My Life

Sometime soon after I was rushed to the hospital near the end of 2022 and explained all my defects to a nurse my first night, she asked if was I like other handicapped people she had met, where they had lived their lives by getting everything out of their body while they could and were ready for what was next. I hadn't thought about it in such terms, but I had to agree. During the next week, I had multiple other doctors and nurses ask similar questions; I suspect that belief isn't that unusual among folks similar to me. It's kind of hard to explain; I've spent nearly all my life thinking that my body isn't the same thing as myself; I suspect it was one way I kept my sanity at times. After a while I got used to having limits and my challenge was always trying to come as close to those limits without causing problems. As I got older those limits became more challenging.

After spending three weeks in the hospital with six surgeries and a cancer diagnosis, I was happy to be going to a rehab center where I would hopefully recover more strength; hopefully start walking again, and with some luck my lovely wife Elsa could rejoin me. While the place was nice enough, none of the rest happened. I was feeling somewhat better and went through daily rehab, but I could only walk a step or two before feeling lightheaded at best; plus my request for an emergency Visa for Elsa got stuck in some spam folder for days before I realized something was out of order.

After that month I was transferred to a small adult care facility in Laytonsville on Super Bowl Sunday. It took me a few days of getting used to the changes; the nurses there, sisters actually, did a wonderful job of nursing me back to health. I started regaining strength and being able to do even simple things, but I still wasn't able to even sit up for extended periods. Eventually, they had a specialized wound nurse, who worked on getting the right dressing for my sensitive skin and finally healing my wounds. We decided to avoid any rehab until I understood my treatment plan better. Initially, I had been referred to Howard U Medical Center, but we changed that to a Medstar hospital much closer to where I was then, but that delayed things for another month.

Luckily my lovely wife Elsa had finally made it to the US, but my condition shocked her more than I expected. We decided it was better to find her some place closer to live where my treatment was expected to be. Additionally, when she got to my apartment, she discovered my car had been towed and later sold before I was able to contact the towing company. A good friend from work went around with her and they found a lovely place in Gaithersburg. While smaller than my place in Laurel, it was much more up-to-date and they had an extra storage space for my books and computers. While she was getting our new living space together, as well as getting rid of the debris of living 30 years in my old apartment; I was starting a new round of tests before treatment. The CAT scan showed spots on my lungs, indicating my cancer had spread since my earlier scans. My doctor declared it at stage 4. And while they may have been able to treat it earlier, I was so weak, that it probably would have killed me. After that, given that I was stable, I signed up for hospice care and at the beginning of August I was finally able to move in with my lovely wife, Elsa. It was nice to be out of institutions after seven months. It took a bit longer to get everything set up, but in September my brother and sister-in-law, were finally able to visit our new home. Where they discovered that while Maryland wasn't horrible, its traffic was (it's hard to describe how congested parts of Maryland are without being in it). They were able to get Elsa to explore our world of tacos and chocolate pie. Elsa, an excellent cook, has been frustrated as my appetite has declined, but I have been able to sample her wonderful French-based cooking.

Elsa has done a excellent job of providing wonderful caregiving while getting used to the ways of the USA. And despite everything going on, we have been able to laugh enough and remember why we fell in love to start with. Luckily both her family, my family, and our friends have provided plenty of emotional support as we adapted to this. Our chaplain said it better than I ever could "Elsa is more than just lovely; she is loving, devoted, caring, tender-hearted, has a sense of humor, is brave, and spiritual--truly a blessing to you" I ended up being with a most amazing person that continues to amaze me every day.

I was born in the small town of Grants Pass Oregon, in 1961, while I would be classified as a baby boomer, actually a member of Generation Jones, I often felt closer to gen-X. As a sign of my life, my first memory was when I was around three years old in a hospital in nearby Medford after some surgery on my right eye. I survived that and outside of having to wear glasses. I mostly had a wonderful childhood, though it probably took me until fifth grade to wrap my mind around my disabilities. At that time, being handicapped meant I had to wear special shoes with braces. In addition, I had lost hearing in my right ear due to early childhood cold or flu. My parents owned a couple of grocery stores, of which we ran one. I probably started working there during the summer when I was 9; it was mostly a fun way to get an allowance. My one scary moment was when a few of us were moving stuff in the ceiling one day and I accidentally lost balance and fell through the ceiling. Luckily I didn't hit anything before the floor and ended up with a cut on my chin; though I scared everybody and my brother complained that I got blood in his car when they took me to the hospital.

