Category: Retirement

Duke and Marion’s Big adventure

Duke and I are off on a grand adventure. (490 miles so far) We are driving down into Mexico to do some exploring and to stay a week at a condo in Manzanilla. On Wednesday we left Union City and drove to Escondido down near San Diego to spend a day with my parents helping to instal the new printer they received for Christmas and to visit and hel;p with a few other tasks. Tomorrow we are off to Tucson.

I haven’t blogged in a while. Lot’s going on. One of the highlights was a trip to the Computer History Museum right before Christmas. My daughter works there but it was my first visit. It felt like going through a museum of my working career. They had pretty much every computer I ever worked on, IBM 360, Univac, PDP 11, Data General Eclipse, early CP/M machines, the Compaq portable that looked like a sewing machine, Sun machines, and of course PCs. The highlight of the visit was when the guys who had renovated the museum’s PDP1 computer ran it to lead us in Christmas carols. It was so cool to see them run the paper tape programs through the machine and flip the switches on the front of the computer to play the carols. The man running the PDP 1 was one of the original programers of the machine, Peter Samson. According to his wikipedia article “For the restoration project he reverse-engineered music tapes from the PDP-1 era and built a player for the museum.” I highly recommend touring the museum if you get a chance. i plan to go back again soon

The Big Day!

I think it rather ironic that I left Sun after 18 years at least partly because of the possibility of being laid off. Sun does so many lay offs that they can say that lay offs are a core competency.Today I was laid off by a profitable company that is rated one of the very top companies to work for in the country. Of course this isn’t the whole story. Had I looked I might have found another job and then I would still be employed. Instead I quite happily chose to retire.

So today is probably the end of my work life. I say probably because I haven’t ruled out taking on another job or consulting assignment that really excites me. But for now I have reached that very exciting major milestone, Retirement! I am still sad to see the project I put all my energy into for the last 17 months die and I am sad to be leaving a lot of new friends but mostly I am very  excited about all the possibilities in front of me.

A few updates on activities this week…. My non fiction book club met Wednesday night. we read Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox. In this biography Maddox does a masterful job of describing complex science and of telling Franklin’s story. It is a compelling book and I highly recommend it.

Last night we went to Yoshi’s and saw Earl Klugh perform. I always enjoy live music at Yoshi’s and although I wasn’t familiar with Klugh’s music I really enjoyed the show.