2000
Well, another year had flown past & once again it's time to bring up to date those of you with whom I have been remiss in communicating during the year. I hope that you are well & the stock market hasn't treated you as harshly as it has me (believe me, Betty Windsor doesn't know what an Annus Horribilus is:-) This year, as last, there is no German version, as I just don't have enough time & you guys in any case speak better English than I do German.
As I left you last year, Chrissy & I were back in Munich & happily working on a GPRS project for SONY, but that was shelved at the end of January & it was time to look around again..
I got very tired at about that time, after 20 years of the same old, same old & toyed with early retirement, or at least a major change of career (middle-age crisis? :-), but when it comes down to it, I just don't know of any other way to make so much money for so little effort and have so much fun. So it looks like I'll be hacking code for a few years yet.
Having decided that, we accepted a chance to go to Ericsson, Yokohama & jetted off to Las Vegas for a week, for an early 40th birthday celebration for me.
In Las Vegas we lost,as expected, at the slots; lost some at roulette & blackjack, as one would expect, but it had to be done for the experience. How I got on at poker is here.
No point in trying to describe Las Vegas (though there are a few of my photo's here). It's like Disney, one has to experience it.
Yokohama, indeed all of Japan, is very good. However, the job wasn't quite what we had hoped for at the time. They were just beginning to set up a System Test centre there & are taking a very long view of it. Everything seemed to be happening incredibly slowly & eventually when someone called trying to tempt us to return to Munich, we succumbed (I'm beginning to wish that we hadn't).
That said, we enjoyed Japan very much. The people with whom we worked were a great bunch and we'd be quite happy to go back, as things seem to have picked up speed now (hint, hint :-).
We managed to see the imperial palace & much of Tokyo (and lots of bars) & the cherry blossom & for my 40th birthday , we spent the day at Tokyo Disneyland - yippee!
I did a "fun run" of 10km around the Imperial Palace on 5th May, but had not run for many months. It almost killed me. The Imperial Palace is on perfectly flat ground - at the front. Behind it there is hill half the height of Everest. Well, I made it, but not in any time to be proud off, so that was also motivation to return to Europe & hit the gym again. (fat & forty doesn't leave much choice. "Once more unto the gym, beer friends, once more". I'm on the wagon too, since gaining 10% over the last year (aaah, those Bavarian beer gardens). This is the last attempt; get fit & thin again, or accept it & relish in gourmandising).
Apartments in Japan are incredibly expensive (about us $4,000 for 50 square metres) and few & far between, so we spent the whole 3 months in a hotel (some of my photos of the hotel & its surrounding are here). At least it was the newest & most expensive hotel in the new, modern, up-market part of Yokohama. Room price was GBP 233/night, so I was glad that Ericsson was paying :-) Check it out here. Not a great site, for such a good hotel. While you're at it, check out where we stayed in Hong Kong - Hey, this is fun, strolling down memory lane. During our year in Holland, we stayed in a self catering holiday apartment here. No web page for some the crummy apartments we've had over the years, though.
For Hanami, the cherry blossom viewing ceremony we had an office outing (where I learned that cherry blossoms are best viewed reflected in a glass of sake). There are probably some cherry blossom photos among the many photos of Japan here.
I don't normally like to poke fun, but I did find some peculiar usage of the English language in Japan. Which led me to find this even more bizarre collection.
We saw all of the touristy things: Sumo & lots of temples, etc. We had a bullet train trip to Kyoto. All in all, we had a great time & would love to go back and probably will one day.
In May, I decided I'd like yet another laptop and since I liked the idea of carrying Linux in my pocket, I bought a Sony Vaio PCG-C1XS. Have a look at the Sony page for the specs. It's a beautiful little machine; with a 12bG drive, I have it partitioned to dual boot Linux & windoze (for games), with Linux, of course, the default.
In June we returned to Germany, thinking that at least we had avoided the very hot Japanese summer- only to find the temperature was 40 Celsius! That led to a summer of beergardens :-)
At the start of July I realized that we now had 4 laptops which I was constantly plugging in & out of the printer and the telephone line, so I decided to build a small home LAN; more for the experience of the thing than for practical reasons. Of course, I first had to buy a desktop to act as a file server. I first installed windows 2000 to see what it was about & it seemed ok. Then I had ISDN connected & the supplied NT box didn't have w2k drivers, so I fell back to windoze 98 SE for the Internet Connection Sharing. Of course, I'd prefer to run Linux with Apache/Samba, but if they don't have w2k drivers, what chance do I have of Linux?
