Technically, this weekend, I was un-employed.
Last week I was cleaning my office at Maricopa, 
digitizing old silly artifacts, 
tossing files, and trying to organize 
14 years of web sites.
Thursday, was an open house at our office, and I was overwhelmed by the people who paraded by to wish me well. And many gave nice cards, faux ocotillo, 
a clean mug, and other fun stuff. There’s never been so many people in my quiet office nor ever so much hugging and emotion. Thanks to everyone who came by, called, or e-mailed.
On Friday, 
I turned in my keys and badge at the front desk of the Maricopa District Office, a place I “habituated” for almost 14 years. I had started in 1992 
, a naive, geology graduate school dropout with some amount of technical skills on computers. What a 
long road it was!
My last official duty was an 
Ocotillo Online Learning Group Meeting at Paradise Valley Community College. My colleague, Sidne, made a fun hast and crowned me 
“Wizard of MCLI”.
But now for the next part… Tonorrow morning, my morning commute is 15 feet down the hall, as I report to “work” my first day for the New Media Consortium. I am still doing some set up, organizing the home office, waiting for Qwest to come with the phone/fax/high speed internet lines, and rigging up the new 
MacBookPro.
I’ve not really pushed the new Intel/Mac. It is clean, and responsive (then again, I have yet to install PhotoShop. Then again, the other computer at home is a 700 MhZ iBook, which I manage to do a lot of PhotoShop work). The trackpad is a bit racy, gotta adjust. The magnetic attachment for the power supply is just damn brilliant (a few months ago, my dog go started under the desk and took off at full speed wrapped around a power cord– I barely managed to catch a flying iBook)- note the A/C “brick” us about 130% the size of the older one. The optical drive is a hair slower to spin up. But on the flip side, the machine boots up fast, sucks in photos in iPhoto like a rocket, and I have the “beta” version of Boot Camp prepped so I can boot in Windows XP if the mood should hit me (I need to wait later in the week to get my hands on a Windows install disk). I am currently running a copy of OpenOffice which is actually amazingly familiar for the other software they replace.
And I forgot how many little things I had rigged on my old PowerBook at Maricopa. Virtual hosting for my web sites so I could run web apps local from the desktop. Browser bookmarks (I actually tossed about 80% of the old ones, Google and del.icio.us make them rather obsolete), RSS reader. Oddball utilities. I got a new palm (a basic Zire 22, calendar and lists, about all I do on a PDA) and am using it with iCal which I had not bothered to do before. Gotta figure a reasonale way to move maybe 5 Gb of music from the iBook used with my Shuffle, or just re-digitize a smaller set of songs. Oh! FrontRow and the remote are cool, though all I did was look through a few photos. Oh, gotta buy a copy of BBEdit.
But there are just the little things. This week, I hope to immerse myself into my new role (I have a 2 day trip to Austin for my “orientation”, maybe NMC “boot camp”. Oi, two disconnected ‘boot camp’ references in adjacent paragraphs).
I am also giving some deeper thought to the role, and focus of this blog. It surely will continue, but may likely be outside the scope of the day job, and definitely is an activity I do off the NMC clock. Or maybe I will find a different range of topics (Dogs Only? Today I actually got our Labrador, Cadu, to catch a frisbee, an amazing accomplishment!) I’ve been wanting to revisit its purpose, maybe spend a few weeks doing a Mission Statement (just kidding).
Yup, I am a weekend in limbo, detached, and floating along. But it has been a nice ride so far, and like a raft trip, you can get eager when you see the river bend around a canyon wall, not seeing where it goes. Is there a roar of a class V rapid ahead? Or more riffles? Or a long calm stretch?
Only the river of time knows.
Don’t change the focus of this space too much … be the voice of the NMC here. No reason to stop pushing the message from the “personal” perspective. It opens the walls of the organization. I think it is critical. BTW, have a great first day!
Why would cogdogblog be off the clock? It’s the online portion of your brain. Or, are they going to want you to only publish to NMC-sanctioned URLs? If anything, I hope you’re blogging MORE now…
Thanks Cole… I was hanging on to a few pokes at the ADCE site, where sans the iPod blog, the freshest content is from maybe January 2005 (I actually got a trackback ping from the discussion area, which was cool). They even have the defunct “Future Present” blog that we abandoned back in August, and which was still sending me spam karma notifcations (now going to dev/null at Maricopa).
Going well so far- toughest decisions today- which jeans to wear, or just boxers, and whether I really ought to shave.
D’Arcy-
I was just thinking out loud, and my thinking outloud, not NMC’s. Just trying to be a dutiful employee (for at least a week ;-). No muzzling has occurred.
It was more giving some thought to what I might be writing about and the way writing might change– not because of any rules but because my environment is going to be different.,
Like I was looking at my categories and I had topics like “eportfolios” and “learning objects” which are not things I see doing much on (I wiped them out to a more general “ed tech” category).