Microsoft HUP Is a Good Deal--But Less Of a No-Brainer
For many Microsoft corporate partners (and the US government), Microsoft has offered a home use program, where for a nominal fee you could license a copy of certain groups of your business-licensed Office products for use on your home computer for a nominal fee (like $10-15).Microsoft has long been eyeing trying to convert its perpetual license business to more of a subscription model (like the antivirus market) which would smooth out revenues, particularly in the maturing PC market. Indeed, Microsoft's lucrative Office Suite market, a de facto monopoly, has been challenged by open source (freeware) office suite products and at the other end by Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings, like Google Apps. Of course, Microsoft has tried to create a de facto subscription model through expensive upgrade cycles and (until recently) 10-year support product lifetimes, part of which includes an extra-cost extended period. (In an age of cyber criminals, you really don't want to run without current security software patches.)
So Microsoft has been pushing its own SaaS subscription program, Office 365 (which I believe has been available since 2013), in two forms: home/family, $99/year (across devices, some programs PC only); personal, $69 year. (You can still pay for a one-time license from $150 (student) to $440 (professional suite).)
It looks like Microsoft has retired its one-time license HUP offering to 30% or so off its 365 Home offering. Granted, you no longer have to go through upgrade processes; you'll always have the latest, greatest, security-patched software features. But it's still multiple times the former one-time license fee, and that's just for one year's fees. I just don't use the suite enough to justify the cost.
Labor Day: Different This Time
It doesn't feel like s holiday, probably because for the first time in years, it's not a paid holiday. Technically in my role as a short-term independent subcontractor, I work for myself. I cannot bill at the client site. Of course, I also don't have benefits, clinging to overly expensive COBRA plan via my former employers. So basically this is an unpaid day off, but I can bill tomorrow.BEB Update: Bruce Retires?
To unfamiliar readers, Bruce Breeding was one of my office mates in a UH PhD student cubicle suite. At the beginning of June, Bruce suffered a minor stroke, followed by a massive stroke in the hospital. At the current time, Bruce is making significant progress in rehabilitation, often involved in conversations. He is still some time away from normalizing his diet and walking on his own, with weakness in his right limbs.Most of what I've gotten is from Susan's regular (not not daily) blog posts. Susan is a cancer survivor and no doubt she is doing in turn her part in nursing Bruce back to health. She's implied she has served in some healthcare profession in the past after raising their family, although for much of the past decade she's worked customer service at some quilting enterprise. It's been more unilateral; I knew Susan was on Facebook, and she responded to my initial messages in early June after my brother-in-law had suggested something had happened to Bruce. I hadn't gotten an email or their annual Christmas card in years, I suspect due to the fact I had moved 4 times and them twice over the past decade. Bruce had his own business email address but at one point he had implied it had been a tough business. Bruce is also a fairly private person; while I'm more likely to reach out to contact other people; of course, Bruce had outside interests like the Scouts and his church. I don't know much about Bruce's means, siblings, etc. (although Susan recently mentioned sisters) He did get his bachelor's from Rice University, which has a reputation of being in "the Ivy League of the South". Only parents of means could afford to send their kids there. I remember wondering when he invited me to home dinner, how he could own a decent house, Susan a housewife raising a young, growing family. I was making maybe $550-650/month on a half-time teaching stipend. I was on a tight budget and my idea of passing my doctoral oral comps was going to the dollar cinema and splurge on a large popcorn. I had no idea how Bruce could support his family on that unless he had substantial savings or maybe some work on the side--or maybe support from his folks. What I do remember after he left his college professor career in Kentucky, he was having a new home/business (2-story?) house in Plano (a NE Dallas suburb) It would be thoroughly wired, I remember him showing me where his secretary's office would be. Now building in TX is much cheaper than building in CA, but I still suspected I was looking at something in the mid-six figures even back then. Maybe he had closed on some good contracts before he had left Kentucky. It wasn't jealousy on my part; it was just curiosity on how he managed the financing.
Susan or one of her relatives blocked my messages on Facebook after I raised, out of longstanding curiosity, why he had left Murray State. The timing, with Bruce fighting for his life, probably was inappropriate, but the response seemed an overreaction given our long friendship. All I know is that he had voiced frustration over ill-prepared students one time. It seemed to be too early for tenure-or-perish, but maybe someone told him tenure wasn't in the cards and Bruce wanted to leave on his own terms. It's just Bruce had started before me at UH and graduated after me--a long time for the payoff of a short academic career. Did he look at getting another academic appointment?Maybe Susan and others saw it as my reading failure in Bruce's career. Granted, my professor career was just 5 years long, but I didn't view as failed. It was brutal academic politics. I was great in the classroom, and I was a promising, prolific researcher. The last 3 years I spent a huge amount of time trying to find a new tenure-track position and fight off bureaucratic crap; heaven knows where I would be if I had chosen BGSU over UWM. I've written before out the person who got my slot had been awarded early tenure while I was fighting for my life at corrupt UTEP.
So Susan announced over the weekend that Bruce and she had retired over the weekend. It was 3 months after his strokes. Susan and Bruce are about 66. I think there are some gaps in Bruce's memory; he told a case worker that he was 61 vs 66 (a few years older than me) and had been married 33 vs 44 years. It seems that Bruce had reached the end of his 3 months or so family leave mandate. I'm not underestimating Bruce's challenges back to a normal lifestyle; even eating a regular diet and walking are future objectives. I'm not sure what that means--going on COBRA to remain on Blue Cross or Medicare.
Still it's weird to have gotten in touch with my old academic contacts. I remember having gotten in touch with Jane Carey, who had edited some human factors in IS volumes where I had published essays. She had been teaching at Arizona State-Phoenix; when I had touched base over a sister blog post, she told me she had retired to Idaho or Montana (sic), vs her own target retirement home. I didn't think she was much older than me, and I think I would have asked her out if we had lived in the same area. Retirement was not even something I was thinking about. Then I remember writing to Minnie Yen, Bruce and I's other UH office mate who had gone to Alaska-Anchorage and my only co-author, and she mentioned "feeling old" . It could well be my old professors are now all retired, but I haven't heard from them in 20 years.
I don't know what would happen to me in Bruce's place. I do have a sister and two nieces in the nursing profession. But if I had a stroke in bed, I might well pass before someone found me.
Susan gave some hints about what had happened in the days before the stroke. He had been under a lot of stress. I still don't know the nature and extent of his work; he was a licensed CPA; maybe it was a fusion of accounting and IT. He seemed to be an employee because Susan mentioned his boss visiting him.
