Chapter 52: Developments in Canberra

A Stitch in Time

Late December 1996 – January 1997

We had the big Christmas Day party at Banksia Lodge, much as we had done in previous years. My father again played ‘Santa Claus’, handing out presents to all the children present. On Boxing Day, we watched the televised start of the Sydney to Hobart yacht race, there were some impressive boats; a huge Reichel/Pugh maxi, owned by the head of the software company SAP. ‘Morning Glory’ was first out of the harbour, followed by ‘Condor of Currabubula’, ‘Brindabella’, ‘Wild Oats’, ‘Ragamuffin’, and ‘Secret Men’s Business’. It looked like it would be a fast race to Hobart, probably a good thing for those who were trying to do the Pittwater to Coffs race as well.

The next day, the 27^th, we drove up to Mona Vale to the Parson’s place for Cathy and David’s birthday. We had brought some autographed copies of the most recent ‘Triplex’ CD to give out to them, and one for Wal and Bev Parsons, too. It was great to catch up with the Parsons clan, David was telling me that he and Mary were moving to Canberra in the first week of January, as he was starting a job with the Foreign Affairs Department. He couldn’t give a lot of details about it, but it was something to do with security for the various Australian Consulates in foreign countries. He asked where our new Canberra office was located, and I gave him the details.

By mid-afternoon, we felt that we had almost overstayed our welcome, and said goodbye to everyone, wishing both David and Cathy a very happy birthday. They wished us the best of luck in the race, and Cathy walked us out to the car, kissing us both goodbye. Once we were home, we checked the progress of the Sydney to Hobart race, ‘Morning Glory’ was putting in an excellent performance, leading the fleet by a decent distance, and was on record to break ‘Kialoa III’s record that had been set in 1975. They had a video, taken from a helicopter, and she looked magnificent powering down the NSW coast, somewhere east of Eden.

“That’s some impressive yacht,” Lisa said. “Would you like to be on that boat?”

“It would certainly be an experience,” I said. “I would probably have to learn how to speak and understand German, though!”

“That’s gotta be pretty serious racing on something like that,” Lisa said. “I’m happy to stick with our boat!”

“It must cost close to a million dollars a year to campaign that boat,” I said. “I guess when you run one of the largest software companies in the world, you can afford to do things like that.”

“Maybe one day, WTM Consulting will be big enough to afford to sponsor a yacht like that,” Lisa said.

“Well, don’t expect me to run a company that big,” I said. “That’s not what I want to do with my life, it’s enough hassle with us as big as we are right now.”

“Have you thought about finding someone else to be the CEO / manager for the company?” she asked. “You just stay there as some overall strategic director, but get someone to do the day-to-day management? Like you have Linda managing things in Canberra, have a dedicated manager working with David here?”

“That’s an idea, I never thought of that,” I replied. “Maybe if we keep growing like we have been, find someone who really knows how to manage a medium sized technology company.”

“What do YOU want to do though?” she asked.

“What do I want to do? I want to go back to my job as a professor at university, teach and do research. But without all the bullshit, giving passes to rich kids whose daddies paid lots of money to the Uni, and destroying the reputation for quality education and research that have been built up since the 1950s. Maybe in a few years, I’ll be able to go back, and do what I really enjoy, but until then, running the company is a good alternative, it keeps my brain active, keeps me current with the computing industry.”

“Maybe in a few years, according to what some of the others from the uni said. I was talking with Ken Robinson at the Christmas party, he was saying there’s moves to get Hiller booted out, he’s been a real disappointment,” Lisa said. “Just be patient, honey, things will happen.”

Lisa was right, as was usual for women in my life. On Christmas Day, during the party in the back yard, I had caught up with several of my colleagues from the University. Ken Robinson, Claude Sammut, Geoff Whale – sadly, John Lions was too unwell to attend, his health had declined in the last few years, and he had to retire from the University. But they told me that Paul Compton was about to replace John Hiller as head of the school of Computer Science Engineering, which was seen as an interim step before Hiller was ‘asked’ to leave, along with the vice-chancellor. Geoff told me to keep it all under my hat, there were machinations being done by the University Council; stories about the favours being done for the children of big Asian donors were starting to appear in public.

