A Year Gone By

I can hardly believe it's been over a year since my last post. Obviously, I can only hit on the major things since then. One of the most major is that Dad passed away in January. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer about a year after my cancer. They took the prostate out, but some of it had already gotten away. The fact that he made it another 7 or 8 years and that he survived the pneumonia a couple years ago is amazing. But it finally caught up with him. He passed away in his sleep at his home on January 5.

The next most serious thing was getting laid off in April. FedEx had posted sharply lower earnings and apparently something had to be done. They had already done an across-the-board pay cut for all salaried people, suspended the 401K matching and announced there would be no raises or bonuses this year. But in April, they eliminated about 500 positions locally and 1000 world-wide, and mine was one of them. So I'm looking at other positions and keeping my ear to the ground for any consulting.

After I got laid off, I took that as a chance to write a little code that had been in the back of my mind for a while. I started a Scheme interpreter for Inferno. It's pretty functional, but still needs some work, especially with continuations and proper tail calls.

However, the last couple weeks have been occupied more with another little project. I found a 1921 Buescher stencil saxophone in the attic of Dad's garage. I've been taking some pics as I've worked on getting it working again. I'll post them soon.

Maybe it won't be another year before I update this again. We'll see.