I am recently retired from a career that started in academic hard science and ended up in commercial software technology. I am now in the process of inventing the next version of myself. While I have been employed for most of my life, luckily it was usually in circumstances where I had a lot of control over the content and direction of my work. Nonetheless, it is strange to now be in a position to define my next career (or non-career) all by myself.

I am fortunate to have an example close to home of someone who has transformed herself very sucessfully. My wife, Candace Petersen, had an extremely productive career as a systems engineer and analyst. She went from that highly technical world to a new passion and is now a very accomplished pastel artist. I am not ready to give up technology quite as much, so expanding my existing interest in digital photography seems like a nice compromise between what I used to be and what I might become.

I think I am the only one in my family that likes the self portrait to the right, but it seems appropriate to me for this context. I was on a photography workshop in Italy and managed to photograph my reflection in a brass plate in an Italian museum (although you can tell it took some concentration to get the camera pointed correctly). I think it is a good image of someone trying to create a new dimension in their life.