Real Time View

The other day I walked over to our local Starbucks for my usual early morning coffee only to be surprised to see a number of folks standing around a pretty good outdoor kitchen. When I first saw the line I thought there was a small protest forming outside the local supermarket and wondered what was the problem. As I came even closer to the group I began to wonder if it wasn’t a political group assembling for a morning of campaigning door to door. I am an early riser these days, and it was only a little after 5:00am with only the first signs of dawn visible, as I walked up to the coffee shop. The usual marine fog layer was still blanketing the area and so the atmosphere was a little surreal. But I sat outside to drink my coffee and it was only then that I understood what was going on – Hollywood had come to Simi Valley and to the local Wood Ranch village shopping area. And I have included a picture of the scene as it unfolded early that morning. It was to be the first day of shooting of...

I have enjoyed a busy week in my Simi Valley office, catching up on a lot of correspondence that I have, for the most part, only lightly addressed in the past couple of weeks. Paging back to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, and to re-engage in a couple of exchanges I had let slip, how I longed for the simple days when snail mail arrived at my desk a couple of times a week. There’s a flip side to staying fully engaged with all that’s going on across the community, of course, as each time I do re-engage I run the risk of saying something wrong or sounding foolish. And I was reminded of this as I was paging through pictures that I had taken last week at Willow Springs race track. The picture I have included here is of the car returning to the pits with the words of caution in the background – “EXTREME DANGER STAY BEHIND YELLOW PIT WALL.” How much safer it would be for us if we just stayed inside our cubicle. If only we stayed away from the debates our industry so frequently let percola...

It is not that often that my lead photo is of an advertisement, but recently I came across the one I have included here. The yacht described in the advertisement was called Tanami, which is the Australian aboriginal word for “never dry”– there have been others who have suggested that the yacht was called Tamami, which is yet another Australian aboriginal word meaning “dry desert” as in Western Australia, there is the Tamami desert. Oh well, who would know an N from an M … It’s not so much the story of Tanami, and about speculation as to the true interpretation of “never dry” (a reference of course to either the quantity of drinks onboard, or to the water that flowed through the unprotected cockpit in high seas), as it is the reference made of it being the “beautiful sister-ship to Theme and Mistral! All three, fractional-rigged, 40’ sloops, came off the drawing board of Peter Cole and followed many of the lines of the innovative 12 meter America’s Cup yachts of the day – and to me, t...

I was reminded recently of my times living in the ‘70s. I was thumbing back through old pictures, and came across this picture taken of me at the Sydney Auto Show back in the early ‘80s. You can see that I maintained my ‘70s hair style, even then, with not a single grey hair in sight! The car I am pictured with is the race car, a Mazda RX7, of Canadian/Australian touring car driver Allan Moffat, with which he successfully campaigned against the local V8 cars of Ford and General Motors. My brother, Greg, and I were anxious to take a good look at the real thing, as we had only ever seen it on TV. I had returned to Sydney in late 1977 as the head of technical support for the local subsidiary of the US-based software company, The Computer Software Company (TCSC). The company had built an alternate, but fully compatible, operating system for the IBM mainframe that it called the Extended Disk Operating System (EDOS). Working closely with the then-dominant third party mainframe leasing compa...

I am back in Boulder for the July 4th weekend. After nearly four weeks of continuous travel, and from going to one user event after the other, I have really enjoyed the downtime that came with the holiday break. It’s been a while but I took some time out to take my motorcycle up into the mountains once again - and it's pictured here just before I rode off. The weather in the greater Denver area has been very hot with afternoon thunderstorms and as I pushed the bike out of the garage, it looked like the afternoon was going to be a repeat of those evenings already passed. But I couldn’t see any lightening, so I thought I would take the road up into the mountains where only after a few miles up the road it began to rain heavily. Riding became difficult and I had to change my approach and what came to me were memories from my most recent performance driving classes. For the sake of safety, they were teaching the class to take corners with a relatively late turn-in, waiting until they h...