My adolescent years were a challenge, not just the usual hormonal changes, but the fact I had two surgeries on both of my legs during two of the summers. Spending weeks in a wheelchair wasn't a fun experience and learning to walk again was its own challenge. Luckily my parents had sold their grocery stores and were able to use some downtime while taking care of me. Neighbors, family, and friends helped greatly in my recovery as well. Given the limited entertainment options available, it probably helped that Watergate dominated the news cycles for one of those surgeries. I remember joking with my doctor that I would like to watch the hearings at the regular time after my surgery. For me, a few months after recovery from the first surgery I started feeding like a normal person and no longer had to wear braces on my legs. As an aside, sometime after I got my first Tivo in the late 90s, it was set to do the recommended recording. One snow day I found there was a Discovery documentary called something like "Shark Attack Surgery" which I started watching on a whim. It turned out to be about operations similar to what I had. It was profound to see kids who were dealing with the same isues I did. During this time, my family had a chance to travel throughout much of the Western US, and that became a major part of my life. One of those random events I will always remember is being in the parking lot in McDonald's in Bend Oregon as we heard Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency.

My high school years were in ways easier. After trying real estate for a few years, my parents wanted to get back into retail and got the franchise for the local, state-controlled liquor store. That gave us a stable income, though the hours were longer; and I had a unique summer job through college. We did a lot less traveling, except for weekend getaways, though I was usually lucky enough to spend a few weeks with my brother and his family in Las Vegas, before it became family-friendy, in the summers. I enjoyed being able to blend in with 800 students in my sophomore year of a then three-year Grants Pass High School, in 1976. New high schools in the county next year, cut the total closer to 350 for my junior and senior years, while our high school went to a four-year school, but that seemed large enough by then. For me, discovering the data processing class changed my life. After one semester of an organized class, I and a couple of friends were able to take self-study classes for the next year. These mostly were early attempts at writing code in BASIC on one of the terminal/teletype machines scattered in the high school hooked up to the country's mainframe. It quickly became one part of my life that drove out other interests. It was a wonderful experience given the technology, but by the time I graduated, I knew I missed out on some of the high school experiences. Probably the closest I came was being involved in a normal high school experience was when I was on the high school's Mathlete team that won our regional competitions in mathematics. I also ended up hooked on watching sports on TV. It didn't hurt that the Portland Trailblazers won their only championship in 1977; I and my dad became fans for life. I remember when my parents last visited in the 90s, my dad watched the Chicago - New York series with the same intensity as he had watched Portland two decades earlier.

Going to college at Oregon State in 1979 was a new event, being 160 miles from home. I adjusted pretty well, my health probably reached its plateau. I met some great friends while living in an all-male dorm. I thrived as a Computer Science major while taking other interesting classes. Initially we had a powerful CDC Cyber mainframe with 160K of 60-bit words, which was large for the time. Though we started seeing IBM PCs by my senior year; while our department had a PDP-11 running version 7 of BSD Unix available for some of my senior classes. Though I also had a couple of classes that still used FORTRAN for the last time; a senior-level project had me using COBOL as well, since I was one of the few people with experience, though we didn't have to use punch cards this time.

The non-academic part of my life was in full growth. While our college football games were played in the early afternoon as God intended, we had a poor team and I only went to a game a year; I went through my college years without seeing a victory. Basketball was another matter; we had a top-ranked team my first two years, but alas we went out early in the tournament. The only game I went to; the last game of my sophomore year, where we were undefeated and ranked number one in the nation; but we lost to a top 5 Arizona State team. My best friend suggested I should not attend any more games since I was bad luck; which I mostly did, though I had less free time as an upperclassman as well. Years after we graduated, and our football team was good, we met up in Dallas Texas, and Madison Wisconsin to watch football games involving Oregon State; though for me, still without winning a game. While I wasn't a social butterfly, I at least had something of a social life, actually being seen in the company of females. I felt almost normal by the time I graduated with my degree in four years, though I had to take more than a full load my last year, which was a mistake in retrospect. I didn't get any job offers during that recessionary year 1983, alas.

