Category Archives: Mentoring & Other Business

There have been 22 applications so far to the Russia and Israel
SEED term: 5 from Israel and 17 from Russia. I have been in meetings with potential SEED mentoring program participants all morning,
plus taking time to talk with a local journalist. This is my last
day working from this office. Tomorrow, John and I will get to
see something more of Israel. We are talking about taking a tour
of Masada and the Dead Sea before moving to our hotel tomorrow
in Jerusalem.

John visited Bethlehem and Jerusalem with a local tour company
yesterday. He said he was surprised by how small everything was.
These are places that loom very large in the imagination and
have a great presence in the world. However, the physical reality
is much more intimate, even crowded. The metal star set into
the floor of the cave under Bethlehem’s Nativity Church is
supposed to be the exact spot where Jesus was born. The star
itself is two hand spans wide and the hole in the middle (so that
pilgrims can touch the rock itself) fits one hand at a time.

John said that there were very few tourists in Bethlehem yesterday.
His Israeli tour guide drove to the gate, John walked through
and had his passport checked, and he was met by a Palestinian
tour guide on the other side of the wall. Bethlehem was
quiet and the adults had one purple finger tip from voting in
the Palestinian legislative elections. John bought the traditional
hand-carved olive wood nativity set: 1 shed with star and palm
tree, 2 sheep, 2 cows, 3 wise men, 1 shepherd with staff,
Mary, Joseph with staff, and Baby Jesus on a separate manger,
with a little camel thrown in for free because John was the
only customer. The shed has a music box which plays when the star
is wound up. (Our son will love this!)
John said Bethlehem was very poor compared to the
surrounding area and that there were lots of beggar kids. He
could not visit Rachel’s tomb nearby because it was blocked by
the wall between the Israeli and Palestinian lands.

The Sun Israel staff have lunch together on Thursdays – a very
pleasant way for everyone to keep in touch. We just got back
and John is talking with the local Engineers about Sun’s products,
tools, and architectural review systems. He is supposed to be
on vacation today but this is too good a chance to miss.
I will have my first afternoon meeting soon.

This is my second day working in Sun’s Herzliya office here
in Israel. This is an exciting time to be here, between
the Palestinian legislative elections and Prime Minister
Sharon’s long illness causing an effective transfer of power.
My husband John is taking a bus tour today to Bethlehem and
Jerusalem. Since Bethlehem is in the Palestinian section, John
may see something of today’s voting. There was a big conference
here in Herzliya at the hotel next to ours and Israel’s acting
prime minister, Ehud Olmert, spoke. When we were walking back
from work last night, John and I took a detour to avoid the
small group of yelling protesters outside of that hotel. There
wasn’t any trouble but it was clearly best to be someplace else.

There have been 17 SEED mentoring program applications so far:
2 from Israel and 15 from Russia. The deadline is 30 January.
I am working through a number of emails from managers of
applicants asking for support, advice, or information. Managers
of staff who were not accepted to prior SEED terms are asking
for an analysis of how their staff member could improve. Other
managers are asking for advice on potential mentors for their
staff.

When travelling, one of the greatest challenges is food. Not
so much finding good or tasty dishes but in trying to figure out
what to order and the contents of what we are eating.
Cooking and food terms in English classes are often very basic.
A person might know the word for bread, for example, without
knowing the word for pastry, pie crust, or cake. In Russia,
we had several discussions about the difference between blinis,
pancakes, blintzes, and crepes. I think that blinis, blintzes,
and crepes are the same thing in Russian, Yiddish, and French.
Pancakes are thicker and courser. The word for cream in Mandarin
appears to translate as “milk oil”. This makes sense logically
but it is odd to see “milk oil” on the label of a package of
cookies. Last night, John and I went to a pleasant restaurant
and all was well until we came to dessert. The poor waitress
had to describe their ten options. We finally picked something
that she said was squeezed melon and ice with stawberry ice
cream on top. What arrived was stawberry sorbet in a pool of green
melon puree – very nice!

Yesterday, my husband John and I flew into Tel Aviv, Israel
where it is 68
degrees warmer than in St. Petersburg, Russia where we started that morning! Even Sun’s Russian Engineers said it was unusually cold.
I am now working from Sun’s offices in Herzliya. Herzliya is a
beach town with palm trees, resort-style hotels, and surfboard
kites visible
along the horizon. It looks and feels like southern California.
Herzliya is also a major Israeli technical center home to lots of
companies like Sun. The American Ambassador to Israel lives here.

