Bill Gates and I were both doing a bit of thinking over the last few weeks. As a person who has visited the Punch Bill Gates website (OK, it was purely by mistake but I punched him anyway) it was a bit of a shock to realise that we'd been thinking along similar lines.

Last week, Bill announced that he was stepping down as the president of Microsoft to become the chief software architect. Oh, and he'll be the chairman as well. Bill says that he wants to get back to his roots and do what he does best which is focus on the technologies for the future.

Actually, what a lot of people think he does best is monopolise the computer industry but, with the prospect of Microsoft being broken up into smaller entities following the antitrust case, perhaps he feels that the time has come to trawl through the morass of programming all over again. All the same, given that his view of the future back in the early days of computing was that all life would end in 2000 (otherwise he surely would have insisted that all software realised that there was a year after 1999) I'm not sure that his new stuff will be all that great. I suppose, though, he does have a 1,000 years to play with. And he won't be sitting in his garage with a few bits of wire and a silicon chip - or if he does, I guess he'll be doing it in the comfort of a garage that's been built to the spec of a man who's worth the GNP of a few small countries.

However, I'm fully behind Bill's lifestyle change because it reflects (well, sort of) a lifestyle change of my own. After five years of burning the midnight oil - rather too literally on many occasions - and then hopping out of bed at the obscenely early hour of predawn, I've decided to do the decent thing and make a choice between the bond market and the book market. And I've come down on the side of the book market. Many people (especially those in the bond markets) would suggest that I should have done it before now, but then I wasn't exactly making a living out of it despite what you might think and, much as I love my art (!) I was never one for deciding that starving in the garret would make me a better writer.

But, since my current publishers has decided that it's worth paying me to write books, I felt I should do the decent thing and devote my time to it. The main benefit is easily identified - six o'clock in the morning will now be a joke to me. The downside is that it's my garage that has become my office and it currently resembles the workshop of the teenage Bill Gates - since it's a jumble of wires and computer screens and mice (the point-and-click variety rather than the ones that make you jump up on your chair and shriek in horrors). This is because I haven't yet managed to transfer all the data from my old and slow Mac to the new improved Bondi blue version and I'm currently using both.

I've noticed, though, that in the few days since my retirement from NCB, I've watched more CNBC market-wrap programmes than ever before. Obviously withdrawal symptoms! But it's actually much more fun watching them when you haven't been looking at screens all day and it's even better fun surfing the market sites on the Internet when you haven't been staring at the long bond price for six hours already.

And the treasury market has been in the news since the US Treasury announced that it was buying back $30 billion (€29.7 billion) in off the run treasury issues. Off the runs - those non-benchmark issues which are less frequently traded - have been out of favour since the long-term capital management disaster back in the autumn of 1998. Since then, the demand for liquid, benchmark issues has been much stronger because people don't want to be stuck with less liquid, less saleable issues. In fact, they've been great value relative to the benchmarks.

It's because the treasury doesn't need to borrow so much that it's retiring the debt, something that the NTMA will watch with interest, no doubt, given our own Government's equally favourable borrowing position.

I was eager (God knows why) to see how the treasury market traded on Monday but forgot that it was closed for Martin Luther King day. And also, no doubt, to give them time to digest my departure. At this point I suppose I'd better apologise to the people I didn't say goodbye to last Friday night as I wandered out of Isaac Butts with rather too many bottles of Miller under my belt. I plead extenuating circumstances, I could have been tired and emotional. In fact I was probably drunk. It's those happy little moments I'll miss when my view is of the garden shed instead of George's Dock.

I suppose I won't miss queuing for sandwiches. Or wondering what it is about the IFSC carpark that makes so many people decide to drive up to the barrier without having prepaid their ticket despite about 100 notices telling them it would be a good idea. Or spending £1 million a week on tights that last a day before turning into expensive ribbons.

But I will miss a lot of the people who have been good friends to me over my more-years-than-I-care-to-remember time in financial markets. And I'll miss knowing what's going on in every corner of the world all the time - those Reuters and Bloomberg scrolling headlines are manna to a news junkie like me.

Which is why I haven't retired completely. Due to popular demand (well, demand. . .) I will be returning to the pages of The Irish Times in a month or so to give you the view from the outside track. But how outside is outside when I can surf to my hearts content on the absolutely myriad amount of business and market sites that are available to the non-market professional?

Time will tell whether or not it's as easy to read markets when you're sitting at home instead of in the IFSC. But I was always one for a challenge.

See you on February 18th!