Let's get this party started!
Oct. 4th, 2017 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thetimesinkStories abound. Tales demand to be told. Time has held its wall in place well enough...
As a member of Daynotes, EditThisPage, Frontier, and general blogging when it meant "web log" with personal, tech, and photo pages, TheTimeSink, ever the true "time sink", has been around since 1999 in one form or another. The tag line here (and with LiveJournal prior) is "A home away from home"; that continues. What is likely to change is the level of content and the frequency of posts; it's simply too convenient to work in this medium. The other takeaway is that this place is an excellent place to post "first pass" work that may find a place in one of my other sites. "Tales from the Street" already exists albeit very deliberately choked back for practical reasons. Personal stories pretty much ended when the boys weren't boys anymore. The psychology site was simply blocked via .htaccess. Others may or may not survive the test of time (tech stuff is tech stuff and some very old posts still receive queries for info).
That said, I haven't lost any of my penchant for story-telling. I've just put the online portion on a back burner and utilized other outlets. Times are changing and I think it's time to get back in the game. "How" and "where" are still open as I gather several sites under one umbrella, but here is a good place to turn over the autumn leaves as they fall...
To wit: I've threatened a cv on more than one occasion. I'm thinking that starting with that may give a bit of an overview and background for what progresses from here:
1969 --> 1973: Fresno State College Fire Department (later CSUFresno): basic firefighter training; Fireman, Engineer, Captain; training by Local FD; enrolled in EE degree, cross-enrolled at the local JC for Fire Science degree
1973 --> 1978: California Department of Forestry, Schedule A (structure assignment in a wildland setting); Engineer signed to Westside FD in western Fresno (Coalinga area)
1975 reassigned to Fresno Metro, Battalions 7 and 8 for Paramedic Training
1975: Paramedic training, first class in this area, certified 1975, held continuous through 1994, paramedic, mobile intensive care paramedic
1975 --> 1990: Paramedic, Paramedic Preceptor
1978 Part time with local ambulance provider as Paramedic
1978 left the Fire Service to join the private sector as emergency and transport paramedic
1980 Flight medic with local hospital
1982-->2002 Instructor with the local JC, EMT-I primary and re-certification
1984 our firm received the first exclusive, non-subsidized contract for EMS services utilizing System Status Management and Priority Dispatch west of the Mississippi
1988 I moved more to admin work from field supervision, 1990 moved off a regular shift, 1994 end of cert
Various duties to include: Resource and Facilities (logistics), Plant Management, Network introduction, Purchasing. ...and the ever-present, "And other Duties as Required"
The contract we initiated in 1984 has continued in place with the latest renewal in 2017 good for five more years.
September 20, 2017, advised my position had been eliminated.
So what with the span of time, the integration of a new style of emergency care provider (two actually: EMTs were also new) into a system that would become an EMS "System"; from writing patient care notes on the backs of the envelopes we tore the dressing from to the introduction of ePCRs on tablets... Yeah, there may be a word or two that string together to tell a tale.
BYOB and gather 'round.
(edit: date correction, wording; spelling...)
As a member of Daynotes, EditThisPage, Frontier, and general blogging when it meant "web log" with personal, tech, and photo pages, TheTimeSink, ever the true "time sink", has been around since 1999 in one form or another. The tag line here (and with LiveJournal prior) is "A home away from home"; that continues. What is likely to change is the level of content and the frequency of posts; it's simply too convenient to work in this medium. The other takeaway is that this place is an excellent place to post "first pass" work that may find a place in one of my other sites. "Tales from the Street" already exists albeit very deliberately choked back for practical reasons. Personal stories pretty much ended when the boys weren't boys anymore. The psychology site was simply blocked via .htaccess. Others may or may not survive the test of time (tech stuff is tech stuff and some very old posts still receive queries for info).
That said, I haven't lost any of my penchant for story-telling. I've just put the online portion on a back burner and utilized other outlets. Times are changing and I think it's time to get back in the game. "How" and "where" are still open as I gather several sites under one umbrella, but here is a good place to turn over the autumn leaves as they fall...
To wit: I've threatened a cv on more than one occasion. I'm thinking that starting with that may give a bit of an overview and background for what progresses from here:
1969 --> 1973: Fresno State College Fire Department (later CSUFresno): basic firefighter training; Fireman, Engineer, Captain; training by Local FD; enrolled in EE degree, cross-enrolled at the local JC for Fire Science degree
1973 --> 1978: California Department of Forestry, Schedule A (structure assignment in a wildland setting); Engineer signed to Westside FD in western Fresno (Coalinga area)
1975 reassigned to Fresno Metro, Battalions 7 and 8 for Paramedic Training
1975: Paramedic training, first class in this area, certified 1975, held continuous through 1994, paramedic, mobile intensive care paramedic
1975 --> 1990: Paramedic, Paramedic Preceptor
1978 Part time with local ambulance provider as Paramedic
1978 left the Fire Service to join the private sector as emergency and transport paramedic
1980 Flight medic with local hospital
1982-->2002 Instructor with the local JC, EMT-I primary and re-certification
1984 our firm received the first exclusive, non-subsidized contract for EMS services utilizing System Status Management and Priority Dispatch west of the Mississippi
1988 I moved more to admin work from field supervision, 1990 moved off a regular shift, 1994 end of cert
Various duties to include: Resource and Facilities (logistics), Plant Management, Network introduction, Purchasing. ...and the ever-present, "And other Duties as Required"
The contract we initiated in 1984 has continued in place with the latest renewal in 2017 good for five more years.
September 20, 2017, advised my position had been eliminated.
