Real Time View

In my lifetime I have walked away from very little so talk of auto manufacturers walking away from what made them famous is a message to all within the NonStop community – who has fallen out of love with NonStop? According to a road test featuring the 2013 BMW 135is in the May 2013 issue of Road and Track, “The 1-Series is the last car that BMW engineered before the Germans, as a car-making culture, fell out of love with driving.” Of course, this really grabbed my attention so I kept on reading. Was Road and Track simply taking liberties with the truth? Had they crossed the line and what about the mighty BMW M3, the envy of every car enthusiasts? It was late last year and I just couldn’t resist taking this picture. It happened outside our local Starbucks and yes, the police officer was sharing a joke with someone who had apparently stepped over the line. It was Halloween, of course, and the other party was a fellow police officer. However, for just a moment, it sure did grab my ...

Watching this year’s Academy Awards event led me to look again at the success of solutions and middleware vendors and their contribution to renewed interest in NonStop! This past weekend I reported in a client newsletter on just how wild and crazy the weather has been of late in “Colorful Colorado”. Then again, the locals continue to insist – wait an hour or so, and it will change. With so much snow falling, as shown once again in the picture to the side here, it’s hard to imagine that just a week ago I was turning laps in our car on a local racetrack within the shadow of Pikes Peak. However, the upside is that we have spent the past couple of days watching newly released DVDs of films that won awards at the recent Academy Awards festival. We have watched the film adaptation of Les Miserables, the winner of three Oscars, as well as taken in the pageantry of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that won one award. Up next, Life of Pi, a film that had eleven nominations and that came away...

I wasn’t trying to set a record, but I have to admit my Holidays have been strange. I moved to California in 1983 and started working at Tandem Computers the day after Thanksgiving of that year. Of course we never celebrated Thanksgiving back in Poland; there were no Indians to speak of, and corn was food for cattle, so Thanksgiving was a new Holiday for me. I still recall my very first Thanksgiving, 1975, in Minnesota, at the home of our friends, Dan and Dorothy. It was the first time that I ever tasted turkey. I mostly enjoyed the food, as the conversation was in English, and I did not speak   it yet. From the time I arrived in the US at the end of June, 1975, till that November, I took all the English as a Second Language (ESL) classes I could find at the University, and I watched Sesame Street   every day, but I still had a hard time hearing individual words in fast delivered sentences! Anyway, it was a great dinner and the very next day we took off to Michigan – ...

As much as we all anticipate warmer weather to arrive so too does the NonStop community anticipate change. But let’s be careful about the advice coming from friends … Each time I think I am making a final reference to winter, along comes a storm to remind us all living here, in North America, that we have ways to go before warm weather arrives. Driving back to Colorado, following another week visiting with colleagues and friends in northern California, we were caught up in yet another winter blast where driving proved difficult. While there are many heading south for Spring Break, a ritual I still don’t fully understand, we are not among them and the only view we have is of snow-clad trees. But change is on the way. I get the sense that readers of this blog share only a passing interest in what is happening here in Boulder, but are far more interested in observations about the changing nature of NonStop systems and how this is reflected in changes appearing across the NonStop com...

  “ The cloud is the love child of the internet and virtualization” was posted to a LinkedIn discussion - is that all it is? Is there anything more? For the NonStop community it’s getting “exciting”, to quote Jimmy! Today we live in a stylized world. Symbols are created as a shorthand way to convey information as well as to reinforce historical connections taking us back, so as to speak, to better times. As the latest generation Corvette was unveiled by GM in Detroit, just a few weeks ago, it was the appearance of a very stylized chrome stingray along each side of the car that generated considerable interest. It was as if the presence of the stylized stingray legitimized the car, irrespective of what might be present under the hood! I have often wondered about how stylized images and what they depict resonate with communities. We see a yellow diamond with a black cutout of a deer alongside a road and immediately we know to be careful as there could be wildlife crossing in fro...

For many, many years I have worked in IT – and as a women, you would know just “how alone” you are if you attempted to use the restrooms at breaks during conferences – long lines to men’s but nearly empty women’s bathrooms. Yeah, it had its good sides. I guess. Most of the female coworkers in that environment you might describe as “Tom boys” – in conversations with many I found out that they grew up with a bunch of brothers, or their father always wanted a boy and tried to bring them up as one, or they came from a foreign land and were simply fighters to start with. All three apply to me, sadly. Consider the words from the song “Fight Like a Girl” by Bomshel:   “I'll hold my head high I'll never let this define The light in my eyes Love myself, give it hell I'll take on this world”   Seriously, and I realize it is an inflammatory subject, there is a huge difference between managing teams made up mostly of men versus those made up of women. The ...

A persistent top ten most popular post has been one of the earliest posts to this blog, “It’s a sign!” so it’s about time the topic is revisited in light of just how fruitful fulfilling the needs of a niche has become.       There are so many times when we simply remark on how it’s just a sign of the times. Perhaps not as dismissive as the comment “Whatever!” but all the same, it’s a short-hand, somewhat equally dismissive way to reflect on how it’s just not our fault. We aren’t to blame. We aren’t involved. The snow that fell here in Boulder this weekend and pictured above was a reminder that seasons manifest themselves rather predictably. If there is snow on the ground then yes, it’s winter. The fact that we aren’t enjoying nearly as many snow days as we once did, well, yes, that too is a sign of the times. Readers of this blog will have scarcely missed that the most widely read post of all times was that of November 6, 2007, It's a sign! The post drew attention ...