My Last Day

For 10 years I worked for Kaiser Permanente, the first 4 years was a wonderful time, the management were people oriented, and cared about you and everyone in the shop was a friend or at least someone you could walk up to and say, hey! lets go grab a beer. Then The West Coast took over and Turned a Regional organization into a National one run out of California.

When California took over, one by one we saw all east coast Managers let go, to be replaced with faceless people on the opposite coast. We saw Management start to ignore the professional advice they were paying us to provide and to follow a strictly California Centric theme, one with lower efficiency and markedly lower Availability of servers. As the numbers and stats declined we saw Re-organization after re-organization as wave after wave of management came and went as things went down the tubes. Never once did the idea that the things that changed were at fault for the flagging statistics, no the problem was the people...the technical experts who were hired for some inexplicable reason could not meet the same numbers they once had. Never once did management consider the fact that they kept increasing the number of servers and continuously reduced the size of the support staff that over work might be the real issue.

But that is all in the past, to "FIX" what was broken the company decided to just outsource most of IT, believeing that the problem lay with the workers and not the management.....we will see how that works for them.

But for now, I am free, no longer is that big carrot of a pension out there encouraging me to endure abuse and over work, no incentive is out there to make me work unpaid over time or 12 hour exhaustive shifts rarely having time for a lunch break. No My new company doesnt have any kind of carrot other than the 401k I contribute to, and thus there is no stick big enough to induce me to work for free anymore.

For some perverse reason I am sad to be leaving Kaiser, it is probably the good memories from before it Nationalized, when we were family and we all worked together and had reasonable expectations of us....and a managementthat actually cared about employee satisfaction. We didnt need a union, we didnt need strong contracts, we just worked together....but that is over probably never to return. Now I take my UNIX Admin skills to whoever makes it worth my wile to work for them. Anyone know of a small company that interested in Quality over Quantity?

I feel free and liberated now....so here is to the future.

The deed is done

After 8 years of just living together, we finally did it. My other half and I finally got the Government's blessing on our union. I've been living with her for 8 years, and we were fine without the Governments interference but the down side finally outweighed the benefit. Since we are not a Gay Couple my New Employer would not allow me to have her on my Medical and Dental unless we were married....If we were Gay, it would have been no problem I am assured. Makes one wonder who it is that needs to confiscate marriage for their own use....but I digress.

Anyway Im happy and she is happy about being married so its all good. We had a very small ceremony during which we both kept breaking up and laughing even during the vows. So join me in thanking the woman who is making me somewhat more honest :) Thanks C. I love you.

Jack Bauer - Good or Evil?

Personally Id vote the guy in as president.
I think about his actions and I tend to agree with his way
of thinking and doing things. I also agree that the time to grieve
and get emotional is NOT in the middle of the mission, you put it aside
and deal with it when there is time.

I agree with Bauer's comment to the Senator. "You are weak, incapable of facing evil
and doing what is necessary" I find that many of the people I have met and meet
really are weak and not equipped to deal with Hard men who have ill intent. It may not be their fault. It is because they have lived sheltered lives and never been subjected to violence.
To me this seems "Weak" but if we are to have a society of people who are sheltered, then do we
not need people like Bauer to protect them? I say yes.

And if we do need these hard men to protect our soft society, then who is qualified to lead them? Certainly not a Weak demographically palatable soft person as they are not equipped to deal with the savage nature of reality. So who then can lead? In our real world Jack Bauer would be in prison and the Savage men would win every time.

I've noticed especially lately on Television that anytime an agent or cop or citizen is forced into a position to kill a savage attacker intent on violence there is an inordinate amount of emotional grief after the fact which I really do not understand...personal experience and philosophy has taught me that this is not the reality, I care not a whit about those I may have harmed or killed while they were intent on harming or killing me or those I cared about....so what does that make me?

Thinking about this has lead me to wonder.....am I a sociopath? I see no problem with treating
violent, savage people, violently and savagely in the name of keeping others safe. Has my life
living in the rural areas raised to kill animals for food and then in the Military to face down aggressors left me a being unfit for polite society? I feel I fit in well enough, that I have never harmed another person or even threatened them without cause....but should there be cause, I have no hard feelings to cope with, it is just a situation that needs dealt with. I am at a loss to understand those who would defend the "rights" of those savage types at the expense of the soft civilized side of society. So what am I?

So what of Jack Bauer and those who view the world and life as this fictional character does....where do they fit in?

So am I a sociopath? a deviant? What am I?

Happy Birthday to me and Feliz Navidad!!!

Hit 47 today, woohoooo, soon Ill be half a century old....wowzer.

The Reveal

Some more vanity from me.
Picture is 7 years old and I am now heavier and much much much greyer.
This is back when I worked in an office. As you can see we were a casual dress
code environment. I am a jeans and sweatshirt kind of guy and don't like the
pretentious attitudes of the people that I have worked with who maintain that
in order to be "Professional" you have to wear a monkey suit and a noose...I mean tie.