I had always wanted to get my Master's degree and while I don't think my parents totały understood, they allowed me a year working at the store while applying for graduate school. That was a useful experience to help get me grounded, though I didn't get accepted by my hoped for school.

I went back to Oregon State in 1984 and initially was accepted into the Computer Science Department, but my GPA was too low for the grad school. After raising it to be good enough for the grad school, the new graduate advisor to the department rejected my application. After looking around a bit, another degree in Math Science turned into my best bet. I probably had a real social life for the first time. I lived in the international dorm and had a unique experience with a lot of memories that I will always cherish. I was even able to show a couple of good friends from Singapore a little bit of Grants Pass and Boatnik one year.

During the Spring of 1986, I had an interview with an organization of the Department of Defense out in Maryland. It was the first of what turned into a routine cross-country flight. I was hired as an intern; it sounded interesting; to work in three different offices, take a few classes, and learn about the agency before I moved into my permanent office. I and my dad had an nice cross-country trip to get me setup in Laurel in September. It turns out Fall is the best season to be in Maryland and my starting class had a fun time playing tourists the first few months; I remain friends to a couple of folks to this day. Alas, I was an indifferent intern; I quickly learned the program was initially set up more for computer operators to move into other career fields than anything else. They didn't have much for people who already had their degrees; that part was a recent addition. I remember spending most of my first year trying to get out of taking an additional 400-level computer science class, than anything else in the program.

My first office was a small fun group, with a couple of people with roots west of the Rockies; I remain in contact with one to this day; though I quickly learned I was free labor and didn't get assigned the best projects. My second office was even better in some ways, worse in others; it was located in some repurposed flood relief trailers that had long seen their best days. We mostly didn’t have indoor plumbing, reliable heat in the winter, or a/c in the summer and poor phone service; but we had our own parking, an BBQ pit which was a nice side benefit, though the lawn tennis court was gone by the time I got there. It allowed me to ignore almost everything else and write an insane amount of C code. Though programming while wearing my heavy coat wasn't something I wanted to replicate. Having some Unix experience I was able to play system administrator with my workstation. After that, my third tour was with an organization in a old, boring building at least with indoor plumbing, heat and air conditioning; we had a bunch of new hires; the primary mission was converting old code to C to run on modern Unix systems. I quickly found myself very busy with that, while also trying to finish my Intern requirements. I also found that the people who administered the intern program didn't understand much about the classes in the requirements; I wasted several weeks basically redoing a class, that everyone took when I started, with a different name. Even writing a technical paper, which I saw as a straightforward assignment, ended up taking longer, as my reader was expecting to inject herself more into the writing process and wasn't happy that I turned in a paper that I considered mostly done. After throwing myself at the head of the advisory panel, I was allowed to graduate late, which was only notable for me since it was the last time my parents got to see me graduate. By the time I graduated, they had started reforming the intern program, giving degree holders the chance to get a master's degree among many other improvements, but I can't say I enjoyed my experience.

While I was trying to finish the program, I also started my first real office. It was a newly formed office related to one of the intern tours, with other new hires. I was hired to write a then-new X11 Window System graphical user interface (GUI) for some already existing code while riding herd over a menagerie of computer workstations as systems administrator. It turned out to be a nightmare. We were stuck in half desks in another office while our new spaces were getting ready. Not to mention, I found out later, that one wall was full of asbestos. Our primary computer workstations were in another machine room on another floor that we didn't have direct access to. The code I was supposed to write a GUI for, turned out to be so broken that I spent weeks just fixing that first. Then my management asked me to look at fixing another system that was partially broken. After spending weeks trying to get my head around it, with the usual government meetings, etc.; we found out nobody was using the data from that system. Given, that they had recently moved to their own rehabbed space, my old intern management there was pretty mellow in letting me hang out there, on my full desk with a computer on it. By the time, my real office had moved into their own spaces, I was pretty bummed out of that organization. In retrospect, I was way too inexperienced for what they wanted me to do. When my last intern office had an opening a few months later, they offered me a chance to come back and I took it. I did feel bad for my first office and ended up doing a little bit of system administration for them until they could get a replacement. Strange enough I was back in the same physical office space with the same asbestos wall over a decade later. At least there were fewer people in the office and we had regular desks, computers, and even bookshelves. Due to my role, I had a nice window desk with no less than four computers under my desk, including an early HP Itanium, which generated a lot of heat by itself. I baked in the summer, and I was mostly useless in the afternoons of the hot days, unless I got away from my desk (never have I enjoyed afternoon meetings more).

