News & Analysis
A Christmas in the Sierras
Rick Merritt
12/28/2012 10:24 AM EST
A walk in the wilderness
Also over dinner, I met a young man who just graduated from Cal Poly and by a lucky turn of events landed his first job at Lab 126, the secretive Silicon Valley design center for Amazon’s Kindle family. I also overheard a passionate conversation about RF circuits between a young engineering grad and a seasoned veteran.
I struck up a conversation in the fireplace room with a man I had met on the trail. He turned out to be a scientist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Plenty of good science is still being conducted on many fronts at the facility, he said. His department has learned to work with crystals as small as a micron on a side, using x-ray lasers to zap them to unlock secrets of their atomic structure.
The best parts of my trip were two days out in the wilderness a mile or so from the lodge. One day I blazed a trail on cross-country skis around a frozen lake through knee high snow. On my last day, snowshoes carried me over a still-running creek, deep into the forest where a white jackrabbit ran across the trail.
From time to time I would turn off the music on the MP3 player that fueled my efforts. I listened to the lonely sound of the winds caressing the Sierra peaks in the distance.
On Christmas morning, I hiked a mile or so down snow covered Highway 40 to where I could see a distant ridge beyond Donner Lake. I watched as a rosy finger touched the ridge line. Before jogging back to the lodge for a hearty breakfast of oatmeal, bacon, potatoes, fruit and eggs I stopped for a quiet moment of gratitude for what seemed to me to be the greatest gift of all—another day of life.
Next: Kid-sized igloo
I struck up a conversation in the fireplace room with a man I had met on the trail. He turned out to be a scientist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Plenty of good science is still being conducted on many fronts at the facility, he said. His department has learned to work with crystals as small as a micron on a side, using x-ray lasers to zap them to unlock secrets of their atomic structure.
The best parts of my trip were two days out in the wilderness a mile or so from the lodge. One day I blazed a trail on cross-country skis around a frozen lake through knee high snow. On my last day, snowshoes carried me over a still-running creek, deep into the forest where a white jackrabbit ran across the trail.
From time to time I would turn off the music on the MP3 player that fueled my efforts. I listened to the lonely sound of the winds caressing the Sierra peaks in the distance.
On Christmas morning, I hiked a mile or so down snow covered Highway 40 to where I could see a distant ridge beyond Donner Lake. I watched as a rosy finger touched the ridge line. Before jogging back to the lodge for a hearty breakfast of oatmeal, bacon, potatoes, fruit and eggs I stopped for a quiet moment of gratitude for what seemed to me to be the greatest gift of all—another day of life.
Next: Kid-sized igloo
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Robotics Developer
1/4/2013 2:21 PM EST
I think that Tony's comment on the need for HP to tap an insider to run the company is very interesting. I can only assume that the board selected the outsider CEOs to bring about change or to foster new thinking. It seems that for many working in a company that bringing in a new upper level management person has negative connotations. I am not sure if this is warranted but oftentimes the newbie "shakes things up" and remakes the upper management team in their own image. In some cases this can bring much needed life / new ideas, in others it can start a cancer that will kill productivity and effectiveness of the organization over time. Never having been at that level of an organization I often wondered why things were done and what were they thinking.
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