It’s one of the occupational hazards of being a nurse. I seem to have caught one of the respiratory infections that’s been going around. I had a dry cough on Thursday and Friday. It developed from there to body aches and extreme fatigue. I couldn’t get out of bed for the entire weekend. I just slept for two days.
Still feel a bit tired, but at least I feel like I am on the backside of this. Posting resumes with the post about property taxes in Tampa.
Alternate title: Where I was.
This absence was two years in the making. My wife spent countless hours planning this, and forcing me to go to stupid timeshare sales pitches. So where was I? I was in Europe for the past three weeks. I will spend a few bytes over a few posts detailing my trip. The reason for the lack of posting? We all know how the EU feels about freedom of speech, so I wasn’t about to access this blog, lest I find myself in some European prison because some Islamist or Eurofag took offense at something I once said on here. I had originally scheduled a bunch of posts to cover things during my absence. I usually do when I am travelling. In this case, my scheduled posts sat there and didn’t post, showing a “failed scheduled” status. WordPress glitch, I suppose. For that reason, the posting on this blog didn’t happen as it was supposed to. The “OPSEC” post was scheduled for the last day in March. It didn’t post until nearly a week later. I didn’t know that until I was airborne over the Atlantic on my way home.
The planning for this trip began two years ago. The time share pitches were through Hilton. It seems that you get a lot of Hilton Honors points if you sit through sales pitches for their timeshare product. My wife would use those points to get us all sorts of things- more on that later, but it turns out those pitches (5 of them in total) wound up saving us about $8 thousand, and we didn’t even have to spend any money on a time share. I guess it was time well spent. My wife is good about finding deals like this.
The time for the trip began with a flight to New Jersey. We left the house and our cats in the possession of our trusted house sitters and headed off to the Orlando airport. As usual, air travel was horrific. We were supposed to land in Newark, but we were stuck orbiting in the area due to unfavorable winds for about 15 minutes. Then it seems the pilot must have only put five bucks’ worth of gas in the plane, because we had to divert to New York’s JFK to get fuel. We were informed the fueling would take about 3 hours, and we were free to leave the plane and drive to Newark, but our checked bags would have to stay on the plane to be retrieved later. We decided to stay.
After fueling, the plane took off and spent an hour flying the eighteen miles to Newark. In all, our original plan to arrive in the hotel in Jersey City by 6pm was thwarted- we didn’t get to the hotel until nearly 1am. I will continue the story tomorrow-
For reasons I can’t yet discuss, I won’t be able to access the blog or its website for the next several days. All will be explained then, but no comment approval or posting until at least April 6.
I have a couple of pre-made filler posts scheduled for the next week, but that’s it. See you all on the other side of the hiatus.
It looks like at least one frequent reader has figured out who my current employer is and sent me an email about it. I recently posted something that apparently had too many details in it, and that someone was able to figure out which hospital I was talking about. For that reason, I had to take the post down, as I don’t want to risk that someone who matters can get me in trouble. Sorry for the inconvenience.
With this first post of the year, I want to wish a Happy New Years to all of you. I worked last night and got home late in the evening. It was an exhausting shift, and that means I was in bed asleep before the turn of the new year.
This past year was a huge one for both me and the blog: I posted 527 times, and the blog saw more than 2.4 million post views, which is more than 4600 views per post.
Personally, I did pretty well. I earned 3 board certifications and finished my MBA. I am doing that because I realized what a disaster of a dumpster fire my place of employment has become, so I decided to do something about it. That’s what all of us should do: If you don’t like your job, get a better job. If you can’t get a better job as is, then do something to make a better job more likely.
Let’s see if we can make this year a good one. I’m going to start the year by spending my day applying for new jobs. I already applied to three of them this morning. One thing I have discovered during this job search is this:
Employers are using AI driven ATS(Applicant Tracking Systems) to screen applicants. These systems look for very specific things, and automatically reject applicants before the application is even seen by human eyes. The key to getting your resume to a decision maker’s human eyes is to tailor your resume and application to that ATS. So the I have begun using my own AI system, pasting my resume and the job requirements into the system, and letting the AI rewrite my resume to match what the ATS is looking for.
Let’s see how that works.
Today’s post is running late because I spent the day repairing my in-laws’ car. Maybe later. Maybe tomorrow.
I just added a new instruction manual to the training page. It’s a set of instructions for building a wood gasifier. This allows you to convert wood chips into fuel for internal combustion engines using common hardware parts. It looked interesting. If you haven’t already, check out the page, it’s full of interesting manuals, all in pdf form for you to download.
Please contact me by email or commenting to this post. I am unsure if it was you who posted a recent comment, or it was an imposter. The link in one of the comments attempted to download a file that was blocked by my antivirus because it was infected with a virus.