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Friday Jan 30, 2009
Onward This is my final posting on this blog site. It has been a great three years at Sun, from which I've gained so much. Nowhere else have I had the opportunity to meet and work with some many brilliant and talented engineers in one place. It's been an honor and a privilege to be part of this team. Like your friends and even your competitors, I wish all of you, and the company, great success in these tough times. We'll always need a company like Sun Microsystems. My future blogs will be found on Searching for Wisdom. Posted at 11:29AM Jan 30, 2009 by rezippel in Personal | Comments[0]
Thursday Jun 05, 2008
Another reminisce
Looking at Sin-Yaw Wang's blog a few minutes ago brought back some fun memories. I was amused by the reference to Lapsang Souchong tea and, in a more recent post, Richard Stallman. As it happens, I'm also drinking Lapsang Souchong right now (2:00AM and don't ask why). Back when I was a student, and RMS was working on Emacs and Lisp Machines, I was introduced to Lapsang Souchang by Gerry Sussman who called it "thesis tea." It was just as effective back then as it is now! Just to bring up some other trivia, did you know that Richard Stallman and our own Guy Steele put together the initial key bindings for Emacs? I remember before that there were a number of different TECO based macro packges for "visual editing" or "control-R mode" in use in the AI lab/Project Mac at MIT, and we each had our own customizations with slightly different key bindings which drove all of us nuts. It was a pretty powerful environment though; I even formatted my Master's thesis (on radical denesting) in TXJ, a mathematical formatting system written in TECO! I'm still not sure whether that was heroic or just plain stupid, and it's debatable whether the mathematics in the thesis or the formatting was the greater intellectual achievement. Posted at 02:06AM Jun 05, 2008 by rezippel in Personal | Comments[0]
Thursday May 08, 2008
היום יומ הולדת
Posted at 12:18PM May 08, 2008 by rezippel in Personal | Comments[0]
Friday Jul 20, 2007
On the Boston/SFO Shuttle
Like a lot of people at Sun I tend to travel to the Bay area a lot. My last trip, which I'm still trying to finish has been a doozy. It started with my rental car. Now, I don't need much, I've only got a carry on bag and a laptop. So why did Avis give me a Minivan?? Just parking finding a sufficient parking space for the thing took effort, and once I found a space, with it took a major dose of Boston parking experience to parallel park it. The business part of the trip went well, we have over 160 submissions to Innovation@Sun in October! That great response and I this to be a great conference. Meetings, more meetings, and then its time to head to the airport. I've been looking at for a new cell phone for a while, and I've tried out a number Verizon 8830 (poor IMAP support for email), Nokia E62 (good IMAP, lousy interface), etc. At the airport I thought I saw something magical. As I was heading towards the shuttle from the rental car spot, I saw someone typing on their cell phone with one hand....and each time he typed a little puff of steam rose from the cell phone! A ha, just what I need to be eco-responsible, a steam powered cell phone! Or was this part of the advertising campaign around the new Harry Potter book? As I got closer, my wonder changed to dismay. He was holding a cigarette. How could this be in California? I though cigarette's had been banned! My search for a cellphone continues. Next, get to the gate, to head home for a few meetings on Friday, and nice weekend with the family and then back to California on Monday. Or so I thought... The boarding time comes and goes, and finally they announce that plane is being serviced for an electrical problem and if it isn't ready in 20 minutes they will cancel the flight. And then they mention that the plane has been in the service bay since last night for this problem. If 12 hours wasn't enough time to fix the plane, then I doubt 20 more minutes will help. So race to the service desk, ahead of 100 others, and discover that every flight to Boston for Thursday and Friday is booked. But no problem, they can route me through Chicago, and I might find a standby spot on another flight to Boston, there's three possibilities after I arrive. I agree, I haven't been to Chicago in a while. When I arrive in Chicago, the first thing I discover, is that 2 of the 3 flights to Boston have been cancelled. And the one remaining flight is running a little late. The plane at the gate ahead of the Boston flight (2 hours after its departure time), is still there. That flight is being rescheduled and the plane towed to the service bay. Needless to say, there are no standby spaces on the flight. A few hours later, I'm in some airport hotel, (the shuttles where broken, and it only took an hour to send a replacement). Hungry and ready for bed. What else do I have to do, I'll write a blog entry.... But you know, that idea of a steam power cellphone isn't bad. I wonder if its been patented yet? Posted at 07:50AM Jul 20, 2007 by rezippel in Personal | Comments[0]
