Do me a favor, y’all…
I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7. Let me know if anything looks funky, m’kay?
Setting the table
Yeah, I’m still here. Not going anywhere.
Since my time is somewhat limited right now, I thought I’d take a look at my logs and see what people are searching for when they hit this blog. A couple of things that aren’t related to slutty celebrities and sluttier teachers jumped out at me, so I’m planning to “answer the mail” so to speak with the next few posts.
I could keep posting about Huntsville and being homesick, but I get tired of writing like that and I know y’all get tired of reading it. I’ve deleted a half-dozen half-written posts like that on several of my blogs in the last week. Also, I spent the weekend removing my cranium from my rectum, and feel much better.
Ch- Ch- Ch- Changes
So, here’s the thing: Look at the header. It’s changed.
Yep.
We’re moving. Out of Florida.
(Say it ain’t so!!!)
Not too many people know this, but I used to be a very good market researcher in the aerospace & defense electronics industry, made a really nice salary, worked from home, and didn’t realize that I was providing my services cheaper than the company could get a consultant for, despite earning a really nice up-north-big-city salary while I lived in a small Florida town with a microscopic mortgage.
So, when I completed the heavy lifting and had the job cruising along smoothly in maintenance mode, I was cut loose along with a bunch of other folks that represented 20% of the SG&A budget of an $8B company. Three weeks after the results of a 3-month project I spearheaded to develop an electronics industry market model was presented to the board of directors of the company. So, someone thought my work had value, although it would not surprise me to find that the people using the data did not know that the person that gave them the data did not develop the data models themselves.
Ahem.
I heard I was replaced by an MBA over 10 years younger at half the salary. Nothing I could do about it, I was too young to claim age discrimination, and even if I could, the company and my management were all in Canada.
Effin’ Canadians. There is neither good steak nor any parking in the whole country, so don’t bother going there, m’kay?
In short order I received a call from a major competitor located 50 miles from my front door. “We want to hire you, but we need you to do a project for us so we can see what we’re getting.”
No problem, coming right up!
You know where this is going, don’t you?
Yeah, I took it in the keister. Turned in the project, the job magically got put on hold, and I got screwed.
So, I spent a bunch of time out of work. I had a few interviews, but couldn’t nail ‘em. I begged, borrowed, and even played poker at gulp-stakes to pay the bills. Eventually, I wound up selling cell phones at Radio Shack in St. Augustine for $9.10/hr plus commissions. Yes, it sucks as bad as you imagine but I got tired of my kids coming home from school and seeing me hitting ‘refresh’ on Monster.com, still in my pajamas.
“It’s awfully important to win with humility. It’s also important to lose. I hate to lose worse than anyone, but if you never lose you won’t know how to act. If you lose with humility, then you can come back.” — Paul “Bear” Bryant
Then I landed a slightly-less soul-crushing job as an inventory specialist for a small manufacturing company. I’d also spent half my career in analyst and management roles doing materials management, so it was right up my alley. Then I spent 8 months sitting around staring at the walls while the company went through a dry period without new business coming in. I still had a paycheck, but it wasn’t much of a job. And that paycheck was incredibly small, not much better than Radio Shack.
I’m proud to say that even though I owe so much I’ll be lucky to pay off the bills by the time I retire, we never missed a payment. Not once. It’s been a tough, tough ride and it’s long from over and we still might fail in the end. But I’m proud of how I’ve managed this black-hole time of my life. I’ve interviewed with so many people that told me stories of people they know that had been laid off, and those people went bankrupt because they were too proud to take the jobs I took.
Hope I don’t offend anyone out there, but that’s false pride. I took a lot of crap from managers I wouldn’t have hired and customers that would be ashamed of themselves if you showed them a tape of how they behaved a year ago. I never defined myself by my job, but by how I went about my job. I like to think that is possible to retain dignity and professionalism, even if I’m wearing a name tag. When my family’s future and my good name are on the line, there’s no job I’m too good/smart/qualified/underpaid to take. I have way more respect for the kid working his way through school at Radio Shack than I do the guy that screws over Amex for $1500 because he can’t bring himself to take a job that requires him to fill out an application.
“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.” — Booker T. Washington
Anyway, around Christmas, I received an e-mail through my network letting me know there might be a job for me if I was willing to relocate. Former managers of mine, including one that was a friend of the family for many years. Three months later, I have another new job, this time incredibly challenging and one I’ve only done tangentially in the past, but the pay still only gets me about halfway back to where I was. But, it’s enough to make the move.
No, I’m not putting company names on the intarwebs, but I will say that in two weeks I will be a resident of Huntsville, AL. Hopefully in some kind of short-term corporate apartment while my kids finish school in Florida. Yeah, THAT’S going to suck.
As for this website, I’m planning to stick around for a while. I’m still a Floridian, and love Florida for all it’s quirks and blemishes. I love what I do here, the site is getting better every day, and the results are showing in the stats. If I get the sense that I’m falling out of touch with the uniqueness of Florida, I may change things up here. But, not right now.
So, I’m terribly excited and incredibly sad at the same time. I’m hoping that this move will allow me to continue the rebuilding process in my career, and lead me back to bigger and better things. I fully expect to be back in Florida eventually, and will enjoy being a tourist on my visits “home”.
“I was born in Alabama, but I only lived there for a month before I’d done everything there was to do.” — Paula Poundstone
So, what’s going with you?
Yeah, I know I haven’t been digging out many “Only in FLA” items lately, nor coming up with new “7 Reasons…” posts.
I’ll get back to that stuff soon. After all, it’s only a matter of time before a teacher crosses the line with a student or someone who has been handed a dream career on a silver platter pisses it away for booze and dope.
