Real Time View

Enjoying lunch in our new community, the lifestyle afforded by being in Florida and living alongside the Emerald Coast’s intracoastal waterway certainly has its upside. Having only recently taken up full time residence – yes, Margo and I are now in possession of our Florida driver’s licenses – we are beginning to come to terms with a lifestyle balanced equally between a vacation-like atmosphere and the quieter side of a planned retreat. It seemed only fitting that our first true guests joining us for a luncheon at the Jimmy Buffett styled Chill and Grill, was none other than my former partner in tech, Brian Fitzgibbon with his wife Nancy. They happened to be working while vacationing nearby and it proved a time of reflection. Not so much being right next to the water, mind you, but rather times spent living and working in Sydney during the last years of the 1970s.  I feel a little edgy I feel a little weird I feel like a schoolboy That's grown a beard I'm livin' in the ...

  Off the wind on this heading lie the Marquesas. We got eighty feet of the waterline nicely making wake. A lot of attention is being given to sailing events. There is the solo race around the globe that sees participants now battling each other in the Pacific Ocean. However, for a Sydney boy such as I remain at heart, it is not just about sailing around the world but rather, taking on some serious and oftentimes totally unpredictable waters of the Tasman Sea as the annual Sydney to Hobart blue-water classic takes place. I have loved sailing for almost all of my adult life. I spent four years racing sloops on Sydney Harbor where our crew managed successive wining seasons with me deftly balanced on the foredeck, raising and dropping headsails with hoisting spinnakers, all part of the job at hand. Being on the foredeck meant little time to understand the finer points of actual sailing, when it did come time for me to take the helm in the annual Flinders Island race, I proved ineff...

Yes, it’s spring time and even the big cats crave shade! However you want to classify it, there is no escaping the arrival of springtime along the front ranges of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The transition from deep winter to the delights of spring may happened over the course off just a few short weeks but no matter, the trees alongside our condo are putting on quite a show. They are also providing much-needed relief from the fierce afternoon sunshine as already temperatures have climbed into the mid-90s, F (32+ C). Can’t complain though as neither Margo nor me are winter bunnies preferring instead the warmer temperate climate of the near-tropics. Whatever you might think of Colorado and the mountain retreats should you be only passing through on your way to canyons and reservoirs in nearby states, as the state motto says, it’s always a case of Colorful Colorado. The runoff from the snow-laden mountains is already underway; giving us quite a show with every stream and river borde...

Movement of people; movement of commerce; movement of data – there’s no stopping NonStop! Roadblocks? Get over it! When will this end? When will normalcy return? When will 2021 arrive? And so the questioning continues. For a year that started without any clues as to what would follow, we have been left to wonder about our own situation with family, friends and neighbors. As news headlines continue to broadcast ominous warnings about what is still to come, we might be thinking that the time has come to lease that old missile silo, after all. Even with vaccines making their first appearance, it is going to take time and for most of us, this new life centered on being hunkered down in our own homes will continue. Living in Colorado where a massive uptick in construction is under way with new homes, new schools and yes, new roads being built. As we look around our own neighborhood, development has continued unabated such that even freshly built homes re-entering the marketplace have sold...

Within the NonStop community change has always occurred at a measured pace, but with NonStop X and virtualized NonStop will that still be the case and can the NonStop team do it all by themselves? It has become a popular practice, fraught with danger and unintended consequences, changing lanes without signaling in the hope of jumping into a lane that is moving a lot faster! In some metros signaling that you are about to change lanes typically encourages the slower driver in that lane to accelerate; closing the door on any opportunity to capitalize on traffic that is moving more quickly. Indicating your intent, such obvious signs of being courteous, is taken to be signs of weakness; a passive driver unsure of their next move. However, the desire to get to a destination more quickly is inherent in every driver on America’s freeways (as it is in other countries I have visited) even if that means taking risks. When it comes to technology, it has always been a race – an opportunity t...

The NonStop product is alive and doing well and now attention has turned to expanding its market presence. It’s time to talk about partnerships and ecosystems … Having returned from Sydney after spending three months “down under” the takeaways were as numerous as they were informative. The most striking thing about Sydney is that after decades of minimal investment in infrastructure suddenly the city is investing in upgrading every imaginable piece of its infrastructure. From new tunnels for freeways aimed at allowing big-rig trucks to get off arterial roads and out of site, to new traditional and light rail networks and even tunnels under the harbor (or so we were lead to believe).  The city skyline is totally compromised with construction cranes everywhere you turn – from Sydney’s Circular Quay to Darling Harbor and Cockle Bay, it’s all go, go, go as if with a sense of urgency. Sydney has to play catch up with infrastructure to match its population growth that has seen...

Choices need to be made and I have chosen NonStop. HPE now faces some pretty big decisions and it’s become clear that, driving future NonStop sales will be done with partners! There are times when many of us are left wondering about the choices we make. There are currently advertisements where actors are left wondering about their own choices and it led me to consider how we managed to arrive at this point of time developing, testing, operating and indeed promoting, all-things NonStop! Once again, I find myself scrolling through the photos on Facebook that were taken during the recent reunion of Tandem alumni and if you are interested in all things NonStop and have as yet not joined the Facebook group, Tandem Computers, perhaps you may want to consider joining. As we head into another round of user events in the run-up to the big one, the NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC), and apart from everything that may be covered, it is THE gathering for all those IT folks who have made the...