“There are quite a few people – powerful, influential people – who would love to see you back, and running the school,” Ken said. “Maybe two or three years, and they will want you in that position. But you never heard that from me!”

I wasn’t all that surprised with what he had told me, I knew back when things blew up between Hiller and myself, just how incredibly angry members of the Council, and key players on the Professorial Board were at what those two had been doing. As the Dean of Engineering, Professor Wainwright said to me, ‘everyone knows how dedicated you are to maintaining the integrity of our academic processes, and you have an unimpeachable reputation in your field’.

Of course, if I was to return to the university, we would need to make plans about who would run the company. Maybe if we started looking at someone to take over the overall management responsibilities from me, they could become the CEO should I return to lecturing.

Over the next week, until New Year’s Day I spent time in the studio, first with Allison, Fiona, and Garry, each of them had written some songs that we felt would suit ‘Triplex’, so we worked on those. On Saturday the 28^th, the rest of our original band arrived, we wanted to have a big practice and jam session, since the next week we would be playing at a New Year’s Eve gig at Victoria Park, and we were a bit on the rusty side. We spent two hours before lunch in an extended jam session – we played ‘Promised Land’, ‘Crossroad Blues’, ‘Teenage Wedding’, and several of our own songs, just to get back into the groove of playing together. Paul had invited Mike Franz to join us, along with Ian Moss and Don Walker. Mike had his Yamaha stage organ, Don played my Rhodes and Clavinova, leaving me free to play my guitars, which I really enjoyed.

Don was in fantastic form, particularly on ‘Teenage Wedding’; he took a piano break with Paul, Mandy and Fiona on horns backing him. When we finished, we were all over the moon, it sounded great.

“Okay, that’s a definite one to include,” Mary Beth said. “Damn, you guys still have it!”

“What we need to do is get everyone to take a solo,” Don said. “Stretch it out to fifteen or twenty minutes, each of you in the horn section take a lead, all we need to do is work out how to wind it up, so we all finish together.”

“We’ll follow your lead, Will,” Paul said. “We can work it out as we go, let’s hit it from the top!”

We played it again, this time stretching it out to over twenty minutes, I would call out for each person to take a solo lead. By the time we finished – we managed to finish in sync! – I really needed to take a break, I hadn’t put my voice through such a workout in a long time. We took a lunch break, during which we started to flesh out the set lists that we would play. The intent was to have a good mix of some older songs, our compositions, and a few Cold Chisel numbers, Don told me I had to do ‘Khe Sanh’, according to him, no one could do it better than I could.

“Do you want to toss in ‘Rising Sun’ and ‘Janelle’, too?” he suggested. “If you don’t want to do ‘Janelle’, I can understand.”

“Nah, they are both good ones to do, let’s see where we can work them in.”

By mid-afternoon we had worked out three decent, hour-long sets that would work for the NYE gig, and we spent the next two days rehearsing and getting them sounding acceptable. We all agreed that we had left it much too long since we had all playing together, even if we weren’t making records, touring, or even playing local gigs, we agreed that we should get together at least once or twice a month and just play music.

Over the next few days, we worked on the sets for the NYE gig, made sure we had a list of all equipment that would be needed, and I updated my set lists and notes for the show. I was very excited about playing live again, this time with the full group (plus some additional friends). Lisa made the comment to me that playing with the group was something that had been missing from my lfie over the last year or so, and probably was why I had been emotionally out of sorts. I felt that she was right, I found that right from our first afternoon rehearsing together, I was feeling recharged, my outlook on life was positive, and it was like I had rediscovered my purpose in life.

Around noon on Tuesday, we packed our equipment into the road crates, Mary Beth checking off every item from her list as we packed it, loading it into the truck from Alberts. At the venue, the stage, including the lights and sound equipment was already set up, so all we had to do was set up our equipment, and then run a quick sound check. Everything seemed fine for the evening’s concert, we hung out in the dressing rooms, relaxing.

