KatysBlog

January 23, 2009 · 10:17 am

Remote Inauguration

We were very excited that Jessica, my 20-year-old daughter, attended this week’s Presidential inauguration in Washington, DC. You can see her blog entries and photos at http://feelingelephants.wordpress.com/. Ours is a politically passionate family. One of my earliest memories was glee that my candidate (John F. Kennedy) won the presidential election over my older brother’s candidate (Barry Goldwater), in 1964.

Our family has always been split between liberal and conservative. The divergence of our current family politics is best shown in two objects: a framed picture of the late President Ronald Reagan that my father put up in the front hall of their San Francisco house (intended to be seen by everyone who came over for parties to phone Obama voters, hosted by my mother), and the shoe with BUSH –> in gold paint on the toe that someone gave my father for Christmas:

I was at work at Sun during Tuesday’s inaugural morning so I went over to the Menlo Park campus Crossroads conference room to watch history unfolding
live by CNN TV broadcast on the big screen. Because I usually get my news from National Public Radio (NPR), it was particularly interesting to see how the great and powerful look and interact:

Why did Jimmy and Roselyn Carter greet George and Barbara Bush with a kiss for Barbara but then walk by Bill and Hilary Clinton, who were right next to the Bushes, without a word?
The senior President Bush does not seem to be aging well. He sat next to Hilary Clinton and behind the new First Lady Michelle Obama, so there were many pictures of him with his mouth open looking confused.
Hilary Clinton, on the other hand, looked radiant two days before her confirmation as our new Secretary of State.
It was fascinating to watch outgoing President George W. Bush during his last minutes in office. I saw Bush pat the leg of one of the tall Marines in full dress uniform as he walked past – like you would pat a friendly dog.

It was certainly a great day for San Francisco, with soon-to-be President Barack Obama walking into the ceremony right behind Senator Dianne Feinstein
and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. This is a welcome change from President G.W. Bush pretending that California did not exist. Having Dianne Feinstein serve as Chair of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies meant that we got to see a great deal of her between speakers and events. We are so proud of her!

Except when greeting people, President Obama seemed grim during much of the event. The only time I caught a big smile was when he messed up his inaugural
oath (he had to take it again later). The biggest smile of the day, however, was that of cellist Yo-Yo Ma who appeared delighted to be performing with violinist
Itzhak Perlman. There was much wondering how the instruments and musicians could play “Air and Simple Gifts” so well on that cold day. This was cleared up when it was announced today that those on the inaugural stage heard the musicians live but a prior recording was broadcast for everyone else. However
real the broadcast, Ma’s smile and the superb music were a genuine delight.

CNN in Sun’s conference room

Feinstein, Obama, Pelosi on CNN

Obama taking the oath, CNN

Clintons, Obama, G.H.W. Bush, CNN

Hilary Clinton, CNN

Perlman, Montero, Ma, McGill, CNN

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Filed under News & Reviews, Politics

Tagged as Jessica, San Francisco, Sun Microsystems, Wade

January 22, 2009 · 5:48 pm

Distributing Family Stuff

Ellen Rachel Bolli Van Gilder, Great Grandma’s Piano Bench 2009

Walter Van Gilder, Great Grandpa’s hand made mirrors 2009

My brothers and I are working out an equitable and peaceable way to distribute family stuff. Unfortunately, we are the descendants of many generations of craft workers, artists, and collectors, so there are a great many things to be considered: furniture carved by our Mother‘s Grandmother, mirrors and stained glass created by our Mother‘s Grandfather, our Father’s Grandfather’s iron train set, our Father’s Mother’s painted set of cider mugs with matching pitcher, paintings and drawings by our Mother, etc.

Having seen several excellent examples of nasty, greedy, and predatory behavior during estate distributions, we are seeking a better way to bestow heirlooms fairly. Our motivation comes from growing up during a family fight over an estate that started in 1990 and lasted for more than ten years; the quarrel about which descendant got what eventually outlasted the lifetime of the original executor. We hope to avoid that experience in our generation. As our Father says: “I would rather burn it than fight about it.”

