In May of 2025, FXPAL would have had its 30th Anniversary. Amazing how the IT world has changed in 30 years.

My understanding is that some of our Japanese colleagues who were at Fuji Xerox are planning a small get-together in or near Palo Alto later this year. I hope that all comes together.

About 10 former FXPAL-ites got together in December 2024 in Mountain View. Having missed two earlier gatherings, I was really pleased to attend. For me, it was tempered a bit by hearing about the passing of Dr. Jim Baker a few weeks before that. Although we have lost many wonderful colleagues over the years, the passing of Carleen Martin in 2023 and now Jim at the end of 2024 really makes me feel like FXPAL lost its parents.

I am still disappointed in the way FXPAL closed. I certainly had trouble packing up all my stuff –cough-TooMuchLego-cough. It certainly was an interesting challenge to design a simplified internal and external network and set of servers that could run for a year without maintenance so that the Japanese residents had the resources they needed. I tried to leave good enough documentation so that when FX changed something on their end, it was fixable. Sure enough, they changed something, but Plan A worked. I know that the support team did their best to make things as easy as possible for people at the end, but the pandemic made it hard to find a sense of closure. I do see some of you on occasion, and I know I owe several people a lunch. And I owe a few apologies, especially to A and J.

I also never realized how much I traumatized myself doing that commute for 24 years, 4 or 5 days a week. Sorry, John. I’m certainly not willing to do that again for something silly like helping a startup use AI to foreclose on people and rent their houses back to them. (Yes, I got headhunted for that one. No thanks.) Maybe someday I’ll find the right company that uses IT to help people or maybe I’ll just stay retired, teaching robotics and building old Lego sets.