SuperComputing 08, held in Austin, Texas, was a huge show and a huge effort for many of us at Sun, especially Rich Brueckner. The Sun booth was humming, attractions included Scott Tokar, a magician, and Rich’s Java Chopper, complete with biker chicks.
Tag Archives: what I do
The Glamorous Life
I’ve been told that some of my colleagues envy my job. I admit that it’s a lot of fun – and, when asked what I do, I focus on the positives – but right now I’m mostly tired. This month is the most intense I’ve yet had with Sun. Here’s what it’s looked like so far:
Oct 23: Flew to Minneapolis.
Oct 24, 27, 28: Filmed interviews with the SAM-QFS team at Sun’s Eagan, MN office.
Oct 29: Flew back to Denver, straight into meetings and more office time.
Nov 1-6: Filmed parts of Sun’s Data Management Ambassadors’ conference, fortunately being held near my “home base” office in Broomfield. Especially fortunate because I still had a lot to do organizing the SC08 Student party. Worked long office hours when I wasn’t behind a camera in a hotel conference room. (At least this particular conference room had huge windows, so I didn’t feel like I was in a cave all day.) When I was behind the camera, I was also usually doing something on my laptop, such as running the October stats on blogs and community websites.
Nov 8: Flew to San Diego.
Nov 9: Much-needed day off (it was a Sunday!), went to the zoo. Spent much of the evening on email, trying to finalize details for a blogging contest to be held around an important product launch the next day. Having received no word on a decision by 10:30 pm, I went to sleep.
Nov 10: Woke up and checked email again at 12:30 am, nothing. 5:30 am, still nothing, so I went ahead and mailed it, because the contest began at 6 am Pacific Time. Woke up at 7 to film an all-day ZFS Workshop at LISA.
Nov 11: Flew to Las Vegas for Sun’s Customer Engineering Conference. Lunch with Barton, toured the CEC show floor, hung out and had dinner with my OpenSolaris buds, declined to go to a late show with them, went back to my hotel room, watched House.
Nov 12: Filmed an HPC track that took most of the day, plus one other presentation. In the evening, participated in a Birds-of-a-Feather session on blogging. Disagreement was, er, lively.
Nov 13: After a very bad night’s sleep (my room at Caesar’s was right on top of a disco), got up at 4 am to catch a 6:22 am flight to San Francisco. Lynn picked me up, already dialed in to a staff meeting. In the afternoon, moderated the chat as Lynn’s presentation to Forum 2.0 was streamed online. Had a few ideas about how to do the moderator’s job better, will be writing about those later. In the evening Lynn and I had a meeting with Meena, then went back to our hotel for dinner. Had an extremely hot bath – the cold water didn’t work. At least the bed was very comfortable.
Nov 14: Up early again, interesting news on my iPhone. Hurried to get to Sun’s Menlo Park campus for Lynn’s second Forum presentation, then a dash to the airport for our flight to Austin. Arrived a little before 5, Diana about the same time from Denver, then ran into Matthew at baggage claim. Everyone’s coming to town for SC08. Got our cars, I went to Spankyville, where Ross was preparing dinner for a gang of us.
Nov 15: Up at 8 to catch up on emails and run some party-related errands, then on to film at Sun’s HPC Consortium all afternoon. Ended the day filming an interview with Dr. Jim Leylek. Had a quiet dinner with Dominic, went home and to sleep.
Nov 16: Up early again for the Consortium – first speaker of the day was Andy Bechtolsheim, so sleeping in was not an option! Left early (Peter took over the camera) so I could go help set up the venue for the party. More running around to pick up a tank of helium for the balloons and move our student helpers to the venue. Busy with preparations and then the party (which I think we can count as a success) until about midnight, went home and collapsed.
Nov 17: Woke up at 6:30, my brain immediately whirring madly through all the things I needed to do, though my body emphatically did not want to get out of bed. Made it back to the Consortium by 10 am to continue filming. Left again at 1:30 to go see Ross’ new home, have lunch, return the helium tank, and dash out again to film the opening of the SC08 show floor.
