Real Time View

Just finished skimming through the October issue of NonStop Connect Now and read the item promoting an upcoming webinar (December 2, ’09) on the subject of 35 years of NonStop evolution. According to the promotion: “Throughout these decades, NonStop has evolved continuously and has now become a standards-based, modern infrastructure that continues to meet the needs of the most demanding customers and applications … take a look at the evolution of NonStop and hear about its past, present and future.” It occurred to me that we take so much of what NonStop has achieved over the past 35 years for granted, and often forget just how hard those 35 years have been. Today when we read of how, after 35 years, “NonStop has delivered on the promise of continuous application availability, unparalleled data integrity and industry leading scalability,” as the promotion piece above led with, how often do we simply forget all the hard work and long hours that a tightly-knit group of p...

I had the very good fortune to spend two weeks back home in Boulder . It gave me the opportunity to revisit favorite spots in and around the town – and to catch up with old friends. Coming from Southern California I wasn’t quite prepared for the weather but then again, being exposed to seasons, has its attractions. And the photo here is of the bike parked beneath a tree in our garden that was putting on quite a show – fall in the Rockies is mostly about the color yellow! But the coming of fall is not just about the display of colors, but about change. We saw days where the thermometer dropped as much as 30 degrees. One day it was 80+, the next barely 50! And the storms? On two occasions the continental divide glistened white with snow and one early morning, we were treated to one of the best electrical storms I have seen in years – lined up, one behind the other, weather fronts moved across the state with the regularity (and precision) of a metronome! It was out of necessity that I al...

Anniversaries have been on my mind of late – last week I wrote the 125th posting to this blog. A total I didn’t think I would ever reach, and each time I go to the blog and see it displayed, I am surprised. And the readership has continued to climb with every posting. In a few weeks time we will be participating in HPTF&E and I am sure I will run into many of you – I am planning to drive up to Las Vegas from Simi Valley and that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Lately, I have been drawing material from the car magazine Motor Trend as often as I have done in the past from Road and Track, as I find the editorial content addressing issues other than just cars. And with what is happening in the car industry, the heads of these car companies are certainly doing their best to generate material for them. But in this latest issue of Motor Trend, writer Arthur St. Antoine talks about the loss Formula One (F1) suffered with the passing of Graham Hill, on November 30th, ‘75. And it...

Late last year I was invited to my high-school reunion. In Sydney, no less! Unfortunately, business got in the way and I had no chance to participate. This is the second time I have missed a reunion, but our school captain, Will Jephcott, persists and hopefully I will make it one year. Then again, you have to be careful what you wish for – after all these years will I recognize anyone and will anyone want to see me? The picture above is of me when I was 13 or so – and it was forwarded to me by Graham Maher. Graham who? In High School, I played Rugby and after a short stint in Rugby Union switched to Rugby League where I didn’t do too badly, playing a little representative League. But there was very little equipment available for fitness training – in Australia, there was never any funding on the scale I see today at the local US high schools – about all we could do was running and participate in ball-handling drills. But I did develop a fondness for long-distance running and enjoyed cr...

I was walking to the coffee shop this morning and as I was about to step onto the crosswalk I heard a thunderous crunch. Heading the other way across the intersection was a small car that had driven through a deep drainage culvert running across the street. The impact from driving through this dip was a tearing noise that sounded very much like something under the car was no longer attached. An expensive dip in the road! And it made me recall the roads I have travelled recently as I have crisscrossed the south west. Readers may have already checked out my social blog buckle-up-travel where on August 26th I wrote a blog posting “ Crisscrossing the Continental Divide … ”. Many of the highways I took were in pretty poor shape. On the interstates, it was a different story as nearly every bridge was under repair, but driving any road other than the interstate was fraught with dangers. Washouts, potholes, and crumbling edges pounded the car continuously and often had you peering off the end ...

I was reminded recently of my times living in the ‘70s. I was thumbing back through old pictures, and came across this picture taken of me at the Sydney Auto Show back in the early ‘80s. You can see that I maintained my ‘70s hair style, even then, with not a single grey hair in sight! The car I am pictured with is the race car, a Mazda RX7, of Canadian/Australian touring car driver Allan Moffat, with which he successfully campaigned against the local V8 cars of Ford and General Motors. My brother, Greg, and I were anxious to take a good look at the real thing, as we had only ever seen it on TV. I had returned to Sydney in late 1977 as the head of technical support for the local subsidiary of the US-based software company, The Computer Software Company (TCSC). The company had built an alternate, but fully compatible, operating system for the IBM mainframe that it called the Extended Disk Operating System (EDOS). Working closely with the then-dominant third party mainframe leasing compa...

I try to avoid starting a blog posting with references to the weather! It is a bit like saying - I like your tie! Or, I like your shoes! But returning to Boulder has been a bit of a shock, and I really did have to check the calendar. Yes, it is June 5th! From early afternoon yesterday, the rains came. Hard! And through breaks in the clouds, I can see the snow falling in Estes Park and across the Continental Divide as well as the Front Ranges. I am being advised that the snow level is down to 8,000 feet. But it’s June and it’s BBQ season – I wanted to ride my motorcycle on the peak to peak highway this evening, but it’s now out of the question. The limited amount of driving I have had to do has been hazardous, with signs on the freeway announcing “Pooled Water on the Highway”, but having the SUV in the garage helped a lot. Not sure how long it remains viable, given how gas prices have soared, but there are still times where the vehicle’s ground clearance and its all wheel drive capabili...

Back in the early ‘70s I worked at the Steelworks in Wollongong, an industrial town south of Sydney. It was when I first realized that being part of IT had an upside – the data center was the only building on the campus that had air conditioning, and as anyone familiar with what working near a blast furnace is like, any place cool was a welcome relief! Wollongong sits on top of rich coal deposits that are part of a dish-like coal basin that lies beneath Sydney and surfaces at Wollongong, Lithgow to the West of Sydney (and beyond the Blue Mountains) and Newcastle, a little North of Sydney. The picture I have included here is a view of the Port Kembla facility, with the Wollongong Steelworks lying behind the coal unloading facility – courtesy of the National Library of Australia. There are a number of interpretations for the word Wollongong, with the Sydney Morning Herald providing a couple I found particularly relevant to today’s blog posting. The first from a Terry Gorman, who conclude...

I was sitting in the airport lounge in Frankfurt when I came ac ross an article in Time magazine. It was a story about a British real estate development company that built a building for a group of artists “fashioned from 20 recycled containers in London’s Docklands district” back in 2001 and had since constructed another 27 buildings from these old containers. In the London suburb of Uxbridge, “a 120 room Travelodge hotel is being built out of 87 (of these) steel crates, stacked and snapped together Lego-like into two nine-story towers.” The picture I have included here is of the construction of this building where the installation of the containers is clearly visible. I wasn’t working in IT back at the birth of containerization, in fact I wasn’t even at school yet, when in 1955 the “world’s first truly inter-modal container system used the purpose-built container ship, the Clifford J. Rodgers” sailed between Vancouver, British Columbia and Skagway, Alaska. It carried 600 containers...