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It may surprise many to read that as a teenager growing up on Sydney’s North Shore, I was already into cars. I made models of Formula One cars – back then it was a Ferrari “sharknose” and a Porsche (yes, Porsche were an F1 constructor for a number of years) – and I built slot-car circuits. My favorite configuration was the Warwick Farm race track; a circuit in Sydney’s western suburbs that, today, no longer exists. My mate Graham Long and I snuck out to the circuit one Saturday afternoon to see a club racing event and, from that time on, I must admit, I was hooked. This was the 1960s and it wasn’t long before I became a regular at a slot-car establishment in the Sydney suburb of Hornsby; nearby to my High School, Normanhurst Boys High School. I built a model of the Pontiac Tempest – a later model of which carried the badge, GTO, and it was a wild, overly large car for a slot car and my crashes were legendary, as an off-track excursion would take out several other cars. As I prepared ...

Pouring a good measure of any adult drink over ice cubes is a common enough practice. Mixologists will tell you that for some drinks it’s better to pour from a chilled bottle to lessen the impact of a warm fluid on the ice. Then again, for most of us who from time to time imbibe on such concoctions, such a dilution process is welcome. In our household, an evening cocktail has become part of our routine. Disclaimer: it is neither an encouragement to do the same nor a suggestion that it is required. Eventually, the understanding of the humble martini comes down to simple chemistry where the eventual solution proves to be to our liking. And with that, comes the chemist’s clarity that “you prepare a solution by dissolving a known mass of solute (often a solid) into a specific amount of a solvent.  For the NonStop community, its successful history is liberally littered with solutions of every kind. These are solutions of a different nature, obviously, and yet, to succeed they h...

From Photos posted on Whova For as long as I can remember participation in NonStop focused events has been the highlight of the year! I have had the good fortune to travel to events worldwide, from Europe to Asia and even to Australia. The opportunity to simply catch up with former colleagues and newfound friends has made any inconvenience experienced on the day a moot point. Then again, my enthusiasm for customer-focused events can be traced back to 1979 when I attended my first global gathering of the EDOS community. As an Australian working in the early days of IT, making plans for any overseas trip was always a mixture of angst and longing, given how the price of the airline ticket to almost anywhere on the planet was exorbitant. The companies I worked for wanted to maximize any perceived value on offer, so at the time before I joined Tandem Computers in 1988, these trips to international events seemed to always total something like six weeks. Many telexes and faxes were involved a...