Catching up..and ramblings of the day

Very briefly catching up with 1+ years since I blogged:

• RSA announced in December 2005 that our office would close in December 2006.


• I started looking for a job in January 2006 but changed my mind and decided I would work out the year and take a break from high tech.


• I am happily unemployed for now. Just taking things as they come.

Interesting quote from Michael Brecker, the great jazz sax player, in Time Magazine about John Coltrane: "There seemed to be too many notes lying around. I kept listening to it, though, until one day something clicked for me, and the doors swung wide open." Michael Brecker died from leukemia earlier this month. I am not a great Brecker fan, but I am struck by how similar his experience was to mine. I sort of liked Coltrane's music for a long time. Suddenly I got it and would probably listen to nothing else if I didn't restrain myself. Coltrane was just way ahead of most of the rest of us.

In other news, there have been articles in the SF Chronicle about Jim Gray being lost while out on his sailboat. I didn't really know him but had heard him speak and had seen him around while working at Tandem where he did a lot of groundbreaking data base work. Here is the article. One of the things he wrote was this classic book on transaction processing.