Done yesterday (20120330 Fr)

A strange day. Expected, of course. I spent the morning, and a couple of hours in the afternoon, wrapping things up: final backups, setting up email and voice mail forwarding, writing my farewell letter, taking the boxes and my desktop computer out to the car... Then the two rounds of goodbyes, in Cupertino and Menlo Park. I got a nice card, and an expense check for some USB microphones I bought last year. (16-bit. Don't want them. I kept the cables and stands.) Abandoned a fair amount of nice hardware that I don't have room or an immediate use for.

Goodbyes bittersweet, of course. Got hugs from several long-time coworkers; one (our IP person) seemed on the verge of tears, though I could have been reading that wrong. Alexithymia and citalopram have their uses; I stayed upbeat if not always cheerful.

I realized, somewhere in the course of the day, that although I've never had to move a whole house before, I've moved my office four times over the last two years, and our two remodels counted for almost a move each. Still, it'll be rough -- there's a lot of attachment here.

I found out, going over one of the brochures I picked up at the Social Security office, that if I start collecting before my full retirement age (66, next year) my payments will get reduced to almost nothing because of the money I've already made this year. So I'll go back to plan A and fire up the Ricoh pension, which doesn't have that problem.

Added "master toolmaker" to my LinkedIn profile; I'm going to spend some time today tweaking my resume to reflect the fact that I consider myself a writer, craftsman and toolmaker rather than an engineer or scientist.

Of the items added to my to.do file over the last three weeks, I appear to have flagged 55 as completed, and 40 unfinished. It's actually a little better than that, since some of those 40 are categories, and about a dozen are WIBNIfs. I'm reasonably satisfied with my progress.

A couple of links in the notes. I was looking for images of me on Google, and ran across this cartoon that mentions "Vampire Megabyte".

( raw notes )

Warrior to warrior

This isn't a Songs for Saturday. It's important, it's political, it's inspiring, and you ought to go watch A Message to All Police Officers From Occupy Wall Street, delivered in an extremely powerful speech by an LAPD officer.

Hat tip to pocketnaomi