I am writing this out because when I searched the web for a good example, a property distribution process to model ours on, everything I found seemed to be associated with contentious divorces. I did not find any models in which the parties were assumed to be on speaking terms. My brothers and I each want some family stuff but we also want to preserve our good relationship more than we want any particular thing. I hope that the system we have developed over the last six years will be of use to other families who share our values.

Our parents are both living and have very generously and foresightedly agreed to distribute a selection of their family possessions in advance of their passing (which we hope will be many years in the future). My brothers and I have been in this distribution process for the last six years and have already sorted out who gets which of the larger pieces of furniture. In addition to getting a family chore done, we are learning more about each other and getting closer through these discussions. In this context “distribute” means transferring ownership but not necessarily the objects themselves. For example, my parents dining room table was given to me several years ago in one of our distributions; however, my parents will continue to use the table for their lifetimes.

At first, the distribution lists were annual and small, with just three or four heirlooms going to each of us. The distribution we are discussing now is our most ambitious, with fifty-four heirlooms to be sorted into three groups of eighteen. Here is an overview of the process we originally used:

Our parents make a list of heirlooms for us to consider and distribute. Usually, this means my having several discussions with our Mother since I live closest. One of my brothers lives at the other end of California and the other lives across the country, in Massachusetts.
My brothers and I ask questions – how big is it? what condition is it in? where did it come from – is there any special meaning to it? Sometimes pictures are distributed.
My brothers and I check with our spouses to collect their opinions.
My brothers and I have a three-way phone call during which we decide who gets what. The call is only between the three of us, no spouses or parents.
I tell our Mother what we decided in our call.
Our Mother writes each of us a letter giving us the items.

With so many more items to distribute this time, it has been harder to come to a decision. Our Mother sent us a list in August we are still discussing. We had not seen many of the items, so the whole family took a house tour when my brothers visited during Christmas. We walked around the house we grew up in and asked our Mother to point to each item on her list. Last Saturday, my brothers and I had a preliminary phone call.

We discussed what “family furniture” meant to us. If our Mother bought it, does that still count as “family”? When our Great Grandparents’ early Victorian house on Circle Park in Knoxville, Tennessee, was torn down in 1964, our Grandmother removed the front doors. Eventually our Mother had the doors installed on her house in San Francisco. Are those antique doors “family furniture”?

My brothers asked me to sort the fifty four items into three groups prior to our next call. I decided to ignore the potential market value of the items and focus on three important categories: size, history, and who actually wants the thing. I created three groups of 18 items with roughly the same number of things in each of these categories in each group:

Size: Small (antique toys, table clocks, the Cherokee hunting bow, the cider set), Medium (side tables, small chairs, stained glass panels and mirrors, our Great Grandfather’s glass case of stuffed birds), and Large (the front doors, our Father’s white leather arm chair, an 8′ tall hall mirror in a gold plaster frame, a huge wooden ice box, a set of balloon back chairs with seat cushions embroidered by our Great Grandmother).
Special Family Origin: anything made by a family member, the bannister from the Circle Park house, our Great Grandmother’s wicker rocking chair, etc.
Desireability: Anything that more than one of us expressed interest in during the preliminary phone call.

I sent the sorted groups to my brothers with the following proposed process:

Step 1 – Before the Meeting – Review the groups, ask questions, talk with spouses, say if there are one or two “heart’s desire” items
Step 2 – During the Meeting – Each of us picks a group (1, 2 or 3)
Step 3 – Accept / acknowledge conditions to replace installed items (such as the front doors)
Step 4 – Discuss trades. Other than trades, the group is distributed intact, where and as is.

I am curious to see how well this sorting worked and whether the distribution discussion goes better as a result.

Note: None of the items pictured are for sale. I do not provide pricing or sales advice for similar items. Please do not ask.

