Not really retired 😀

I read with some humor my last blog post from 6 months ago, saying that I was retired. Ha! As I mentioned 6 months ago, my wife has chronic health problems but those have stabalized, and life is now fairly good. I did start a very much part time (15 hours/week) advisory gig with Mind AI about 4 months ago. Enjoyable work on an interesting product. I am not performing any substantial development work, rather spending most of my time as an architect and advisor. I am 71 years old, and leaving heavy lifting development work to younger and more energetic co-workers is for the best.

I have a huge backlog of writing projects, mostly on hold for the moment because of my work at Mind AI:

  • A new book "Artificial Intelligence Programming in Python: Exploring the Boundaries of Deep Learning, Symbolic AI, and Knowledge Representation".
  • Edits for my Common Lisp book, adding new examples.
  • Ideas and some new code for my Swift AI book.

For the last year I have been basically giving away my recent eBooks for free on Leanpub by setting the minimum price to $0.00. I stopped doing this today. Now all of my recent eBooks are available for free online reading on my website https://markwatson.com and readers have to pay for PDF/ePub/Kindle versions on Leanpub.

I have been very happy to get 5 visits to my home in Sedona this year from old collegues, including my boss from 40 years ago and a recent co-worker from Olive AI. Great fun!

I also have a new hobby: I joined the Northern Arizona Audubon Society. Yes, I am now a bird watcher! I have some experience at this bird watching activity: I have had my pet parrot for 20 years. Looking at wild birds is fun also, and the birding hikes are guided by experts so this is a learning experience.

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