Letting Loose Control of Outcome

I'm just going to carry on as if all is the same and see what happens.

I admire your ability to take this viewpoint. But it must be hard ... at least it would be for me ... to sit back and not try to control the events you can't control. That is the root of much of my trouble ... since I don't trust anyone or anything, I try to ensure at least a safe outcome for me. But this means expending unbelievable quantities of energy on worrying. And that's hard. And I'm tired.

So bravo to you for being able to hold onto a much better outlook on things.

Monday nights when E is over and we all go out for a curry - you know, curry, that hot stuff that you used to be able to scoff down!

Ah, I remember well. I doubt very much I would attempt anything like what I did before. And certainly not on the night before a long airplane flight. ;-)

Other than that I managed to qualify for the final of the freestyle chess tournament (http://www.freewebs.com/freestyle-chess/ see if you can spot my surname) so now I am officially in the top 5 on the "most advanced chess players in the world" list :)

Congratulations! I do indeed spot your surname!

In my SOA class I usually mention that in my opinion the most significant computer-related development of the last 25 years was the adoption of TCP as the universal networking protocol. I still believe that ... and your chess competition thing is another piece of evidence. Could that have been done without TCP? Sure. But uniting the planet around a common networking protocol allowed the focus to shift to things like this. Fast, plentiful bandwidth had something to do with it too. :-)

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I am back from Sacramento. One week here, then off to Columbus to teach my SOA workshop. While in Sacramento I had the opportunity to quickly review my material with two senior architects who cover the state of California. They very much liked what I had. They very quickly asked if I could come back to Sacramento and present the material to a gathering of state agency personnel. Apparently the SOA charts I put together tell the story better than they'd seen anywhere else.

It was nice to get further validation from two people who have enough background to meaningfully compare my material to other material available.