Real Time View

It was only a few weeks ago when we took our car to the track, for the last time this year. And it was a wet weekend, raining so hard on Saturday that all events were cancelled. It was still a gamble as Sunday morning rolled around as the rain continued to come down, but intrepid drivers were not prepared to give up on the entire weekend. The picture here is of the Corvette on grid, rain easing up just a little, but with me a tad anxious all the same. The season had started with a wet weekend and so it seemed appropriate to end on a similar note. Ending the year at the fabulous (for Corvettes) and very wet Auto Club Speedway, a combination of an infield road course with the wide open banked oval of the NASCAR circuit (and hence the label “roval”) seemed appropriate, if not a little depressing. When there’s water on a track however, all drivers take to the circuit with a measured sense of self preservation. No matter the kind of car on track, there’s not a driver who wants to retu...

This week I flew to Cupertino on business, leaving LAX airport early in the morning. Pulling back from the gate and taxing to the active runway, we passed the forlorn sight of the QANTAS Airbus A380 super-jumbo standing idle alongside their hangers, pictured above (courtesy of AP, as published in the Australian newspaper). Recent mishaps with the A380’s Rolls Royce engines have forced QANTAS to ground their fleet of super-jumbos. On a flight from Singapore to Sydney an engine failed catastrophically and the plane was very fortunate to make it safely back to Singapore. QANTAS has for years enjoyed the reputation of never having lost a passenger to a plane crash and since the modern era of jet airlines remains alone in this category. Providing a reliable service is core to QANTAS’ business and any weakening of this message brings serious repercussions. The Airbus A380 super-jumbo is an impressive and extremely innovative aircraft that has captured the flying public’s imagination. B...

I was last in Berlin, Germany, in the early summer of 2005 and it was for the European ITUG user community event. There was much to anticipate, as Martin Fink had just been newly appointed to lead the NonStop organization, and the first new NonStop server based on the Intel Itanium chip was to be launched. This was my last year as ITUG Chairman, and immediately following the user community event I flew to Warsaw, Poland, for a brief family vacation. However, I did take a few days out of my vacation to participate in the launch of the HP Integrity NonStop server at the Enterprise Network Storage Architecture (ENSA) conference in Copenhagen. Also in attendance were Chris Rooke and Neil Pringle of HP, and Chris was particularly excited as he showed me a full-page advertisement from the Wall Street Journal. It featured Intel, highlighting the new HP-Intel partnership, and it welcomed the NonStop user community to a new era based on standards and commodity components. As exciting as...