I can pull off the suit look if I want to, the problem is, I just so rarely want to.
Need to find a newer picture that doesn't make me look as dorky as the ones I already have.

Obligatory Narcissism: Or all about me.

So when one starts to write a blog they have a few options about how much they reveal about their person. So I guess I will put what I am comfy with sharing into this little Bio-post so any visitors to this blog will have some clues.

Born and raised by a married man and woman. The eldest with 2 sisters and a brother. We always lived in fairly rural areas, mostly in PA but with occasional periods in West (by god) Virginia and Minnesota. Always had guns around our home, hunting, fishing and trapping equipment was abundant, it was with the resources from the hunting, fishing and trapping along with my dads day job that we managed to eek out a fairly comfortable lower middle income existence. We ate what we killed or caught and sold the hides from trapping, beaver, muskrat and fox for extra spending cash...back before fur became un-PC well, before there was even a term PC.

I learned how to survive in the wilderness, how to shoot and provide for myself. I also spent huge numbers of hours reloading shotgun shells, and of course shooting. 12gauge for a skinny little kid (116lbs at 5'10" on my 18th birthday) was an experience but I managed and I could not guess how many cases of .22 rounds I fired from various single shot rifles and later in my teens a Remington semi-auto. I learned a lot of useful skills from my dad, skills I would have liked to had the chance to share with my son but circumstances would rule that out.

As I approached age 18 my father ensured I knew well in advance that once I reached the age of 18 I was expected to move out and make my own way in the world. There was neither money nor desire for my parents to send me to college and was rather pointedly directed to the military. I always did well in school and graduated 10th in my class of 500. The US Navy a sporadic tradition for my family recruited me for it's Advanced Electronics program which I decided to pursue. My scores on the aptitude tests were high enough that I was urged to take the Nuclear Power program or to follow the path to the Naval Security Group. I was not interested in the Nuclear Power program so went the Security group route. I entered an intense series of schools which imparted the equivalent of a B.S. EE education in a mere 2.5 years. At the end of that training I still did not know what I would be doing for the Navy, I was granted a Top Secret SCI clearance and then entered another 10 months of education on the systems I would be supporting. I cannot say what I did, but I can say that it irks me to no end that Tom Clancy could write all about what I worked on and make millions from it. :)

I spent 1980 to 1990 in the US Navy stationed at various remote facilities and spending a lot of time on planes going to places that I "Did not have the need to know" where they were. I came to really appreciate the leadership that Ronald Reagan brought to our Nation and witnessed first hand the transition of the US military from being a Joke form the 1970's to being respected world wide in the 1980's. In 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union the Armed Forces in general were drawing down so after completing another 10 month training course and receiving a rather large reenlistment bonus, I was let go from military service.

I married a woman whom I had served with and traveled with her for several years from duty station to duty station and worked as a civilian contractor. We had my son and daughter and had wonderful plans for the future when we received word that we would be posted to Fort Meade Maryland for the last 4 years of her active duty service. The only snag was that she would be away from the kids and I for about a year for training. I set up house in Maryland and found a decent contracting job with one of the beltway bandits and at the end of my wife's training I found out that we would not in fact be sharing a future together. Life sucked for a while but I got through it and moved on.

It was while I was working for the Beltway Bandits that I learned the trick to making a career. I learned that employment was a sort of game, each side maneuvering to get the best deal it could, and that everything was negotiable no matter what "Policy" said. If you were needed bad enough then you could negotiate. Salary was also something I learned to negotiate and I owe this education to one specific person who was an African Immigrant that worked with me on one project. He pretty much explained the "game" to me and it was like a light switch being flipped.
With this information I managed to exceed my life goals that I had set as a naive kid from rural PA before I hit the age of 30. Needless to say I had to set some new life goals.

With all the training I had from the Navy and a public school education I managed to do fairly well for myself and finally met the love of my life, with whom I now live in Maryland. I work from home as a technical expert and keep horrendous hours. We live with our 3 dogs Kodiak (kodi), Bailey (bailey pig) and Calley (rat dog). Kodi and Callie are American Eskimo rescues and Bailey is a Beagle/Doxie mutt also a rescue. My children now live with their mother in PA and my son has graduated from HS. Bailey is the Boss Bitch around the house when Mysti or I are not asserting our dominance, and is also the pigdog, not a scrap of food falls without her scarfing it up....and when feeding time is over, Bailey is in charge of making sure that the dog dishes are cleaned down to the chrome finish.

Life has accelerated it's pace for us and I have started working on getting a degree just for my own enjoyment. I recently finished an AA in transfer studies to facilitate my pursuit of a BS in Computer Science. Where I go from here, I am not sure, but my hopes are to retire from full time employment within 10 years and do something I enjoy more than what I am doing now, perhaps something a bit more people oriented and less machine oriented.

That is a capsule summary of my life to date, Next I guess I might post my personal interests.