Katy Dickinson

SEED Mentoring 2008-2009 Terms Announced

Today Greg Papadopoulos, Sun's CTO and Executive Vice President of Research and Development, as the sponsor for Engineering's worldwide mentoring program, sent out his announcement that the 2008-2009 SEED terms will be open for applications from 21 May - 9 June 2008. As I wrote in my May 10, 2008 blog, as of Greg's announcement today, we have integrated PreSEED with the Recent Hire and Established staff groups offered by the SEED program. The 2008-2009 terms just announced are for Recent Hire and Established staff groups. The next regular worldwide all-Engineering PreSEED term will be offered January-June 2009 (with applications in November 2008).

The SEED program now has coverage for all of the exempt grades in Engineering, which it didn't before. This sounds like a small change but it took Tanya Jankot and me months of tool redesign and rewriting of the process documents to be sure that everything was covered and made sense. Now for the live test of a worldwide all-Engineering application period...

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

Posted at 05:20PM May 20, 2008 by katysblog in Mentoring & Other Business  | 

Matilija poppy

On June 3, 2005, I wrote about the two matilija poppy plants (Romneya coulteri) going into my garden. Matilija poppies are a Southern California native plant that can grow to eight feet tall. Matilija is probably a Chumash Indian word but many people pronounce it as if it was Spanish. The flowers look like big fried eggs balanced on top of long grey-green stems. Matilija poppies are mostly grown from cuttings and, once established, can take over large areas. I have dedicated a whole section of our river bank to matilija poppy colonization.

One of my 2005 poppies died in its first year but the second is strong and now in full bloom. When I was taking photos of the flowers, I caught a bonus image of a yellow butterfly pretending to be a poppy leaf.

Images Copyright 2008 by Katy Dickinson

Posted at 12:23PM May 20, 2008 by katysblog in News & Reviews  |  Comments[1]