13 June 2016: Images retaken and reposted, note added. 4 Feb 2021: photo links updated.

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2 Comments

Filed under Home & Family, News & Reviews

Tagged as Eleanor, San Francisco, Wade

January 18, 2009 · 11:38 pm

My Daughter is Going to the Inauguration!

Jessica Dickinson Goodman, January 2009
photo: copyright 2008 Katy Dickinson

My daughter Jessica is participating in the
University Presidential Inaugural
Conference (UPIC) in Washington, D.C. this week, so she will see
President Obama’s inauguration in person! Jessica was invited (along with thousands
of other kids) because she is an alumna of a
Congressional Youth Leadership
Council (CYLC) program she attended in High School. She signed up for this
conference almost a year ago, long before we knew whose inauguration it would be.
You can see Jessica’s pictures and updates on her blog:

http://feelingelephants.wordpress.com/.

Jessica took the bus to Washington DC yesterday bringing the camera she borrowed
from the CMU student newspaper, the
Tartan. So far, she has heard a
talk by General Colin Powell.
Tomorrow, they hear from former Vice President
Al Gore. Tuesday night after
the inauguration, she will attend an inaugural ball. The picture above is of
Jessica showing us her new ball gown (with the shawl I brought her from Bangalore)
before I packed it. It is so exciting to have a member of our family attend this
historical event!

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Filed under News & Reviews

January 16, 2009 · 3:30 pm

CAHSI and Diamond Age

This morning I had the honor of addressing the 2009 Annual Meeting of
CAHSI – the Computing Alliance of Hispanic
Serving Institutions. CAHSI is a “consortium of universities that are
committed to increasing the number of Hispanics who earn baccalaureate and
advanced degrees in computing”. I was part of a panel called “Mentoring Lessons Shared”
which also featured speakers from IBM, Google, and MentorNet.

I arrived in time to hear the last part of a very interesting keynote address
by
Dr. Dan Atkins, Kellog Professor, Community Information, University of
Michigan (and past Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, National
Science Foundation). Dan ended his talk with a Grand Challenge to the audience
to help find a way to college educate the extraordinary number of qualified students
worldwide for whom there are not enough university programs. He gave the number
100 million qualified students and said that it would take creating a major
university (U.C. Berkeley, Stanford…) every 15 minutes to meet their need under
the current educational structure.

Over lunch with Dan and other speakers, I recommended Neal Stephenson’s superb 1995
book Diamond Age or, A Young
Lady’s Illustrated Primer. This book addresses a piece of the problem
Dan challenged CAHSI to solve: it tells the story of what happens when an elite
educational tool is hijacked for a vastly broader audience of little girls.

In 2007, during her senior year in High School, my daughter Jessica experienced
firsthand the unmanageable glut of excellent university applicants. She is
very happy at the school she accepted: Carnegie Mellon
University (in Pittsburgh, PA). However, at the time, it was very stressful. Princeton’s 2007 rejection letter to Jessica said they had 18,900 applications for
an entering undergraduate class of 1,245 students. Looking at the current

Princeton Admissions Statistics, the situation has become even worse:

I still like the suggestion made by Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore in the article

“Why the best schools can’t pick the best kids – and vice versa”
(Los Angeles Times, Opinion, 18 March 2007):

“The tragedy of all this selectivity and competition is that it is almost completely pointless. Students trying to get into the best college, and colleges trying to admit the best students, are both on a fool’s errand. They are assuming a level of precision of assessment that is unattainable. … There is a simple way to dramatically reduce the pressure and competition that our most talented students now experience. When selective institutions get the students’ applications, the schools can scrutinize them using the same high standards they currently use and decide which of the applicants is good enough to be admitted. Then the names of all the “good enough” students could be placed in a metaphorical hat, with the “winners” drawn at random for admission.”

