Dave's Retirement Adventure

Dalcon International, Inc. was founded by David L. Condra in 1978, and incorporated in 1979 in Nashville Tennessee. The company initially did business as Nashville Computer Center, subsequently changed the DBA to Dalcon Computer Systems in 1981. The product focus of the company was business computer systems designed to meet the needs of small businesses. As an indication of how early Dalcon was in the Nashville market, it was the first company to be listed under the then new Nashville Yellow Pages listing, “Computers”. Although personal computers were just coming into businesses for use by individuals, Dalcon’s focus was on systems to run an entire small company, which required multiple simultaneous users accessing a common database, which was not then supported by personal computers. Consequently, Dalcon based its solutions on the Alpha Micro , which enabled the development of multi-user application software such as would be required for a business that had a number of peopl...

This blog is a continuing chronicle of our transition from a working life to retirement—with odd other posts as something comes up. I write it to crystallize my own thoughts and also for the few folks reading who might be contemplating their own retirement options and plans. As I hit 70 and decided to fully retire, Estelle and I conceived the idea that it would be an adventure to spend six months living in South Africa. It is a comfortable second country for us, given her upbringing there and our short visits over the years. A secondary benefit of living somewhere else for six months, particularly in different rental apartments and homes, is that we get to try out a different lifestyle than the one in our home we’ve known for the past 36 yrs.   A chance to explore some questions such as how do we live in a one or two-bedroom apartment? And, what do we miss compared to living in our house and living in central Nashville? The preparation for a six month stay involved fi...

Introduction As an old engineer/gadget guy who has gone a bit overboard in my retirement implementing smart home technology, I get questions at times about what I recommend. This post is my current thinking on smart home technology implementation and I’ll try to post updated versions as the world keeps changing. Of course it's a bit techie but my main point is, if you are building or remodeling, you should consider at least some of this and you need some level of understanding to make sure your contractor is designing/recommending appropriate pre-wiring and equipment location planning so that your home is ready for technology when you are. You are welcome to point your contractor to this post and ask them to give you feedback and recommendations. There are a multitude of options available today for smart home technology. You can naturally google around to see what is recommended but unfortunately most of the links, websites, books, and videos were created in past years,...

Historically, when taking a big vacation to a special place, I have been challenged to get the most out of it since I rarely allowed the time to do reading in advance or to digest and absorb the trip on return. With my newfound retirement time, I was able to do more advance reading and this trip to Egypt was so impact full I felt the need to write down thoughts along the way and did a couple of emails as well. Here’s the consolidated trip report. I understand most won’t have time to read it, but I sure enjoyed the experience of trying to capture what we had seen and felt during the trip and the process really helped me internalize the experience of the trip. About 24 hours after leaving Nashville, with stops in NYC and Rome, we arrived on time and all worked well for the trip to Cairo. Things were a little weird when the leg from Rome to Cairo was loaded and we saw about 180 mostly middle eastern looking men and about 5 women, including flight attendants and Estelle. Seems only o...