It was only a few weeks ago that I made the final decision to quit. Quitting can be a bad thing; inherently it means that you’ve left something undone or unfinished. After 13 years with Future Shop/Best Buy Canada, I don’t think that’s the case.
Quitting can also be a good thing: quitting smoking, quitting poor eating, quitting-like Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain-while you’re ahead. It can be a separation from something that isn’t good for you, or something that isn’t going to benefit you. That’s not the case here either.
So why did I quit? I’m not the only person asking this question… And a thank you to everyone who has expressed concern or regret about my decision via social channels, asking this very same thing.
I quit because my stomach told me to. It wasn’t a snap decision; my gut is far too finicky to trust with such an important thing over a brief period of time. It was a revelation that came through over the course of a few months, with some life changes leading the way.
Last year was an interesting year for me: I published my first novel, taught my first course at UBC, and had my first moment where I thought I might lose my job for real-the first time I’ve felt that in a very long time.
With all of that in hand, my decision to quit came naturally. I had a good run with Future Shop; I owe a lot of what I have today to good folks who worked or still work there. Still, it was time to move on.
So now I sit, staring at WordPress with the words “Tap here to begin writing” looking back at me. Sounds good to me.
The longest part of the upgrade to WordPress 3.0 was backing up my databases. I’m running six separate sites on WordPress, one of which was running WP3 RC1. Logging into my host and backing all six up through MySQL took 15 minutes. Upgrading all six sites concurrently took under a minute.
The clean new look of the dashboard is a welcome change, and a unified update panel makes maintaining a site much easier with fewer clicks.
The next step will be to merge these sites into a single WordPress installation using WPMU. That’s going to have to wait for the weekend, however.
Check out the improvements in this recently released video from WordPress.org