I hope to survive until Saturday, when I leave for warmer climes and something resembling a vacation. I should note that this month has been equally intense for practically everybody at Sun. We’re all looking and feeling a little ragged around the edges by now.
above: I did get to sit down long enough to have a caricature drawn at the OpenStorage Summit
Portrait of a Videoblogger
One of the activities at the Open Storage Summit party was to have our portraits drawn by talented caricature artist Doug Shannon.
I’ve been thinking lately about the differences between videoblogging and professional video.
Professional Videography vs. Videoblogging
^ filming at the Open Storage Summit after-party
I don’t claim to be a professional videographer (for one thing, I’m entirely self-taught). I do videoblogging, which is fundamentally different.
From my (very limited) experience, it seems that professional corporate video is, usually:
- thoroughly planned (and likely scripted) in advance;
- involves quite a lot of large, heavy equipment, with multiple people to set it up and run it.
- the people who do this know how to do media, but don’t necessarily know much about what or who they’re filming (nor do they need to).
- filming often takes place in a studio, which may need to be reserved well in advance, or in some other carefully-planned, controlled location;
- professional post-production (editing, compressing, and posting video) can take a long time
- all of this is expensive
Videoblogging, on the other hand:
- eh… not so planned. When I go to an event, I have an idea which talks I want to film, but things usually get added or subtracted at the last minute. Alongside the formal talks, I also try to grab interviews and other material.
- equipment is minimal and light, reasonable for one person to move around and manage.
- a videoblogger is part of the community, and therefore can see and take advantage of filming opportunities as they arise – or create them.
- shooting can take place anywhere – no reservation required.
- post-production is quick and dirty – the important thing is to get the material out FAST
- all of this is cheap
The Bi-Professional Couple: A Conundrum Close to the Bone
My life is lived in multiples.
I’ve read books, articles, and blogs about multicultural marriage, living, and child-raising. I have written about being a third-culture kid, raising a bilingual child, and living and trying to work in a foreign country.
But this is the big question, more difficult than any of the above: how can a marriage survive being made up of two people whose careers are equally important to each?
If you have ever been part of a two-career couple, you know how hard it can be to find jobs that make both of you happy in the same location, especially (but not only) when that location is far from home for one or both of you. When a couple expatriates for one member’s job, the “following” spouse may not even be allowed to work, depending on the working spouse’s visa in the foreign country.
When you follow a foreign spouse to settle in his or her country, there probably won’t be legal obstacles to your working (you may take on the citizenship of your spouse, or you can usually get a work visa), but there are many other hurdles: language, culture, job market, and your own feelings about who you are and what you want to do with your life.
When Enrico and I married in 1989, I gave up an interesting job just then getting off the ground (doing technical training in far-flung countries) in order to be with him in New Haven and give birth to our daughter. In retrospect, my “accidental” pregnancy was probably subconsciously designed to resolve our increasing conflict over my exotic (and from Enrico’s point of view, dangerous) travels: a baby was a reason we could both agree on for me to stay home.
And stay home I did: I was mostly a full-time mom for 18 months. I did not resent or regret this; indeed, one reason that I never had another child was that I would have wanted (and felt it fair) to do the same for any other child of mine, but, once I had got my career off the ground again, there was never a “right” time to take off 12-15 months.
Moving to Italy was, for many reasons, the obvious thing to do when we did it. Though Enrico, fresh out of a Yale PhD, could have landed a university position somewhere in the US, it would have been the usual long start to an American academic career: post-doc here, assistant position there, teach a lot, and pray for tenure.
