Though I intended for yesterday to be my last day of work, it didn’t quite work out that way. Even basically working twelves my last 4 days didn’t help me get everything done that I needed to get done.

I still have a number of things to finish up, so I guess I will be back in this weekend. If I were retiring right now, it would be a bit different. I could walk away with no repercussions – and probably would. However, I’m still an employee until February 28, though I’ll be on “holiday” until then.

I’m sitting in my office the day after my “last day” of work finishing packing up stuff and taking care of some final pieces of business – and I’ve just found a note about what triggered the decision to retire early in 2007.

We had been talking about it and moving closer to making a decision for a couple of months. There are a lot of things that went into the making the discussion, and I can’t really point to any one thing as a reason for retirement.

The note says: “April 30, 2007,” (the date I initially set for the final day of work), “Trigger was response in All Hands (meeting) to question about procedure compliance being impacted by manning issues.”

Without going into specifics, what I saw was upper management taking an employee”s question personally in a very public forum and going off saying that it had been positively determined that manning issues had nothing to do with the procedure compliance issues that had led to the meeting, which was NOT what I heard the employee asking about.

After that meeting, I expressed my frustration about managment’s response and other things on the phone with Karen, and commented that I was really tempted to just retire as soon as I could. Her response was, “Well, just plan on it.”

So I did – and subsequent decisions have moved it even sooner.

Yesterday, I walked by a classroom where one of my classes was being taught.

By “one of my classes,” I mean one of the topics where I’ve been the primary instructor for quite some time.

Others have been assigned those topics.

However, they still have the ones they were already responsible for.

I’ve been replaced in that others are getting my work. I hope someone will be hired or transferred in the share the load.

Maybe they’ll need to hire a contractor.

I know someone who has some expertise and could do the job – for the right price.

A lost Exit78 post, recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; March 2011

Bob Woodward has a very interesting article revealing some of Gerald Ford’s thoughts about the Bush administration’s Iraq policies in a new article in the Washington Post. In short, Ford very strongly disagreed with the justifications used to take the United States into war.

It’s unfortunate that Mr. Ford did not express these views before the war started. I realize it would not have made any difference, but it would have been another influential voice speaking out against the folly of basing the war on weapons of mass destruction.

A lost Exit78 post, recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; March 2011

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch! tanstaafl!

I first came across this idea in a book by Robert Heinlein called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I first remember reading in the late 60s or early 70s. Without going into the plot or story line, I’ll just say that it was one of my favorite books and I re-read it so many times that it eventually fell apart. In 1996, my daughter bought me a new copy, and annotated it “with thanks for introducing me to this book.”

TANSTAAFL! In the on-line community, there are a tremendous number of people who are trying – and succeeding – in getting their “free lunch.” However, their “free lunch” is not really free, because someone else is having to pay for it.

I’m not talking about those who come up with something bright or innovative that attract people to their blog or website. I am referring to those who are trying to make money in less than ethical ways – the spammers and the phishers, the people who fill our e-mail inboxes with too-good-too-be-true offers or create web pages that are pages of links without content that connect to more page of links without content, those who create viruses and worms, and others.

What harm to they do? They’re just trying to make a buck.

They are stealing time at the very least – and could be doing much worse.

Every time I have to personally deal with a spam e-mail, I use up a little bit of my time. Every time I have to wade though search results full of useless web pages to find what I want, I use some of my very valuable time.

The worst part of it is that there are enough people out there that will click on the ads on the useless web pages or respond to the spam that these slime balls and sleazes will be getting a free lunch at the expense of many others – at the expense of being of not being able to have an internet free of garbage web pages – at the expense of not being able to freely post your e-mail address on-line!

The free lunches of all the internet slime balls and sleazes are being served up daily by the newbies and other not-so-knowledgeable users of the internet and e-mail.

A lost Exit78 post, recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; March 2011

I spent quite a bit of yesterday trying to find a WordPress theme that would work for me. I was looking for something easy to modify in a three column format. I also wanted it to have a fairly crisp appearance.

I’m not much for writing code, though I can sometimes sit down and work my way through it, so I was looking for something that was already out there and ready and ready to use

After looking and downloading and evaluating quite a few 3 column themes, I settled for one that I’ve been using for quite a while. After several hours of editing to get the colors right and the various components in the locations that I wanted them to be in, I just could not get the links titles to automatically show up. They work fine in my older blogs, but I couldn’t get them to work right in this new one. After a couple of hours of frustration, I finally copied over the theme from one of my older blogs. Of course, it worked fine. Then, when I was switching back and forth looking at other themes, I saw the two themes next to each other and realized immediately what the problem was – and remembered that I had run into it before!

I had downloaded an older version!

Great, all my editing would have to be done again!

Then I got to looking at another one that I had selected for looking at the theme files and realized that it met everything I was looking for and was easier to modify, to boot!

The theme is 3C SEO, and is touted as:

A basic, easily customizable and se optimized theme with 3 columns.

It’s pretty much ready to go for now, though I’m sure that there will be some changes over time. Who knows, maybe, with retirement, I’ll get around to learning how to build my own theme. (Only after the dozens hundreds of other things I really want to do.)

A lost Exit78 post, recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; March 2011

This blog is my general purpose blog for publishing material of a wide range of topics. It replaces North Farnham Freeholder. That title worked for a while, but then just didn’t seem to be right for me.

A lost Exit78 post, recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; March 2011

Replacement Blog

I’ve not posted here since last August. I’ve been busy doing a lot of other things, including working my way into retirement – I have two weeks of work and several weeks of 2007 vacation between me and “officially” being retired – and creating a blog to replace this one. The blog has it’s own domain – exit78.com – and I will be adding content in subdirectories of that domain. Exit78 is my general purpose blog. I still have other blogs for my civil war and outdoors recreation stuff.

Post from one of my abandoned blogs – North Farnham Freeholder – recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; March 2011

As this blog develops and grow – and as I develop and grow as a blogger, I will be adding links on the blog to other blogs that:

• are of interest to me and, I hope, of possible interest to any visitors to this blog
• are helpful to me as resources to help me in what I want to do with this blog and my other on-line material.

The first two blogs that I am adding are problogger and dPS. Digital Photography School, since both are related to activities I intend to pursue.

A lost Exit78 post, recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; March 2011