Real Time View

It may not always be smooth sailing ahead but for NonStop, our journey continues; better hands than mine are on the tiller and nobody is getting wet … Almost forgotten this day, given the world’s current plight of fighting the global pandemic, was how this blog passed yet another milestone. As we started the month of September it was the beginning of our fourteenth year of blogging. Yes, thirteen years have passed since the first post appeared, August 29, 2007.  When it comes to the subject matter of NonStop, there has been no end to the stories that we can tell and even after all these years, I have no thoughts about easing up on the posts. There’s just too much excitement about NonStop still to come! When I first started blogging I did so from a corner desk tucked away on the landing of our Simi Valley rental townhouse. Commuting between Boulder and Simi Valley, even as I was working out of San Francisco, meant time on the road to kick around ideas with Margo that mostly wound up...

Remember the lines, “Alone again, naturally!” Or maybe the lines from other songs that in these times reinforce the massive societal changes under way – will these changes be with us for good? There is something very comforting about kicking off a post to this blog with lines from a Jimmy Buffett song. Resonating with the times, Jimmy penned the lines - Everybody's on the phone So connected and all alone From the pizza boy to the socialite We all salute the satellites On the other hand, as Margo and I continue to practice social distancing and yes, washing our hands at every opportunity, it is still very unnerving to watch how society has changed. Yet again! We have spent a month holed up in our Windsor home, so grateful that we bit the bullet and finished our lower floor complete with a media room and a wet bar. After a brief scare when we were diagnosed with Influenza B there was a follow-up this past week with x-rays and blood tests and it’s all good. Sigh ...

Has a renewed sense of urgency taken hold inside HPE that is (positively) influencing the HPE NonStop team? Is HPE looking like a start-up, once again? Whatever you call it, a lot of positive news is coming from both of them and it's not just their new digs … For a company with staff that doesn’t fly all that often, the Pyalla Technologies team – that’s Margo and me – will be heading to the airport late Saturday to begin our journey to Edinburgh, Scotland. Already this year we have flown back from Australia in January before escaping to Munich, Germany, in March for a couple of adult refreshments together with a couple of client meetings. Turns out this return trip to Europe in May, for the European (NonStop) Technical Boot Camp (ETBC) will be followed with a visit to HPE Discover in June. We have even managed to squeeze in one more trip to participate in N2TUG on June 27. It also turns out that there is a significant uptick of interest in Regional User Group (RUG) ev...

It may just be the lyrics from a popular song but so much about Australia that warrants further attention even if it is only a matter of sibling rivalry! I have just landed in Sydney, Australia. Looking out the airplane window in the hours before we landed and as first light began to illuminate the night sky, the window perfectly framed the Southern Cross stars along with the two pointers that combined have helped navigators through the ages determine where the south celestial pole lay. Taking up temporary residence to the north west of Sydney, the bush setting of these Sydney suburbs is just so different from anything you can experience in the US or Europe. It’s definitely a far cry from what I have become used to living in Colorado. However, sighting the Southern Cross is a reminder that Australia is part of the Southern Hemisphere. Even though Australia may be better known as the land down under, it surprises many of our friends in America that Australia is really much clos...

With the arrival of 2018 I am celebrating thirty years of association with NonStop and before that, Tandem Computers. And yes, a lot has changed but the fundamentals are still very much intact! The arrival of 2018 has a lot of meaning for me, but perhaps nothing more significant than my journey with Tandem and later NonStop can be traced all the way back to 1988 – yes, some thirty years ago. But I am getting a little ahead of myself and there is much to tell before that eventful year came around. And a lot was happening well before 1988. For nearly ten years I had really enjoyed working with Nixdorf Computers and before that, with The Computer Software Company (TCSC) out of Richmond Virginia. It was back in 1979 that I first heard about Nixdorf’s interests in acquiring TCSC which they eventually did and in so doing, thrust me headlong into a turbulent period where I was barely at home – flying to meetings after meetings in Europe and the US. All those years ago there was ...

A message about how necessity drives innovation isn’t anything new for the NonStop community and yet, it’s pleasing to hear all the same! During a recent extended power outage I was left to figure out how best to entertain myself. Margo’s family commitments left me alone in the house and I was happily working away on storylines I had been considering for a while – some of which have now appeared in the latest issue of NonStop Insider as well as in posts made to LinkedIn – when unexpected darkness descended. When Margo and I built the house we had looked into integrating a sizeable UPS / Generator but nothing materialized. We do have a huge generator of course with our mobile company command center (our RV), but while we often recharge the batteries from the house, we hadn’t considered adding the necessary connections for the RV’s generator to power some of the house’s necessities. It was a very cold day in Boulder, Colorado. Improvising out of necessity I was able to find a way ...

Progress continues to be made on The Machine with the first working prototype unveiled at HPE Discover 2016 (London). Could future NonStop hybrid systems leverage future iterations of The Machine? This week I came across an article in, of all things, Composites Worlds. It was in response to a Google search for technology appearing in manufacturer’s prototypes that eventually is adopted within existing product lines. The article began with, “Already used in series production of structural carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP) parts for BMW’s (Munich, Germany) i3 and i8 models, high-pressure resin transfer molding (HP-RTM) is viewed by some as new technology. To others, it is merely modernization of early RTM processes, like that used to build Dodge Viper parts 25 years ago!” In several auto magazines it has already been highlighted that perhaps the single most important outcome of the development of the hybrid BMW i8 was not the new power unit but the fine-tuning of t...

For the longest time I have not thought of Ikea – I hate furniture assembly, the tool I know how to use is my phone, so in the end it is not even worth it to buy “assembly required” stuff. Reminds me of the time at Tandem when a new printer arrived with the instructions composed somewhere outside of the English speaking zone and one step listed was to fringer the part in place. Ever since all of us involved in the exercise of assembling this printer say “go fringer!” whenever a situation calls for “go figure!” But I digressed. The thing is in the past few days I have been forced into thinking about Ikea. First, CNN Money reported how the new Ikea night tables will charge our phones wirelessly. See http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/02/technology/ikea-furniture-charge-phones/?iid=EL Getting rid of the wires has been my personal dream for the longest time,  for a very evident reason, too. Well, today I read an article in the Fortune magazine about Ikea growth and expansion to...