Cornell reunion cycle

I just received the following post-card in the mail for https://www.cornell.edu/

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This round of reunions appears to target graduates in years ending in 2's and 7's

I recall that a couple of Anduril executives, Brian Schimpf and Matt Grimm https://www.anduril.com/anduril-leadership, are each Cornell graduates. It turns out that each appear to be 7's. Courtesy of Linkedin, viz., 

with this being their 20th with the 7 suffix. The CU lineage came to my mind after seeing them together in a presentation shortly after receiving this card. 

For this reunion round I'm targeting my 35th graduation anniversary with a 2 suffix (1/1992)

 

A 15 year gap between their graduation and mine which is not quite a generational gap (20-30 years), although it has definitely been a generation of graduates between my cohort in 1992 and the recent class.

This last point of generational gaps come to the fore for me when I bumped into the parody page  https://theonion.com/man-confident-he-wouldve-been-brave-enough-to-send-thumbs-down-emoji-in-cornell-group-chat/

I guess that I have inadvertently been 'brave' since I find myself often giving the thumbs-up emoji in Slack when I want to acknowledge a message. I confess that I had to Google the below explanation after reading the Onion headline above.

Maybe a potential use for personal ambient AI is to provide me a pop-up when I commit these faux pas in the future :)  

Beyond better instant messaging hygiene, it would be interesting to visit the Cornell campus since I haven't been there since 1992. I wonder if my EE haunt of Philips Hall, the proximate Upson Hall for comp sci on the engineering quad, and the hike to White Hall for math (if my memory holds) are still around.

And given the beauty of the region, Ithaca definitely qualifies for the saying https://alumni.cornell.edu/cornellians/ithaca-is-gorges/.  Hopefully Ithaca hasn't gone all Austin, TX, namely tie-die of "Keep Ithaca Weird". I can only absorb so much change in this era of break-neck AI dynamism. 

Another nice thing about Cornell is that my email address vjz1@cornell.edu is a forever address that is also backed by a free Gmail account with storage

Go Big Red.

UW pulled its free Gmail and storage for my email vzimmer@uw.edu, although it still supports forwarding. And now IEEE is separately charging for its Gmail to keep vzimmer@ieee.org alive. Luckily ACM is maintaining its forwarding vincentzimmer@acm.org. This IEEE change coincides with Intel Retiree organization 'retiring' email forwarding, so I'm now losing vincent.zimmer@intelretiree.com too. Oh well.

The transient nature of email accounts reminds me of the ephemeral nature of the internet. I sometimes snap pictures of web sites I cite since as this blog ages the links end up going stale as content ages off the web.

OK.  Enough random editorial for a Saturday.  Back to work.