We got on stage at 7:00 pm, started the first set, since it was still light, I could see just how many people there were in the park. While it wasn’t the largest crowd that we had played to, it was certainly up there with some of the other large concerts we had performed. After our first break, it was time for Allison to take over the vocals, we started with her rendition of ‘Desperado’, then ‘Bobby McGee’. Don and Ian did their rendition of ‘Georgia’, and after that, it was what Garry had termed ‘the panty moistening’ group – ‘Wonderful Tonight’, ‘We’ve Got the Night’ and ‘Have I Told you Lately’. We shifted things up a notch or two with the ‘R&B’ numbers – ‘Treat her Right’, ‘Midnight Hour’, ‘Mean Woman Blues’ and ‘Pacific Highway Blues’. We ended the set with our upbeat cover of the Crystals ‘Da Do Run Run’, again, Allison taking the lead vocals.

“Did you see all the people at the front up and dancing?” Allison said when we started our break. “That song always gets people moving, it’s so much fun!”

“How’s the voice holding out?” I asked her. “The final set, and the encore is going to be tough on both of us.”

“No problems here, how about you?” she replied.

“The voice, my throat is all good.”

We had timed the final set such that we would finish just before midnight, so we could do the ‘official countdown’ to the New Year. At one minute to midnight, we finished the set, and Mary Beth patched the Telecom ‘Talking Clock’ into the PA system. We stood along the front of the stage, Allison next to me, her arm around my shoulder, and we counted down the last twenty seconds, right at midnight, we all yelled out ‘Happy New Year!’, Allison wrapper her arms around me and gave me a deep, passionate kiss.

“Happy New Year, Will,” she whispered in my ear. “I hope this will be a great year for us both.”

Time for the final set, we kicked it off with ‘Good Times’, then ‘Make You Happy’, and the final three songs were the three Chisel ones, ‘Janelle’, ‘Rising Sun’, and we closed out the night with ‘Khe Sanh’ – the response was so great, we had to play that a second time. When we finished, we were exhausted, but I was still incredibly pumped up, it was a fantastic night.

We were still tired when we woke up in the morning. I would have loved the opportunity to sleep until noon, but the race start was only five hours away. Time to put our sailing bags in the car, drive up to Clareville. Lisa dropped me off at the club, I took our tender out to the yacht, and motored down to Jack’s place. Everyone was there, and Jack was briefing us on the expected weather conditions, which didn’t look ideal for us, sadly.

“We’ve got twenty knots on the nose, directly from the nor-nor-east, we’ll be thumping into it, all the way up,” he said. “It’s precisely the worst direction we could have, the lay line to the finish is directly into the wind.”

Twenty knots, that meant using the number two jib, and it was potentially on the limit of having to put in the first reef on the main. Plus, it meant having to tack constantly, in an easterly direction until we hit the East Australian Current, then back slightly west of north, until we were almost at the shoreline, and so on. It was going to be a tough, slow race, unless by some miracle the wind direction shifted more to the east.

We stowed our bags on the boat, attached the two self-adhesive race entry stickers to either side of the bow, and once we had said goodbye to friends and family, motored off. We stopped at the fuel dock at Alfreds to fill up the diesel tank, then hoisted the main and the number two jib to sail up to the start line. We didn’t bother to rig the sheets and other lines for a spinnaker, there was no chance we would be able to fly the kite, not with the wind from the direction and strength that it was blowing. The wind was almost at the point where we were considering putting the first reef in the main, so we put the three reefing ties in through the eyes in the main, so everything was ready to put in the first reef.

Our starting tactics would be to on port tack at the committee boat end of the line, that is, the line closest to Barrenjoey Headland, with aim of making our first leg to get as far east as we could before hitting the body of the current. We would put in a tack, aiming for Tuggerah Beach, before tacking again to clear Norah Head. At least, that would be the aim, whether the wind and sea conditions would permit that, we would see. The rest of the fleet was milling around the starting area, it looked like half the fleet were going to be taking the same starting strategy as us, while the other half would attempt a starboard tack first, before tacking to clear Box Head. Not the tactics I would have chosen, but I wasn’t on those boats. We discussed what our strategy should be, given the wind strength and the rough sea state, we wanted to give other boats plenty of room, as Jack said, trying to force our way to get the perfect start right at the gun would be all for naught if we fouled another boat and had to take the penalty turns.

