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Oakland Colosseum, November 1981 There was a time when I thought I would pursue a career in professional rugby. Back in the day, this meant playing for a regional Rugby League team in my home country of Australia and I was absolutely sure I could make the grade. Having won the high school annual best-and-fairest aware for Rugby League three years in a row; making it to zone representation and then to district trials for a national side (to tour New Guinea), I thought that well, why not? To this day as much as I may rue the decision by my parents not to sign preliminary papers allowing me to try out for an entry level team within the pros, it was not to be. Ever since I catch myself wondering how that might have turned out. This was late 1960s where the signing bonus was limited to just $2,000 and where the “salary” maxed out at $200 with a win and $20 with a loss. Professional, yes! A career, not so much! Over the years I have spent many hours watching all forms of football. I ha...

  Anyone who was in IT in the late ‘70s knows all too well how IT managers wore pocket protectors and flashed their gold Cross Pen and Pencil sets. Long before Walmart and Costco there were several club-like discount stores where you could shop for deeply discounted Cross Pens. At one time Margo and I even bought deeply discounted Montblanc Meisterstück fountain and ball-point pens. Margo still cherishes hers but somehow in my travels of the ‘90s I managed to misplace my set. The significance of the presence of gold Cross Pen and Pencil sets weren’t so much about status or even leadership as much as it was about culture. They signified a sense of belonging to a profession where it wasn’t about slide rules and scopes as much as it was about drawing flowcharts and transcribing intent onto coding pads. You just had to have a good pencil and then the pen played a role in documenting a cover sheet. Perhaps it is simply too much time spent on Zoom calls or maybe the gaps in betw...

  Picture courtesy of Frank Sheeman Today marks a special occasion and perhaps not one that you might expect I would bring to everyone’s attention. Yes, on this day March 2, 1970, I began my career in IT. As a trainee “Cadet Programmer”, working for steelworks south of Sydney, I spent two years learning the art of programming. At that time of lowly pay structure for cadets of any discipline in the steelworks, I just couldn’t wait to move on and to take one more step in a career that would continue to this day. In the posts to this blog I have covered many aspects of my life in IT so I won’t revisit it in this post. However, it was in my early days working for Tandem Computers that I ran into the practice within Tandem of producing tee shirts to celebrate almost any occasion. Be it a new program, a new product or even just a feature, the creation of a new department or the opening of a new building, they were all celebrated with a tee shirt. One colleague told me that his parent...