Football Epilogue

Image by Pexels from Pixabay Friday May 27, 2022. My last day of work for the company I've been with for over 13 years. By most accounts, I should be still heading into the office today. After some toying with the idea of making a job change over much of the pandemic, I had decided to be content. The work was challenging and there were new opportunities to advance the state-of-the-art (in magnetic sensing) for some potentially big customers falling into place. Despite the usual grumbles that come with any workplace, I was happy-ish.  Enter the cliche irony of opportunity presenting itself when not looking. One of my colleagues, and former customers, had moved from his previous company to a much larger entity. As fate would have it, his division was spun off into a private company via a merger. The spin-off was to create investor opportunity for a now hot technology: Quantum computing. The company, Quantinuum, is poised to grow fast and their hardware development side was in need o...

2016 was a doozy of a year. Lots of household names passed away, the election defied arrogant polling and I'm still not wealthy nor famous; although I must admit to some putting sticks in hornet's nests on Facebook in uncanny oldest sibling fashion. I rang in the new year with the kids. We had ample junk food, played board games and watched movies on the DVD player my son bought from Goodwill for $5 earlier in the day. He was hoping it would be a small soldering project, but it turned out to work sans repairs. Finally, we toasted midnight with sparkling grape juice. Around 11 pm I had the kids sit down to do a little 2016 reflecting and 2017 goal writing. My son got right on it. He was grateful in 2016 for the new puppy at their mom's house, learning how to ski and seeing the new Star Wars movies.  My daughter was a little more bashful and I actually wasn't able to get much from her aside from going skiing and getting her pet turtle. I had a few things: ex...

It's Friday. I thought I'd monkey with my walking data a little more now that I have some more data points. I am even working on an auto-updating graph that will track my steps on this site. In looking at the previous post I'm of the minset that the daily step number may not be the best for tracking long-term progress. The typical periodicity for life seems to be the week. We ask people what they're doing each week, or how their week was. We plan work and vacations on a weekly basis. Weeks reset after a weekend. Most workouts, fitness plans, diets, etc. are based on weeks. It's the 21-day (3 week) Fix. Thus, it makes sense from a social-psychological perspective to look at weekly performance. Daily, is good to make sure you're hitting targets each day, but as a measure of progress the daily satisfaction gets lost in life. That said the measure should also be something that can be conceptualized on a daily basis. Also, like drug testing, I want a measure of my ...