While I started working in the second half of 1986, but was probably closer to 1992 before I feel like I started my career. While my intern contract required me to spend six years at our agency and I wanted to get involved with an organization and projects to see what I could do. All things considered, I think I had a pretty awesome run for the next twenty years.

It seemed I would move into a fun office with good management that would slowly devolve and after around seven years, I would move to something new and fresh. It was only in the last decade, when my body started to break down and my usual drive left me that I really struggled. I was at the height of my powers by 2008 and enjoyed working on various planning and research projects, one that involved DARPA. However, I was starting to get overwhelmed with work, and after starting a unique project, which I wanted to do, without having enough time to make sufficient headway. I was really frustrated; with a reorganization in our future, I knew I needed to make a change. I emailed a former manager and asked if there was anything in her neck of the woods, software management. She said yes and after a quick interview, we came to a mutual agreement for my new position, or so I thought. I hoped moving to a new office would help me regain my energy and drive. Given the location of the office, in a staff organization, I figured this would be my last major technical success before I would be able to slide into a non-technical role for my last few years until I was eligible to retire.

I will always remember that new office. The fact it took several months to actually move to the office because of the reorganization, should have been a warning sign. A few weeks after I arrived, I went to talk to one of my managers after solving a minor problem. I found her talking to one of her IT managers. We did the usual new employee chit-chat and I didn't think anything of it; that manager seemed nice enough. Later that day, I overheard my local management complaining that I apparently shouldn't be talking to their management! I never found out why, but that was just one of many strange, bizarre moments I had in that office. I expected some differences since my interview, but it seemed like a totally different place. My managers, who knew my interests six months earlier, now seemed to know little beyond my name. It was a matrix-managed organization that should have had a small bookkeeping element, but that didn't seem to be the case, as management mostly focused on the clerical part of the software procurement process. Most people seemed badly underemployed and many quickly left. I basically had one major technical project, managing some open-source software repositories that I really enjoyed, but there wasn´t much else. Even though only two commercial vendors resulted in most of our official work, management had no interest in expanding our support of open-source software, or much of anything else beyond procurement (I used to joke they would be happy if they could also manage the purchasing of light bulbs and toilet paper). There was a group of contractors that did most of the IT work, but there was little government coordination with their work, even if it would have made life better for everyone. One evening one of our customer-facing servers went down when I was the last person in the office. The next day, I asked my management what I should I have done. Their response was sad but predictable; claiming our office only worked from 9-5 M-F and they did not know anything about how to call in the contractors to bring our servers back online (which was actually required to be documented, but management apparently only documented a off-hours software procurement process). There wasn't a lot of interest in planning or staff work in general; management had the general vibe that if they ignored the larger IT organization we were in, they would eventually forget about us. They ignored all IT trends with even more vigor. I had no role in any of this, which was really depressing. I had hoped to recover some of my energy, but really never had a chance, and I didn't see any path forward for the longest time. I sort of survived, but my health worsened from the stress and I'm sure I got PTSD from the entire experience.

Near the end of that tour, after I saw a report produced for the CIO about open-source software, I was able to contact the CIO; suggest I would be a better fit in the propsed new organization, which he agreed with, and with the next reorganization, my project was moved to that organization, while my original office got new directions. My only enjoyable time in that organization was after my management had to meet with the CIO, when they found out I knew more about some of his new plans than they did; they seemed surprised he would have interest in this organization. They then setup a meeting with everyone in the organization with the CIO, except for me. I never found out why I wasn't invited to that meeting either. They quickly had to find at least IT adjacent work for nearly everyone in the organization before their new management took over (the organization above us was broken up with the pieces moved to other organizations). It was funny to see most of the people who had quietly been doing clerical and bookkeeping work start doing IT-related work again. It was the only time I saw them email what people were actually working on; before that information was handled on a strange need-to-know basis. By then I had concluded that management was terribly broken in ways I couldn't understand, it definitely wasn't servent leadership. The experience pretty much killed my motivation and any plans I had; I was just happy to leave.

