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bio, travel

St. Barthelemy: The Return

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We last visited St. Barthelemy in December 2000/January 2001, when Jeet had just bought the property on Gouverneur Bay and threw a big New Year’s Eve party which reassembled most of the folks from the previous year’s Millenium Party in France. There wasn’t room for everyone at his place, so we fanned out across the island. I chose the cheapest hotel I could find, and that was still well out of my usual price range.

Before about 1997, I had never given much thought to an island vacation. My ideal holiday was to travel someplace such as India, where I had lots to see and/or old friends to meet. As an adult, I’m not a beachy type, though much of my childhood in Thailand was spent in the pool or the Gulf of Siam. Nowadays I don’t like swimming because I can’t see without my glasses, and I’ve learned that it’s not wise to let my fair skin burn.

But sometime during the dot-com boom, when I had been traveling from Italy to California four times a year for work, a lying-on-the-beach kind of vacation began to look appealing. Our first stab at it was Martinique, where we found plenty to do, but also spent a lot of time lounging and being served rum drinks, watching Ross splash in the pool with some French kids her age (who christened her “the Italian mermaid”).

We next went to Saint Maarten, where there was even less to do (though lots of good food to eat), and we enjoyed not doing it.

We spent Christmas of 2000 in Saint Maarten again, this time staying at the nudist beach, on our way to St. Barth’s. Liv Tyler and Puff Daddy tried and failed to crash the party, but it was thrown open to the public for the second set of music by the Afro-Cuban All Stars, and it seemed that the entire population of the island arrived, causing a historic traffic jam.

Since then, I hadn’t had opportunity nor great interest in returning to the Caribbean, but Jeet’s invitation came at exactly the right moment. I’d been planning to spend Thanksgiving in Austin with Ross, knowing I’d be exhausted after a very intense month of work for Sun. An island vacation isn’t quite the extravagance it seems when all you have to pay is the airfare – we were invited to stay at Gouverneur Bay. Along with as many other people as will fit; Jeet likes to surround himself with friends. (So do I, for that matter, though I don’t have quite as tempting a place to invite them to.)

It’s taking me some time to wind down (especially with a large layoff at Sun looming on the horizon), but this place is amazing. I hope eventually to remember how to relax. Let’s see, 11:48 am… a little early to get into the vanilla rum…

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bio, my life in tech

Sun’s SC08 Student Party

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The SuperComputing conference every year attracts computer science students from all over the world who participate in various ways: as volunteers, as competitors in things like the Cluster Challenge, as part of SC’s Education Program, and in a Broader Engagement initiative, run by Livermore Labs’ Computing Applications & Research Department. It’s a large and fascinating group, comprising students and educators from all over the world: China, India, Nigeria, Italy…

We wanted to give these students – current and future HPC developers – an introduction to Sun and our OpenSolaris HPC software developers’ stack. But they’re already working hard this week, so we didn’t want to lecture them. Instead, we threw a party!

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The Glamorous Life

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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

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bio, living in the USA, politics

The Streets of Colorado

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Last Sunday, a cold, dreary fall day in this part of Colorado, I went out canvassing to find out who’s going to vote for Obama. I arrived at the local HQ (a storefront in a strip mall near a Costco) around noon. A guy explained to me at length what I was supposed to do, over my increasing nervousness.

“Do I have to do this alone?” I asked. “I was told someone would be with me.” I didn’t feel confident about knocking on doors by myself. Having spent so much of my life overseas, most recently the last 17 years in Italy, I know that many standard American cultural cues pass me by completely unnoticed. And everyone’s armed in this part of the country (yes, including the liberals) – I didn’t want to miss something that might imply: “Get off my lawn before I blow a hole in you with my 12-gauge.”

Eric, the man who’d been training me, instantly agreed to go with me. On the way we chatted about more personal things and I learned, with no great surprise, that he, too, had been a Sun employee. He got laid off in July, calculated that he had enough money to retire early, and decided to devote his time to campaigning for Obama.

We had pre-printed sheets of paper with names, addresses, and (usually) political leanings for each of the people we were supposed to visit. These were organized by street and side of street (odds and evens), including a map showing the location of the targeted houses.

“Why are we going door to door instead of just calling?” I asked.

Eric’s an engineer, so he has studied the numbers behind his activities.

“This is more effective than calling. Studies show that, for every 14 doors you knock on, you persuade one voter. It takes 200 calls to do the same. This is a swing state, and Jefferson County has traditionally voted Republican. 200 votes could make all the difference here.”

“That’s a lot of doors,” I gulped.

We knocked on 34 doors in about 90 minutes that day. The people we had come to see were all listed as Democrats or undecided. We weren’t expected to call on any Republicans; the thought is that it’s too late in the game to persuade them. Now it’s mostly about making sure that people have their mail-in ballots and know what to do with them, or know where they can go for early voting (which starts Oct 20th in Colorado).