The SEED application deadline is 30 January. There have been
12 applications so far: 1 from Israel, 11 from Russia. We will
select 25 to 30 of the final group as participants in the
March-September 2006 SEED term.
I have already made two group presentations here plus I am meeting
many of the Engineering staff individually. There seems to be
a lively interest and I hope to have many more SEED applications.

While I am working tomorrow, John will go on a bus tour of Bethlehem
and Jerusalem. I got to visit Israel’s sights some while I
was working on the Ashdot Yaakov kibbutz near Tiberias in 1979. Also, John and I will get to spend three days in
Jerusalem at the end of this week.

Tomorrow morning we fly to Tel Aviv to meet with potential SEED mentoring
participants there. I haven’t been able to read my Sun email since Friday so I
hope all is well at work. All applications are due on 30 January.

John and I were at the big iron gates of the Hermitage museum before it opened this morning.
We got to see a crew cutting green blue blocks of ice with a chain saw and stacking them
to make a small building with stairs and a ramp. It was not clear what the building will be
used for but it will be very large. The Hermitage is in a former palace of the Czars and is one
of the greatest museums in the world. We walked for four hours and only saw a small
portion of the most famous paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramics, armaments,
furniture, and textiles. Most pieces come from Europe and America but there is some
representation from other parts of the world as well.
The building itself is lovely with room after room decorated with complex plaster ornamentation or murals. Some
of the fireplaces have intricate mosaics in which each piece of glass is smaller than a grain of rice.
It is overwhelming and excellent. We bought a pass to take photos in the museum
(for 100 Rubles). Some
of the best photos John took were out the icy windows at the frozen Neva river and
city beyond. We came
to the Impressionist galleries last. We left after seeing Picasso, Monet, Gaugan, Van Gogh,
and Renoir.

We left the museum in time to get to church at 3 p.m. but when we got to St. Mary’s Lutheran,
we found that the Episcopal congregation
had moved and no one knew where. Frustrating. We walked back to the hotel on Nevsky Prospect
in the frigid
weather, stopping along the way at a bakery and at a book store. We bought Harry Potter
in Russian for our kids and some books of Russian music for Dina, our daughter’s vocal coach:

• Borodin
• Dargomyzhsky
• Bulakhov
• Gems of Classical Operetta

Dina is from Georgia (not the US state) and teaches all of her
students Russian songs along with Italian, German, French, and other languages. We figured
she would already have Tchaikovski, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Russian standards so we
looked for others.

Tonight, we went to Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” (also called “Figaro’s Wedding” and “Le Nozze
di Figaro” on the program) with Jason at the Mariinsky Theater. It was funny and
wonderfully sung, with excellent sets and costumes. The subtitle projector above the
stage was of course translating from Italian into Russian so we just had to enjoy it without
knowing what was being said word for word.

We are all packed and ready to fly to Tel Aviv in the morning.

Yesterday was our last day of work in Russia. John met with some of the
St. Petersburg engineers to talk about Open Solaris and also the Architecture
Review Committees. I had back-to-back meetings and got to talk with many excellent
candidates for the SEED program. I hope we will have many applicants by the
30 January deadline. Today, John and Jason and I got to do some sight seeing
around St. Petersburg during a very notable cold spell.

We spent quite a long time at the Fortress of Peter and Paul on Zayachy Island in
the Neva river. The cathedral inside the fortress is where the most famous
Czars (Russian kings and queens) are buried. We saw the tombs of
Peter the Great and Catherine the Great and the last Czar Nicholas II and his
family. They just moved the last Czar’s body into this church 7 years ago, close to
100 years after his murder. Most of the Czars’ tombs are very simple and very
similar white marble boxes surrounded by black metal
fences on the main church floor but two newer ones are of very bright colored stone – one
red purple and the other dark green – with gold letters. Nicholas and his family
have a room to themselves near the entrance. There are large marble plaques on the
walls with names and dates for him, his wife Alexandra, and their four daughters and son.

We did some shoping (which is difficult when it is twenty degrees below freezing). In the
early morning, we went to a farmers market to see how produce, meat, fish, and flowers
are sold here. Each flower bloom is wrapped in straw to protect it from the cold. The
shopkeepers in the outdoor stalls near the Church on Spilled Blood had to put
their pens in their mouths to warm up the ink to write me a receipt. We bought Ded Moroz
(Grandfather Frost – the Russian Santa) figures and 15 piece matryoshka nesting dolls. The
Church on Spilled Blood gets its name because it is on the spot where one of the Czars
was killed with a bomb. The church is large with many colorful and elegant onion domes of
different sizes, both of
golden metal and of colored tiles. We also walked out onto the frozen Neva river a little ways.

