Personal Stories
« Previous EntriesThe Big Picture
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010One of my favorite books is an autobiography of Thomas Edison published around 1934 very near the end of his life. In it, the author relates the observation that the phonograph was perhaps Edison’s most radical invention. You see, at the time, no one even thought it was possible to record people’s voices. The idea [...]
Big Picture
Thursday, May 20th, 2010Every once in a while, there is something on the web that knocks my socks off.
As many of the readers of this Weblog know, I was once an astronomer; my PhD is in that field from the University of Virginia. During that time, I studied the structure of spiral galaxies (1), (2), (3) like [...]
Life and Thought
Monday, May 10th, 2010Time for a thinking piece. If you don’t like mushy stuff, skip this one.
Several people I know well have passed on in the last few months. And times like that make you reflect on their lives and your own.
I also urge you to reflect on how each of us must work to live [...]
Getting into Business
Sunday, April 11th, 2010A little remembered episode of my past is that I started a company called Netek in 1984. The “plan”, which was formally written down, was essentially the same as that of Finisar.
Except. That the plan called for us to invent, design, develop, manufacture and sell products for fiber optic network that we were certain that [...]
Watching a Team Win
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010Those of you who read this Blog may not know that I graduated from Butler University. Yes the same Butler that is now in the NCAA Basketball championship game. All of the other schools have 10,000 students or more (typically sizes are more than 20,000 students) but Butler has only 4,000. And more importantly the [...]
Green Home Video
Saturday, December 19th, 2009I have written about the green home in Tiburon … now here is a video!
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Remarkable Reliability and Longevity
Sunday, November 1st, 2009Over the last 30 years, one of the major trends is that American made cars have become more reliable and demonstrate longer lifetimes. Much has been made about how this was done because Japanese cars were already doing this well by the mid-1970s.
I remember growing up and the typical lifetime for an American car was [...]
Annual Report – Natural Gas
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009The Tiburon home originally had natural gas heating in 3 separate zones. It also had all of the hot water used for washing, showering and sinks warmed from natural gas. Finally the cook top stove burners were natural gas. The home is still divided into 2 separate addresses 1 Reserva Ln is the main home [...]
Annual Report – Electrical
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009The “green home” in Tiburon, CA has completed its first full year of operation and data collection so it is time to share its results with you.
This chart shows the most basic part of the results and it is the focus of this post. Results from our natural gas and water usage will follow in [...]
A Mighty Mind
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009Tonight, Lew Aronson passed after teaching us all how to fight cancer for the past 9 years.
Lew was ornery, never at a loss for words and the smartest, most diligent and cleverest fiber optic engineers that I knew in my 30 years in the field. He was Finisar’s chief scientist for most of that time [...]