Tony is a Geek

I was invited to do some work at the new IoT Watson offices in Munich : Highlight Towers After work, I was invited for a meal...I was told there was an interesting guy who was going to join the team.  Anyway, due to some error with the restaurant booking, I had the pleasure of being on a 4-person table with John Cohn for the entire evening. I'm not sure who was the geekier / nerdier.  As you can imagine, Arduino's, MQTT, Pi's, Robotics, all-the-IBM stuff and a ton of other stuff was talked about and laughed about.  It was a great evening and helped me to realise, I should stay as I am and not "become what management structures" think I should be. Continue to have fun and actually do that rare thing: ENJOY what you do.  If you do not, stop doing it, do something else.  I know I have fun & actually enjoy what I do. Look forward to some "fun" postings over the next year - rather than "an IBM sales blog" (as a good Friend recently...

A short while back I was surfing good old eBay, when I stumbled over a Minitel machine. After doing a bit of checking on wikipedia , I found out that it was an old 1980s machine that was the Internet before the Internet....but they only switched off the service in July 2012! It involved you dialing up a phone number, connecting your phone to the device and then using the keyboard and special orange function keys to navigate around. It looks to be like a Prestel / Teletext / Ceefax / CompuServe type of "internet".  Remember those days :-)  If you're from the US, then think early days AOL (before the free CDs). Anyway, I happen to have won a bid and the nice snug little device arrived at my humble abode waiting for me to do something useful with it.  First of all, I was surprised that it actually worked!  It powered on and everything!  I say, "everything"...as it just sat there with a blinking cursor and didn't really do anything at all.  Oh and ther...