Last year, Deirdre Straughan was kind enough to
give me one of her I’m Blogging This for Sun tshirts. She is now collecting
photos of how those shirts are being worn. Check out
Deirdre’s blog for the entries so far. Here I am in my
caboose office with my
cockatiels, Simon and Garfunkel:
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Images Copyright 2009 by John Plocher
Filed under News & Reviews
We got back last week from our annual camping trip. Every year since 1993,
my family has vacationed at the
Lair of the Golden Bear, the family camp managed by the
U.C. Berkeley Alumni Association.
The Lair is in the Sierras near
Pinecrest.
There are 3 camps within the Lair: Gold, Blue, and Oski.
As usual, John, Jessica, Matt, Paul and I picked up
my mother
Eleanor in San Francisco and visited Poot’s House of Cactus in Ripon on the drive
to Pinecrest.
In over 50 years of Lair camping, each week has developed its own style and
traditions. Our family is always well represented in the 10th week Camp Blue Review –
the Lair’s Wednesday night talent show. This year, Jessica sang “Losing My Mind”
by Stephen Sondheim (she studies Music at Carnegie Mellon), Matt did gymnastics (he is on the Gymnastics team at
William & Mary), and the whole family acted in a Cal vs. Stanford vampire skit written by
my brother Pete, called “Twilight at Pinecrest”.
We celebrated Paul’s birthday with his traditional Lair Cake.
After our week at the Lair, we drove our truck and Yuppie Wagon trailer over
Sonora pass (9,624 feet above sea level) through the stark and lovely
Emigrant Wilderness
to Nevada’s capital Carson City, where we
visited the Nevada State Railroad Museum.
We then drove to Vacaville to see the newly-in-use
Nut Tree train (on a very tiny
track, alas!) and the
Consolidated Rock & Mineral shop. We stopped off in San Francisco to
drop off my mother and pick up our
two new birds and then drove home to San Jose.
Entering San Francisco
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Matt, Jessica, Paul, Yuppie Wagon
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Picking up Grandma
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Visiting Poot’s House of Cactus
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yucca
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hippo cactus
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cactus flower
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Camp Blue Road
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wine & cheese
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John in hammock
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jay bird visiting
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squirrel in bucket
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our tent
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Jessica
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Jessica and Matt
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Wheel and Deal in the lodge
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visiting butterfly
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my nephew Daniel
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Blue Review skit audition
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my niece Lynda
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Lynda’s girl pack
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Paul, Jessica, Matt
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Pete, Eleanor, Katy
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Family with Oski the Bear
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Jessica
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Matt, Blue Review
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Jessica, Blue Review
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Jessica and Matt
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Paul watching a movie
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sunset tree
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the creek
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water skeeter
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Pete, Eleanor, kids
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pinecones
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Jesscia and Paul, Nut Tree Train 1994
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Nut Tree Railroad 2009
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Nut Tree Railroad flyer 2009
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San Francisco in the fog
Images Copyright 2009 by Katy Dickinson and John Plocher
Filed under Home & Family, News & Reviews
Just over a week ago, we picked up our newly-adopted cockatiels, Simon & Garfunkel, at their Mickaboo foster home in San Francisco. We have been enjoying getting to know each other. They are in their office cage next to me now nibbling at each other, butting their heads together, and making squeechy noises.
We have discovered that Garfunkel will bite unless we pick up Simon first. If Simon gets to do something, Garfunkel forgets about biting in his eagerness to join in.
We had them checked out by Dr. Fern Van Sant, DVM, at For the Birds here in San Jose. She said that the guys had been well cared for and loved in their foster home and were about five years old. Both of them have damaged wings – probably from trying to fly in a cage with horizontal bars. Only one wing out of the four had feathers long enough to clip this time but we hope to see their wings growing back.
| In their travel cage
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Looking at their new home
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Treats from John
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| Simon close up
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Investigating the rug
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The office cage
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Images Copyright 2009 Katy Dickinson
Filed under Home & Family
Recently, our cat Tino was checking out a plastic storage container. He propped his front paws on the lip and stood on his back legs so he could peer inside. The empty box suddenly flipped over on top of him just as I walked in the room with my camera. He wasn’t hurt, just confused and embarrassed.
