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Being starry-eyed, tilting at windmills and the eternal optimist are among the labels that have been bestowed upon me. But when it comes to NonStop, the right “jumps” continue to be made giving me good cause to stay the course! I have spent much of my time working for very large organizations. From my earliest days, working at the steelworks that later became a part of the giant BHP Billiton, at Nixdorf Computers and then, much later at Tandem Computers, I always gravitated to off-beat projects. And within these large corporations working on such off-beat projects didn’t always endear me to either my colleagues or to my managers – aren’t you spending a little too much time working on that obscure feature? As for long-term career prospects, and being safely employed, I never placed too much weight on such things. However, it has been working on these many different (mostly unheard of today) product features that have proved to be the best education I could ever have had. And it may

For three years my assigned task as an ITUG board member was to liaise with the NonStop Regional User Groups (RUGs) and in so doing, I came to appreciate the value they provided the NonStop community. Looks like we are watching a resurgence of interest and that’s good for us all! After only a few weeks absence from the west coast, following the highly successful HP Discover event in Las Vegas, nostalgia pulled us to Capitola for a traditional walk on the pier and a quick bite at the original Margaritaville. It was during my first years at Tandem Computers that Margo, comForte’s Brad Poole and I would head to this part of the coast just to soak in the atmosphere.   While not related to the more famous chain of Jimmy Buffett establishments of the same name, nevertheless, just being this near to the ocean and sipping a margarita made this side trip well worth the time it took to get there. The picture of Margo above was taken from Magaritaville and captures the atmosphere well – wit

Surprises take many forms – some pleasant, some unexpected and even some that stop us in our tracks. What didn’t surprise me however were the many references made about NonStop at this year’s HP Discover event! It’s been about a month since HP Discover 2012 was held, and yet all that transpired during that week has remained with me ever since I pulled the RV and trailer out of Las Vegas and headed back to Boulder. For the duration of the event, the RV had been parked further down the strip and given the heat we all experienced I was glad we had a room in the Venetian. With really good air conditioning! There’s little that still surprises me even as automation continues to make inroads into our lives. As a technologist for several decades I associate automation and modernization as an integral part of progress and a contribution to simplifying my life. I have to say that to date, whether its automated car washes, automated check processing at an ATM (and now even cash dispensing i