England’s Green and Pleasant Land – again. So soon.

As part of my quest to simplify my life I’m now spending 3 months in the UK to sort out my affairs here. It didn’t start well. I left my Macbook on the British Airways plane on which I arrived. Me. Left a computer on an airplane. Traveled to my UK home in Rutland before I noticed. I’m losing it.

Well as my life for the last 25 years has been almost weekly flying this is the first time I have ever left anything behind. And a Macbook!

I have a ready excuse – you don’t have to believe this; its for my benefit really to offset my guilt. I traveled to the UK in a business-class seat so that I could get a flat bed and a proper nights sleep. However 2 hours out of London we hit severe turbulence and I raised my seat into its upright position and watched a video on my Macbook. It then became so bad that the flight attendants asked us to put away heavy loose objects – such as Macbooks. I tucked the machine down by the side of my seat against the aircraft inner skin as I ( and others) usually do. However the flight attendant didn’t like that and said I have to put it in the special little draw on the floor. As I couldn’t easily reach it she did it form me. And that is where is stayed when I got off the plane with my backpack – and my OTHER laptop, a Dell Latitude D610. The backpack was so heavy I didn’t think for a moment something was missing.

I was home before I realized it and immediately called BA about it and sent a backup email.

It turns out that BA have outsourced lost property and that anything found on the plane is handled by them. In this case anything found on a plane at Terminal 5 is carried to some central point in Terminal 5 but is not logged in. Apparently it just sits there until a van load accumulates when it is carried to the lost property office under Terminal 3. This can take up to 5 days, depending on how much accumulates. So I called every day from Tuesday to Thursday with negative results.

And then on Thursday evening I got an email to call them which ended in an interrogation over the Macbook i.e. what did it look like, any distinguishing features etc. Then they asked “Who’s Judith?”. Success! They had booted it up and hit the login dialog that is titled “Judith’s Macbook” because I originally bought it for her – another story – and that was the name I gave it.

So on Friday morning I set off on the 100 mile journey back to Heathrow to collect it, armed with my passport to identify me, Judith’s to identify her and a letter from her giving them permission to release it to me.

And 5 hours later I had it. For the diligent, yes 5 hours to do 100 miles. 4 hours through ugly start-stop traffic and endless roadworks and 1 hour to find Lost Property in the bowels of Terminal 3. It was about a 40-minute walk from the car park.

I then hit stationary traffic on the way back and couldn’t even get from the M4 onto the M25 so I stayed on the M4, went out west and did a big loop through High Wicombe across to the M40 with a plan to take the M40 to Birmingham and then take the A14 across to Rutland.

But the M40 was at a standstill from 40 miles south of Birmingham. So, with the help of TomTom I took to the backroads and made it back in just over 4 hours.

Oh, yes. And between being shouted at by the TomTom I noticed how green and pleasant the English countryside is…

Getting my affairs in order…

Having decided to kick back and take things easier by retiring from corporate America I now have time to think.

Well, that is a two-edged sword as it has lead me down a path that should ensure that I will never work again. It could be that I won’t be able to find the time due to the workload I now have as a result of that retirement.

The latest set of tasks is to rationalize what is, these days at least, laughingly called “my wealth”.

Let me explain.

There have been several distinct phases in my life and I have treated each one almost as a completely separate life. A sort of serial multiple personality disorder.

The first life was my mis-spent youth as a rock-and-roll musician but that’s as much detail about that as I am prepared to expose at the moment. Suffice to say I didn’t make any provision for the future.

In my early 20s I got a “proper job” and joined IBM as an engineer. The was partly because I met my wife-to-be and she made it clear that unless I got a “proper job” then she would become a wife-not-to-be. I became the (relatively) good corporate husband, worked hard, contributed to my pension plan, educated my two beautiful daughters, saved a little and after nearly 30 years I quit IBM, taking a handsome early retirement package.

The next phase surprised friend and family – and me. I upped and moved to the USA and started a consultancy company. This I ran successfully from 1992 until 2002 with the erstwhile help of my American business partner Carol. During this time Carol made sure that our (separate) pensions were taken care of and that we stayed solvent. When we started the company Carol agreed to join me on the understanding that if she received a marriage proposal from a millionaire then, assuming he was suitable, she would accept and we would dissolve the company. In 2002 she met Cal, he asked, she accepted, we dissolved the company.   I retired again.