I moved into the new office, but they lacked enough people to do the open-source mission that needed to be done, with a indifferent middle management and I continued to struggle. It took weeks just to move me to a new desk from my old office, to a different team than the one I was working on, where I discovered it didn't have any phones on it. I really wanted to move out of a purely technical role, by now, but we lacked the resources. Eventually my local management tried to help, probably recognizing that I was burned out before I did. Since I was close enough to regular retirement, they tried to keep me occupied by moving me to a new project with a smaller role. Eventually I moved to a part-time billet. Sadly I was unable to recover as much as I wanted and couldn't do any deep work by the time I retired near the end of 2017. I felt bad for what had happened, but I knew I didn't have anything left. The only thing I can say I really did my last few years was to get into meditation, which helped me survive; I really wish that was a thing when I was growing up.

While I started as a computer programmer; I ended up moving to systems soon after, but I kept an eye on the programming side nearly all my career. However, I spent most of my time managing systems. Some of the time it was for others; other times it was while I developing or managing tools. The title of computer systems architect was the one that defined my favorite role given my broad experience.

Among technical items, three would be pillars of my career. The first would be the open-source software, which I saw it develop during my time working. It's funny to think what discovering the Free Software Foundation and GNU software in 1990 would lead to. I was lucky enough to recognize the trend early and supported the internal use before it became generall?y recognized. I remember having to explain to folks in our CIO’s office why we should use software we didn't pay for in the late 90s. I also ended up doing some sort of software support for nearly my entire career. Probably as a side effect, I made it to four of the O’Reilly Open Source Conventions, three O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conferences as well as an Apache Software Convention, among others, which were mostly a blast and I got to hang out with some very cool people; I used to joke that it wasn't a real conference unless I saw Chris DiBona, then Google's head of Open-source software, there. As an aside I went to the International World Wide Web Conference in Manhattan in 2004; I almost met another good friend from high school one night for dinner, but last-minute changes in plans prevented it. Though being able to plan a meetup was a good sign that we both had survived and prospered; the 1979 versions of us probably would have been happy. I believe I had a overall positive impact, though I really didn't have any impact by the time I should have been a mentor.

Similarly, I spent nearly all my career on Unix and Unix-like systems. I started working with the early version of Unix on MassComp systems, probably mostly notable in that Tim O’Reilly wrote some of the documentation; which I wished I had kept. I then moved to early Sun SunOS (4.x) where I stayed through Solaris 10, more or less. There were short trips early with Silicon Graphics IRIX and longer ones with DEC’s Tru64 and HP’s HP-UX later as we became an early adaptor of 64-bit computing. By the early 2000s, it looked like Linux was the next hot thing and I started focusing on that, and in time that became my primary platform, even when I was forced to use a Windows desktop. Related, Sun’s Open Look was probably the first graphical environment I really used, though I used the basic X11 tools more often and never learned Display Postscript. The late 1990s saw us move to the cross-platform Comman Desktop Environment, where I became a local expert. The rise of Linux saw us move mostly to the Gnome Desktop Environment along a bit of KDE. I no longer had to worry about supporting those environments directly, so my knowledge of Gnome was more limited. Though by a strange twist of fate, I ended up using KDE on a DEC Alpha for a while before moving back to the mainstream. My first Windows experience was with XP, late in its lifecycle, though by the time we moved to Windows 7, I found the experience acceptable for a lightly used desktop as long as I had Linux access to do actual development.

Finally, I spent nearly all my career with what initially would be called collaborative software. I would start with Notes software from the PLATO project, and spend more time with NetNews software; but the World Wide Web would take much of my career. I was lucky enough to discover both Gopher and the WWW during one weekend in 1993 and my life was never the same. Luckily my management then allowed me to explore new technologies. I enjoyed working on that for the longest time, though it was often the biggest headache as it often involved new technologies that existing policy didn't cover. For the longest time, it was fun working on the technical side while also pushing for the necessary policy changes as well. I got well known to some senior staff people as we worked on developing acceptable technical products. A side effect of this was that I also spent a lot of time with web browsers including providing Tier 2 support. The political side of this was often the most interesting. The rapid pace of change was hard for folks used to the standard DoD pace to adapt to. At times this was personally painful, but I lasted over a decade before I finally threw in the towel; though I continued to follow the technology and help out on occasion.

One thing I discovered with all these technologies, is that after spending enough time and effort, it usually became easy to see what was next. Even in the last decade of my career, I felt like I could see the big picture as well as anyone, it was in the details I struggled with. The downside for me was I could also see what wasn’t in the future. There were times when it would have been better for me to just work on some projects even when I could see they were dead-ends.

