Real Time View

In my lifetime I have walked away from very little so talk of auto manufacturers walking away from what made them famous is a message to all within the NonStop community – who has fallen out of love with NonStop? According to a road test featuring the 2013 BMW 135is in the May 2013 issue of Road and Track, “The 1-Series is the last car that BMW engineered before the Germans, as a car-making culture, fell out of love with driving.” Of course, this really grabbed my attention so I kept on reading. Was Road and Track simply taking liberties with the truth? Had they crossed the line and what about the mighty BMW M3, the envy of every car enthusiasts? It was late last year and I just couldn’t resist taking this picture. It happened outside our local Starbucks and yes, the police officer was sharing a joke with someone who had apparently stepped over the line. It was Halloween, of course, and the other party was a fellow police officer. However, for just a moment, it sure did grab my ...

Watching this year’s Academy Awards event led me to look again at the success of solutions and middleware vendors and their contribution to renewed interest in NonStop! This past weekend I reported in a client newsletter on just how wild and crazy the weather has been of late in “Colorful Colorado”. Then again, the locals continue to insist – wait an hour or so, and it will change. With so much snow falling, as shown once again in the picture to the side here, it’s hard to imagine that just a week ago I was turning laps in our car on a local racetrack within the shadow of Pikes Peak. However, the upside is that we have spent the past couple of days watching newly released DVDs of films that won awards at the recent Academy Awards festival. We have watched the film adaptation of Les Miserables, the winner of three Oscars, as well as taken in the pageantry of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that won one award. Up next, Life of Pi, a film that had eleven nominations and that came away...

I wasn’t trying to set a record, but I have to admit my Holidays have been strange. I moved to California in 1983 and started working at Tandem Computers the day after Thanksgiving of that year. Of course we never celebrated Thanksgiving back in Poland; there were no Indians to speak of, and corn was food for cattle, so Thanksgiving was a new Holiday for me. I still recall my very first Thanksgiving, 1975, in Minnesota, at the home of our friends, Dan and Dorothy. It was the first time that I ever tasted turkey. I mostly enjoyed the food, as the conversation was in English, and I did not speak   it yet. From the time I arrived in the US at the end of June, 1975, till that November, I took all the English as a Second Language (ESL) classes I could find at the University, and I watched Sesame Street   every day, but I still had a hard time hearing individual words in fast delivered sentences! Anyway, it was a great dinner and the very next day we took off to Michigan – ...