Lunch today was wonderful mushroom pie with soup followed by apple pie
and tea. We are still mostly eating our big meal in the morning because
it comes with the hotel room. I like blinis (crepes) best with jam and sour cream.
There are pastries with chopped hazel nut fillings – rather than the almond filling
more usual in the USA.
The hotel cook will make omlettes to order plus there are dozens of other
serving dishes of fruit, vegetables, yogurts, nuts and cereals and
granolas, baked goods, fish and caviar, and even baked beans and cooked
tomatoes for the English who don’t know any better. John and I went
to a late dinner at the Tandoori Nights Indian restaurant.
After four days of even the most excellent Russian food, eating something more
usual for us (chicken tikka masala and malai kofta) was a treat.

Tomorrow night, we are going to hear
Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” at the Mariinsky Theater. We also finally found a
place to go to church services tomorrow as well. We will see the
Hermitage art museum in the morning and go to church in the
afternoon. The Episcopal service is supposed to be held once a month in the St. Mary’s Lutheran church
building (at Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa 8) after the Lutherans are finished with
their morning services. The poor lady at the hotel desk spent over an hour trying to find an Episcopal
church in St. Petersburg in her directories. Because the Episcopal congregation is
sharing a building with another denomination, it did not show up on any
of her lists.

We fly to Tel Aviv on Monday to meet more potential SEED participants.

I have been working from St. Petersburg, Russia yesterday and today
during a notable cold spell. It is about -17 degrees Farenheit
(-27 degrees Celsius) right now. I have been in meetings with individuals
and groups of Engineers at two of the Sun buildings, talking about the
SEED mentoring program. We have 6 applicants so far, 5 from Russia and
one from Israel. The deadline is 30 January.
I will be in the office here tomorrow as well and then
John and I have the weekend to see something of this lovely city.

Mostly so far I have seen the hotel (the Corinthia Nevsky Palace)
and the streets between there and Sun’s
buildings. There are some very impressive imperial palaces and Soviet public
buildings. The Christmas lights and decorations are still up because
Russia celebrates the holiday later than we do in the USA. There are
green and purple floodlights and twinkle lights in
the trees at night. The sky gets lighter
around 9 a.m. and the sun rises above the buildings after noon. There
are very long shadows and then it starts to get dark again around 4 p.m.

The food is very good, way beyone the simple piroshki and blintzes
and borscht I grew up eating in San Francisco. Smoked sturgeon is amazing
stuff. Much better than smoked salmon!

John and I fly to St. Petersburg today. The local administrator
just wrote to say that she checked with our hotel and they had
no record of our reservation so she made another. I sent her the
original reservation confirmation number from our travel agent just
to avoid duplications. She has also arranged for a car to meet us
at the airport. What a pleasure to have someone watching out for us.

Greg Papadopoulos (Sun’s CTO) sent out the announcement that the
SEED term for St. Petersburg and Tel Aviv was open on 9 January.
Since then, there have been three applications, one from Israel and
three from Russia. It looks like a good group so far. All
applications are due 30 January.

As usually happens with applicants outside of the US, there is
confusion about the “Demographic Information” section of the
application form. We request demographic information from SEED
applicants so that we can conduct statistical analyses.
Providing this information is entirely voluntary. Because Sun is
based in the US, our record keeping on matters such as race is
probably specified by what the US government requires. SEED
could have a different set of categories, but then we could not
compare our data with that of the company as a whole.

Our SEED application’s list is based the racial list we found
on the Sun Employment Application form.

• African American
• Asian/Pacific Islander
• Caucasian
• Hispanic/Latino
• Native American/American Indian/Alaskan Native
• Multi-racial/Multi-ethnic
• Decline to respond
• Other: Provided in Text Box

We added “Multi-racial/Multi-ethnic” after discussion with
some SEED applicants who did not find anything on the
original list made sense for them. Probably the category that
causes the most confusion is “Caucasian”. People whom I would
consider to be in that category after I meet them often put
under “Other” such descriptions as:

• European
• French native
• Iranian/Persian/Middle-eastern
• Russian
• Slavonian
• White

For what it’s worth, one formal definition of Caucasian is “a person with
origins of the original peoples
of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East who is not of Hispanic origin.”
(from the
Governor’s Affirmative Action Office, Oregon State.