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Images Copyright 2009 by Katy Dickinson
Filed under Home & Family
My daughter Jessica has generously been my guide in setting up this new version of my blog. My first blog can be found at http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog/
She asked me to write a blog entry about the Remington Portable Typewriter shown in the photo at the top of this blog. I recently bought the original at a garage sale here in San Jose, California. It is probably from about 1925 and came with its cover intact, including a leather strap. Long ago, I learned to type on a portable typewriter and developed great respect for these capable and elegant little machines. Here are some photos:
1925 era Remington Portable Typewriter with original dust
1925 era Remington Portable Typewriter with less dust
Images Copyright 2009 Katy Dickinson
Filed under News & Reviews
Publication
I hope you will want to read “Sun Mentoring: 1996-2009“, the newest Sun Laboratories Technical Report by Katy Dickinson, Tanya Jankot, and Helen Gracon, published this morning. You can see the spotlight announcement on Sun Labs’ public home page at http://research.sun.com. The Report number is TR-2009-185.
Announcement
August 28, 2009- Sun Microsystems has benefited from a long-term successful culture of mentoring, especially in its worldwide engineering divisions. About 7,300 mentoring pairs have participated in one of Sun’s formal mentoring programs since 1996. Sun has developed several internal formal worldwide mentoring programs, three of which are still offered. To create this report, the authors analyzed Sun’s 1996-2009 mentoring program data, plus Sunwide data, plus information from a Gartner report on Sun mentoring which focused on the ROI of Sun’s mentoring programs.
Mentoring has paid off for Sun in increased productivity, efficiency, and greater satisfaction among participants. This report presents what Sun did and how Sun did it to allow others to take advantage of the company’s extensive and successful experience with this remarkably effective and versatile business method. So far as is known, this report is unique: no other company has published a long-term detailed analysis about its corporate mentoring program.
Abstract
This paper provides a summary of mentoring information, best practices, metrics, and recommendations developed during 1996-2009 by Sun Microsystems, Inc. Sun provides network computing infrastructure solutions that include computer systems, software, storage and services. The company has a strong corporate culture that values and promotes mentoring. Sun has offered several internally-developed formal mentoring programs, including:
Mentoring increases effectiveness and efficiency to achieve business results by doing real work, real time. Developing a corporate culture of mentoring is a good way to establish a network of communication across organizational silos, promote a wide variety of talents, and broaden the diversity of ideas and innovation available to the company. The ROI on Sun mentoring has been calculated to be 1,000% or greater.
Mentoring is near the top of most lists of tools that are effective at promoting professional development and advancement in industry. As a business method, mentoring works well generally and also is particularly valuable to women and minorities. These benefits are of special interest to engineering companies and are in addition to more objective productivity measures of mentoring success such as increased performance ratings, higher retention, and more promotions. SEED has been sponsored since 2001 by Dr. Greg Papadopoulos, Sun’s Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Research and Development.
The home page for SEED is http://research.sun.com/SEED.
Originally published: 28 August 2009
Key Links Updated, photo added: 8 April 2016 and 13 June 2020
Filed under Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews
Summer events:
 Jessica is home |
 Resurrection lilies |
 Scarf Sunday |
My daughter Jessica had a successful summer being the web intern for the World Organization for Human Rights USA in Washington, D.C. She also worked in a bike shop.
This is the season for roses, resurrection lilies, yarrow, cactus and other heat-loving plants to bloom in my garden.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church sent a hundred campers off to Camp Oskie (which for that week becomes Camp St. Andrew’s) at the Lair of the Golden Bear, the University of California at Berkeley Alumni family camp in Pinecrest, California. On Scarf Sunday, everyone comes to church to show off their new St. Andrew’s Camp scarves, tell camp stories, and sing. This year’s theme was Safari so the altar was flanked by a life-sized cardboard tiger and lion. Leopard print was the fashion for the day.
Images Copyright 2009 Katy Dickinson
Filed under Home & Family, News & Reviews
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