Real Time View

A post late last year following NonStop TBC 2023:   “Wherever travel takes Margo and me, I often take photos at that location. A reminder of where we have been and  a way to start conversations with family and friends.”   With the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp 2024 (NonStopTBC24) being a matter of only a few days away, travel continues to dominate the conversations at home. This year, we drove our SUV from Florida to Colorado where we prepped for the conference completing, as was needed to do, the presentation I will be giving on Tuesday, 9/24/2024, at 1:30PM. Will I see you there? Sure hope so – it will be new and will tackle a couple of interesting developments within the NonStop community. Ingenuity? It is certainly taking center stage as the modernization of NonStop continues. Colorado, however, was just a midpoint in our trip to Monterey, California. Preparation completed to drive to Monterey; it was a case of loading our sports car for the trip to the...

  Many years ago, when Margo and I frequented the highways of North America in our RV, we talked about buying a dog. For those who may have passed RVs in parking lots, you may have run across the decal telling everyone that the RV was unlocked and the keys were under the German Shephard. We had a colleague from our Tandem Computer days that bred German Shepherds and we thought that there would be nothing better than to own a pair of them. Back when I lived in Sydney I had a Shephard – Labrador mix and the family truly loved him, so the idea of owning a pair of Shepherds didn’t seem all that out of the ordinary. With tickets to California in our hands and plans to accommodate well advanced, it was only the voice of our family members warning us: with the dogs we do not get to play with our granddaughter and that led to a late cancellation of such a purchase. It then should come as no surprise that at that time we had made the decision to call them Primary and Backup! I recalled this...

From video clips to social media posts to publication editorials, NonStop is gaining traction whenever availability is no longer an option. But the question remains, can you afford not to NonStop?                                                                       We are now deep into spring and for us, living in the Northern Hemisphere, summer is in sight. For us Americans, Memorial Day isn’t all that far away and with this remembrance of times past, we begin a period of backyard BBQs and days at the beach. Yes, it’s nice to step outside to enjoy a timely glass of wine. Well, sort of; no one is prepared just yet to get too far ahead of them...

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 ...

Infrastructure has dominated the conversations of late and for a very good reason – NonStop continues to contribute! Traversing Europe via rivers and canals is always a cool thing to do and this time, we are actually getting to see the countryside in a little more detail than previously experienced. You see, way back in the early 2000s, we booked a river cruise to take us from Munich (Passau) to the Black Sea. Unfortunately, two days into the voyage we were advised upon arrival in Vienna that there would be no further movement of the vessel – the Danube had risen too high for the boat to fit under the bridges. Of course, we didn’t mind, as a week in Vienna was perhaps not too shabby a second prize! But it did remind us of the importance of infrastructure – don’t make the bridges high enough and your all-important tourist traffic stays put! Business took us to Amsterdam and with a chance to check in on folks in Frankfurt and then spend some time in Budapest gave us the opport...

With HPE CEO Antonio Neri posting and tweeting – HPE strategy is becoming clearer and it is all good news for the NonStop community! Most of my background in IT is well known to the NonStop community but this isn’t the time to dig into the archives and reflect on past accomplishments. However, and just an observation in passing, for someone who was often told that he would find it hard to stick to doing just one thing well, maybe there is a story here after all. The NonStop community is witnessing change, but change a little different from what the rest of IT is observing. Yes, we are embracing hybrid IT in one form or another and yes, we are coming to terms with virtualization, provisioning and software-defined-everything. And yet, for the NonStop community, change is happening in unforeseen ways as it wrestles with where NonStop is headed amid concerns about “what is NonStop!”  Expressed differently, are we happy to be given more options as to how we deploy NonStop or ar...

Our desks may be cluttered with phones, laptops, tablets and PCs and there is still a need for cables but we have come a long way with comms and for the NonStop community, we have so much choice when it comes to media focused on NonStop! Where do we go for news today and how do we keep in touch with colleagues and business partners worldwide? Once, these two matters were very separate topics – we had phones, email, faxes and newspapers.  When the fax machine arrived near my office at Nixdorf Computers, back in the early 1980s, I could see my skills as a telex machine operator go out the window (and after all the time I put into becoming a skilled operator) but on the other hand, I started faxing everyone I knew! When it came time to consider working for Tandem Computers I heard about its Tandem-based email system and I was hooked. So much so that on my first day in the Tandem offices at North Sydney, I accidentally sent an email to everyone in the company only to recoil in s...

Sometimes you just have to work at it to fit a sizable  project into an already tight schedule but for the NonStop community, the creation of the digital publication has truly been a labor of love … Hustling the Jeep into the space normally occupied by our RV certainly shone the spotlight on just how little room there is to spare when we drive the RV into our allocated storage location. Blue skies above the facility go a good way to explain what was happening here – with temperatures along the front ranges soaring well into the 70sF (20sC) it was time to get the RV smog tested and begin the preparation for an early return to Americas highways. With the sale of our home and office and with a couple of week’s gap before we take up residence in our new home and office, this will become our temporary residence. Getting into and out of tight spots has become routine for Margo and me, but it still is a tentative situation first up as the winter months finally shake their hold. And n...