Category Archives: Mentoring & Other Business

Sun’s internal home web page just came up with a new banner:

Good News:

Meet the most recent employees recognized by their peers through the ‘Making a Difference’ at Sun global program.

One of over 30 posters is of me!



Sun Copyright 2006, reprinted with permission

Earlier “Change Agent” series posters presented formal portraits. This
group is more fun: they asked us to provide our own photos. Some are
formal but others show kids and dogs and even one guy half way through
a really unfortunate haircut. My husband took my photo when we were
visiting the Dead Sea in Israel in January 2006.

We have matched 83% of the 2006-2007 SEED mentoring program participants
with mentors. There are 15 left to match. The last two pairs matched
are interesting from the point of view of geographic, demographic,
and professional diversity.

1. The first mentor earned three university degrees (from California, and
   New Hampshire). She is a Vice President in Business Architecture here in
   the San Francisco Bay Area and has been with Sun over 20 years.

   She will be mentoring a Systems Group Engineering Manager with university degrees from India and Texas. He also works in the Bay
   Area and has been with Sun for 8 years.

2. The second mentor earned at least two university degrees (from
   Indiana and Missouri) after she started out in India. She is a Marketing
   Director and Sun Sigma Master Black Belt here in the San Francisco Bay Area and has been with Sun over 14 years. She was a SEED participant herself several years ago.

   She will be mentoring a Software Staff Engineer with university degrees from France and New Jersey who works in the UK. He has been with Sun for
   over 8 years.

Last week’s reduction in force here did effect some of SEED’s 2006-2007
participants and newly-matched mentors but we are actively working
to re-match participants whose mentors have left Sun.

For the last five years,

Danny Cohen and I have been building up our joint collection of
subway maps. Both of us travel a good bit and are fans of good
design and, in particular, interested in the worldwide influence of

Harry Beck’s 1931 London subway map. Our collection is
carefully labelled and pinned up on a cork board on the wall outside
of Danny’s office in Sun Labs in Menlo Park, California.

Along with
the maps is a London Transport
Museum poster of Harry Beck’s original. Some of the maps
up are color printouts from the web but most were collected by Danny or
me or other Sun map fans on trips. The game is to find subway
maps from different places showing clear design descent
from Harry Beck’s original.

Danny just came home with a map of
Oslo. In total,
we have:

• 
  Barcelona TMB

• 
  Boston MBTA

• Hamburg
  U-Bahn and S-Bahn

• 
  London Tube

• 
  Moscow Московское метро

• 
  New York City MTA

• Oslo
• 
  Paris Metro

• San Francisco BART
• Stockholm
• 
  Sydney CityRail

In a web search, I find that there is a book by Ken Garland:
Mr Beck’s Underground Map (Capital Transport Publishing 1994),
and even a set of
Wikipedia entries about this. We are not alone!

Danny just said we should ask people to send us maps for our cork
board. If you find a subway map not listed above which is clearly
related to
Harry Beck’s original, please send it to:

Katy Dickinson

Sun Microsystems

16 Network Circle, Mail Stop: UMPK16-164

Menlo Park, CA 94025 USA

When rummaging in a storage area in Sun’s soon-to-be-vacated Newark
campus, we found a large framed print of a black and white photo of
Scott McNealy enjoying his 1990 April Fool’s Day prank. The joke
that year was that Scott kept describing the Sun corporate strategy
as “All the wood behind one arrowhead”, so the instigators put a 60′
fletched and arrowheaded telephone pole through Scott’s office and
through his 5th floor window and 12 feet out over the front entrance
of the building. The framed picture shows Scott working at his desk
with the huge arrow going through the window behind him.

