August 1, 2006 · 6:51 pm

Scrounging for Hopper

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!

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July 31, 2006 · 11:30 pm

Raging Waters

Our family plus two borrowed teenagers went to
Raging Waters water park
last Friday. We came home sunburnt (despite covering everyone with
sunblock), tired, and happy. My favorite “ride” is the Endless River,
a long looping stream you can float around in for as long as you like.
The kids mostly liked the wilder attractions, the Dragon’s Den and
Serpentine Slides being the favorites. We rented two tube floats at the
start of the day so that we did not have to wait in line so often – that
was money well spent.

The best part of the park is people watching. People watching in the
Bay Area is always fascinating, as you would expect in a community which
boasts of 300 languages. With everyone bouncing around in the water
with their friends and kids and wearing very little, it is even more fun.

Physical differences of size and color are particularly noticeable. Skins
are everything from plum dark to the skim milk white of my own daughter,
hair is every cut, style, and color that nature and bottles offer, and
the tattoos (both permanent and just-for-the-day) are just amazing. One
young man I first saw on a float in the Endless River was mostly notable
for his brightly dyed yellow hair and the new black tattoos on his back.
Out of the water, he drove a bright red wheelchair.

My husband (who stands close to 2 meters tall) and I were in the Wave Pool
in the middle of a crowd of folks from Tonga or Samoa and we felt very
small. We also saw just-walking kidlets at about knee height and every
size in between.

If the food weren’t so dull and expensive, we would go more often but
even so, Raging Waters is a fine
place to spend a hot summer day.

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July 31, 2006 · 10:48 pm

67 SEED Matched, and Grace Hopper Conference

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.

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July 26, 2006 · 5:00 pm

Tweaking the Yard

While it has been so very very hot in San Jose, California, this week, we
have been working on the caboose preparations in the early morning and
after sunset. John installed a temporary light fixture at the end of
what will be the platform/deck so that he can work after dark.
The electrical, gas, and water lines are now all tidy with switches,
outlets, connectors, and spigots as appropriate. Watering the yard
is much easier with new spigots in all the locations where I have wanted
them for years. The new brick walkways are working well – especially the
one which goes around the ends of the rails so I can use my wheelbarrow
to move rocks and dirt around.

I moved some of the larger stones to make a rock garden next to the concrete
pad of the spa. I planted two Portulacaria afra (Elephant Plants) and a
Succulent Sempervivum (I don’t know its common name) among the rocks.
I put two larger flatter boulders on top of base rocks to make seats and
made sure there were smooth boulders on the bottom layer to feel good
against bare feet. I think this will grow into a comfortable informal
bench as well as a planting area. I am deciding how to plant the rest
of the space. I may install my garden railway there with little mountains
and small-dimensioned plants to make it look to scale.

The “2nd Annual San Jose Grand
Prix” is downtown this weekend and they have rented all the big fork
lifts so we have to wait for that to end before we can move the caboose
wheels.

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July 25, 2006 · 8:54 am

UCSC Spanish

Our daughter is taking an intensive Spanish class at the
University of California at Santa Cruz
Summer
Session. This program was recommended to us by a friend who
volunteers with
Habitat for Humanity, building
houses in Guatemala every year. We decided to do this because Jessica is interested in studying international relations when she goes to college and four years of classical Latin will not be much help in that field. We hope
that she can test into the second year of Spanish for her senior year in
High School.

Jessica is the only high school student in her class and the only one
in her dorm. She is having a good time being on her own for half the week
even if it can be lonely. The experience is giving her some excellent ideas
on what she wants in a college besides academics. Living in a redwood forest, daily encounters with deer and the campus mascot, the
Banana Slug,
and eating in a cafeteria are all new experiences. We
expect her to come home wearing a Fiat Slug t-shirt.

Next week, Jessica also begins an SAT tutoring session three nights a
week with Excel Test. The first
time she took the
SAT, she got a perfect score
in English but her Math score may not be high enough to get Jessica
into some of the more technical colleges. This tutoring company
was recommended by her college advisor.
The advisor said that frequently the more imaginative students had trouble
getting the highest SAT Math scores because they kept interpreting the
questions instead of answering the simplest way.

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July 24, 2006 · 9:56 pm

It’s official: he is taller

Sadly, the day has come when my youngest child is taller than me.
My son Paul will be 14 next month and is in a major growth spurt.
At the start of June, we were almost the same size but now Paul is
noticeably taller. He is only gloating a little because we told him
that the taller of us has to wash dishes.

It is beastly hot this week. It hit 106 degrees Farenheit (41 Celsius)
today in San Jose, with no breeze. We were missing the pool we took out
to put in a caboose rail line, so we filled our outdoor spa with cold water.
Paul has been enjoying paddling around and splashing the plants to keep
them cool too. Our
neighbors are sleeping in the cellar to get away from the heat. We
were at the hardware store on Sunday and listened to a frantic woman
complaining that she had been to five stores and all were sold out of
any size of air conditioner or fan. We are watering all of our plants
daily, spraying the dogs with water, and discussing shaving the cats.

Paul is very excited that the whole family and his best friend Zach
are going to Raging Waters water
park this Friday. Going there was one of his special requests for this
summer. In this heat, it will probably be very crowded.

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July 24, 2006 · 9:13 pm

55 SEEDs matched (65%)

The mentor response to the 2006-2007 SEED Engineering mentoring terms
has been very enthusiastic. We matched almost half of the participants
(42 Recent Hires and Established Staff) during the first week and we have
now raised that to 65% (55 matched) before the send of the second week
of matching. 18 of the newly matched mentors are Distinguished Engineers
(including a SEED alumnus who was just promoted to DE) and four are Sun
Fellows.

I always have fun seeing who will take who, not just in terms of individuals
but also in terms of demographic, professional, and geographic patterns. The
match I made just before leaving work was between a Vice President of
Worldwide Operations based in the San Francisco Bay Area with a recently
hired Member of the Technical Staff in the Systems Group based in Burlington,
Massachusetts. I am sure these two women will have fascinating conversations
during their year together.

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