Saturday Oct 14, 2006
Simchat Torah It's a couple of days early, by our synagogue had our Simchat Torah service today. The portions of the Torah are read in series during weekly services. This week we finish the Torah and start at the beginning, so we read the last few lines of Devarim (Deuteronomy) and the first few lines of Bereshit (Genesis). My sons are young, so to keep the interested (with all the singing and dancing) we explained the readings. Turns out, one of the favorite movies is Prince of Egypt so they were fascinated by Moses' last days, as well as being very sad that he actually died. But the very next moment, we have the creation of the world, and the usual discussion about on which day the big bang occurred; and how could there day and night before there were stars, etc. At anyrate, I was amazed at what interest there was in the bible sections... First, their hero from a Disney movie followed by science, with singing and dancing, and cookies to finish it off. Why wasn't synagogue like that when I was young? Posted at 01:22AM Oct 14, 2006 by rezippel in Personal |
Tuesday Oct 03, 2006
Smoot wins Nobel Prize! As one of those MIT alumni who lived on the Boston side of the river, I walked across the Harvard bridge at least four times a day for too many years. And, of course, know all too well that it's 364.4 Smoots plus an ear. When I heard that George Smoot and John Mather won the nobel prize today, I was excited to think about how the next painting of the smoot marks would be changed this year. Before, getting too wound up in this I thought to check the references a bit, and discovered that George Smoot wasn't the LCA freshman whose height was used to measure the bridge, but it was Oliver R. Smoot (could he be a relation?). While Oliver didn't win a Nobel prize, his career was most appropriate. He was chairman of the American National Standards Institute from 2001-2002 and President of ISO from 2003-2004. As for George Smoot's Nobel wining accomplishment, the image of the background radiation from the big bang that he produced, when explained to a layman like me truly inspires awe. In many ways, it is the photograph of creation! Posted at 11:08PM Oct 03, 2006 by rezippel in Personal |
Tuesday May 30, 2006
Advertising is Evil
I came back from a long business trip a couple of weeks ago, and what struck me was all the advertising I kept running into. It was on the walls of the airport terminal, on the coffee bug I picked up, on the TV monitors in the waiting area, etc. I thought I might get a break when I got on the airplane, but no, even the in flight shows included commercials! When I got home, I played with my sons for a bit and then they watched a TV show. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that they were more in tune with the commercials than real content of the the shows they were watching. After they went to sleep I watched a Red Sox game for the first time in quite a while. Not only were there commericals during the breaks in the action, but even during a pitch you could see the advertising on the stands behind the batter. I was pretty fed up. I hadn't realized how good I had it locked up in a conference room for a week drinking coffee, Dr, Pepper, and eating strawberry licorice and cookies. I don't mind seeing a mind seeing an ad every once in a while. Sometimes they inform or are amusing, like the current Apple ads. But more often then not they are annoying. Afterall, that's why God invented Tivo---to restore a balance with the evils of adverising and commercials. But then it hit me. My last refuge from commercials and advertising was the library. There are never commericals there, just books and people reading them. But today, the library is being replaced by the Internet (see the May 14, 2006 NYTimes article in the magazine section). And what's the portal to the Internet library? It's Google. And Google is constantly inserting advertisements around the results of my search. And when you look at business plans for startups these days, it seems the most common approach is that by using this nifty new technology they invented, they will create a unique community that can be used for targeted advertising (which of course, we will make unobtrusive but which the users will find irresistible). Isn't there a way to provide real value to your targeted community? Is advertising the only way to make money these days? Posted at 01:37PM May 30, 2006 by rezippel in Personal | Comments[2] |
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