Category Archives: Mentoring & Other Business

What a wild week! We matched the last of the first group of EMEA SEED
participants. All 32 have now started their mentoring
partnerships.

• 75% of the mentors are executives, including:
  • 5 Vice Presidents (including one Fellow)
  • 19 Directors (including 7 Distinguished Engineers)
• Location:
  • 20 of the Mentors are based in California (62%)
  • The others are in France (4), Canada (1), the UK (1), and
    other parts of the USA (6)
• Priority Patterns:
  • 16 of the SEED participants were matched with their
    1st or 2nd choice Mentor (50%)

  • 9 were matched with their 3rd of 4th choice Mentor (28%)
  • 7 were matched with a Mentor lower down on their
    Mentor Wish List (22%)
• Cycle Time:
  • Matching started on 5 December and ended today:
    a 36 day cycle

  • 25% were matched in the first week
  • 66% were matched in the first two weeks
  • 94% were matched in the first month
• SEED Experience:
  • 4 SEED Alumni Returning as Mentors
  • 18 Mentors are serving for the 1st time with SEED
  • 7 Mentors are in their 2nd time with SEED
  • 3 Star Mentors are in their 3rd or 4th time with SEED
  • 4 Superstar Mentors are in their 5th or 6th time with SEED

In addition, John and I are making a bid to buy a

Western Pacific Caboose. (Yes, the end car on an old train!)
We have wanted one for our backyard
office and library for years. This is the second time we have
bid and we will know in a few days if we get this one! Check out
what goes into
moving a caboose! We have been calling the city about permits,
crane and trucking companies, insurance companies, a soils engineer
(to discuss filling in the swimming pool the caboose will replace),
and lots of other folks.

In addition, we fly out next week for a trip to St. Petersburg
and Tel Aviv to meet potential SEEDs. And this is Midterm exams
week for our daughter. No problem!

We have 30 out of 32 of the participants matched for the
Prague, Grenoble, Hamburg, and Dublin SEED term. The last two
mentoring pairs are in conversations and I hope to hear confirmation
on those matches soon. I am very pleased to see four of our mentors
this term are SEED alumni themselves!

My visa for Russia finally arrived on 3 January. This took seven
weeks from sending off the passport to getting it back with the new
visa. The actual visa has two parts:

1. The usual full page form pasted into my passport – very official
   looking and using Cyrillic letters I can’t read so I can only hope it is OK.

2. A 3rd generation photocopy hand cut folded over piece of paper
   stapled to the next passport page for use in multiple entries. I only
   have a single entry visa but I am told by someone who commutes to Russia to
   leave the paper in even if no one asks for it. I made copies just in case
   it falls out.

We are all ready for our next SEED term: Russia and Israel. I will be
visiting St. Petersburg and Tel Aviv later this month. Sun CTO Greg
Papadopoulos will send out the announcement email to the two sites on
Monday. (The Russians are out on winter break this week.) Tanya
Jankot has all of the web-based application materials ready and tested
and good to go. I still need to get confirmation on what days and times I
am making the presentations to the Russian and Israeli
Engineering staff and management groups
but I hope to get word on that next week. I have requested badge access
and a secondary login account in advance so I can start work as soon as
I get there.

I called the Travel Medicine department of the medical clinic and they
said that since I have current Hepatitis-A and Tetanus shots, I do
not need any more inoculations to travel to Russia or Israel. John and
I are looking forward to the trip. We are already watching the
weather reports to see what we should pack. St. Petersburg is overcast
this week with temperatures of 26-35 degrees F. Tel Aviv is
clear with a chance of rain this week with temperatures of 64-69 degrees F.

We have matched 25 of the 32 SEED participants so far from Dublin,
Grenoble, Hamburg, and Prague. There are quite a few mentors who are
working with SEED for the first time. Two are SEED participant alumnae
returning as mentors. California is still the largest work location
with 14 mentors representing the Golden State. The Centennial State
(Colorado, so called because it became a state in the year 1876, 100
years after the signing of the American Declaration of Independence)
comes in second with 3 mentors. Other US states with 1 each are:
Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, and Virginia. Countries other than
the USA with mentors this term include France (both Grenoble and
Velizy), and Canada (Burnaby). So far, there are just the two mentors
in France working with mentees in their own time zone.

The Dublin, Grenoble, Hamburg, and Prague term officially runs
January-June 2006 but many mentoring partners are already meeting and
having their 2 hour partnership discussions with the facilitator.

Besides mentor matching, Tanya Jankot and I are working on:

• The next SEED term (the 2nd group in EMEA – from St. Petersburg,
  Russia and Herzliya, Israel), which will run March-September 2006

• The in-person 2-day SEED event in March 2006
• The 5 year report on SEED’s progress and success (2001-2006)
• The current quarterly reports

Starting today, I will be working from home during Sun’s winter
break. I will be available through email, as always. Back in
the office on Monday, 2 January 2006.

