Real Time View

An email exchange last week with a client provided the storyline I was looking for to introduce subjects covered in a recent interview with HP NED’s Martin Fink. Take a look to see what’s peculating to the top of his agenda … A couple of years ago I vacationed in the south of France. It was May so I was able to pull into Cannes and watch the fun that surrounded the Cannes Film Festival, and draped over one of the waterfront hotels were banners promoting Brad Pitt and the film, Troy. I was fortunate to be on a commercial sailing boat, operated by one of the more popular cruise lines, and one of the benefits was that we shared the same dock with many of famous patrons. It was a little further west along the coast, at St Tropez, however, where I came across a yacht that was truly a delight and the picture above captures what caught my eye. In today’s world of composites and carbon fiber sandwiches, this stunningly maintained timber yacht was a thing of remarkable beauty! I have spent mu...

The HP Discover event is now history but the arrival by chance of a photo from an earlier ITUG event together with a posting in HP’s web site has me rethinking where NonStop is headed … Mark Faithful forwarded me a photo this week that was taken at the ITUG event in San Jose, late October, 2002. It is of a luncheon held in honor of that year’s guest speaker, Gene Kranz whose book “Failure is not an Option” included a detailed account of the 1970 effort that went into rescuing the Apollo 13 crew. The photo above captures Kranz and his wife with the ITUG Summit 2002 committee. Shortly after this photo was taken, Kranz addressed a full house of community members and he reflected on the events that led to the successful recovery of the crew. I have always enjoyed attending user events and have found participation highly rewarding. No matter where they may be held or how big or small an audience they attract, they have proven to be the best way to pick up on the latest trends concerning ...

Driving through the desert I’ve been forced to take detours and it’s been hot. Following Las Vegas and HP Discover, focus has shifted to Palo Alto where the heat has been turned up! Will relief appear with the gathering of clouds?   This week I yet again took a road I just simply had to take a few weeks ago, as snow blocked the highway I had originally intended to use. High in the Rocky Mountains, even at that time of year, an unexpected downfall of snow had proved too great to risk tackling in a rear-wheel drive car. Now my destination required me to go down the same road I had chosen as a backup before, but this time I was forced off it, taking yet another detour onto a secondary highway because scorching heat had brought with it raging fires that closed the road. Driving an all-wheel-drive SUV in case the snow returned, I found fire instead; welcome to living in a mountain state! The temperature is already 108 degrees, there’s little humidity, and in the higher elevations i...

Is it the free beer and soda we miss? Or is it something else? HP Discover will reveal much about HP’s plans for NonStop and news will travel quickly in cyberspace! Saturday morning saw the parking lot adjacent to one of our favorite coffee shops sprinkled liberally and colorfully with sports cars. With the coming of the warmer weather, an impromptu car show takes over the locale the first Saturday of each month. So we backed the Corvette into one of the vacant spots and joined the festivities! The cars included some exotic machinery and the photo above I took of Margo as she passed by a Vette, a Viper, and an early ‘80s Lamborghini Countach with its six dual-throat weber carburetors sending shivers down my spine. Tucked back behind Margo, astute car aficionados will recognize the sleek lines of a modern era Ford GT, still looking like new and that hasn’t seen a single snow or rain day in its life. This posting however, is not about cars or about car enthusiasts and yet, after sp...

With the HP Discover event imminent, and with headlines about outages showing no signs of ebbing, it’s solely up to those of us within the NonStop community to convey the real story on NonStop’s place in business … I don’t have explanations and I can’t fathom it at all! The rain continues to come down here in Boulder and in all the years I have lived here I can’t recall a cooler, wetter, spring! If this rain keeps up then the countryside will be more reminiscent of England than it is of California, or Tuscany, or even parts of Australia, where the predominant color for much of the year lies somewhere between gold and brown. All summer we usually have to deal with humidity levels around ten percent, but this rain certainly alters that metric. The picture above is of irises in full bloom outside my back door. I haven’t paid all that much attention to them in the past; perhaps I was out of town when they last blossomed. In fact, only a few weeks earlier the landscaper had suggested we...