A memorial for a deceased colleague

On Friday I went to a memorial for an ex-colleague of mine, André Bensousson, who died earlier this year.

I first met André when I went to work on Multics as a GE employee in 1967 when it was a joint MIT-GE-Bell Labs project. The Bell Labs guys went off to build Unix (emasculated Multics) several years later. At that time GE was a part owner of Bull, the French computer company. They had sent André over for a year in 1966 to learn about Multics. This year got extended and except for about a 1/2 year he remained in the US associated with the Multics project (while GE's computer business was sold to Honeywell, Bull was nationalized, Honeywell's computer business was sold to Bull) until it was killed in 1986 and stayed a bit longer working on my next project before he returned to France. He remained a Bull employee during this whole period - probably a world's record for a foreign temporary assignment.

André was a methodical designer and analyst who always worked from first principles and derived an elegant solution to whatever problem he was working on. See the André Bensousson story on the Multics web site as an illustration of how he worked. I have rarely met anyone in the computer software business (and I have met many many people) who even came anywhere near to his style and methodology.

It was a low key gathering organized by a women who had among other things been with him for about a year while he was ill. There were some pictures of him including one when he was about 6 years old and another in his Algerian army uniform! as well as some more contemporary pictures. Among the attendees were about a dozen of my old colleagues (rsc included) and some of us went out to a delicious dinner at the Harvest Restaurant afterward.

Planning ahead is a good idea

Seeing vwaffle's post of the recipe for Hello Dollies reminds me of my favorite cooking story.

I was making this simple recipe which is almost the same. I got out a mixing bowl, a baking pan, buttered the pan, and turned on the oven. I went to the pantry closet and got a box of graham crackers, took some out and crumbled them with a rolling pin and put them in a mixing bowl. Then I went to the closet to get the walnuts; I brought them in and chopped them up to add to the bowl.

Then I went back to the pantry for the chocolate bits. Oops - none to be found. So I trudged out to the nearby Store 24 and bought a package. I came home and poured them in the bowl.

Then it was back to the closet for the Condensed Milk. Guess what - there was none. So another trip to Store 24 for it. Fortunately this was the last ingredient; I really would have checked for any others if there were more.

This recipe was in my head so there wasn't an ingredient list to look at and check. Which brings up my cranberry bread recipe which does have an ingredient list - one of the items in the list is:
why no wheat germ?

I usually add some wheat germ. And since we just bought some cranberries it is time to make some.