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!
The Fourth turns out to be a big deal in Ashland. If we had known just how big a deal, we’d have skipped the play for that day and just enjoyed the Fourth.
It started with a parade that lasted for about an hour and a half, then everyone moved to the park for booths and the standard Oregon eat-a-thon. That night there were two band concerts and fireworks.
If you are wondering why this took so long to get posted, it’s simple, if sad. I got a new computer with Vista, and working with web photos is a lot harder with it. The system I had set up to work with XP just didn’t work, and it took quite a while to figure out just what would work. Everything about Vista seems a littler clunkier (is that a word?) I mean, Windows XP always seems sort of clunky to me, with everything taking more effort than it should. Vista just seems to be more so. I’ve learned how to turn the worst of it off by now, but things still take a lot longer than they should.
I haven’t put together the picture show yet, but I thought I’d talk a bit more about Ashland and the Shakespeare Festival.
Ashland is a relatively small town, in a lovely setting, with a drama festival that runs most of the year. It also has a college and is sort of an art center. In fact, it’s a lot like Sarasota in many ways. It’s only about 5 hours from the Bay Area, so it’s not difficult to visit, and this visit was pretty much on the spur of the moment.
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Just a quick note to brag about Andy’s work at UCI, where he’s majoring in music. You can see and hear his end-of-class project online
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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We’re finally settled down in a house (not an apartment) and have the rest of our stuff out of storage. I haven’t written anything because I just didn’t feel like it. I haven’t even been reading much, including other blogs. We’ve gotten stuff unpacked, and have even gone on a couple of day trips when the weather was nice. I feel like writing again
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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.
The Supercomputing convention was in Tampa this year, so Flo and I took the opportunity to visit Family and the Roseate. The convention was huge, but exceedingly unexciting, while downtown Tampa was as unappealing as ever. I knocked off a bit early one afternoon to drive out to the Gulf. [read more…]
I’ve just spent a lot of the weekend trying to sort out the problems I created in ballfam.net. I tried to add a module that would let me post the Roseate article for family only. I didn’t succeed in that, but one of the modules I was trying out killed the picture gallery. I had to find the offending module (an experimental process) and then recover the data base from before the time I added it in.
A lot of time went into understanding how these web tools work. The interfaces aren’t really isolated very well at all. That’s geekspeak for “Everything interacts with everything else”. It makes testing a nightmare, with the results I saw here.