was installing a time & attendance system for a client who had a large number of locations - I was doing the corporate office first.  Because I was the only person in my office who had been trained on the particular version of the software, I was kind of The Guy.  Any support questions, any problems, any issues - it was me.  My employer was still coming to terms with technology, which was both a blessing and a curse. In the previous year, I'd been sent to Dallas to train on this new software.  The company we distributed for had purchased another company that wrote a time and attendance system which ran on the IBM AS/400 Minicomputer.  Now, before you start yelling at me, it's...

I get it.  I'm old-fashioned.  Just how old, though...  You might be surprised. I do remember very clearly hopping into the VW Beetle my parents owned when I was very young and riding, unbelted, in the back seat, the half-mile or so to my grandmother's house for the occasional Sunday Night dinner.  It was a chance to see my grandmother, yes, and her house on the bank of the Mississippi River, and her COLOR TV.  We'd watch the Wide World of Disney, usually, whether it was a Disney movie, a nature program, a tour of the park under construction, or ... Well, anything else in color was cool.  Our TV at home was black and white, which was how I later saw Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. But the media I consumed, as it was, back then was all local.  Mom usually kept a radio on in the kitchen, tuned to the local AM radio news station, WJON.  They would deliver local weather every 15 minutes or so, farm prices, local news updates, and they had regular...

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, ...