Real Time View

One of my most treasured photos – Jimmy and me, at a not that long ago N2TUG gathering. Following my first attempts at blogging, back in August of 2007 – yes, some 18 years ago – around the time of the European ITUG Summit in Brighton, UK, it was a good friend of mine and former ITUG board member, Sam, who came up to me and said, “Slow down with the posts; you write faster than I can read!” Not a put-down or in any way condemnation of those early posts but rather, a recognition that time is important for all my readers and dropping a post on a daily basis, albeit a lot shorter than what I post today, was perhaps not an ideal way in interacting with the Nonstop community. Give them time to read, think and perhaps comment otherwise readership will dwindle. How right he was, it turns out. Today, with post number 651, readership is as strong as it ever was and for that, I have to thank Sam. What started in 2008 with the first “Three Wishes for NonStop” can be viewed by scanning the Labels ...

  For those who have been reading my blog posts through the years perhaps a small celebration is due as this is post #650. Yes, at an average of 1500 words, it represents 975,000 words. Almost a million and if you tried to print it all out it would come to roughly 3250 pages. But enough of this. It may get more interesting of course if you add the number of posts to our social media, Buckle-Up-Travel, as well as the number of columns in The Connection and NonStop Insider but, as I just wrote, enough is enough as I am sure you get the point. Yeah; Margo decided to have a new business card with the title, Cofounder and Managing Editor as it is well deserved after reading and editing all of my 1,000,000 words! Coming at a time when so much is going on with NonStop, not the least being the renaming to Nonstop Compute, it should be encouraging to read that so much continues to be written about Nonstop. For our community, there shouldn’t be any topic left unaddressed. Integrated stack? Y...

  When this saying of Mark Twain popped up in my LinkedIn feed, I took it as a sign that this month’s post should feature commentary on the journey I took this month. It involved many miles, a conference, and opportunities to talk to well-placed industry experts. Time on the road is also an opportunity to escape routine and in so doing, provides ample time to simply observe what transpires around us – an important element even for the most jaded of IT professionals. From Florida, drive to Colorado to then fly to Dublin, London and Paris before an extended weekend in the Bordeaux idly drifting on rivers while passing wineries, musing all the time on what is happening today with NonStop. Or should I correct myself and say, with HPE Nonstop Compute. Yes, I am missing HPE Discover this year as I extended my stay in Europe. Put this down as yet one more case where I cannot acquire things ‘by vegetating in one little corner of the earth.’ Not even for a week or two. The desire to thi...

Enjoying lunch in our new community, the lifestyle afforded by being in Florida and living alongside the Emerald Coast’s intracoastal waterway certainly has its upside. Having only recently taken up full time residence – yes, Margo and I are now in possession of our Florida driver’s licenses – we are beginning to come to terms with a lifestyle balanced equally between a vacation-like atmosphere and the quieter side of a planned retreat. It seemed only fitting that our first true guests joining us for a luncheon at the Jimmy Buffett styled Chill and Grill, was none other than my former partner in tech, Brian Fitzgibbon with his wife Nancy. They happened to be working while vacationing nearby and it proved a time of reflection. Not so much being right next to the water, mind you, but rather times spent living and working in Sydney during the last years of the 1970s.  I feel a little edgy I feel a little weird I feel like a schoolboy That's grown a beard I'm livin' in the ...

On a sunny and oftentimes breezy Boxing Day in Sydney a gathered fleet of yachts makes a dash to the headlands of Sydney Harbor where, with just the right conditions (and from this photo and the set of the sails, that looks to be the situation), they will turn south and for as long as they can, these yachts will be on a reach, the wind coming from the north east. Navigators will be pouring over displays to determine the likely conditions for the passage across Bass Straight hoping for smooth sailing all the way to Hobart. It was the summer of 1973 when I had the opportunity to be among the spectator fleet onboard Theme, the yacht I raced on for four seasons. Looking back on the day, we were witness to one of the favored yachts, Bumble Bee III, destined to compete in the upcoming Admiral’s Cup regatta out of Cowes on the Isle of Wight, ran aground on the rocky Sow and Pigs reef. Amidst the great expectations held for this yacht when it makes its appearance at Cowes, there was shock. S...

A long time ago, walking around the campus of Tandem Computers we would watch Lockheed P-3 Orion aircrafts returning from their mission of surveillance over the Pacific. One of our colleagues with a military background would explain all this and tested us with a question from time to time as another Orion flew past “and what is its mission?” Around that time, I was attending a Meta (now Gartner) conference in Phoenix along with other participants from Tandem and the night sky was putting on quite a display. Picking out the constellation, Orion, one of our group participants turned and playfully asked our military coworker, “and what is its mission?” And it continues to resonate with me to this day. I am constantly being challenged on what is my mission and, in many instances, the context is unclear. Am I looking at the night sky or am I focused on items much closer to home. When it comes to missions, they can be given to us or self-imposed. To execute we need to accept them, of cou...