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  El Dorado County Part 4 – I Become a Manager and County Politics Downtown Placerville I was working in a Project Lead position in the IT department of El Dorado County whose offices were located in Placerville. The IT department in the county, as in most companies, is not a revenue generating department. It's role is more one of cost avoidance, i.e. you automate because it's more efficient. Organizations who are not IT companies fund their IT department by charging the other departments that are using their services which is pretty much all of them. Usually the charge is based on how much IT services they use. It's reflected in the department's budget and of course it's just all on paper. In 1991 I'm not sure how many organizations did this particularly well but our CIO was well versed in this area and he implemented a system where each department was assigned a baseline charge for IT services and then an additional charge based on that department

El Dorado Part 3 – Returning to Normal El Dorado Camping Trip - Me, Linda, Wilma, husband of ?, ?, John, Helen, and Leianne   I was working at El Dorado County and had just, with help, completed converting and enhancing the county's Welfare and Child Services systems on to a new IBM mainframe system. It had been over a 9 month process, one where I had been working long days non-stop. There was now a rather long list of issues that needed fixing. There were also new ones cropping up pretty much daily. In fact new issues were being discovered faster than we could resolve the existing list of issues so the issue list was growing. This went on for a few weeks before we were able to turn a corner where our fixes were finally outnumbering the new issues being found. I distinctly remember when this happened. I had been working closely with the Social Services Admin manager, Lila, and was meeting with her and others multiple times a week. Occasionally the Department head would

El Dorado County Part 2 Me and Kris at the Eldorado County IT Holiday Party I was working at El Dorado County converting their Social Services systems from an old Sperry UNIVAC mainframe computer to a new IBM one. The task had a completely unrealistic deadline and although I was seriously engaged in doing it, I was not feeling a sense of urgency since failure was a sure thing. The two main systems were the Child Services System and the larger Welfare System, that included Food Stamps and AFDC. There was no way any one person could convert those two systems within that deadline. Heck, one person wouldn't even of had a chance of converting one of them. It wasn't a normal conversion. It was essentially creating a whole new Welfare System. Did I mention that I had not previously worked on a Sperry computer before so I was going through a learning curve to boot. Regardless the conversion project was something that was beyond my control. There was no way it was going to

El Dorado County Me and Kris on the backyard deck at our  house in Rocklin K ris and I were married and had moved to Rocklin. Being computer programmers we figured our best hope for employment was up in Placer County as there was a semiconductor manufacturing company up there as well as Hewlett Packard. Consilium, where we had been working in Silicon Valley, was a software company whose product was the leading semiconductor manufacturing software on the market. It turned out neither of the hi-tech companies in Placer were interested in us. We ended up getting jobs elsewhere, Kris with the IT department of the Sacramento Bee downtown, and me with the IT department at El Dorado County located in Placerville. The result was we both had commutes but in different directions. (Placerville is not in Placer Country and Yuba City is not in Yuba County. What happened there?) A t El Dorado County I was hired into a programmer analyst position. The county was my first experience

Hazing, What is it good for? - The Fraternity Blues I never understood the practice of hazing. Hazing is, at least to me, an archaic practice of servitude where one is oppressed and tormented by someone or someones as a sort of initiation into a group or club. This was a rather common practice back in the middle and probably even later part of the 20 th century. The practice of hazing has a long history evidently going back to at least 387 B.C., with the founding of Plato’s Academy. I, myself have been briefly subjected to hazing a couple of times. I also kinda feel basic training in our military is actually a kind of hazing as well so that would increase my experiences to 3. I am not a fan. I resisted the non-military instances and just put up with it in basic training understanding that resistance had unwanted consequences. My first experience with hazing was when I was sent off to college in the fall of 1967. Freshman hazing was still “a thing” at that time. A

Beanies and Bright Ideas I graduated from high school in June of 1967. Having never cared for school, the thought of doing four more years of schooling after high school was not an appealing one. It had been a long haul just getting through 12 years of public school. Higher education to me was just a fancy name for even more wasted time sitting in a classroom. However, my parents always considered college for me as a given. Coming from them it seemed to be a requirement if one was going to be a success in life, so the master plan was for me to go to college. The only question was where? W here ended up being Valparaiso University in Indiana. That fall my parents drove me out to Indiana and delivered me to Valparaiso University. Valparaiso was and still is a Lutheran affiliated school. Among other things it had a good engineering program but it's most notable claim to fame at that time was a large beautiful campus chapel. We arrived at the dorm I was assigned to,

Happy Birthday Fudge i once had you and you had me my world was light though you are gone you're still with me am grateful but it's bittersweet happy birthday thinking of you   

  The "Boob Tube" & Me An Old 50's 13" round screen TV  “ The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” Gil Scott-Heron '74 but it may be streamed. B eing born in 1949, TV was a relatively new thing when I was young. While the TV was invented way back in 1927, it was not really commercially viable until 20 years later. Less than 50,000 homes had a TV in 1946 but that number jumped to over 4 million by the time I was born. By 1955, when I turned 6 about 75% of homes in America had a TV. My parents didn't own one when I was born but I remember them getting a round 13” screen TV when we were living in Levittown on Long Island. I don't remember us watching it a lot. When I got old enough to watch for myself my parents set down rules on how much time I could “waste” watching TV. If my sister and I were caught watching during the day when the weather was nice we would be strongly encouraged to go outside and play, or at least do something else. Usuall