Real Time View

Many road warriors we know all too well expect that when they head to the airport to board their flight and attend to business they will then return home safely. It happens all the time. For anyone that has walked through an airport of late there is no doubting that the desire to get back out into the world has returned. Gates are packed with check in and security lines back to their former slow crawl patterns. What is not expected is to see planes parked at the gates, along taxi runways and worse. Who knew that a simple computer glitch could take down the air traffic control network across the United States? When news of a glitch spreads it almost never turns out to be a minor irritation. Of late we have read about such glitches affecting  banks, trading houses and more – so much so that for the community at large, it’s become almost a case of well, here we go again. But bringing air travel to a halt, that’s a glitch on a completely different plain! Everyone it seems is left hur...

Whenever opportunity presents itself for a road trip – then count us in! But with next month’s N2TUG event I will be retracing steps I first took back in 1976 that led to eventual move to the U.S. Road trip! Road trip! Did someone say road trip? I have just wrapped up a post to our social blog about road trips, including ones prompted on short notice in small planes and yes, that counts. But more importantly for this audience, our next road trip will take us to Dallas for the N2TUG NonStop user event. There have not been too many user events that we have missed, but there is always something very special about Texan hospitality. And it’s no secret among the NonStop community that for this event, there will be even more that will be special – the founder of Tandem Computers himself, Jimmy T! It’s a little known fact that my first ever residency in the US was in Dallas. I had been living in Edmonton, Alberta, where I had emigrated to from London, UK, – no, a London winter wasn’...

Big picture reveals are always important and for as long as I can remember, the major draw card for any event involving NonStop has been an opportunity to see the bigger picture emerging. However, 2015 HP Discover will likely see more attention given to HP than to its products and just for that, it’s bound to draw a Las Vegas size crowd! May will be the first month of 2015 when I haven’t been to Vegas. Conferences and events have been the primary attraction and I have covered them in previous posts – both the post Of hubs and spokes; of niches, clouds and beyond the horizon; it all looks good for NonStop X! and Read the news? NonStop information presentation powered by InkaBinka! Of course, visiting Las Vegas also gave me additional material for posts to our social blog, Buckle-Up-Travel, where I am pleased to say, readership has steadily climbed this year – something I am putting down to there being less talk about cars on track and more about business considerations that ari...

At first, it just seemed like a good idea. On second thought, how would I find enough to write about? Seven years on, and some 500 plus posts to multiple blogs, when it comes to NonStop there’s still so much more to write about …      It actually crept up on me but in the end, it came as a surprise. Readers who check out older posts to this blog may have noticed as well, and I believe I gave out a few clues over the past months. Yes, with my first blogs appearing in August, 2007, six years have passed and I am now starting my seventh year of blogging to Real Time View - continuing to generate what I like to think is further “Ink on NonStop”! To be fair, I am not sure how many posts I have written for industry, vendor and community blogs I support, but a back of the envelope calculation suggests somewhere north of 500 posts, not including the features and updates I provide to both, The Connection and Tandemworld. Along the way, I have been well supported by the vend...

It is with a lot of sadness that I write this blog. As I sit back with a coffee here in Simi Valley, I can’t keep my thoughts from wandering to Mannheim, Germany where, in a few days time, the HP NonStop community will be gathering for the first ever Community Connect Europe (CCE) user event. This will be only the second European user event that I have missed since the early ‘90s and even though our company, GoldenGate. will be well represented, I have elected to skip this one. So here I am in Simi Valley and the photo you see is of me enjoying coffee at my local Starbucks! My first opportunity to attend the European ITUG event came in 1991 when it was held in Munich, Germany. I was working for Tandem Computers in Cupertino, as the program manager for NonStop NET/MASTER, and had stopped by Amsterdam on the way over. But I didn’t make it to Munich that year as I had to return to Cupertino for personal reasons, and it wasn’t until the following year, when the event was held in Nice, be...

I have just returned from a quick trip up to Silicon Valley for meetings with HP among other commitments. On my way home from dinner last night – and I have to give Evvia, a Greek Restaurant in Palo Alto, a plug as the food there was excellent – an Ice Hockey game was being broadcast. Coming direct from the HP Pavilion in San Jose, the commentators were talking about an incident, where clearly one teams “skater” had been hit hard by the other teams “goon”. In the game of Ice Hockey, from the time you show any talent whatsoever, you quickly become tagged as either one of the elite, a fast and skilled skater with great puck-handling skills, or as a goon! The later character is the very physical and aggressive player you only ever send out onto the ice after your opponent elects to take a cheap-shot at your best skater. But every so often, a good skater will make a tough play only to hear much later that he has just been labeled a goon, an association that will take years to shake off. ...

In 1988 I was kicking around the Sydney offices of Tandem with not a whole lot to do. I had returned to Australia from North Carolina and had pursued a job with Tandem Computers with the intent of returning to the US just as soon as I could. I had been working in Raleigh, North Carolina on an L1 visa but had to re-apply for a new L1 visa and for this I had to return to Sydney. It was while waiting to get to Cupertino that I was encouraged to work with some of the local users – folks from the banks as well as some local ISVs, etc – and to see if we could form a user group. I jumped at the chance and over a couple of really lengthy lunches, we came up with the business plan for OzTUG. By the time the group held its first meeting, late in ’88 I recall, I was working as a Program Manager within the Distributed Systems Management (DSM) group, and I had my new L1 visa. The picture here is of me about to drive down to Monterey for the weekend - a dreadful car by today’s standard but back ...