Katy Dickinson

Fondue - Melting Pot

We have a new favorite restaurant for special occasions: the Melting Pot fondue restaurant in downtown San Jose (72 South 1st Street). Three families went together to celebrate John's birthday dinner last month. We had a wonderful time. It was a long meal and wasn't cheap but the food and service were excellent. The little kids, teens, and adults all enjoyed themselves. The restaurant even had glow bracelets for the kids to take home (after John tried them on).

The dessert course was particularly well presented with the dark dipping chocolate being set on fire as it poured. We had such a good time, we are going back on Saturday to celebrate my daughter Jessica coming home after finishing her first year at Carnegie Mellon University.

Images Copyright 2008 by Katy Dickinson

Posted at 03:49PM May 07, 2008 by katysblog in News & Reviews  | 

Women of Vision

On 27 Febuary, I wrote a blog about Sun Labs' Susan Landau, Distinguished Engineer, winning the Anita Borg Institute 2008 Women of Vision Award in the Social Impact category. Sun has 58 executives, engineers, students, and interns attending tomorrow's WOV celebration event, with Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos giving the welcome address! We are all very proud of Dr. Susan Landau.

But, I am also proud of Sun's Engineering community which made this celebration possible:

• The women who applied for the award on Susan's behalf, put together the nomination package, including executive letters of recommendation from Sun's leadership, and nurtured it through the process.
• The executives who put up the funding to cover Sun's Gold sponsorship of the event. (The fee was split three ways between Software, Operations, and the CTO/Sun Labs group.)
• The Marketing staff who designed the program advertisement.
• The University Relations staff who invited 20 students and interns to sit at Sun's tables at the event.

Among Sun's 58 attendees, we have students and interns from a dozen schools and universities, plus Sun staff from Labs, Systems, Legal, Operations, Human Resources, SunIT, Marketing, Microelectronics, and Sales. Everyone wants to celebrate!

Posted at 11:57AM May 07, 2008 by katysblog in Hopper - Anita Borg Institute  | 

Silly Vehicles

Sometimes when John and I are feeling worried about yet another big bill for caboose restoration, we try to put things into perspective. In addition to having fun fixing up WP668 and bringing a historic railroad caboose back into (limited) service, we will end up with 390 square feet of comfortable, usable space at less than the going rate for new San Francisco Bay Area construction. Also, based on what we see driving around here, not even counting Ferraris and other high end sports cars, there are much sillier vehicles we could spend money on:

Here is a current photo of WP668:

Images Copyright 2008 by Katy Dickinson

Posted at 08:32AM May 07, 2008 by katysblog in Caboose Project and Other Trains  |