Just like many boys my age, one of my first hobbies was building plastic scale models; mostly airplanes, but pretty much any military vehicle. My masterpiece was a large model of Titanic that took months to assemble. I ended up with a couple of other large models that I thought I would assemble after I got my own place with enough bookshelves to actually display them properly; alas that never happened. I also learned to play the piano and my parents bought a used one for me. I mostly stopped playing when I was in Junior high. During my Senior year in high school, I started practicing again so I could play at an acceptable level; though since, or maybe because, my parents were at work, nobody actually heard me. It did provide some stress relief during that school year.

During my high school years, I also took to playing board wargames. My best friend would come over and play since my parent's house would be otherwise empty. My favorite time, was the summer after we graduated high school; for several weeks, I had various folks come over and play various games before we made our way to college/the real world. Among the games we played was one called Diplomacy, based on pre-World War 1 Europe. I enjoyed it a lot and given the era, played it by mail for many years throughout college. In college, I had a good friend who I also played wargames with a few times; most famously on a Saturday afternoon in the Fall of our Freshman year, while we missed an awful Oregon State football team that had a last minute upset of Stanford; for some reason, he has never let me forget that event. I played various board games a few other times, but really never had that much free time, though I did have my only motorcycle ride to play one game. I did play by mail one wargame as the gamemaster, a Frenchman, retired from Tokyo to Tahiti, with players around the world. Sadly, it was never finished, but I had fun explaining to friends why I was getting mail from Tahiti; while a friend expanded her stamp collection. I stopped playing wargames before I moved to Maryland. I still enjoyed playing the few times I was with my best friend and his wife from high school, and I met up with them a couple times at gaming conventions, but I really never took the hobby up again, even after I retired, though I hoped I would.

Like many other nerds of the time, I used our local library heavily through high school. In college, I usually had a Bantam WW2 paperback with me to read during the quiet times. I had a decent collection of books by the time I got to Maryland and added to it through the years. When it was sold earlier this year, I was proud that my collection of books on World War II was pretty complete, even in the more obscure areas, though I wished I had been able to read more. While I didn't collect them in the same way, I also had a good number of computer science and programming books. It was probably the nature of the beast, as the books would become outdated in short order, and there was always something new out there to learn.

I left college with a CompuServe account along with a Commodore Amiga computer and used that service regularly until I was able to get on the real Internet. In those early days, before the World Wide Web, Usenet was my main pursuit, though I was mostly a lurker. In the mid-90s, around a month after Commodore declared bankruptcy, my Amiga (well the serial port) got hit by lightning while I was at work. I replaced it with a no-name PC laptop in time for the Windows 95 release. I ended up replacing that with an early iMac. I have kept using Apple products to this day; though I continued to buy PC laptops a while longer; usually putting a version of Linux on them eventually.

Many times since 1986 being able to get away for even a few days cleared my mind. The first time I left the East Coast was soon after I started. I took advantage of a three-day weekend, homecoming at Oregon State, and very good friends in college to make a quick trip, visit friends, see some college football in the afternoon, and enjoy a wine tasting later that night. Sunday I was able to talk with my parents and surprise them with my location. They made it up Monday and I'm sure my mom was happy to see me after a couple of months. I flew out Tuesday; had new friends pick me up at BWI later and made it back to work Wednesday, but dragged that week, and tried to avoid doing that again.

After my initial last-minute trip, I continued to travel back to the West Coast almost as much as I could. Mostly to visit family. Later as I started attending technical conferences, most of which were held on the West Coast, I usually tried to squeeze in a short trip to visit friends or family before or after the actual conference. During the busy year of 1999, I made four trips, two back to Grants Pass, seeing my father before his health really declined; and my first foreign trip, to Ottawa. Which may have been my limit. I took 2000 off from traveling to recover.

I was always interested in taking a cruise after watching "The Love Boat" in my younger days. During the summer of 2000, I heard about the company GeekCruises, now called Insight Cruises, which offered technical seminars on cruises. Turing 40 in 2001, I decided to try one out in early 2001. For me that was perfect, an XML seminar during sea days, while having a regular cruise experience the other times, though our group also had dinner together; we drove our waiters crazy by changing tables among our group for dinner. I was hooked pretty quickly and went on multiple cruises with them, and after a few years even started going on cruises on my own. One of my favorite trips was taking my mom on a cruise around a year after my dad passed away. I think she was looking to get out again and she had a wonderful time. She enjoyed people-watching on the Lido Deck; but also enjoyed dressing up, or maybe having me dress up, for what was then regular formal and semi-formal dinners. It was one of those times, I knew I had done good.

