Sunday 5 October 2008

Retiring!

Today is my official last day as an IBM employee. I am retiring after 34 years with IBM, which according to my calculations is around 61% of my life! I've had a great time at IBM, and I have enjoyed the opportunity to do many interesting and satisfying things. The best part has been the relationships I have developed with people I have worked with over the years, many of whom have become close colleagues and friends. My IBM career has been an exciting ride with some wonderful experiences, and now it's the right time for me to move on to the next stage of my life with a different work/life balance and more time for personal and family things.

I'm not completely giving up technical work. I'll still be active as a Tuscany committer and in the SCA standardization work at OASIS. I'm also co-authoring a book on Tuscany. I'll post updates here as the project progresses.

I have made some resolutions for my retirement. One is to go for a walk first thing after breakfast every weekday. I've been doing this for the last 3 weeks when I've been on pre-retirement vacation, and I'm really enjoying it. As well as making me fitter, I'm finding it really good to have some time to think about the things I want to do that day. Thinking while walking seems to be a good combination for me.

Another resolution is to write more of these blog entries! I'm not quite sure how this one will turn out. It takes more effort for me to write a blog entry than go for a walk, but maybe that will change with more practice. My thoughts at the moment are to talk about various things that are occupying me at the moment. These might be technical topics related to Tuscany or SCA, other computer-related matters like my experiences with networked printing at home, or things that have nothing to do with computers such as the Great Tree Stump Project. More about that another day...

4 comments:

lizhiyun said...

I wish you all the best.

Paulex said...

Simon,

Best wish to you from China.

And I'm looking forward to your "more blog post", I believe they will be very interesting :)

Two years ago we met in Hursley's coffee room to celebrate Harmony's graduation from Apache incubation, it still sounds like yesterday to me...

John Lynn said...

Simon - it's me again, that huge Simon Nash fan. We met at a REXX symposium back in the late 80s or so. I remember pouring over your works from the VM days: the Process Model package, ESPF, and others. I was a youngster back then, and you were a great example and a great influence through your well-crafted tools.

I wish you the best! Enjoy the walks!

Unknown said...

Dear Simon,

It must be now 10 years ago that you retired. You may not have raised many Blogger entries in those 10 years, but you have done so much on Minimserver/MinimWatch/MinimStreamer!

For 5 long years I have been operated by expensive Naim equipment using MediaServer on the Synology NAS, and always found that quite limited in functionality. I never realised I could easily install another mediaserver on my NAS, and run that on the Naim App!

Yesterday I found out about AssetUPnP, BubbleUPnP and Minimserver. Based on users feedback at various forums I chose to 'try' Minimserver. It then took a bit of hassle to install the latest Java, download and run the 3 packages above, but I got it all running quite smoothly. Quickly leared, and even started to improve the tagging and display structure in the 'Profile' section of MinimWatch.

What a great piece of software you have created. It runs like a breeze on my Windows PC/Synology NAS/Naim app!

Thank you for spending more than 10 years to develop this, and serving an ever-growing community of computer audiophiles.

If my calculations are correct, your age must be about 34years/61% + (now-2008) = 66 years old. I wish you many good years ahead!

All the best,

Bert Benckhuijsen
Dutch guy from the Netherlands
Living in Singapore & Gouda