Shy of Retiring

A few years back I found oceanographer Mirjam Gleesmer’s blog ‘Wave Watching’: https://mirjamglessmer.com/wave-watching/ which is just what it says: a fascinating and insightful blog about watching waves – and what we can learn from doing so, not only about waves but about what they traversed, reflected off, diffracted around, broke over… It spoke to me particularly because I was then watching waves almost obsessively: ripples on puddles, waves on our local lake, splashes from moorhens and coots and ducks on the canal; sea waves, coastal waves, every kind of wave. I wouldn’t quite say it risked losing me friends but people certainly got used to walking on and eventually looking back surprised to see me stopped staring at some interesting wave phenomenon. Although I became interested in those sorts of waves they weren’t the source of my interest: radio wave were. I’ve studied and worked with waves a lot: it’s a foundation topic in physics and electronics, and I’ve worked on soun...

 A few decades back, when Sarah and I set up our own company, I read a book by Regis McKenna called "Relationship Marketing". It's no longer in print and I don't still have a copy but its basic message remains with me and was quite simple: business is built on relationships - real, genuine, sincere relationships. It isn't always true, of course: some businesses have to be based on the standard "price, performance" calculation and some are based on other factors - but the route we chose, and that worked for us and for our customers, was relationships. Our business was then - and is now, though in a slightly different but related (!) field - a niche, and a highly technical one: people needed to talk, and to trust, and what we were selling wasn't a simple commodity in a well-supplied and established market. Not everybody needed what we were offering - in fact most people either didn't or didn't know they did - so in those days even though I adop...

Homeschooling has become a household word during pandemic lockdown, but both my grandchildren have been homeschooled since before the pandemic. Surrey historically has too few state school places, and Joshua was not offered one locally so would have had an hour's commute to a school in the next town. My daughter Jenny runs a pre-school and has a good educational brain, so took the brave - and so far very good - decision to homeschool. Since they all live with us (we are what in pandemic times is called a 'multigenerational household') I get to see homeschooling in action. Although I spent much of my career teaching, it was in industry and at Masters university level so I am involved mostly in opining wisely about strategy rather than actually teaching school level. Since I studied physics and spent my career in physics, computing and mathematics I am handy to have around to answer questions but despite having been a school governor for ten years and chair of governors for f...

 I posted something on twitter, in response to a question about living in a commune. It's just a spontaneous twitter 'thread' but several people liked it so I thought I would share it here, as it refers to a short period in my life that was, in retrospect, special. When I left school I was idealistic so wanted to join Voluntary Service Overseas - but had no useful skills so they didn't want me. My granny - who seemed to know all sorts of people - suggested the kibbuttz movement in Israel (no, we're not Jewish). So my parents, who were wonderfully liberal, somehow let 18-year-old me go to war-torn Israel on my own, not knowing to where I might be allocated. I worked in a factory making photo machines to save the money to afford it, and flew out to Israel with no idea where to go. From Tel Aviv airport I took a taxi to the kibbutz organisation office, slept on the pavement, and finally found I was to go to Kibbutz Mahanayim in the Golan Heights. Neither my parents, my...

 I like Rockaway Beach. It's one of ten small communities down south of San Francisco, strung out along CA-1 - the Pacific Coast Highway - that are collectively known as Pacifica. Each is individual, all are small, and very different from the big city to their north. I discovered Rockaway Beach when I used to fly to San Francisco a lot - usually to Sunnyvale or Milipitas, centers of hi-tech silicon design - and once looked for somewhere to cool down and relax before the long flight home. 'Pacific Coast Highway' sounded promising, and 'Pacifica' sounded nice, and Rockaway Beach had a big sign so I stopped there. One of the shops at Rockaway beach used to be - and I hope still is - Christmas Cove. It sells Christmas decorations and toys all year round - that is all it sells. I walked into Christmas Cove, in high summer, and the lady greeted someone who must have come in behind me: "Hi! How are ya?? Great to see ya!" and I looked to see who she was greeting b...

I have helped to create two happy accidents in running.  I devoted much of my career to Digital Signal Processing - a highly mathematical branch of real-time, high-speed, computing whose subtle and complex nature fascinated me, and in which I loved being involved. Late in that career I wrote several books, encapsulating insights I had been privileged to have explained to me by many great people I worked with, and that I felt were valuable to pass on to others. I didn't write them as text books: I wanted to inspire others to enter or continue in my field, and I wanted to help change that field from a dry mathematical purist academic study accessible only to those with a specialist education to PhD level, to a living, fascinating, human endeavour accessible to anyone with the diligence and motivation to pursue it. It is a passion I had, to change that little part of my world - to push aside the traditional academic gatekeepers and the worthy but dull mathematical approach to it, and ...

This has been a year of disruptions, and one is to running. Races and formal runs that might have served as milestones and motivations  have been cancelled, and runs with our local group have had to be suspended at times because of lockdown rules, but in the main, to some extent, I and others have kept running, more or less. Running has implications for general fitness, health and mental welbeing so is important in that respect, though for someone like me who runs for fun I can't say it is essential. The biggest impact for me is social: our run group has been meeting every Saturday for years, and after-run coffee has become a stable part of our lives and a weekly chance to catch up with friends, so we all miss that. But there is also a nice aspect, in an odd way, due to the social distancing. Running can be a bit of a selfish pursuit: I am guilty of it myself sometimes, running in a bubble, oblivious to people I see or pass, on a mission, focussed on my pace or my style or my exhau...