Last day

Yesterday was my last day at work. I'll continue to provide completely optional support, unpaid. But this is because I really want to do the work. The database there is on the order of 400GB (I thought it was 500+GB, but then I ran a few clusters and lost some bragging rights). That's the main reason I want to work with it. I have permission to continue some experimental work to enhance performance and since I don't have access to any other database that large, I'm happy to do the experimental work for free because I'll learn from it :-).

The last week or so of work I was sick a lot. Some of that was due to the weather, some of it was, perhaps, over-adventurous eating :-). But a lot of it was just fatigue. Timmy is a handful and I'm not in my prime anymore. I'm going to have to get much more fit so I can take care of him fulltime when we get to New Zealand.

That's the proximate reason for quitting a job I enjoyed thoroughly. We're migrating to New Zealand so it was convenient to quit at the end of the year and take a month and a half to get ready for the trip. Now I'm trying to figure out what I'll be doing. I need to limit reading online articles. If I don't consciously limit it, I'll do it all day. every day. I need to be much more hands on with Timmy, and I need to exercise (weights and aerobics work) so that I get more fit.

I'm planning to learn how to use git too, and oracle, and visual C#, probably. I'll work more with java (after a very long hiatus) and maybe play with SQL Server. I'm working with the developer or express editions of all that payware, so there will be some things I won't learn (e.g., how oracle works on grid hardware or how to cluster oracle or SQL server for multi-master functionality). But it should be enough to learn the basics.

I'd love to learn more about postgresql, maybe even enough to be able to submit some patches. But that's just a wish, not something I'll be pushing extremely hard to do.