Real life is coming at me hard right now, but in a good way. I’ve got some new job prospects that have progressed beyond the initial interview and promise to return me to the point where my career jumped the tracks more than two years ago, or even put me in an entirely new field that I find stimulating. I’m also exercising and losing weight, and spending more time in the evening getting my kids settled for bed or watching Lost.
Some of you may have noticed that I no longer do sponsored posts on this domain, and I seem to have regained about half of my PR. Those of you in my blogroll ought to be happy. I don’t have any problems with sponsored posts, and I think they are valid content and I still do some on other domains. I just decided I wanted to reset everything here and determine later how to proceed with monetizing. Ironically, this domain is my best-performing in a number of measures (although, I have a new one that is kicking butt after just two weeks!), but I just woke up one day and realized it had been a while since I’d done a paid post here, and I kind of liked it.
Oh yeah, Happy Valentine’s Day!
An open letter to IP 71.14.122.243, visiting this site at 6:18 p.m.
Why do I let the troglodytes get me down?
Most times, if some idiot leaves a stupid comment, I just come right back at them and move on, or I’ll delete it because I have no respect for anonymous commenters, and therefore feel no compunction about sending their words off into nothingness.
Every once in a while, though, someone manages to push a button.
Today’s button was someone that used the “N” word in their name, and left a hate-filled comment that also used the “S” word – the word that rhymes with “Pick”. They came here as a result of a search on Google for “why the south is better”.
That one got my first-ever report to their internet provider for abuse.
Yes, ding-dongs, we can do that. We can track you down. You leave your IP address everywhere you go. For instance, I know you live in Greenville, SC. I sincerely hope the person at Charter Communications that is tasked with investigating the report is African-American and/or Hispanic. You know, someone that will be extra motivated to track where else you’ve been on the internet.
If there is a God in heaven, you’ve also been visiting those websites that will get your red neck thrown in prison.
**Feel free to leave suggestions below if there are additional steps I need to take to handle this putz.
Thank you!
While I’m nowhere close to the traffic circles Mr. Fab, Colleen, and Kat run in, I’m happy with my little corner of the blogosphere at Florida Sun Dog. October was a great month, with 1600+ visits and 5600+ pageviews. While I didn’t post every day, I still managed to post 30 times so ‘yay me’. After destroying my feeds during my last hosting move, a lot of you are coming back and I’m thankful to see that. Hope I can write enough good stuff to keep y’all around.
Man, times like this I’m so grateful for politicians that threaten old men with anal rape, and those that are willing to pay for it in park bathrooms.
Y’all come back now, y’heah?
Feed Fixed
Ok, I believe my feed is finally fixed. I still don’t understand what happened, but Feedburner wasn’t able to see the native RSS feed – I could subscribe all day long, but not with Feedburner. So, hopefully, you could see it.
We’ve moved!
Moved to a new host. Not sure if the feeds are broken. The domain was hosted at blogger, so the blog still exists at floridayarddog.blogspot.com, but will be eliminated shortly. I need to know how my feeds are doing, so let me know which site’s feed you’re getting.
Thanks!
Fair warning
I’m over my trepidation regarding migrating my blogs to Wordpress and a new host. Since I went with Bluehost several weeks ago, I’ve mucked around trying to screw stuff up and haven’t. So I’m feeling better about my problems with GoDaddy being GoDaddy’s fault and not mine.
Effin’ GoDaddy.
This blog is hosted on Blogger. Nothing against Blogger – the price is right and the UI is easy to learn and use – but I need the tools and features in WP in a bad way. So, I’m going to take a deep breath sometime this week and mobilate this blog over to Wordpress. I don’t know when – could be as soon as tonight – but sometime when I can sit down and have a couple hours of uninterrupted time.
But here’s the thing – I have no idea if my RSS feeds are going to break in the process. So, be looking for it. I’ll probably give a final “Here goes nothing” post, then we’ll just have to see on the other side, right?
Oh, and if anyone has a recommendation for a super-cool WP theme for this puppy, let me know.
I may be the most retarded blogger in the world
Mr. Fab posted yesterday that I’m a blogging madman.
Nope, just retarded.
Why do I speak of myself in this manner?
About two months ago I created this domain name and assigned it to this blog, which used to be called Florida Yard Dog, and was a free blogspot blog. A lot of people don’t realize this, but when you have a domain name, you can still host your blog on blogger. Once it’s set up, it’s completely seamless to you.
However, I also had an e-mail address specifically set up to receive comments from this blog. When I changed the domain name, I stopped checking that e-mail account.
Unfortunately, I never changed the e-mail address in my settings to send those comments to a different e-mail address.
Doh!
So, I remembered this morning about the e-mail account and figured I’d go in and clear it out. As expected, I appear to have won 75 international lotteries in the last two months, so I’m HUGE now, y’all!
I also saw… comments. After I got done with some well-deserved self-abuse, I read them.
I see now that Cheryl was commenting a month before we ever met in Orlando, and had even asked to trade links. My cousin, my own flesh and blood, who reads this blog even though she doesn’t even live in Florida (is that even allowed?) took it upon herself to insult something like 12 million people (I keed, I keed!). Nicusor took the time to point out that the DoFollow image I created points to a different blog (I meant to do that). Mr. Fab tried to play virtual alpha-dog and I suspect may piss on my leg when we next meet (and, to pre-empt the comment I KNOW is coming – No, I am not into that). Finally, Granny gives us the scoop on that minor train wreck (I’m comparing to the trainwreck that is the Brit/Lind/Paris triumvirate) that used to be Mindy McCready.
So there. Just a little link-love to anyone kind enough to take the time to drop by and comment during my retardation. Enjoy!
Florida Sites- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
-