In the end, we went for a very conservative start, crossing the starting line maybe ninety seconds after the gun, but clear of the other boats, and on the course we wanted. This wasn’t the time to be ‘heroic’, other boats had been a bit too aggressive, there were shouts of ‘protest’ elsewhere along the starting line, and we saw at least two other boats move clear and do their 360-degree penalty turns. Their problems, not ours. We headed out, slightly north of east for three nautical miles, then put in a tack to head north, we were hoping to clear Toowoon Point, and once we were close to the shore at Tuggerah Beach, tack out to clear Norah Head. It was going to be a hard slog, the wind had increased to twenty-five knots, and Jack gave the order to put in the first reef on the main.

It was slow going, the wind had added a solid chop in addition to the usual long ocean rollers, the boat would pound into each wave, water would spray back over us, and as much as Lisa tried to ease the boat through the waves the force of each wave would slow us down. Steering the boat and trimming the sails was a constant grind, Jack had us rotate positions every thirty minutes, to give us a break. It took four hours to clear Norah Head, usually under good conditions, we would do that in two and a half hours. It was too rough to use the galley, so rather than trying to heat up some dinner, we handed around some pre-made sandwiches, coffees would have to wait until we could use the stove and boil water.

By the time night fell we were off Swansea, certainly the slowest trip we had made from Pittwater to the entrance of Lake Macquarie, and the wind showed no signs of abating. Just before the sun set, I tried to get an estimate of our relative position, both Jack and I felt we were somewhere in the middle of the fleet. Some boats had tried a different tactic, heading much further out from the shoreline on their eastern tack, hoping to find smoother seas, and being able to make better speed on their northern legs to compensate for being in the stronger southerly current, but that hadn’t appeared to have paid off. The larger boats were making much better time, their additional waterline length, weight, and momentum meant they weren’t affected by the choppy seas anywhere near as much as we were.

There wasn’t much we could do to improve our speed, as it was our sails were at the limit of their range of wind speeds, and if the winds increased even further, we would have to change down to the number three jib and put the second reef in the main. Several more sets of tacks had us off Newcastle harbour, Jack said once we were close to the shore, about halfway up Stockton Bight, we should head out to sea a few miles, so that the next tack would take us clear of the headlands at the entrance to Port Stephens.

It was a wet and uncomfortable ride up the coast, even though I had been relieved on the mainsheet by Ritchie, I didn’t bother trying to go below, it was far too rough to be able to sleep. Just sit on the rail, hang on, help others when it was needed, there wasn’t much else that could be done. I guess it was sometime around 10:00 pm, we were just off Fingal Point at the entrance to Port Stephens, we had just put in a tack to head north again, when there was a loud ripping, tearing noise, and the end of the boom dropped down towards the cockpit.

“Fuck, the main’s ripped!” Jack shouted. “Lisa, steer head to wind, Will, you hold the end of the boom up, Fiona, make sure the main halyard is free, and we’ll drop the main.”

I looked up, Jack had turned the masthead lights on, and I could see the main ripped from leech to luff, it was only the luff line that was holding the sail up. We sprang into action, lowering the main and flaking it over the boom, I clipped the end of the boom to the small wire line that secure it to the backstay.

“Well, I think that’s the race for us,” Jack said. “There’s not much we can do without a main sail. Bugger! Your call as skipper, Will.”

“I think you’re right, Jack,” I said. “As much as I hate to have to withdraw, I don’t think we’ve got any other choice. Anyone have any other ideas?”

The rest of the crew were silent, it was a damn shame, but we would only risk further damage trying to push on, and there would be no way we would be competitive.

“Okay, take us home, Lisa, steer 180 degrees, trim for port reach,” he said. “Let’s get everyone up here in the cockpit, without a main, we need the weight to balance the boat. We don’t want to risk stuffing the bow, not in these seas.”

We turned the boat around, and sailed before the wind, back to Pittwater. With the wind at our backs, it was a much smoother ride, we were no longer slamming into the waves. Even with just the number two jib up, we were able to make a constant ten knots, but it still required constant attention to the helm and sail trim to avoid a nosedive. Jack went below, to radio the race control to advise them we had pulled out of the race due to equipment damage, telling them there were no crew injuries, and the boat wasn’t in any danger of sinking. I heard him say he would report in again once we had reached Pittwater.