However, one of our clients in California asked me if I would help them set up a computer Enterprise Architecture department – as an employee.  Well as I had been retired for a couple of days this seemed attractive so agreed to do it for a year… and I stayed for seven. And I accumulated another pension fund and set of assets.

So now I am really retired I’m trying to collect all these pensions and other funds into a single manageable portfolio so, as I descend into dotage, I don’t have so many things to remember.

Good plan. It just takes hours, nay days, to sort it all out with each fund and fund manager having different rules and security mechanisms before I can talk to them – a problem compounded that my US residence address has changed and the new one has not trickled into all the computers it needs to be in. But I’m nearly there and maybe soon I’ll know just how much money I will be able to use to keep my aged body and dissolute soul together.

Getting comfortable

I’ve spent most of the last week getting comfortable – from a technology point of view. Now I have the time, I plan – indeed I have already begun – to investigate a number of avenues that might interest me.

Pursuing any of these requires a decent computer working environment and, having spent most of my working life as a transient, working in whatever environment I found myself, I’ve decided that I really need to design a solution that is optimum for me but flexible enough to be available to me wherever I am in the world.

The basic toolset will be a Macbook ( not a Pro – too big and heavy), Google “everything”  and Amazon Web Services. When I travel all I need is my Macbook, access to WiFi and I’m rolling.

I did try a cell phone data plan, having checked out the options, I selected Verizon Unlimited. Yeah, well after 3 days I had exceeded the 5GB monthly cap and had a $150 overage… SO I decide that I could make do with WiFi cafes when on the move.

With this setup I can use the Macbook as a client into any of the major operating systems I will be running on Amazon EC2 and I am backing it all up using Amazon S3. I’ve been using Amazon Web Services almost since its first day and in 3 years I have had zero problems. Of course this was all non-critical stuff but I’m now ready to trust it with the rest of my life… within reason.

Abbey Road

Not many people know this ( “yeah, right” cry my immediate family) but for several years I was a rock and roll musician. I only mention this today as there has been a lot of media coverage about the Abbey Road recording studios and the 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album.

It all got me reminiscing about my days in the business when I actually recorded in the EMI St Johns Wood studios, later, after the Beatles album, to be renamed The Abbey Road Studios.

I hadn’t thought too much about those days but I do remember some of the events of those days. We were under contract to the music publisher Ardmore and Beechwood (A&B), a subsidiary of EMI. In those days the publisher called all of the shots. They owned all the rights to a song and decided who should record it and how it should be marketed.  A&B were the company that were offered the original Beatles material but screwed the whole deal up. Their Artists and Repertoire (A&R) man at the time was George Martin and he produced our first record too.

We recorded a song called “I need you” that I believe my mother bought every copy sold. All 12. We recorded this in Abbey Road Studio 3, which was in the room behind the window you can see to the left of the steps.

The Kinks did better with it as the “B” side of one of their “Set Me Free” record a few years later

George didn’t do much for us but he did better for himself a couple of years later. He decided that A&B had missed an opportunity so he left EMI, started his own company and got involved again with the Beatles. I thought for a while he might contact us again, because he seemed to really like “I Need You”, but after 20 or so years I gave up hope.

He recently got a knighthood though. Well done Sir George! I’ll bet he doesn’t remember me.

If anyone is still reading there is some great background to those days in the book about the Beatles,  The Magical Mystery Tours by Tony Bramwell and Rosemary Kingsland.

My dog fence

Well I seem to have a solution for the escaping dog and ball. I have built an inner fence from insect screen materials that, when in place, are invisible from more than 5 feet away and are therefore acceptable to the residents association. The inner fence was, alas, not the only attempt at a solution.

Solution 1: drape screen material over the fence. Pro: easy.  Con: blows away unless weighted down. Unacceptable to both me and the residents association.

Solution 2: make inner fence from chicken wire. Pro: easy, not disturbed by wind. Con: butt-ugly and not acceptable to anyone.

Solution 3: make bespoke screen doors from screen material AND frames. Pro: Easy-ish, effective. Con: Time consuming to make, needs special tools.

However Solution 3 seems to work and now She Who Must Be Obeyed is happy, the dog is happy, the residents association is not unhappy ( “happy” would be a stretch whatever the subject ) and I’m happy, because the initial problem is solved and the noise from SWMBO has stopped.

