This And That

Stasis?

It occurs to me that I haven't written anything for over a month and that is longer than I like to leave my blog unmolested. The problem, I think, has been too much of the same enjoyment. The days and evenings of the summer seem to have flown by, cooler than usual, but still warm and sunny. I've enjoyed the fête days, the regular boules sessions, meeting up with the recidivist visitors who come only in the summer months and sharing meals with friends. But all that is as usual and there has been little out of the ordinary to comment on. Am I becoming stuck in a rut?

I don't know but feel I should be doing more. There's a limit to the time I can spend drinking Calvados on my balcony and contemplating my navel. The flower displays front and back just require watering now. All the jobs that needed doing in the house are now essentially done. I've thought about adding another layer of polish to the old hand-made tiles in living room and painting the 150 year-old tiles in my bedroom; the surface of these has really gone so there is no other way to renovate them. But these feel like jobs for the winter.

The job that needs doing and which I have been putting off (there's always one) is to recreate my website on Mollans. It's been offline for too long since I changed the host server. Recreating the pages shouldn't be too arduous from the back-ups I have but I know that redoing the SEO in three languages and declaring it to the search engines is going to be a chore. I really must start on it, though......tomorrow?

I do have trips to Italy in September to see my daughter and cousin and to England in October to see my son, which will break the routine, so maybe they will shake me out of my torpor. Or maybe I'm just becoming a bit neurotic in my old age.

Tenth Anniversary

It's ten years (eleven, actually, bit I forgot to celebrate last year), since the American national computer society (the ACM) gave me in 2003 the grand title of Pioneer of Software Engineering. This was richly undeserved, although the time lapse explains why. The recognition was for work to which I contributed in 1968. In fact, the work was done by some 40 of us at a NATO-sponsored think-tank. The key to my personal recognition was simply my age. I was 26 at the time and most of the participants were in their 40s and 50s; they contributed, with their knowledge and experience, much more than I ever could. The ACM wanted the think-tank commemorated with a paper given by one of the participants in Garmisch, Germany, where the original meeting had been held. But.......35 years had elapsed and most of the original participants were either dead, in their dotage or unable to travel. I was simply the one who was left.

In fact, I was only at the original meeting at all because of a series of coincidences and really shouldn't have been in such exalted company.  Yet the other participants, both at Garmisch and the follow-up meeting in Rome, seemed to value my contributions,which pleased but also puzzled me. One of the participants, Bob Barton, who was then VP Engineering for Burroughs Corp, described my role as that of a catalyst: I led the others to think in directions that they wouldn't otherwise have considered.  This could be explained by my background in languages rather than the maths and engineering backgrounds of the others; plus, I like to think, a certain ability with abstract thinking.  Anyway, it was a privilege for me to get to know and work with the other participants, most of whom were professors or heads of research at the peak of their careers, on what proved to be important fundamental thinking on future directions for software development. Their contributions certainly shaped my future thinking and career.