It is similar to this photo:



Sun Copyright 1990 photo, reprinted with permission

I reported to
Eric Schmidt when Sun’s first prank (“Office in Pond”)
was played on him in 1985, and
Adrian Cockcroft and I lead the 2003 team which played the
“BFWTS (Big F* Web Tone Switch)” prank on Scott, so I found the
picture particularly charming. It has now been moved to a place of
honor in Sun’s Menlo Park campus Prank Museum. The “museum” is
really a small stairwell we commandeered three years ago when we
realized that all of the prank artifacts were scattered and getting
damaged and lost. In it, we have assembled for posterity the
following timeless objects:

• 2003 “BFWTS (Big F* Web Tone Switch)” switch, rack, quality dial,
  and stack of CDs

• 1996 Java Espresso coffee dispenser and huge cup
• 1993 “Sharkstation” computer with a shark fin on top
• 1990 “All the wood behind one arrowhead” framed photo

As soon as we assembled our museum, someone put a
big printed sign over it saying “Where are the museum looters when
you need them?” in typical Engineer dark humor… we left the sign
up, of course.

In addition to being a Gold Sponsor for the

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2006,
Sun has a number of presentations and panels scheduled.
The GHC 2006

Program Schedule lists:

• 4 October:
  • “It Takes a Village (and Vision): The Role of Communities and Interoperability in Next Generation Networks” poster session by
    Ingrid Van den Hoogen (Sun Vice President) and Emily Suter
    Ransford (Sun Business Dev Manager)
• 5 October:
  • “What’s a PKI, why would I want one, and how should it be designed?” speech by Dr. Radia Perlman (Sun Distinguished
    Engineer)

  • “Mentoring by the Numbers” panel by Katy Dickinson
    (Sun Director) with Dr. Carol Muller
    (MentorNet) and
    Dr. Mary Jean Harrold (Georgia Tech)

  • “Latinas in Engineering” BOF by Dr.Gilda Garreton
    (Sun Staff Engineer)
• 6 October:
  • “Research in Industrial Labs: How Collaboration Aids Innovation AND The Low Power Processor Challenge for the World’s Fastest Supercomputer” talk by Tarik Ono and Dr.Gilda Garreton (Sun Staff Engineers) with Laura M Zumbrunnen (IBM)

In addition, Dr. Susan Landau and Dr. Brenda Laurel (both Sun
Distinguished Engineers) will be members of GHC 2006 panels.

Sun is a Gold Sponsor for the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing again this year.
The conference will be held October 4-7, 2006 in San Diego, California.
In addition to being on a panel myself (“Mentoring by the Numbers” on 5 October), I am coordinating Sun’s presenters and presence at GHC 2006.
So, today we went scrounging for chatchkes and keepsakes.

Recently, Sun announced it had sold its Newark, CA campus. Of course that
means we need to move out. A friend of mine has an office in Newark. In
preparing for her own move, she noticed that their local storeroom was full
of boxes from a group which had been disbanded. Someone many years ago
had ordered lots of hats, mugs, and other giveaways and Sun-marked
keepsakes. The shipping labels were dated 2003 or earlier. Who knows why it
was never used? Some of the boxes were partly empty but many were intact,
as shipped. She found out I was hunting for stuff to give away at Hopper,
so she asked me to come take a look.

The room was full of boxes and cabinets of files, packing materials, office
equipment and supplies, and Sun chatchkes. Some were spilled on the floor and
others were neatly packed in the cabinets. I felt a bit like Howard Carter
exploring Tutankhamen’s tomb. We sorted through everything and ended up
bringing back two full car loads of stuff across the Dumbarton Bridge to
Menlo Park. We can put it to good use and have fun giving it away!

67 out of 85 SEED participants are matched with mentors so far, 18 days
after starting the matching cycle. That’s 79% matched! I just confirmed
the match of an Engineering Vice President in India with a Staff Engineer in Czech Republic.
From where I sit in California, that sounds very exotic but from their points
of view, they are only 3-1/2 hours apart in timezones. This is like
matching someone in Boston with someone in San Francisco, which doesn’t
sound exotic to me at all.

I also sent in the final version of the “Mentoring by the Numbers” panel submission writeup today for the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2006. Dr. Carol Muller
(of MentorNet), and
Dr. Mary Jean Harrold (of
Georgia Tech), and I will be on the panel. I am very much looking
forward to going to GHC 2006. This will be the third time I have gone
to Hopper and my second panel there. Sun is a GHC Gold Sponsor again.