Aging and Medicare

I am sitting at my fathers bedside in his hospital room waiting for a Dr to decided weather Dad is incapacitated enough to warrant a hospital stay of 3 nights so that his Medicare will pay for him to move to a nursing home. Now Dad had been living on his own with a visit from me everyday to check on him. He has been going downhill the past few months but the last 5 days it has been a straight slide down. He is now unable to transfer himself from his scooter to the couch, scooter to bed or scooter to bath. Now it will have to be a nursing home for him, but he is kind of looking forward to moving. In his apartment he is all alone and after scaring himself by getting lost in the complex one day he is not eager to get out and do that again. The last few times he has been in the nursing homes he has taken about 2 weeks to warm up to the staff and make friends but after that he does seem to enjoy himself.

I am starting down a long slippery slope with our health system, I am still trying to understand the difference between Medicare, Medicaid and TriCare for veterans. Just when I think I have it sorted out another "expert" throws my knowledge out the window! Oh what fun it can be.

Neat Websites

I read, allot! Lately I have been trying to keep track of the websites that I see recommended. One that I will send to some of my friends who are struggling with cover letters and resumes is http://www.phras.in - Say this or Say that? It will give you an example of the usage for Who or Whom? There or their?

Some others that I have found interesting:

http://www.icantfindmyphone.com - I have only the one phone and sometimes set it down in the house and then spend precious time running around the house to find it. This website will allow you to put in our phone number (US only) and it will call your phone! I will be sending the owner of the website a cup of coffee (as he requests)!

I am also looking at AwardWallet.com I have seen it in some of my travel magazines as a great place to use to monitor your reward points. I do have several reward accounts for travel and always end up in a mad rush to save the points before they expire. This website is supposed to help keep you up to date.

Itunes

Some days Itunes is nothing but frustration. I added some songs to a playlist and then wanted to move the songs up and down in the list. No can do. I knew that at some point I had managed to accomplish this so I went to the internet. Everything said that I should be able to do this. Tried all the suggestions and nothing worked! Looked in ITunes help, what a waste that is! Macworld forums did have some help. It seems that if you have shuffle turned on you can not reorder your playlist. Turning shuffle off allowed me to accomplish my goal! It only took 30 min of trial and error for what should have been a simple task.

Job Search and Suicide (A funny combination)

Well, with a full time contract position the search has slowed down a little bit but it still continues. Working in technical/software support again, but do want to get out of that business. Not many companies have a career path for their help desk people so you just flounder when you want to move up.

I am dealing with the attempted suicide of a man I had come to admire from one of my e-lists. He posted his suicide note to the list (about 8000 people) and those members who were online at the time were able to get the police to him in time, now he and his family are trying to pick up the pieces. I know it was a cry for help but wish he had been able to reach out before it came to that. Suicide is devastating to your friends, family and loved ones. You maybe have ended your agony but theirs is just beginning and you are not available to explain. No note is ever enough. My perception of suicide has been forever tainted by a former sister-in-law who threatened it on a regular basis and attempted it at least 3 times a year. She always managed to stage it so she would be found and helped. For her if the attention of the group was not on her, she found a sure fire way to get it back to her. Walk out to the car, swallow a bunch of pills and come back in and tell every one what she had done. Boom, got everyone's attention really quick.

It is a beautiful spring day, and I really need to get outside and enjoy it.

Job Search - Tips and Tricks

I have been in full job search mode for just under 6 weeks now and have had 10 interviews. I have been very aggressive this time with cover letters and follow ups. All this at the hands of a wonderful coach, Liz Ryan of Ask Liz Ryan (http://www.asklizryan.com/) With her in your corner you cannot help but get motivated and stay focused on the goal of a full time position.



This is about some of the ways that I find contacts at my target companies. Even works for blind ads to find the companies behind the ads.



1. Networking Web sites - LinkedIn - show you are searching in your profile. Mine has one of my resume summary's as my profile.

Jigsaw.com - good for finding company's and people

ZoomInfo - Same

Meetup.com - Finding peoples interests and finding groups that interest you



2. Use Google.com it can be your best resource. To find a person in a company I use Linked in and look for the company name in my area (advanced search). Then if they do not have an e-mail address in their profile, Google their name and the city the company is in. Many times you can find them from posts they have made to a forum on a web site. Goggle searches all of them!



3. If you still do not find an e-mail address - Go to the company website and do a search on the website for their name, see if they wrote an article for the company newsletter, quite often these list e-mail addresses, look in the about the company section of the website for names and e-mail addresses. If not there, see if you can find any ones e-mail address. Companies usually follow a standard format (firstname@company.com, lastname@company.com, lastnamefirstinitial@company.com) you see what I mean. Compose your cover letter and send it to your target based on the format the company uses. The worst thing that will happen is if they write back and refuse to help and you are no worse off than you were before. I have never had that happen.



4. No luck on the company website, go back to Google, only this time search with *@companyname.com. This will show you e-mail address's from that domain, with any luck you might find your target there. If not, pick another name and try again.



5. For blind ads, I take keywords from the ad and again use Google to search on the keywords plus the city or any other identifying information that might be posted. Try different keywords and a description of the industry, etc. I have gotten an interview just because the company wanted to find out how I found them from the ad!



6. Push yourself beyond your comfort zone. I am going to networking events in my area (try meetup.com) and making it a goal to strike up a conversation with at least one person a night. Not a "I need a job conversation" but a "Hi how are you? Tell me about yourself conversation". Meeting new people is not only good for the job search, but good for the attitude and gets you out of the house!

What a summer!

Well, I am back at HP as a contractor. No benefits is the worst part of it as HP has always treated its contractors pretty good. I work 4 10 hour days so I get Tues, Wed and Thursdays off. Nice to have along weekend every week.

The fly in the ointment is that HP has created a new call center down in Costa Rica and has 25 Case Specialists down there with a class of 26 more in training. They are due on the phones Dec 26th. I fugure that by the end of Feb first of March I will need a new job.

I am hoping to find something south of here in Loveland. Maybe in Boulder or North Denver. Longmong would be ideal as then I could move back there and be closer to my horse and friends and family.

The consulting business is going ok, most in spurts and starts. I probably need to advertise more but am not sure I want to work 6 days a week. But I do know that is the price of starting a business.

Starting over

I have left the blogs for awhile but want to start again. I need to put my thoughts down in words, maybe then I can organize my days better. I am still unemployed, but am making some money doing computer consulting. I am training home and office users on their new toys. Doing about 3 cleanups at week. Most users do not realize just how debilitating adware and spyware can be on their systems. I have had systems so infected that the only thing I could do is save what data I could and wipe the drive to reload the OS. I have found that most users are never taught that they cannot just load their virus software and forget it. They do not know that it needs to be continually updated in order to be effective. Any tech who talks to a home user needs to be emphasing this constantly. I spend most of my time talking to my clients about what they need to be doing to safe guarding their home computers.