“Well, that’s a fucking shame,” I said, once he was back in the cockpit. “I wonder where it ripped, we’ll have to see when we are back.”

“It looks like right along one of the batten pockets,” Jack said. “That’s a natural weak point in the sail, there are normally additional strengthening patches and reinforcing stitches, but maybe it was worn?”

We were all disappointed, it was the first time I could recall us pulling out of a race in either the Pittwater to Coffs or the Nationals, but there really was no other option for us. At least with the wind behind us the sailing was much smoother, I went below to heat up some food and boil water for coffees, some warm food and drink would cheer us up. Around midnight, we made a crew rotation, Lisa and I went below when Ross relieved her on the tiller, Ritchie taking over the main sheet from me. Fiona came below as well, with Garry taking her place in the pit.

I was able to get a few hours sleep before Ross work me up, we were now just past Terrigal, and would be back in Pittwater within the hour. Time to make more coffee, we got to watch the sunrise as we entered Pittwater, and opposite the Sailing Club, we dropped the jib, and finished the last few miles under power. We tied up at Jack’s jetty, he had already called Christine to let her know we had to withdraw. She was there waiting for us with a promise of a hot breakfast. We radioed race control to let them know we were safely back in Pittwater, and that we had officially withdrawn from the race.

After a nice hot breakfast and showers, we removed the mainsail from the mast and boom, spreading it out on the grass next to Jack’s jetty, and we could see where the sailcloth panels had separated, the stitching around the batten pocket had given way. When Mick returned from the Coffs race, I would call him and have him repair the damage. At least none of the sailcloth itself had been damaged, it just needed restitching. We unloaded the other sails; I would have him check all of them at the same time.

Once everything was unloaded, we put the sail bags in the back of my car, Lisa drove up to Clareville while I motored up to our mooring. Once the boat was secured to the mooring, I made sure everything was stowed properly, I locked things up, and took the dinghy back to the club deck, where Lisa was waiting for me. We were both rather despondent on the drive home, it was a disappointing end to the race.

A few days later I had a call from Mick Lee, he was up in Coffs and had heard we had pulled out, and he wanted to know the details. I told him about the main ripping, the seam along the upper batten pocket giving way.

“Fuck! I’m sorry about that mate, but it was a very gruelling sail up, the wind on the nose for the whole race. If you can drop the sail in at my loft next week, I’ll check it all out, repair it for you – no charge, your sails aren’t all that old, that shouldn’t have given way like that.”

“Thanks, you don’t have to do that, but it’s very much appreciated.”

He suggested that since I had all the sails with me at home, it was a good time to clean them properly. He said I should get a few gallons of the cheapest fabric softener I could find, a generic brand from Safeway, or something like that. When he was back in Sydney, he would come around and show me how to clean them.

“Bring your sheets and the spinnaker tweakers home, too,” he said. “After a while of getting them drenched in salt water, they become all rough and hard, we’ll soak them, too. Do you have a big tub in the laundry, or a four-gallon bucket?”

I told him I could get one, plus the fabric softener, and thanked him for his assistance. Lisa decided she would go back into work, cancel the leave requests she had for the following week, when we would have been up in Coffs had all gone to plan.

“If you want, I’ll take off the following week, when you are planning on being in Canberra for that Internet proposal to the ACT Government,” she said. “You wouldn’t mind me being there with you and Cathy?”

“No, that would be great, and I’m sure Cathy will love it, too.”

There wasn’t much else for me to do at home, so I spent the next day, and the following week in at the office, working on the ACT Government Internet proposal. The others at work were sympathetic about the race result – that is, the non-race – and they asked if things would be fixed in time when the regular club races resumed in February. We had upgraded our standard Linux servers to kernel version 2.1. We had initially used the ‘Debian’ distribution, but several of us had modified that so it was more in tune with the software packages that we would typically install.