I have been on jury duty for the Superior Court of California,
County of Santa Clara, all week. I have not yet been called in,
I am just waiting and available. Sunday and Monday, the
“Current Juror Status” web site said my group should check back
again after 5 p.m. Yesterday, it said check back between noon
and 1 p.m. today. So I am working from home (closer to the court
house than my office) with my grumpy 13-year-old son who is home
with a cold, waiting. At noon, the web site changed, now I have
to check back after 5 p.m. today to find out about tomorrow.

Every county has a slightly different system for managing
potential jurors. Since I was 18, I have lived in San
Francisco county, Contra Costa county, San Mateo County,
and Santa Clara county (all in the Bay Area) with two years
out to live in Santa Barbara. I was never called for jury
duty at all until about 10 years ago. During those 10 years,
I have spent several days sitting in waiting rooms at the court
house and several weeks like this one, available to be called.
I have never actually served on a jury. The jury waiting rooms in
Santa Clara county are much nicer than in San Mateo county.

Last year, I almost served. My group was moved from the
big waiting room to a smaller one. After an hour, the judge
came out to talk with us. He said that he was sorry we would not
be able to serve today after all. The defendant was accused of a
new gang-related crime when they were almost ready for the trial, so
they had to postpone. He said it would have been an interesting
case that took several weeks and he knew we were sorry we would
miss it. We were dismissed. There were some quiet cheers, then we
left very quickly in case he changed his mind.

Being able to serve on a jury is an obligation of U.S. citizenship,
like paying taxes, and serving in the military if drafted. You
can’t volunteer for jury duty, it is randomly assigned. Since
you don’t know when it will happen or how long it will take, it
is not a popular obligation even though it is clearly necessary.

I am getting some work done. My son’s teacher just sent me
email with his homework assigments for tomorrow. I finally got
the telex number for our Russian visas (hooray!) and passed them
to Visa Networks. I am working on matching some SEEDs with mentors.
I have one new match already (both mentor and mentee are in France)
and am calling the potential mentors from whom I have not yet heard.

In just over a week since the first email requests to potential
mentors went out, we have matched 12 out of the 32 SEED Engineering
Mentoring program participants from Dublin, Grenoble, Hamburg, and
Prague. Our mentors so far include two Chief Technologist VPs,
a former Chief Technologist, 4 Distinguished Engineers, a Fellow VP,
a Senior Director, and assorted other luminaries. They are all based
in the USA so far (California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey,
and Virginia) but represent
almost all of the professional areas of Engineering (Software, Services,
Scalable Systems, Marketing, Sun Labs, etc.).

I have 20 matches to make before the winter break… eeek!

It seems that some of the 9 pages of forms I just faxed to Sun’s
administrator in St. Petersburg (or “St. Pete” as she
calls it) were particular to the visa agency she was
using to work with the Russian government to get me
the invitation letter so that Visa Network (the visa
agency in San Francisco) can get me the visa from
the consulate. The new visa agency she just started using in St. Pete
does not need my credit card or the forms – just a high quality scan
of my passport to send to Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The photocopy of the passport I faxed her was not clear enough.

My passport has been with Visa Network in San Francisco – 30
miles and lots of traffic north of my Menlo Park office – since
15 November when I started trying to get a Russian visa.
Visa Network says they will send a scan of my passport
in email today.

I am feeling like the old lady who swallowed a fly…

• There was an old lady who swallowed a cow.
• I don’t know how she swallowed a cow!
• She swallowed the cow to catch the goat…
• She swallowed the goat to catch the dog…
• She swallowed the dog to catch the cat…
• She swallowed the cat to catch the bird …
• She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
• That wriggled and jiggled and wiggled inside her.
• She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
• But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
• Perhaps she’ll die.

The first email invitations to potential mentors for the first SEED
term in Europe just went out. 19 out of the invitations went to the highest
priority name on a SEED participant’s Mentor Wish List (61%). 9 more went
to the second name on a SEED’s Mentor Wish List (29%). The remaining 10%
went to a lower priority name. Sometimes we could not use the highest priority
name because there were duplicate requests, sometimes because the mentor
is already known to be unavailable.

We are asking 4 long-time SEED mentors to consider taking an
additional mentee even though they already have one or more current
SEED partnership. 10 of the mentors to whom I just sent invitations are
new to the SEED program but all the others have been SEED mentors at least once.
Surprisingly, even though all of the SEED participants are in Europe
(Dublin, Grenoble, Hamburg, or Prague), only one of the mentors I contacted
today works in Europe all the time, one works there sometimes, and one
is based in Canada. All the rest are USA-based.

It will take six to eight weeks to match everyone in this term. I hope to
finish matching all of them before I leave for Russia to talk to the next
group of potential SEED participants in mid-January. We have already heard
back from one potential mentor who expressed interest and will follow up with
the SEED who requested him.

I just faxed 9 pages of forms to the Sun administrator in St. Petersburg who
is helping me get my visa. Let’s hope that is enough!