Hurrah!

Tonight I finally got through the final edits to the back-end of DwC, meaning the site overhaul is totally finished. You like? I couldn’t be happier with the overall look and love the plug-ins which Chris designed.  You are invited to check them all out over on the sidebar.

I’ve updated the training calendar over there to reflect my training (starting next week), as well as my reading library to accurately reflect what I am reading and plan to read. Not sure if I mentioned this, but Earl and I (well, more just me after Earl found a dead bedbug in a book, got grossed out and sort of gave up) have become quite the patrons of the San Francisco Public Library. We get over there about every other week, and I’m always working my way through a big stack of books on the night stand. It’s a nice change from buying books- not only because it’s friendlier on the budget, but also because I find myself taking chances reading books that I never would have bothered to purchase. For example, I just finished reading Paula Dean’s memoirs, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t get the best shrimp and crab au gratin recipe out of it- Something I, and my tummy, would have missed out on otherwise. We’ve really been enjoying hitting up the library on Sundays after the Farmer’s market.

Plans for this weekend have me in class ALL DAY tomorrow and afterwards meeting Earl at the gym for our Saturday lifting session. I joined the gym two weeks ago, and have been lifting 3x a week under his tutelage. He crafted me a nice simple all-body workout which hits:

1. chest
2. quads
3. tris
4. shoulders
5. back
6. calves
7. biceps
8. abs

and gets me in and out in just about an hour.  It’s a nice change from some of the super intricate and confusing lifting programs I attempted to follow back in NYC.  Perhaps that is why I never really followed through with any of those… this time shall be different!

Other than that, I have about 4 chapters to read, take notes on, and study for school.  My classes just started in earnest this week and I am already feeling a bit behind.  It’s time to step up that game.  Oh!  And I am going to try and make homemade whole wheat tortillas to serve chicken tzatziki on for Made from Scratch Sunday.  For some reason, I have been craving Greek something FIERCE this week.  Will let you know how those come out…. I am salivating already.

Anyways, I hope you have a nice weekend   And thank you again to Chris for his wonderful work on the Dances with Corgis design overhaul!

The blog was moved off of maia and onto my personal server. Please let me or Courtney know if you have any issues.

What I learned today:

Dropping off applications in person is the way to go.  Today I drove around the Bay Area and handed in my application packets (including 20 odd pages of certifications, fronts and backs of licenses, etc) to each of the firms I am hoping to get hired at.

The in-person application approach (as opposed to the fax it or email it method, which I was debating before) was a success!  I landed facetime with a hiring manager at every single firm, which let me not only give my elevator pitch about why a 28 year old former i-banker hoping to go to med school eventually would make a great EMT on their team, but also snagged three impromptu, on the spot interviews!

Going in person and being (a tiny bit) loud and pushy has its benefits.  For example, at one firm today, I’m talking to the “gatekeeper” who is the random EMT who answered the door.  He tells me the company owners are out at lunch (my mistake getting there at 12:30, but I had a bunch of places to hit today so at least one of them around lunchtime couldn’t be avoided), but he will give them my application.  Not to be turned away that easily, I respond by asking if there was anyone else there at the time that I could at least introduce myself to.   He started to say no and usher me out (politely), but lo and behold the Operations Manager had heard from down the hall, came out of his office and was like, “Pete, I have time, I can talk to her now.”

Score!  That place seemed like a great firm to work for, too.  Unfortunately they had just hired two people and aren’t going to be hiring again until the end of the month.  Agh.  The ops manager told me, “I wish we had gotten your resume two weeks ago.”  Drats.  However, he informed me I was on the top of the pile for the next round of hires in two weeks.

