Caveman's Story
"So what have you been doing to keep busy since you retired?"
Is a question I get regularly. Golf is my siren song. However, Chatham, Ontario, Canada is not exactly tropics adjacent. It freakin’ snows here some days. So I sez to myself, why not fill the “dark times” by embracing the quality that makes you you … your colossal nerdiness.
This “webplace” on the “intratube” is my attempt to document all the little (and less little) projects I’ve been up to since I officially latched on to the pension teat.
TL;DR: After a year-long crash course, I began my career as a professional computer programmer in the summer of 1981 at a stock brokerage in Toronto. I hopped around various jobs in the city until 1987 when we moved to Chatham and, convinced that my COBOL and JCL skills were top drawer, and that this big city hot shot would fit right in, I was hired into what would become a lengthy career at Union Gas.
Programming and general IT projects came and went over the following dozen years but the company, like many others, began moving towards more off-the-shelf applications and less bespoke coding. Stitching purchased software into an existing application portfolio was just not that interesting or challenging. It was also dawning on me that it would be cool and highly educational to move into non-IT business areas of the company. And so in 1995, even though I still loved coding, I bid farewell to my career as a computer programmer and began occupying a variety of gigs in a number of departments and learned loads about business in general and the natural gas and energy industries in particular.
I’ve tried to keep up to date on all the techy things, but technology moves so fast. I find it to be abstract and tough to fully understand. unless I actually do it myself.
So in 1995, I was frozen in time, like my titular website namesake. But now I am unfrozen and I ready to face the technical challenges of the modern age. All of this is purely for my own entertainment. I have no plan to do anything that runs the risk of making money. Check out my projects and prepare to be whelmed.