After the RIF notice, before you leave

In the two months since
John Plocher, my husband, was

laid off from Sun, our family has made many changes. Only one of us is
commuting to work, so our 16-year-old son Paul and I spend more time
together during the drive between home and his High School, on the way to
my Sun office. Between job hunting activities, John has more time to cook, so we
eat out less. (John is an excellent cook so this is good!). The pets are happier
because John is home to give them more attention. Unless I have a meeting,
I work from home in the afternoons while Paul is doing homework. I have less
free time…

We have also found a good many things we wished we had thought to do
before John was laid off. Some of these were contained in a very helpful
unsigned email forwarded to John by someone who left Sun last year, called: “Things I Wish I’d Known The Day I Was RIFd”. (RIF stands for “Reduction in Force”, also known
as a lay off or restructuring.) However, we have also found some of the information
in that email is out of date.

I am writing this to share the benefit of our family’s recent experience with
Sun staff who may be caught up in the company restructuring announced on

14 November 2008. Here are my opinions of some good actions to
consider after the termination notice but before you leave Sun and lose your
SunWeb access (and some actions to consider after). Some of these
actions may only be appropriate for Sun staff in California since circumstances
will differ from state-to-state, and country-to-country. Some actions –
like joining LinkedIn – are
good ideas whether you are staying or leaving. Your mileage may vary.
May contain nuts.

Before your SunWeb access shuts down, print out copies of key records:

– Current and last year paycheck history

– Company training history

– Stock option history and status

– Health benefit elections

– Vacation balance

– Past annual performance review documents
If you have not already done so, use your Employee Giving matching grant for the current year.
If you have a blogs.sun.com account, post a brief and professional
going away message including at least your LinkedIn reference. Your
blogs.sun.com postings stay available after you are gone.
Change your Sun voice mail outgoing message with a new professionally
phrased reference to your home phone or other non-Sun phone number.

Resources which may help and actions to consider later:

Sun provides some very good benefits to RIFed staff.
Use any coaching services offered as part of your package
(such as the excellent
Right Management service). Let the service review your resume before
you send it out. Join their networking groups.
Think through your health, dental, vision, and life insurance choices
and application timelines. Read your RIF package carefully. If the staff
member who is laid off is the spouse of a continuing Sun staff member, talk
with Human Resources (SunDial) soon about when and how you can initiate a
“Qualifying Life Event Change” to provide insurance coverage to the RIFed
spouse. We had to submit a “Life Insurance Evidence of Insurability (EOI) Form”
which is still going through formal review by the insurance
provider. It may take weeks before our coverage is reestablished. However,
John’s other insurance benefits (health, dental, vision, etc.) were reestablished
right after his employee coverage lapsed.
Immediately locate all personal accounts, groups, billing, etc.
that you have linked to your @sun.com email address, and change them
to your personal email address.
In California, you can apply for
Unemployment Insurance
from the day of your notification (while you may still have months yet to
receive Sun paychecks).
If you are asked by the California Employment Development Department, do not
call money Sun provides you after the notification period “severance”.
It is accurate to call it “payment to forestall legal action”.

Here is Sun’s address and phone number which you will need for
the EDD paperwork – from Sun’s 2008 Annual Report:

