sitings of famous people

• I saw John Diefenbaker from a distance of about twenty meters in the Ottawa airport in the summer of 1973. John Diefenbaker was Prime Minister of Canada from 1957 to 1963. In 1973, he was still the Member of Parliament for Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.
  
  
• I saw Queen Elizabeth II from a distance of about four meters when she was leaving the Physical Education building on the University of Alberta campus during her royal visit to open then 1978 Commonwealth Games in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
  
  
• I attended a WHA (World Hockey Association) game in Edmonton, Alberta between the Winnipeg Jets and the Edmonton Oilers sometime in the mid-1970s (the game was played in the old Edmonton Gardens arena). Watching the game from the stands fairly high and to the right of one of the goaltenders (don't remember which team), I suddenly saw the puck coming straight towards me. I still remember the event taking place almost in slow motion as the puck seemed to sail straight towards me sort-of between the rows of people below me. Acting instinctively, I put my hand up palm outwards in front of my face and moments later the puck hit my hand and then landed in my lap (it is just as well that it landed in my lap as I would have certainly not been able to scramble for the puck because the sudden pain in my hand was quite a distraction.
  
  The rest of the game proceeded uneventfully (I don't remember who won - probably Winnipeg but I really don't know). After the game, I went to the Winnipeg dressing room to see if I could get the puck autographed by Bobby Hull, a VERY famous hockey star who was playing out the end of his career in Winnipeg (he still put on quite a good show). I soon found myself in a mob of about a hundred or so people waiting for Bobby Hull's autograph. I eventually made it to the front and got his autograph on the puck that I'd caught. I still have the puck (I see it every once in a while when going through boxes) although the autograph is fairly hard to read since it was written with blue ink on a black hockey puck that had been used in the game long enough for the white logo on one side to be almost completely worn off.
  
  
• I attended a talk by Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, presented at Myrias Research Corporation in the late 1980s. It was a pretty sobering talk as one of the messages that he had was that a startup company that spent more than about $10M before producing a product was almost certainly doomed to failure (Myrias had already spent at least twice that amount and no product had shipped ye (the company eventually failed so I guess Bill Joy was right)).
  
  
• I attended a talk by Ken Thomson, one of the inventors of the Unix operating system, which was also presented at Myrias in the late 1980s. He talked about the Plan 9 operating system that he was working on at the time. I really enjoyed the talk and found some of the Plan 9 concepts to be quite interesting. I still think about the Plan 9 scheme of per-process file system mounts from time to time (the basic idea was that unlike Unix mounts which are system-wide (i.e. seen by all processes), Plan 9 mounts were only visible to processes which were descendents of the process which requested the mount.
  
  
• I attended a talk by Grace Hooper (invented the compiler and coined the term bug as it applies to faults in computer software) in the mid 1980s at the University of Alberta. It was a very entertaining and informative presentation covering all sorts of different topics. At the end of the talk, she handed out nano-seconds to each of the attendees (I havn't seen mine for years so it is probably lost forever). Just in case you don't happen to know this already, her nano-seconds were pieces of wire roughly thirty centimeters long (i.e. the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one nano-second).
  
  In addition to explaining (and illustrating) why a micro-second was a terrible thing to waste, I also remember her emphasizing just how foolish the line "because we've always done it that way" was and why it is always important to challenge people to either give a better explanation or find a better way of doing whatever the task at hand is.
  
  
• (I'm going to sound like a real groupie with the Bobby Hull story and this story but you'll just have to take my word for the fact that these are the only two times in my life that I've done this sort of thing) While in Los Angeles on business in the fall of 1988, I decided to attend a Crystal Gayle concert. Probably because I was only looking for a single seat, I had no trouble buying a seat about five rows from the stage and had a great time watching and listening to Crystal Gayle's performance.
  
  After the show, I was walking around the side of the theatre and happened to come across about five people waiting by the stage door. I was in no hurry so I decided to wait and see if I could get an autograph. Sure enough, about twenty minutes later, Crystal Gale appeared on the steps outside the stage door to sign autographs. I found myself standing one step below Crystal Gale and still looking down on her as she signed the back of my concert ticket (Crystal Gale is slightly under five feet tall and I'm half an inch shy of six feet). She stayed for a few minutes chatting with the fans and then went back inside.