Microsoft top bod Jim Allchin starts his retirement today, and used his final blog post to ponder a future away from the nine to five (or, more likely, the five to nine). It’s pretty clear that supervising the long drawn-out delivery of Vista has driven him bonkers. Here’s a snippet from his retirement diary:

4:00 PM: Home with the boys. Went to the playroom to help them build a train layout. Ended up doing interoperability test to study compatibility issues related to using Thomas trains on Brio track. Turns out while they work, the trains perform better on their native platform. Need to try Brio trains on Thomas track tomorrow.

5:00 PM: Dinner with the family. Had a great conversation about the kids’ day. May have spent too much time asking them “how they would have done things better” and “what do they see as their key areas for growth?”

6:45 PM: Read kids a bedtime story. I was amazed by how quickly they fell asleep when I read them one of my favourite classics, “The Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective Computability”.

7:30 PM: Checked email. Again. No new email.