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

4150 Network Circle

Santa Clara, CA 95054

(650) 960-1300
In the San Francisco Bay Area, there is a networking and lunch group
called CSix where job hunters share ideas
and leads. Similar formal or informal groups probably exist elsewhere.
Buy a current-year copy of the book What Color Is Your
Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles. This book is available in
many languages (French, Korean, Russian, Turkish…). Also check out the
resources on Dick Bolles’ web site:
JobHuntersBible.Com
Join LinkedIn – a social networking
web site for professionals who want to extend their contacts. Be diligent
in linking to your former Sun coworkers so that you don’t lose each other
once you are no longer @sun.com. Use LinkedIn to recommend people you think
highly of and ask them to recommend you. There are several LinkedIn Sun
Alumni groups, including SUNAlumni. Sun Engineering SEED mentoring program
alumni can join the SEED LinkedIn group.
Join the
Sun Microsystems Alumni Association
“The network is the people”
Consider other social networking sites such as
Facebook which has several Sun Alumni groups, including:
The Sun Microsystems Alumni Group,
Sun Alumni on fb, (& several others).
Plaxo is another good networking, address book site.
Participate in
Sun Alumni Blogs
Make your own business cards so that you can easily tell contacts
your new email and phone.
Make doctor, dentist, and other health care appointments soon, so you
are seen while you are still insured. Renew prescriptions that are close
to refills. COBRA continuation insurance coverage isn’t always the same as
the coverage you had before.
Get a special job seeking email address at yahoo.com or
gmail.com. Make it professional, not cute.
A job searching and recruitment web site:
http://www.dice.com/
– “career website for technology and engineering professionals”
A job searching web site:
http://www.indeed.com/
“to search job sites, newspapers, associations and company career pages”

Don’t lose touch with Sun people you care about. As John says, there are
only really 100 people in the Silicon Valley, everyone else is just there
to create traffic jams.

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Filed under News & Reviews

January 13, 2009 · 3:11 pm

Joe Kowalski Memorial

Like many who worked with Joe Kowalski during his 19 years as a Sun Engineer, I was shocked and saddened to hear of his death on Christmas Eve 2008. Joe joined Sun in 1989, nine years after his graduation from the University of California at San Diego in Computer Science. Before Sun, Joe worked at Spectragraphics and Cydrome. He worked for Cassatt after leaving Sun. I knew Joe as one of the stalwarts of Sun’s Architecture Review Committees (ARCs), a process I helped to design and manage
long ago. Joe also made major contributions to Sun’s OS kernel and to Java
software. Joe was funny and friendly and passionate about getting things right.

The service in celebration of Joe’s life was held last Saturday at St. Clare’s Episcopal Church in Pleasanton. One or more top-flight Silicon Valley
startups could have been formed from among the memorial attendees, including:
Steve Bourne,
Bill Coleman,
Rob Gingell,
Eli Lamb,

Tim Marsland, and
Bill Shannon.

Those who spoke during the service remembered Joe for his height (6’6″, two meters),
jokes, basketball playing, love of wine, scuba diving, technical passion, the
spontaneous combustion of his gazebo, and Joe’s devotion to his teenage
daughter, Alexandra. Her own poised and funny remembrance was the greatest
tribute any father could want.

Joe (also known as jek3@sun.com) was just 52 when he died but he did much
with his life that many only talk about. He went on that trip to Africa with
his wife. Joe moved to Hawaii and worked remotely for three years.

If you want to make a contribution in Joe’s memory, his wife Lori has asked
that donations go to Alexandra’s education fund (contact me for
information), or to the stroke center that took care of Joe:

Donations should be designated for the memory of Joseph E. Kowalski
and also earmarked for the stroke center.

Commendation from Joe’s memorial service

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Filed under News & Reviews

January 9, 2009 · 2:22 pm

SEED Matching Update

So far, we have 49 PreSEED mentor-mentee pairs (out of 54 available) and
48 SEED mentor-mentee pairs (out of 54 available). The two worldwide
Engineering mentoring terms are 90% matched in the first five weeks (the cycle began
on 3 December). If the Mentor and Mentee are matched after the
actual start of the term, the mentoring partnership still lasts for six
months from the match date, regardless of when the term formally ends.

On 15 December, I started an experiment which I hope will improve
SEED communications. I set up a group for SEED
Engineering Mentoring mentees, mentors, and managers on
LinkedIn. Since then, I have approved adding
345 current and alumni SEED managers, mentors, and mentees to the new group.

More?

More information on the SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program
is available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/

KatysBlog

Remote Inauguration

Distributing Family Stuff

My Daughter is Going to the Inauguration!

CAHSI and Diamond Age

After the RIF notice, before you leave

Joe Kowalski Memorial

SEED Matching Update

Email Subscription

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