Friday, January 27, 2012

Moving on

As any long term readers of this blog know I was laid off from my job at IBM's Watson Research Lab in Westchester New York about 3 years ago. I was out of work for a while but then got a job in central New Jersey which is about 90 miles away from my Ossining townhouse. This is too far to conveniently commute but I was reluctant to move as the job was originally temporary and I liked my townhouse. So I stayed in a motel during the week and returned to Ossining on weekends. But this wasn't ideal and since my position was made permanent early last year it seemed best to relocate. After a somewhat prolonged search I bought a townhouse near Princeton late last year and after some more delays I had my stuff moved last week.

This took three men two days. About 10 hours the first day to pack it up and load the truck, about 5 hours the second day to unload the truck (leaving the unpacking to me). I found the process a bit tiring. Not in a physical sense as I wasn't doing any of the work but somewhat emotionally draining as it marked a rather definite end to a big portion of my life. At least I didn't have to worry about the cost as my employer paid. Apparently quite a bit, hopefully a reasonable amount trickled down to the men doing the work.

Despite my doubts about moving I am settling in fine in the new place.

5 comments:

  1. Best of luck in your new home.

    Charley

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  2. Congratulations and enjoy your new home. And congratulations for the permanent position in your not quite so new job.

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  3. Sorry about the layoff, but that explains why I couldn't get in touch with you to answer a question about your "table based shift and subtract method." I need to figure out how the S(i) table values are constructed.
    Clyde, at 703-787-9400.

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  4. Hi Clyde, I am not quite sure what you are referring to. IBM did patent a table based algorithm of mine to find an approximate reciprocal of an IEEE floating point number in which the table values were chosen to minimize the error on each interval. If that isn't what you are asking about perhaps you are confusing me with some other Shearer who worked for IBM.

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