samedi 3 septembre 2011

Change

New Season
Boules has been rained off today so I thought it was about time I updated my blog, although nothing of a great deal of interest has happened in the past two weeks. One thing is that the season has changed. It occurs to me that the seasons are barely discernible in England apart, perhaps, from the lack of frosts during the summer. April was apparently brilliant but the weather there since has been indifferent. Here, the mini heat-wave that started as I left for England continued until the last few days of August when a violent storm brought in a change to autumnal weather, which I actually prefer. Temperatures are down to the mid- twenties and the evenings will become increasingly cool. The important constant is the sun. Weather forecasts here are notoriously unreliable, as in England, but here because we are in a border zone between the alpine climate just to the north and the Mediterranean climate just to the south. However, over any sequence of days the weather will conform to that dictated by the season.

It's also a new football season, so one of the real passions of my life can be given its head again.

My summer display of flowers is now over, the remnants looking rather wretched. Neighbors say that what they really appreciate is that there are flowers in front of my house all the year round but that is not quite true. I shan't attempt anything more until November and I'm beginning to think I should hold off doing the summer planting until some time in June. Because spring came early this year, I planted in early May and have had problems keeping the display going even this long. The big success was the jasmine, which flowered continuously for three months. I need changes at the back too; annuals simply don't work there. The ground is so bad that plants take considerable time to establish themselves, which dictates perennials only.

And I've discovered a new ingredient for meals. I always knew that nasturtium leaves were edible but have never really tried them. Now I have and they turn out to be the nearest thing to rocket apart from rocket itself. I shall use the in future instead of buying rocket.

In Memoriam
A good friend and former colleague, Ken Kolence, died at the end of last month. I met Ken at the NATO conference on software engineering in 1968 and subsequently turned down a job offer from him at the Institute fro Software Engineering in Palo Alto on my return from wandering out east. So he came looking for me in London a year later and persuaded me to start a European operation for him. He was brilliant in many ways, the first person to recognise the need for, and produce, tools for computer performance monitoring. He was also what the Americans would call an 'ornery bastard, which probably resulted in his having a less successful career than might have been. IBM (allegedly) tried to take out his relatively modest software operation because it was costing them sales (spurious ones) and, in his own words, he . But he was a good and generous friend to me and the IT industry owes him more than it will probably ever appreciate.