At the end of July I indulged myself on a nostalgia trip and bought a VAX! The chap who sold it said that his company had paid us $20,000 for it in 1990 and I secured it for a princely $157.25! Unfortunately, shipping to Europe cost a good deal more. The whole thing, including 3 @ 19" monitor, printer, tape drive, manuals, s/w, etc, etc weighs 350kg & takes up 3 large packing cases. In reality, it probably doesn't have as much horsepower as the laptop on which I am writing this. Still, it was worth it for the chance to stroll down memory lane.
The summer & autumn passed well in Munich. But, as I have described Munich to you in previous years, I won't repeat it here. We were working for Rohde & Schwartz on a UMTS tester but, as I write, that is coming to an end. We spent some time looking around, wondering where to go next., but in the end decided to stay in Munich a while longer & will be going back home to Siemens (see below)..
After spending some time (successfully) playing poker for virtual matchsticks on the internet, I have just given them my credit card number & begun playing for real. So far, so good. If I continue to be successful, I will print a graph of my progress next year (if you don't hear anything, I bust out :-)
November found palm Beach democrats trying to clain the title of the world's stupidest people. For some reason Palm Beach republicans had no problems wth the "butterfly ballot", nor did the 74 seven year olds who were asked to use the same type of ballot to choose their favourite Disney character. All 74 got it right. At that point I decided to replace the phrase "dumb as a stump" with "dumb as a Palm Beach democrat" and changed the major character in irish/polish/blonde jokes (how many Palm Beach democrats does it take to change a light bulb?). Thank goodness that's over; but I don't hear anyone talking about trying to prevent a repetition.
The best election news coverage of all was in The Onion (every Wednesday), in this edition.
At about the start of December, our friends in Yokohama lined us up with an interview in Hildesheim, near Hannover, which looked very promising, but at the last minute an old friend (who has since become Senior VP with Siemens & keynote speaker at the UMTS symposia) lined us up another interview & we are starting on 8th Jan back home at Siemens. Unfortunately, a noble gesture to help out friends at R&S means that I'll be working there over the holdiays, tring to leave things in a good state for whomever takes over, although we had hoped for a week lying in hammocks on a palm tree lined beach somewhere. Which reminds me that we had also hoped to get back to the USA & several old friends (you know who you are) had tried to facilitate things there, but it just didn't happen quickly enough. Oh, well, our H1 visas are good for another 2 years yet, so we may well see you again.
Well, that's about it for this year. I'll leave you with a few jokes & wish you all a merry festive season and a happy, healthy & prosperous 2001 & hope that you will get in touch & tell me what you are up to.
Q: How many senior managers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: We've formed a task force to study the problem of why light bulbs burn out and to figure out what, exactly, we as managers can do to make the light bulbs work smarter, not harder.
Q: How many Help Desk people does it take to change a light bulb?
A: PC Repair has received your mail concerning your hardware problem and has assigned your request Service Order Number 39712. Please use this number for any future reference to this case.
Q: How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. That's a hardware problem.
Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. Tell software to code around it
Q How many support staff people does it take to change a light bulb?
A: We have an exact copy of the light bulb here and it seems to be working fine. Can you tell me what kind of system you have? O.K.. Just exactly how dark is it?...
One last thought. This web site is only a few weeks old & all that I have so far created is what you have seen. So, don't bother looking around. By next year it ought to be much more presentable.
Feel free to forward this mail to anyone with whom I have previously worked, but whom you don't see on the mailing list. Once again, I would ask you all to provide me with a personal email address, not one from your employer. You would all be well advised to visit Bigfoot and get a forwarding address; that way, when you get a new address, you just have to change it once, you don't have to write to a few hundred people, telling them of your new address & almost certainly forgetting someone. I'd hate to lose touch, so ...
If anyone has e-mail addresses for any of the following, please let me know:
Kevin Gelncross, Alex Watt, Neil Anderson, et al
Derek Blacklock, Dave Kennard, Mandana Salehi, Judith Miller, et al
Anyone at all from STC, East Kilbride, 1980 - 1982
Pat O'brien, Lou Caltrider, Jack Beauchain, Jennifer Rodeniser, Toni Crowe, Jimmy G. Blythe, Hershy, etc
Henna Nadu, Pam Brown, Steve Levy, Peter Prosen
fast Eddie (Draiss)
Paul Van Teefelen, Claes Berg
Karsten Schmidt
Steve Jones
Stephen Parker
Johnny two hats
One final thought - there are a few photos me looking fat & grey, so if any of you would like to send me similar of yourselves, I'd love to see what you look like these days.