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.

33 years in the Panopticon, Books, et al

This is the inaugural blog entry of 2025. I used to try to have at least one posting per month, but the last couple of years have demonstrated something of a slowdown.

In lieu of my Anniversary.Next^ postings like https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2024/02/27-or-anniversarynext12-ai-runtime.html which tracked the latter portion of my Intel journey, I have to find another temporal indicator to inspire a posting.  

To that end, Monday 2/24/25 made 33 years of working full-time post undergrad (2/24/1992). Someone who I admired a lot and retired on the same day from MS contacted me recently to check-in. I told him that I re-entered the workforce and he replied with "RETIREMENT FAIL!" I opined that maybe it's a case of a prisoner that misses his prison cell? Speaking of cells, I now have a named one:

Another quote I recall was that if you are still working in tech in your 50's then you are 'doing it wrong.'  Oops. From Intel "Rule of 75" for retirement to the IRS "Rule of 55" for 401k's, quite a flurry of "Rules of..." these last 6 months.

To move from corporate and government 'rules' into levity, an icebreaker event that occurred a couple of months back was a bit amusing. It entailed a large business conference call where participants were asked to share their favorite reality TV show in the Teams poll. The host berated the crowd for the many mentions of Severance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_(TV_series) in the result stream as demonstrating a misunderstanding of the question. I personally don't believe the respondents were so confused after all. "Perks" anyone https://www.teamblind.com/post/Microsoft-Perks-7yf2EYnJ https://severance.wiki/perks?

BTW I've only seem fragments of Severance when passing by my younger daughter watching it so I may have have drawn some false equivalences from my scant data.  I'm just saying.....

Speaking of questions, the in-person q/a with sci-fi author https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow were quite interesting at a local book store.

The q/a overlapped many of the points he made in https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/26/cory_doctorow.

I soldiered through the long line to get an autograph at the end of the evening

and mentioned that I worked on UEFI. I wanted to stimulate a conversation given some of the points he made online in venues like https://doctorow.medium.com/your-computer-is-tormented-by-a-wicked-god-e90205ed80d7 and https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/, viz., 

After I told Corey what I worked on, he asked where. After the latter response I could see that he tensed tensed up.  I eased situation by saying his voice was important, especially with the passing of folks like Ross Anderson https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2024/03/a-legend-passes.html and his positions on the topic https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2011/09/20/trusted-computing-2-0/.  

Doctorow had a lot of good quotes in his talk, such as "you cannot reason someone out of a position into which they haven't first reasoned themselves into." I should dig into my notes and share out a few other of the fragments from that evening.

From 3rd Place books back to one of my favorite locations at Microsoft, the Microsoft library

And visiting with some former Intel colleagues now working at AMD and non-Redmond MS site, respectively.

Again, sometimes on these cross-campus treks I stop at the Microsoft Library in building 92. It's interesting to see which of the firmware books have been checked out at various times, viz., 

Sticking to the topics of books, at my local building, co-worker Jose visited again after having 

our Thanksgiving time https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2024/11/turbulent-weather-books-and-new-jobs.html posting to get his trio of firmware-related Apress https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7974-8 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7939-7 books signed.

The security book I'm holding has a section on Rust https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4

as does https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7974-8

As such, it was nice to see Rust and firmware mentioned in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VgptLwP588

Good stuff.

On a sad parting note on the topic of technical books, Stuart Douglas

passed away recently.

After a career at Intel working on things like RMX, he pivoted into technical publishing. He was my contact at Intel Press for a series of publications, including the 2006 first edition of Beyond BIOS https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-BIOS-Implementing-Extensible-Interface/dp/0974364908

the UEFI Shell https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1934053147/

Beyond BIOS 2nd edition https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-BIOS-Developing-Extensible-Interface/dp/1934053295/

the UEFI edition of the Intel Technology Journal (ITJ) 

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/research/2011-vol15-iss-1-intel-technology-journal.pdf 

the SIMICS ITJ edition that included the Driver Synthesis paper 

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/research/2013-vol17-iss-2-intel-technology-journal.pdf

and the embedded IOT book https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-0070-4

My participation in the 2013 ITJ was close to the end of Intel Press. The reason that the Apress book mentions Stuart and has so many Intel authors circa 2015 is that Intel Press closed down in 2014 os so. I chronicled some of the arc of Intel Press in https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2021/01/books-and-computers.html.  This closure was part of the austerity (SET or ACT or...?) under BK AFAIK. My final communication with Stuart was about the Secure Firmware Book https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4 book where he had introduced Jiewen and I to the Apress folks and helped with the proposal for that 2020 text

It looks like Stuart's Linkedin page is still active, though

And speaking of LI, I sometimes find 'interesting' bread crumbs of visitors to my site. 