For the ACT Government Internet project, we would be proposing several Linux servers for the usual networking functions; DNS servers (both internal and external), network firewalls and web servers. Phil Lincolne, Peter Witheridge, and I had already done plenty of testing of a new server build, they had been running in our main office for about two months, and before Christmas we had upgraded several of the NSW State Government servers. Everything had been working smoothly, so I felt confident proposing them as part of the ACT Government bid. I would upgrade our Canberra office server on Monday the 13^th when I was there for that week.

Our testing of the new kernel seemed to indicate that it performed faster than the 2.0 kernel, there had been some improvements to the TCP/IP packet handling, which was a huge plus for us, considering the purpose that the servers would perform. We had been experimenting with some different motherboards, based around the Intel Pentium Pro microprocessor. There were some motherboards that supported dual Pentium Pro processor chips, they would be something to investigate once we felt the Linux kernel’s multiprocessor support was a bit more advanced. However, the single processor boards, combined with the capability to have more RAM on the board, looked like we could make better performing servers, particularly using the Intel 450GX chipsets. I read through the specs, quad processors, 8GB of memory ... this was no longer a microprocessor, as Phil said to me “that would have more grunt than a barnyard of pigs!”

We thought it would be at least worthwhile to experiment with one of those GX multiprocessor motherboards. There was talk about the 2.2 kernel having far better multiprocessor support, the current support used something called ‘Big Kernel Locking’, and only one processor could enter kernel mode at a time. Phil suggested that we get a quad processor board and get involved in the fine-grained locking code development.

“Once that code was really bedded in,” he said, “we could assemble some really decent, powerful network processors. We could combine a lot of those network functions into a single box, except where we wanted a second box for redundancy purposes.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” I said. “See about getting a board, let’s go for a quad processor, and max out the memory, unless the cost will be stupidly expensive. Build it as a good, rack mount chassis, maybe two of those new Seagate ‘Cheetah’ drives. Do you think it’s time we experimented in here, at least, with a fibreoptic backbone?”

“We should wait a bit longer for that, there’s 1 Gig ethernet over fibreoptic being worked on; why go to all that trouble to replace the copper with fibre, if there’s no increase in speed?” he said. “If we can move to 1 Gig ethernet at the same time as we replace the twisted pair cabling, that’s worth it. Mind you, I suspect they’ll have 1 Gig over twisted pair out in a year, so why rip out the copper if we don’t have to?”

“Makes sense, the problem is technology is moving so fast, there comes a point where you have to say, ‘we can’t wait any longer’, and accept that the next month or year, something new will come out that will make what we chose obsolete.,” I said. “There will be 10 Gig ethernet on the horizon, or processors more powerful than the P6’s. Fact of life, we must accept it and move forward, or stagnate and die.”

On the Friday I had a call from Mick Lee, he was back from Coffs, and said he would come over on Sunday to look at the sails and show me how to use the fabric softener to get the salt residue out of them and the ropes. Lisa and I decided that we really needed to give the boat a good airing out and cleaning, so we were up at Clareville on Saturday, I tied the boat up at the club rigging deck, we pulled everything out of the cabin, opened the front hatch to let air circulate through, and removed the curtains, cushions and floor covering. All the cupboards and storage lockers were emptied out, and we scrubbed everything thoroughly, letting things dry completely before putting them back inside. The curtains and cushions we would take home and wash in the machine, and I also put the jib and spinnaker sheets in the back of the car.

When Mick arrived on Sunday morning, he was very apologetic about the sail failing, as he said to us, ‘My sails are meant to last more than just a few years!’. He pointed out where the reinforcing stitches around the batten pocket which had given way and said that the thread seemed to have been weaker than usual.

“I’ll take this one back, and have all of the reinforcing thread redone,” he said. “No charge, consider it a warrantee repair.”

“Well thanks, but you don’t have to do that,” I said.

“I’ve got a shitload of business because of your success,” he said. “Every Young 88 skipper who calls me says ‘give me sails like ones that Will Morris’s ‘Young Lovers’ has’. I’ve probably got at least fifty grand’s worth of business thanks to you, and that’s not to mention other boats, not only Young 88s, but people who have seen your asymmetrical spinnakers, and want the same for their boats.”