Many of the people on our list had already received their mail-in ballots, and some of those had already sent them in. Three or four refused our polite request to tell us for whom they’d voted. There are still people who feel strongly that this is a private matter, but Eric suspected that they had all voted for McCain and didn’t want to tell us that.

On the other hand, four or five told us they definitely had or would vote for Obama, and one said that her husband would also do so in spite of being a life-long Republican (they were both young).

We did the first street together, with me hanging anxiously behind, not liking the idea of disturbing people on a Sunday, though most took it well. At some places, someone was clearly home but did not answer the door.

Eric pointed out clues to the likely voting habits of the households we visited. A Subaru in the driveway indicated a liberal. On the other hand, 95% of the houses we visited or passed had four-wheel drive vehicles and/or trucks, so those aren’t necessarily a sign of conservatism. Every house seemed to have multiple dogs as well.

One house where I was just as glad no one answered had a jeep in the driveway hand-painted in camouflage, with various aggressive bumper stickers including one that said “Fuck Iraq” – an ambiguous statement at best.

We split the next street, one of us doing odds, the other evens. Eric was trapped for quite a while with a man who wanted to complain about the price of diesel fuel – the only canvasee who had shown much desire for conversation.

Then, frozen to the bone, we went back to the office. Happily, it’s supposed to be sunny and warm when I go out canvassing tomorrow.

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Americans’ Phobia of Socialized Medicine

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I am baffled by the people I encounter in this country who think that “socialized medicine” is evil. I’m not sure how they arrive at this conclusion. It seems that, for some, anything they can label “socialist” is automatically frightening. But we have state-run fire and police departments and military (among many other things), and the vast majority of Americans would agree that these areas of common human endeavor are best run by government.

Why, therefore, do so many instantly discard the idea that governments can effectively provide health care? Other countries’ governments are managing national health systems quite well. Do we have so little faith in the abilities of our own government?

I’ve seen socialized medicine working for my own family. I lived in Italy for 17 years (my Italian husband is still there), and have written about my (mostly positive) experiences with Italy’s national health system.

My father lives in England with his British wife, and the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has done very well by them. Just a few weeks ago, Dad had a $60,000 operation – paid for by the British government, and he’s not even a citizen! – to implant an electronic device which interrupts pain signals from his body to his brain: a last-ditch remedy for ten years of extreme, chronic pain due to arthritis. And it’s working.

In Italy, my mother-in-law had a mastectomy within days of a tumor being discovered, and her chemotherapy and related medications were free. When our daughter broke her arm, a compound fracture requiring surgery, the surgery, hospital stay, and follow-up care were free. When I had my own cancer scares, all the tests were done within days, and I paid less than 100 euros for the biopsy. I’ve been under treatment for glaucoma for years; with my doctor’s prescription in Italy, the medicine costs 2 euros a month.

Because health care is universal in these countries, medical privacy need not be a huge concern: you’re going to get treated, no matter what you’ve got. Whereas, in the US, you must jealously guard information about any chronic or genetic condition you may have, for fear that it will damage your chances for employment and insurance.

The Problem of Choice

Some Americans fear that a government-run health system would limit their choices, which is likely true. But is that such a bad thing? Too much choice can be as bad as too little, especially when it requires so much time and knowledge to understand what’s on offer and make an informed decision.

One of the most difficult transitions for me in moving back to the US has been precisely this. I’m an intelligent and highly-educated person, but simply comprehending my health insurance options (and, thank Sun, I have options!) has been largely beyond me so far. I have insurance, but that’s about all I know, pending further study that I haven’t had time for. I can imagine how overwhelming this must seem to someone much younger (or older) and/or less experienced than I.

In Italy, things are a lot simpler. You choose a family doctor from a limited list of local practitioners, most likely someone whose office is convenient to your home. When you’re sick, you visit that doctor during his/her office hours (some by appointment, some you just sit around and wait). If you need a specialist or tests, the family doctor writes an authorization and you schedule an appointment, which will be available later or sooner depending on how busy your local providers are and how urgent your medical situation is. I once scheduled a routine mammogram 8 or 10 months in advance, but when I needed one in a hurry for a suspicious lump, it was performed within 24 hours. (NB: Bi-annual mammograms are free for all women over 45. Socialized health systems are big on preventive medicine, because it makes economic sense.)

And if you want choice in Italy, you can pay out of your own pocket to go to whatever practitioner you like.

Of course, no system is perfect. Malpractice can happen anywhere. My father-in-law was probably killed in Italy by an anesthesiologist too old to be administering an epidural. My aunt’s botched hiatal hernia operation (in Austin, Texas) led to ten years of agony and, eventually, her death. Malpractice suits are rare in Texas, so she never got the money needed to help fix what the doctor screwed up. Penny-pinching by the Medicare system (America’s version of national health, available only to the elderly and used only by those who have no choice) likely exacerbated her problems and also contributed to her death. Being poor and uninsured limits your choices far more than a national health system does.

Given all this, I don’t understand why so many Americans have such a knee-jerk negative reaction to nationalizing health care. Can anyone explain this to me?

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