Milestone

For the past 25 years I have been doing systems projects, and for the last 10 years I have been doing this on a full time basis. I really enjoy projects and that is why I was attracted to them early in my career and eventually made a career change so that I could work completely in the project environment.

We just completed deploying a new design which was the final phase of a project we launched over a year ago. We are now in the hyper care phase, which is where we give our customers a high level of support while they adapt to the changes. This phase will end after the first week in March when our customer closes and reports their accounting period and thus the project will be over. This is a milestone for me because it is the last project I will see to completion.

Linda knows how much I enjoy this work and she worries I will miss it and not adapt to retirement well. I would agree if it we did not have the plans we do. I really feel strongly that I will be enjoying our adventure way to much to miss my work life.

A new project is being launched in early March which I have been assigned to. This is also forecast to be about a year in length so I will be rolling off about half way through. The good news is the design and configuration phases which are the most interesting will occur in the first half of the project. This will be the first time i will have worked on a project that I know I will never see the final result.

This is also a milestone because we are now at about the 6 months remaining mark before I retire we depart. In between these projects we are taking a vacation to go to Mississippi to work on Katrina relief. We will certainly give an update on this.

Meanwhile our house had three scheduled viewings this past week and that is about all there is to report on that front. Two of them were on Sunday, one in the morning and one in the afternoon so it was a very disrupted day for us. We will just remain on standby for whatever happens.

Getting some life back into the laptop

We had planned to replace our laptop computer this year before we leave mostly for a faster processor and a good graphics card to support new navigation software. With the launch of Vista, we have decided to wait at least a year to allow release of a service pack to correct bugs to allow time for the navigation software to be certified for Vista.

However our current laptop has been running very slow and defragging the C:\ drive has not solved the problem. There are just too many files which cannot be moved so the disk hasn’t cleaned up very well.

This past weekend I collected all of the software disks, backup the data files to an external 160 GB hard drive which we just added to the system and then bravely loaded the system recovery into the CD drive. This cleaned the C:\ drive completely and then began the rebuild from scratch. It took all weekend to get the system back to the condition we wanted. The system has its’ old speed back and the C:\ drive is very clean and has plenty of available space. We did loose some emails which I was saving more or less permanently and I need to manually rebuild the address book and add calendar entries.

Next in line is to add wireless with a high gain antenna so that we can connect from anchorages and to set up Skype so we can call family from more remote areas.

Selling Our Home

This adventure is really getting exciting now. Our home is now listed and the open house is scheduled for this Sunday. Here are some of the pictures which are being used to market our home. This is the one part of preparing which we feel we have very little control over especially the timing, but hey we will just go with the flow.

More Photos.....