On 07/16/2018 02:23 PM, Edward Gould wrote: > Approximately 2 months I had a life altering incident. > I can no longer function as a sysprog. I resigned my no pay job at the place > I used to donate my time. > I find I can no longer do the job. > I hope much success to all of you and hope that you can carry on with your > work, despite IBM’s best efforts to do away with the profession. > Thanks, to John Ells and the many other IBMer’s who give their time and their > experience with IBM-MAIN. > Not sure what is ahead for me, other than traveling with a companion as I can > barely walk. > I am 70 years old and I am finding life without a technical challenge not > interesting and since I can no longer function in that capacity I will have > to find some other outlet. > Best wishes to you all. > > Ed > Ed, I have appreciated your posts over the years.
Some of the things I have done since retirement compatible with the SysProg mindset of interpreting documentation, diagnosing problems, and figuring out new programming interfaces: * Learned more about Linux, html, PHP, etc -- enough to maintain a home Linux workstation/server running Apache with family web content and web-server-based genealogy database . *I have found computer technical skills, and Web site skills in particular, turn out to be in short supply in many organizations where members tend toward the retired. If there are organizations you wish to support and they have (or want to have) a web site, they can always use a volunteer willing to learn how to serve as their webmaster, or to handle mass emails, maintain rosters with MS Excel or LibreOffice Calc, etc., etc. Handling other organizations' web sites is also a way to learn new techniques that can be used with your own web site. Depending on how it is done, maintaining a web site can exercise programming and diagnostic skills. * I have found working with Fedora Linux and finding open source tools to do [almost] everything I need is much more of a technical challenge and more personally satisfying than using MS Windows. With MS, most problems and needs can either be solved by spending money, or else are beyond your control. With Linux, searching will usually locate problem resolutions and free applications. Fedora Linux does seem to always manage to introduce bugs with new releases that affect some of the applications I care about. Even if you don't get down to the level of volunteering with open source application development, you can exercise sysprog skills by diagnosing symptoms, finding circumventions, and reporting Fedora bugs with bugzilla (so other volunteers will run with that and fix the actual bug) * Then there are always maintenance issues with your home network and all the devices that connect to it; and if that isn't enough to keep your busy, you can volunteer your diagnostic skills to less technical friends in need. Many of those tasks don't require that much mobility. And then of course there are open source free compilers/interpreters on Linux for all sorts of programming language (including REXX, Fortran, COBOL, and even APL), so you can write code to solve all those entertaining puzzles and requirements you were forced to put aside while still employed. Joel C Ewing -- Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR jcew...@acm.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
