Category: Personal

Gold Country Weekend

I had a great weekend.  Friends of ours have a second home up in the gold country and they invited Duke and I to spend the weekend with them. Friday night we took the scenic route up to Sacramento along the delta. We stopped at  Isleton  for dinner at the River’s Edge Cafe. We had a great home made lunch  there a few months ago and the home made pasta we had Friday night was also delicious.

On Saturday we all went to the Empire Gold Mine. It is a state park now but it is the site of  the oldest, largest, and richest gold mine in California. We toured the house and explored several of the old mine buildings including the black smith shop and the room containing a scale model of the more than 300 miles of tunnels in the mine. I’m always fascinated by these kinds of places where you can get a real sense of the technology and the history.

Saturday night after dinner we all sat on the back deck and enjoyed looking at the stars through Ray’s telescope. I got to see Jupiter and four of its moon. It was very cool.  It was a very relaxing wonderful weekend.

My First Day at Intuit

Today was my first day at Intuit. I did all the usual first day things like spend the day  in orientation and have a meeting with my boss. But the day started out horribly.  There is nothing like being late to your first day at a new job. I was supposed to meet my boss at 8 before orientation and instead barely got there by 8:30 when orientation started.  I just totally misjudged how long it would take. I allowed 45 minutes and it actually took about an hour and 15 minutes. There must have been an accident because traffic was awful.   Of course this wasn’t really the end of the world or anything  and my boss was very nice about it but I really hate it when I screw up. As I was walking up to the reception area all I could think was don’t let your first words to your new boss on your first day at Intuit be I’m sorry.

I have a meeting tomorrow morning at 8:00 and I’m planning to get there at 7:30!

Leaving Sun

I’ve taken a job at Intuit  and I’m leaving Sun. Wow, I can’t quite believe it is real. The job is an exciting opportunity and I am very excited about all the new challenges, but I am very ambivalent about leaving Sun. I have been here for 17 years. When I started at Sun I had two little girls 3 and 7 and my last name was Brown. Now 17 years later my youngest is going into her last year of college and will turn 21 in a few months, and my oldest has just finished two years of teaching elementary school. My life has changed dramatically. Having been divorced and remarried my last name is now Vermazen. 17 years is in a very real sense a life time. My time at Sun has been an amazing roller coaster. A high point has been working with absolutely phenomenal people who just awe me with their creativity, hard work and intelligence.

One of the things about working for a big company is that you can change jobs but not change employers. I’ve been a customer support manager, a software development manager, a configuration management manager, a real estate IT manger, and finally the IT director for Sun’s iWork program. For most of these jobs I am very proud of what I accomplished. For a couple of them all I can say is that they were low points on the roller coaster and real learning experiences.

Sun is an absolutely amazing company that I will always be proud to have been a part of. I have almost always felt like I could make a difference here and I  have never even for a moment doubted the reality of Sun’s high ethical standards.

Finally I am so grateful that Sun introduced me to blogging.  Creating a blog and being a part of Sun’s blogging community has been so much fun. I think I am hooked for life and I just hope I can create a successful blog away from the warm and nurturing environment of blogs.sun.com.   I don’t know how long my Sun Blog will be around.

Update 2018: Soon after Oracle bought Sun blogs.sun.com went away. I have hard copy of all my Sun posts but they are no longer available online.

A Community Builder and a Renaissance Woman

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what Tom Peters calls  brand. He says "We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc." So starting a new job and starting a new blog have gotten me thinking. I’m a community builder. In my job at Sun I really enjoyed being a part of the team that was accelerating the change to Java Desktop and Solaris 10 across Sun. I am also a renaissance women. I love having a variety of interests, I enjoy intellectual stimulation and I thoroughly enjoy writing about these subjects in my blog. To be interesting is  important to me. So my goal is to be a community builder and to be a renaissance women.

I’ve just finished reading Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. The book is about community building. It is one of those books that you are almost afraid to be seen reading because if you are building community and making friends for what they can do for you, then you are a schmuck. That isn’t what Ferrazzi advocates and it certainly isn’t me.  Benjamin Franklin is my role model. He had a wide variety of interests. Everything from electricity to creating a new country. He believed strongly in networking.Ferrazzi says  Franklin " believed that a group of like-minded, achievement oriented individuals could dramatically leverage each others success to do things otherwise impossible." I think that if Franklin were alive today he would be a blogger. He not only helped draft the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, but he was also a best selling author, ran a very successful newspaper, and was an inveterate writer. I know I would love to read his blog.

If you are interested in Franklin then I highly recommend Benjamin Franklin by Edmund S. Morgan . I read it several months ago but it is a favorite of mine. Morgan describes Franklin’s insatiable curiosity, the strong value he placed on being useful and his industry and frugality which Franklin saw not as a way to wealth but as a way to contentment. When I pulled the book off my shelf I found that I had written a  couple of Franklin quotes on  a piece of paper and left them in the book. The first quote makes me identify with Franklin: "I find I love company, chat, a laugh, a glass and even a song as well as ever." The second is just very true: "You can always employ time better than in polemics."