I took two other things away from my job searching today:

-Current Job Market for EMTs- looks like a lot of places are NOT hiring right now, or are having temporary hiring “freezes,” but anticipate hiring within the month or for people to start in July.  So altogether not horrible outlook.  Heck, this career change has taken me 9 months so far, another three weeks won’t kill me (Earl will be less than thrilled, he has been waiting with baited breath for me to start paying my fair share of the bills again!). I did find the expression, “we are not hiring now, but we are hiring in two weeks” to be somewhat amusing.  It is customary for the act of hiring alone to take over a month at a few of my previous places of employment!   So with that perspective, a two week wait is nothing.    Overall, I’d say this speaks to how solid the employment outlook is for EMTs.  If it’s unusual for them to have a temporary hiring freeze, it signifies that they are normally CONTINUOUSLY hiring, implicating strong need, possible growth, and of course high turnover.  Based on the amount of people who leave to become paramedics, go on to nursing, PA or med school, or becoming firefighters, the turnover makes sense.  Which leads me to…

- Candidate Career Path/Future Goals- This might be a bit controversial, but I’ll just state it as what I took away from some of the managers I talked to today and leave it at that.   Two of the hiring managers told me they prefer candidates who hope to go into medicine in the future, NOT fire.  From what I gathered, it sounds like a lot of people become EMTs just to work for 6 months and then get a job as a firefighter.  One manager complained directly about this!  It sounds like someone who’s hoping to build a career in medicine would be a more motivated and eager to learn EMT because they are interested in the pathology and science side of things, whereas a future firefighter might just be there to put his or her time and then move on.  As I mentioned, just my impression, but I certainly picked up on this vibe which seemed to be working in my favor today.

Finally, I have a full-on job interview (which I landed today) scheduled for tomorrow at 11:00!  Woot.  And with that, off to bed a I go.  Here’s to future good news. 

Oh- one other quick anecdote- you know what else I landed today?  I apparently passed my sitdown interview at one of the firms and now get to move on to this bastardized form of an interview known as the “Pre Employment Ride Along.” AKA… A TWELVE HOUR ON THE JOB, SIMULATED WORK ENVIRONMENT INTERVIEW!!  Holy balls!  No pressure there.  It’s in two weeks with an ALS team.  Yeah.  Nooo pressure there, Greene.  Completely nerve-wracking, right?  I almost hope I land another job before then, just so I don’t have to go through with this 12-hour “try out” ride along.  Heh.  (just kidding).  But, it’s with freaking ALS!  Holy cow…. Earl often tells me how when he’s hiring people at his office he has them write code and do algorithms for him on the spot.  And I always thought that sounded so bad-ass and tough.  Well, now I can trump that!  In your face, MathBoy!  TWELVE HOURS LONG INTERVIEW!!  On an ALS rig! Top that!  It’s on the 23rd.  At least I have a little bit to practice my assessments and study my school flashcards beforehand.  ¡ay!

So, for everybody from the internet who finds this via google, please stay away from Maya hosting. This blog has been repeatedly hacked and the problem is their systems are compromised. The hacker has direct db access which is how he’s creating admin users in wordpress with his desired password. I’ve been repeatedly contacted from other unfortunate Maya users and I even went so far as to contact the Maya admins sometime in early May and they haven’t fixed anything. So… save yourself a bunch of time and hassle and don’t use this company. This blog will be moved in short order.

Sorry for the disruption.  I really should dig up a real admin.  In any case, note to anyone who may find this: when someone using scripts written by dxil or z1cx@hotmail.com defaces your site, make sure they didn’t add valid remote ips to your mysql config.  Hopefully this takes care of the mess.

I just got through cleaning out eight megabytes (!!!) of spam.  This is a waste of my time, so starting Monday, I’m going to block spammy bits of the internet from being able to get to this website.  If I accidentally catch any of you, please email CJ.

Also, do we have any legitimate readers from Saudi Arabia?  They’re also going dark if nobody speaks up.

So… yeah.  I should have upgraded WordPress to 2.7.1 a long time ago which hopefully would have prevented some script kiddy overwriting the theme files, but either the hosting company Maia or WordPress aren’t smart enough to not overwrite any custom themes you’ve installed and it’s a pain to upgrade without shell access.  In any case, bad admin, no cookie for me.

For posterity’s sake:

Hacked ~ By ~ ImM0RtAl BrAiN

In other news, I will be fixing the theme.