Real Time View

Travel has been an integral part of my life. Always on a journey from the time began working in IT. This has been a topic I have regularly returned to in posts here and elsewhere. Exploring the world developed into a lifelong passion for me. What hasn’t changed has been my pursuit too of my other passion, technology. These passions have become intertwined through the years to where separation may I never happen. However, what this journey has allowed me to do is to look towards where it may take me.    In the preview of where this post might go that I posted back on August 11, 2025, as One more preview of my upcoming Three Wishes for Nonstop – do you recall reading it? – my three wishes looked as though they would center on Nonstop technology, Nonstop vendors, and Nonstop business. Since that time, these thoughts haven’t changed. Nothing deters me today from exploring these three topics and to muse on where the Nonstop journey is headed. Looking too far ahead to Nonstop’s...

Why it is that so many times meetings involve airport hotels? As we get closer to spring and the event schedule begins in earnest, we find ourselves staring out a hotel window at scenery that rarely changes. There is always that perfect view, overlooking the air conditioning units even as the sameness about it all does little to encourage enthusiasm (for the day) or drive innovation (for the topic). And yet, as we look at our calendars there is a sense of excitement as we count down the days. Whether it is a two days, weekend or weeklong event, they are predictable and follow well-established patterns. Check in for the flight, grab a cocktail, catch up on email and text, take the hotel shuttle on arrival, head to your room and unpack, wonder downstairs to the lobby bar and then hopefully catch up with colleagues. And so it begins; the routine you have embraced over the years is repeating! Sitting in a hotel room adjacent to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), all of the above ...

  The NonStop community is truly blessed with multiple blog sites and digital publications all focused on NonStop systems; have you visited the HPE Community blog and checked out the posts focused on NonStop? Whenever I need information and Margo throws a question my way to which I have no answer, I go to multiple web sites. Whether I start with a simply Google search or go directly to a vendor’s web page, it turns out there is very little I cannot find once I begin the search. However, there is so much information being posted to the web that sometimes we may miss an important post, or two, simply because promotion of the post slides on by. It has only been in the last year and a half that I have become fully aware of the HPE Community blog. In case you were unaware of this resource close to your typing fingers, it’s gradually building a library of posts in support of NonStop. At times, they may not be easy to find but typing in the names of product managers and marketing managers...

The biggest question we all have is whether business returns to normal. The global pandemic has seen change and with change a rethink in the way we work. So, what's next? The view through the window can be distracting … Are you happy to be working from home? Are you enjoying social distancing and the opportunity to work flexible hours? Realizing that it’s not all that bad to be in an environment where you can simply get up, wander between rooms and look out the window at neighbors all while casually attired? It’s a new world and even as we read more stories about whether or not we will see a return to practices of the past we wonder whether this will be the new norm for most of us. The global pandemic isn’t something abstract. It’s not a story line to be read in a far-off newspaper. It’s not even a movie or television program. It’s real and because of the imminent danger to all of us, fortress home has become not just our hiding place but our new center of the u...

It begs the question, what next? In a world focused on ensuring isolation, going online seems right. Will NonStop meet the needs of those who just don’t want to stop?   I have only just written a post for another blog site about hope. In that post of April 14, 2020 to ATMmarketplace, As our need for cash declines, will ATMs follow suit? I mused on how given all that is taking place – “(T)hese nationwide shutdowns we read so much about aren’t helping with fostering hope. No, the hope of good things to come seems to have been thrown onto the back-burner and left to simmer out of sight.” As much as I would like to say that I enjoyed waxing lyrical, in truth I was attempting to light a fire under hope, as like many of us on this planet, we were hunkered down, practicing social distancing and taking every step possible to ward off this global pandemic. It was while writing this that I caught references to pandemonium at which point, I recalled that it was Milton that p...

For Pyalla Technologies, LLC major business milestones are being passed more often of late – hopefully, there are many more still to appear!  On Monday, August 20, 2007 I posted for the first time to this blog. It was an introduction, naturally enough, and something that had started as a suggestion by the ITUG board of directors. There had been an ITUG board meeting in Chicago and as I was just hanging around at the time; being a former Chairman the board kind of tolerated me. To this day I think their suggestion was to give me something to do and as an encouragement for me to return to my hotel room. At that time of that first post I introduced myself as RT Writer, a reference to the presence of a column in The Connection of the same name as this blog – Real Time View – and of how this was going to be RT Writer’s blog. But so much has happened in the intervening years that my use of the handle RT Writer has for all sakes and purposes, disappeared. A relic, if you like, o...

It’s all about your customer experience; NonStop community needs to step up and join the conversation! It was only a matter of time before I started writing for an automobile magazine. This shouldn’t come as too big a surprise to the NonStop community as for many years stories about cars have been liberally interwoven into story lines featuring NonStop systems. I am now writing a column for the National Auto Sports Association (NASA) magazine, Speed News. I have a really good professional editor in Brett Becker who is really helping me out when it comes to shortening my stream of consciousness and turning it into something you would want to read. If you belong to NASA you may want to check it out as I am now covering the High Performance Driver Events (HPDE) sessions NASA runs for those who simply want to take their own cars out onto tracks across America to have fun in a safe environment. Usually, you will find all the cars headed in the same direction which isn’t necessaril...

A week spent interacting with folks far-removed from NonStop and yet well-informed on all things IT; as time wound down, there was little to argue about – NonStop continues to reward those who step back to look at the big picture! If you have been following Margo and me on Facebook you will know that we have spent the past ten days on the road. This time, the plans we put in place earlier this year didn’t take into account the dates for NonStop regional user group events so no, our travels didn’t include participating in events back on the east coast. Instead, we were off to the southwest where our destination was Albuquerque, New Mexico. We had wanted to catch up with some ex-Tandem folks we knew as well as find time for talks with other professionals and with prospective new clients. Always a fun thing to do for Margo and me! While I am focused very much on all things NonStop, from time to time it is good to get the perspective of others not quite as close to HPE and NonStop...