I suppose the next step is to see if I can sell the dog for about $1000 to cover the costs…

You do not have health insurance

As a crumbly who has just retired I am just beginning a journey to understand the US healthcare system. OMG! It seems to me to be the most complex, illogical, irrational and expensive system I have ever come across. I THINK I have a safety net because I now am eligible for Medicaire but I’m not sure that it solves my problem. I can extend my ex-employer’s health plan for 18 months with COBRA but to continue with that would require me to sell something REALLY valuable – so  J can relax on that count.

As a non-native US resident ( I came here when I was around 50) I didn’t quite see the political issues underlying these systems until I was faced with them. I was thinking of blogging about my observations so far but in my research I found a blogger who pretty-well captures my view so far by James Kwak at baselinescenario .

Watch this space as I wander down the healthcare lane looking for a pot of gold at the end of my rainbow.

The Have’s … and the Have Not’s

It’s not the first time I have seen this in recent months but it still disturbed me.

As I drove into a shopping mall this morning I was confronted by a young woman with three small children holding up a sign “Homeless. Please help.” I understand some of the techniques used by professional beggar’s; a dog with them is common. Is the three children configuration the same technique with different props?

To my unease I didn’t stop… but is this the beginning of a trend?

My dog

I have a dog. She is the most adorable dog that money can buy. Her name is Twiglet and she is a 7-year-old Jack Russell Terrier. For those of you not familiar with the breed, a Jack Russell is about 11 inches high at the shoulder, weighs 15-20 pounds and is 100% energy.

Twigs, her more familiar name, gets several walks a day, usually 30 minutes or more each time. She loves her walks. However, walks just fill time between sessions of her favorite pastime, “ball”. She has “collected” about 30 tennis balls over the years, balls that look identical to you and me but balls that have very different and distinct characteristics to Twigs. And each day there is a different balle de jour. I’m now in a ground-floor (first floor:US) condo with a large balcony/patio surrounded by a fence -cleverly designed to have just enough space between the fence verticals to get a tennis ball through.

As a result, not only is the dog getting plenty of ball exercise but so am I as I have to walk out into the communal garden to retrieve the ball each time it goes through the fence. Which is roughly 50% of the time. There must be a simpler solution other than depriving the dog of the ball game. Condo rules forbid me from changing the fence…

…and where I lay my laptop is my office

Since moving my laptop has been literally that – a laptop. Its not the most effective way of working, at least for me, as to get the device at the right angle to type I usually sit in a nice comfy armchair and inevitably end up withhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…. there I go again. I dozed off with my finger on the “h” key.

So to counter this tendency and to go through the ritual of “going to work” I have bought a desk so that to use my computer I now have to walk 10 feet i.e. go to work. It really works! I now have a workspace where I concentrate fully on the task in hand.

I wonder how long before I’m back in the armchair….

Where ever I lay my head is home…

Having just retired at rather short notice I don’t yet have a clear plan for the rest of my days… assuming that I still have some days left!

If time, money and authorization to reside were without restriction then it would be easy; I’d split my time between Wing, Vancouver and the US. I’m not sure where in the US because I have left part of my heart in San Francisco, Salt Lake City and now Lynden in the North West. Maybe where you want to live follows the Mandelbrot rules i.e. choose a country, within the country then area, within the area then city, then zip code, then street, then house, then room, then chair… Ooops. I must not fall into that trap. My family think that my retirement plan is to move from one recliner to another, because that’s mostly what I did when working.

Of course its not that easy. First off I only have access, without let or hindrance, to the UK because I am a UK citizen and the US because I am a resident alien (maybe that’s why my registration card in the US is called a “Green Card”… it is for little green men.) I can only travel to Canada as a visitor and that limits me to less than 180 days a year. However I do own a house in Vancouver, which I rent out, but that rings alarm bells with all the immigration organizations as owning a house is a major indicator that you may be considering changing your residence. When you are crumbly no-one wants you as you may become a burden on the state..

I also have a daughter living in Chicago and a daughter and grandchildren in Vancouver.

I have applied for Canadian residency as I think I will probably end up there close to my younger daughter but that could take years to come through.

So the US is a good “home” choice for the short term. And Lynden is just one hour away from the grandchildren.

So lets get the communications infrastructure set up. But that is another story.