I even started getting away to some of the nicer hotels in South Florida for short trips in the 2010s, as I struggled with work; it turned out I enjoyed taking a few days off, where I could enjoy lying about a pool in the afternoon and having a good dinner in the evening. When I turned 50, I even had a fun trip of flying a friend to Miami then we then flew to Aruba for a relaxing week. A few years later, I met a lovely Filipina on a cruise and then I took a couple of trips to Asia to meet up with her. I was lucky enough to see Bali, Boracay, Manila, and Singapore at various times with her, though my mobility was starting to decline, and I couldn't play tourist as much as I would like. The last trip to Asia included flying non-stop from Singapore to London on an Airbus A380 as part of an around-the-world trip, which made my inner airplane geek happy. I spent quality time during this period in the Hong Kong, Heathrow, and Narita airports beyond my earlier visits to nearly every airport in the Western United States as part of my travels.¹

However, my body was getting weaker and I had to be more careful just walking around. Just a few stairs at my apartment building would do a number on my knees if I wasn't paying attention. What were initially just minor pains started taking me down more often. I retired soon after I was eligible near the end of 2017. I spent that Christmas with my brother and sister-in-law in Las Vegas, my first time we had been together in several years. After that, I planned on taking a gap year to recover, while I figured out what to do next. I had a lovely retirement cruise, via Insight Cruises, from San Diego (where I spent a couple of days playing tourist with a couple of very good friends) to Ft Lauderdale (where I was able to have another reunion with a GPHS/OSU friend despite me being under the weather) through the Panama Canal. I also did various other cruises that year, a summer cruise with a friend to Alaska being memorable. It turned out to be a great year for the Oregon State Baseball team, which won the Men’s College World Series. I was lucky enough to watch nearly every game, making up for the fact I completely missed their championship runs a decade earlier. I even started to make a dent on my pile of unread books. My best cruise ever however was on Carnival Horizon near the end of the gap year where I met this wonderful woman, Elsa. We stayed in contact regularly and my plans again changed. We dated for sometime before deciding to get married. Given the issues of immigration, we choose St Lucia, as being an easier place to tie the knot, even though it was a bit more expensive. Our first resort, Bay Gardens, did a excellent job putting on the wedding after my bride had found me an acceptable outfit to go with her heavenly gown. We moved to a lovely Sandals Resort for our honeymoon. We had a chance to sample the several restaurants on site, though I made Elsa order for me at the French restaurant. We had a nice couples massage outdoors in a tree house as well. Though we were unable to drink all the champagne they provided. My mental capacity had improved enough that I was able to plan most of that trip, which involved a lot of moving parts and was fun to geek out on. The trip was enjoyable, the wedding was magical. Alas, the pandemic put an end to most of our plans and it wasn't until 2023 after all the paperwork was approved by the US

In true fashion of my life, I suspect my last flight was a night flight from Miami back to Baltimore that was delayed because they had a leaky seal on the pilot's window; we didn’t get back in Baltimore until 2 AM; on a day we started at Trinidad at 4 AM.

I can’t help to end with a few thoughts on that part of my life that I have focused on for the past forty-five years. I’ve gone from using punch cards for a COBOL class to typing this on an text editor on my iPad and with some GitHub magic; it will appear on the web as a basic webpage (luckily I still remember HTML and some CSS). That is a huge amount of change, but I can’t help to think the LLM wave of AI will cause even more change than we have seen before. I’m only a bit sad that I’m not involved with the bleeding edge for the first time in a long while. OTOH, I still keep discovering books about World War 2 that I want to add to my pile.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure if I would change anything in my life. My time couldn't have been more magical. I ended up with a mostly great career, where I had plenty of respect from my peers and managers. Along with spending the past year with the love of my life; I also have great memories being with my family and friends. While I won't quote Lou Gehrig and claim I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth; I still feel blessed and lucky enough to live a full life, surrounded by a loving wife, great friends, and family.