So what with the span of time, the integration of a new style of emergency care provider (two actually: EMTs were also new) into a system that would become an EMS "System"; from writing patient care notes on the backs of the envelopes we tore the dressing from to the introduction of ePCRs on tablets... Yeah, there may be a word or two that string together to tell a tale.
BYOB and gather 'round.
(edit: date correction, wording; spelling...)
no subject
Date: 2017-10-05 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-06 07:53 pm (UTC)Let's fill things in here in comments as the info itself isn't worthy of a post: I enrolled as an EE at the local state college and attended there as it evolved into a state university (not to a UC; that has to do how the colleges are set up within a the university, and this place "done growed" and gained "colleges"). The game plan as set forth by "those who plan" then and now is that you graduate in four years. The reality of higher education is that classes are not available early on as the upper classpersons are grabbing them to finish the basic classes they couldn't take because: circular reasoning. With EE they literally had us taking a basic Soc class the second semester of our senior year because that was where it fit. Prereqs drove the program and each early semester was critical.
The, "Hey, I'm off to college and out in four", plan did not survive contact with the real world. Neither did the financial system of paying my own way (no scholarships or parental assistance). ...and oh, so much the impact of general ed teachers who expected top level work in the same manner as the math and hard science teachers who were the building blocks of the engineering path. Add in 18 units as the only way to try to pull this all off and the recipe for "things not going well" was cooking off nicely.
There was also the not-so-small piece of life that involved turning 18, the introduction to something other than the particular school of "toilet training" I'd had exposure to for those first 18 years, and the political events of the late sixties and early seventies (to include the Vietnam War, the DNC of 1968, People's Park, the fire-bombing of the local computer science lab...). Much to assimilate and process. Much to look at and make conscious decisions on.
Back to engineering: it's a mindset (or can be). I was predisposed to "taking things apart" from way-too-early-on to hear my parents tell it. ...but "how things worked" seemed to need "inspection" since I was barely in school. That I'm still alive at all leads me toward a Prime Mover concept. Seriously. I'm half Irish and can handle the "...protects drunks and Irishmen" well enough, but sometimes Divine Intervention (pick your flavor) is the only thing that can counteract "just stupid!" Examples at your leisure...
Oh, yeah, engineering... So I worked my way through school, dropped classes as needed to pass the ones I needed, repeated what I'd dropped or needed (Rem: stories of an English teacher for significant insights), and continued my progress. Thing is, after six-of-the-best-years-of-my-life, I was still some GE and several semesters away (via the pre-req continuity system) from a degee. ...and I was listening to grads taking jobs at a decent base pay rate, but essentially as drafting techs (all good, but I cannot make a pencil go straight even with a ruler). ...and I had a skill set. ...and that skill set could translate to a higher pay scale than that of my cohorts. Blue collar? White collar? I was raised in the fifties and sixties. Huh.
So I took a job in the fire service. ...not a lateral transfer, rather a step down for the foot in the door. ...and a month later a promotion and reassignment for some life experience (tarantulas and scorpions).
Staying with school: well, I couldn't. I was seventy miles out in BFE on a 72-hour on/72-hour off shift. I'd been concurrently registered at the local JC (yep, the one I later taught with) for Fire Science classes, but other than finishing out the semester that was not going to continue.
Flash forward (past Paramedic, Metro, moving to the private side, and growing that firm from being the thirteenth employee to a Field Supervisor in a place with over one-hundred employees): I went back to State and took some night classes as I now had a fixed schedule. I also took several classes at the JC to fill in the GE requirements. The schedule and duties changed and things went on hold.
Managment time: longish story how, but I ended up with a tie on... That did allow for school during business hours, so hey. I spoke with a registrar at the JC and asked her how the heck to knock out all the GE I could (JC: $12/credit; State $$$/credit). A week later she handed me a game plan and earned the bouquet that showed up the next week in her office: if I took "this" set of classes (a mixed bag at best) over the next two semesters, and if I would let her reassign some GE categories ("Shut up and take the damn speech class"), I would totally be done with any GE needed at the CSU level and she would forward that transcript upstream. I would also have an AA in Liberal Arts and and AS in Fire Science. (Side note: that would make me the first in my immediate family to have a degree of any sort.) That would essentially put me in striking distance of a degree in business (since that's what I did), Industrial Tech, or Engineering. Cool. Done and ready for the next step, whatever that would be.
Then we had kids.
So, yeah, a mindset but no degree. But, the mindset: all of those classes were building blocks. Every item I have deconstructed over the years yields its background. For one who builds "black boxes" and then creates their interiors, everything is data for my random access memory to pull up later. Vector analysis, engineering graphics, and construction techniques (a hands-on plant manager) let me explain to the oldest why hanging a TV flat to a wall worked okay with anchors dealing only with shear forces, but the one higher on the wall leaning out slightly needed anchoring to studs to deal with the lateral forces.
...and while there will be a post on "who and what am I?" (part of the series now available), for now we'll go with: Yeah, not formally, but certainly by temperament. I automatically do kinetics on MVAs, industrial accidents and even simple injuries; I can look at a mechanism and generally work out a clue or two about how the energies are transformed; I multiply safety factors into items I build (see above under "stupid" and twenty years+ of picking up pieces); and I like to understand how things work.
Rem: Craftsman, Maker, Engineer (even if we have to allude to the SteamPunk definition). Oh, and yeah, those "Rem" statements mean we'll have to deal with the programmer, electrician, electronic, and home automation stuff also.
(A quote from a co-worker, "Be careful about putting a quarter in that jukebox...")