I live a split life, in that I have a work persona and then home persona. I've blogged about this before so this might be familiar. That also translates to my friends, in that I have work and personal friends.

Lately I've spent more and more time with one of …

As I approach retirement I think a lot about the what next. On one level this is ridculous as who knows how long I will be on this earth, but then again those who fail to plan, plan to fail.

As I look around my little town I see a …

I have decided to embrace a life where I'm not fussing constantly with home technology, given that's all that I do during my work day, so installed Windows on both the home office computer and my laptop as I just figured it would just work. I do love my Linux …

I'm a newly licensed ham radio operator. I thought it would be a fun thing to do both in my pre and post retirement years (assuming I live that long Lord willing). My Grandfather was a ham, and while I don't have a lot of memories of him (I didn't …

A forgotten or maybe better put is an ignored skill I had is that of reading on a regular basis. For years after I completed my masters degree I was loathe to pick up a book. The education process had so changed my reading from being a joy to just …

So clearly I have lost my open source mind. I've installed Windows 10 on both my desktop and laptop. Before you write me off as a traitor or something worse here me out.

There are a couple of things that motivated this:

1. I've just passed my ham radio basic license …

I never really feel like I've ever really arrived as a leader. For over 28 years I have been in leadership positions in two different universities. Over those years I have learned far more than what I got in a Master of Arts in Leadership degree.

There is good leadership …

I just turned 56. While there is nothing interesting about being a given age until it allows one to drive, vote, or drink (I am part Scot after all). In the last few months, there is an intense sadness that has come over me from time to time. It's not …

About a year ago I turned from hiding the fact that I was once diagnosed with depression, to simply adding when appropriate to a conversation. I do to simply acknowledge it before others, and try not to use it gain some attention or sympathy from others. I still rarely raise …

While I don't hate freedom usually, I do appreciate the iPhone for utter reliability of the device. It works. The platform is constraining though with limited choice in the configuration, types of applications, and other general things that us open source folks tend to want to do with our devices …