Technologists Notes

“Things Have Changed” – Bob Dylan (1999)

“Everything, still remains the same”
“(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay” – Otis Redding (1967)

tl;dr embarking on quantifying meaningful indicators of small computer system performance over the last three decades

In graduate school and subsequent professional work, analyzing performance of computer systems was often my primary effort, including much of the software I wrote, and my first three books. Years ago I pontificated about Meaningful Indicators of System Performance, surveying the (mostly) synthetic benchmarks in vogue in 1990. I was also active in the formation of the Business Applications Performance Corporation. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to my parents, Rev. Mel West, my supervising professor and others, the second great commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”, has been instilled in me as long as I can remember.

I was only vaguely aware of our neighbors in Nicaragua when my father, thanks to Mel’s suggestion, began donating to Rainbow Network in 1998. I began to become more aware in 2003 when Mel sent me a photo of homes under construction at Colonia La Paz, homes and land my father had funded.

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https://technologists.com/60sN70s/

Over the years, as I have digitized much of my collection of private music recordings made by me and others, I’ve given out Web access through obscure directories. Now that the Storm track is commercially available, and inquiries have increased about others, it seemed time to make some of the MP3s more readily available, and they are now at 60sN70s.
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I don’t think I’ve spoken to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (The Last Folksinger) since I met him in 1966 in Columbia, MO. But, it is hard to imagine how different my life would be if not for the encouragement he gave to Caroline seven years later.
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