Mike Ball

A couple of years ago I read a great book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics. It was a great book, applying economic principals in day-to-day situations. I heartily recommend it. This posting was inspired by a video of a talk by Steven Levitt on a topic from the book. One of them lived with a crack-dealing gang, and even got them to show him their books. The business turned out to be a lot more like MacDonalds than like the media depictions. Except, of course, for the very high mortality…

Oh, the talk contains quotes from the gang members. It’s definitely R-rated

I know I should have been keeping this up to date, and there really is lots to report on (we now own a house in Oregon), but I’ve just seen a talk and demonstration that really inspired me. Tod Machover at the MIT Media Lab has been experimenting with new ways to play music, and closes with a demo of a man with cerebral palsy playing his own composition. His talk also features some amazing facts about how people interact with music and a clip of Yo Yo Ma playing the hyper-cello! Just watch it.

Oh, and would you believe a robot opera?

I just saw a wonderful talk by a fellow named Dave Eggers. He’s set up projects to get successful adults working one on one with school kids. Check out the talk or his website. It’s well worth the time.

Who would have thought that retirement would be so busy? I somehow thought that I’d have lots of time and would be looking for new projects. The trouble is; I’ve been saving up things to do and things to read, and there just always seems to be more to do. Reading in particular is taking a lot of time. With the “ripening” cataracts, reading had gotten downright painful. Now one eye is fixed, and the other isn’t really so bad, so I can read again. I’m picking up all of the books that I didn’t finish and working my way through them. And that doesn’t mention the stack of journals and papers sitting by my desk.

But back to Ashland. One thing we are doing is looking for a place to enjoy our retirement, and Silicon Valley is not it. The Valley is a great place for work, partly because it’s full of smart, active, people. Note that “full of people”. Though there’s a lot going on here, getting to where it’s happening is almost always a long and difficult journey. I don’t want to travel to Berkeley to see a play! So we’ve decided that Ashland is a good compromise, having enough smart, active people to be interesting, but not enough to cause problems. This last week we took a trip there to look for a house and check out the winter weather.
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Just a quick note.

We are in Ashland this week, checking out the weather and looking at real estate. The internet connection I have is painfully slow, so I’ll write about it when I get back.

In the last post there was a line “A lot of people I didn’t like”. This was the exact opposite of my intent. The “didn’t” was an edit error from the next sentence. It crept in when I was inserting the sentence in question.

My sincere apologies to anyone who read this before I fixed it.

As of tomorrow, I have retired from Microsoft. I haven’t changed jobs, I’ve retired. For at least the next couple of months I plan to do very little. I’ve been catching up on my reading, we are planning a trip to Ashland in the next couple of weeks to see what it’s like in the winter, and I am expecting to visit Florida in February for Mama’s birthday party.
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I’m writing this while sitting in the waiting area of the Auto dealer. They have a work area with a long desk divided into cubicles, and a fast internet connection for customers. They also schedule appointments, so that I can bring the car in and wait for it to be done. In the mean time, I can work remotely using my laptop.

These guys really know their customers!

We just took a trip to Ashland for the Shakespeare Festival, so I’m feeling mildly Shakespearean.

You may have noticed that I didn’t start writing again after that last post. Well, I came home from work mad enough to chew up an anvil and spit nails, and I just don’t like writing when I’m grumpy.
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Morning Edition carried a very sad story this morning. It was a commentary by a soon-to-be new father in Baghdad. His final words were

Why would I want to bring an innocent child into a bloody savage world? I don’t. I regret what I did. I got my wife pregnent in Baghdad

It made me cry.