Sunday, December 06, 1998

Dateline: Stanford - Scott McNealy, Kerri Strug, and Job

Well, it's been a hectic week, and tomorrow is my first final. Here's a quick update.

Last Thursday, Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems gave a talk at the Stanford Business school. He is quite a character and it was really neat to hear his thoughts on the computer industry, especially since the AOL-Netscape-Sun deal just went through a few days earlier, and Sun's continuing involvement in the antitrust and Java cases against Microsoft. McNealy got an MBA at Stanford in 1980, but said he should have dropped out like Bill Gates and gotten a head start on the competition.

Also, I will start a part time job in January, working at SRI (Stanford Research Institute), working on Java component software for middle school math curricula. I'll be lowering my course load a bit for Winter and Spring quarters.

SRI pioneered areas such as modems, TCP (one of the first two nodes on the ARPAnet, predecessor to the Internet), magnetic ink encoding, hypertext, artificial intelligence, and wireless networks, among other things. I will also get a PowerBook as my computer, and be able to bring it home with me. :)

And the suspense is finally over... today I met Kerri Strug. She was just leaving to go jogging and I managed to catch her and say hi. She seemed like a pretty nice person.

Oh, and in sports news, the men's water polo team plays USC for the national championship today. And women's volleyball beat SE Missouri State and Notre Dame to advance to the Sweet 16. Next up is Texas...

OK, back to work...