The situation is very different in Italian universities: a ricercatore (researcher, the entry-level position) can stay in the same place as long as he or she desires, although (ideally) you eventually move up the ladder to become professore associato (associate professor) and then ordinario (full professor). Positions are few and promotion takes decades (and political savvy), but in the meantime you are guaranteed a stable, reasonably well-paid job in a single location. The teaching load is light, and Enrico can direct his own research as he pleases. Nice work if you can get it…
As for me, I didn’t have a strong desire to remain in the US, my putative homeland – I’d lived out of it as much as in it. I didn’t have a job to leave right then, nor was I established in any field. There was no strong reason for me not to move to Italy, and plenty in favor of doing so.
Enrico sought and won a university position in Italy, and to Milan we came.
I had no idea what work I might be able to do there (aside from the far-too-obvious: teach English), but I figured I’d figure something out, as I always had. In 26 years of being moved around the world mostly by others’ decisions, it had never occurred to me to express or even to have strong desires about the parameters of my own life. I simply responded as best I could to the situations in which I found myself.
It was mostly luck that I found a job in Milan; it took hard work and talent to develope that job into a career. But I was still in reactive mode: taking advantage of opportunities as they came my way, but not making any effort to create my own opportunities. It simply didn’t occur to me that I could.
The first proactive thing I did to influence my own future was the MBA (from the Open University, the world’s oldest distance-learning institution) that I began in 1999 and completed (with interruptions) in 2004. I had realized that I wanted a career in which I could really make a difference, and that an MBA was a basic requirement to thrive in the corporate world.
But it’s unlikely that I could have an important career in Italy. I work in high tech, and there’s not much original going on in high tech in Italy – not because there are no technical or entrepreneurial Italians, but because it’s so damned hard to do the American-style startup thing in Italy (which could be the topic of a long article in itself, but it would depress me too much to write it).
Many of the world’s large high-tech companies have Italian offices, but these usually concentrate on regional sales and support engineering. The things I’m good at are run mostly from US headquarters.
Twice during the Internet boom I tried to persuade Enrico that we should move to the US to let me pursue my career. The second time he agreed, reluctantly, to come with me for a year or two while I helped to launch Roxio, the software group being spun off from Adaptec in 2000-2001. For a number of reasons, that move was aborted, and I returned to Italy, beaten and frustrated, to the same distance-working situation in which I had previously felt so alienated and vulnerable. I quit after a few months, and would have been laid off soon thereafter in any case, as the bubble burst and the economic downturn began.
Fabrizio Caffarelli, my former boss at Incat Systems, is a rare example of a successful Italian high tech entrepreneur, and I was happy to join his new startup a few years later (as the consulting/tech writing gigs I’d had after leaving Roxio also dried up). I had high hopes for TVBLOB when it began, but four years in startup mode at a salary I could have equalled as a supermarket cashier… well, that got old, and personal circumstances conspired to force a change.
I began working for Sun Microsystems as a contractor in March of 2007; they hired me as a regular employee a year later, on the condition that I move to the US and work from an office.
I was ready to go. I had initially loved Sun’s willingness to let me, and many other employees, work from home. I still believe that this works very well for many people, especially those who have kids at home: workplace flexibility is a huge help in achieving the much-prized “work-life balance.”
But the year I had spent as a mostly long-distance contractor reminded me of all the problems I had experienced before, as a very long-distance employee of Adaptec. It’s hard to schedule meetings when you’re eight or nine time zones away from most of your colleagues; you end up having them late at night in Europe – not my best time of day, I’m a morning person. And when you can be neither seen nor heard by your colleagues… well, out of sight, out of mind, out of the decision-making loop – and, eventually, out of a job.
Conclusion: if I want a challenging job, I need to be in the US (or, at least, not in Italy). So here I am, with a job that I enjoy very much both for its current realities and its future possibilities.
But my life here so far is mostly about my job. So much for work-life balance (said she ruefully). It appears that I can have work or have a life, but not both. At any rate, I can’t have a regular home life with my husband, because his job is there, and mine is here, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to make the two meet.
And I don’t have an answer to that one.
Update, 2014: Enrico and I never did find a solution. We separated in 2009 and are now divorced.
Update, 2017: I have since found someone with whom I happily share both the personal and professional sides of me.