A recent list of visitors looks mostly usual other than the USG viewer at the bottom

At least it was 'dept of state' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_State and not 'dept of justice' or some such :)

Speaking of web metrics, another milestone involves the PQC SPDM paper https://www.mdpi.com/2410-387X/6/4/48 reaching 10k views as of 3/25/2025.

And then there was 30

for my sporadic IEEE membership since my Cornell undergrad days.

Nice round #'s to close this inaugural 2025 blog entry.

fin

books & old age

Let's start out with 'books.'  

When supporting the activity https://community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Products-and-Solutions/Security/How-Secure-Boot-helps-protect-against-bootkits-used-in-malware/post/1337354 and the linked video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqC332VCgYI I was reminded of my many office-mates during the work-from-home, namely

 

'books.'  I thought that the confinement of working from home would give me more of a chance to catch up with my reading backlog, but invariably the work-load seems to have increased with the time saved from having done my commute.  

Also, the shelves and my person are much more cluttered and in shambles that a similar view from a couple of years back 

(versus today)

I am a bit comforted by this disparity of 'owned' to 'read' books, though, after reading sentiments like Umberto Eco and his anti-library https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/

"The library should contain as much of what you do not know".  

On that theme of variety, to me it's important to sample the humanities, such as good literature and philosophy, to remind myself what it means to be human, as it is to dive deeply into both my technical domain and the adjacencies. The latter is especially important as innovation often happens at the seams between two domains, and texts that go deep into my domain are often rearview mirror & retrospective, not forward looking. Forward looking includes fusion and leverage of alternate domains into my field.  Think some technique of mathematical logic that can be applied to system software, for example.

Another book that has pleased me during this confinement is "Software Engineering at Google" https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book. Although a read the dead tree version, a colleague let me know this week that there is a free PDF download, too. In addition to leveraging many aspects of the wisdom therein for my day job, such as code review practices, I really enjoyed the 3 'always'.  Always deciding, always scaling, and always leaving. The first helps but not falling into analysis paralysis and admiring problems too long but instead just 'doing something.' The 2nd I use to ensure that my activities can have the largest leverage & impact. And the final one, 'always leaving,' seemed a bit confusing at first blush. Given the 'great resignation' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation and other perennial wars for talent, this struck me as something corporations wouldn't endorse. In closer reading, though, 'always leaving' really means doing your job in a way that you can 'leave' for a broader role, typically within the same organization. In absence of mentoring folks, building a bench, documenting you work, etc., you are stuck in the same role and cannot leave as you may become a Single Point Of Failure (SPOF). The latter is not good for the business, especially given the 'hit by a bus' risk and other reasons someone might leave. Sometime I see folks 'Always digging in' versus 'leaving' where they relish the guru/goto person status and their singular ability to fulfill a role. That's a corporate anti-pattern IMHO. To me I try to embrace this sentiment of always-leaving through well-commented code, documentation (e.g., specifications, design documents, white papers, papers, books, prezo's,....) and most importantly, interaction with colleagues. 

Books are also something of a lifestyle, too. Living in the Seattle area and with the advent of so many online purchasing opportunities, the brick-and-mortar bookstores are becoming rarer. Growing up in Houston I often found refuge in the dusty, disorganized shelf of the local Half-Price Books which was within bicycling distance. Once I could drive, my choices became even broader. After moving to the Pacific Northwest in 1997, my favorite haunt was the Half-Price Books on Roosevelt in the University District in the shadows of UW Seattle. I would often visit that store, both as part of sojourning from the south sound to Seattle for my masters work in the late 90's and as an excuse to go north. The store had the advantage of receiving stock from the local tech worker diaspora and both students and teachers from UW. I miss that haunt https://www.dailyuw.com/opinion/article_33647c22-1a7b-11e7-8490-679e314f85e7.html. Now that my daughter is living on campus at UW, I have a new favorite reason to visit the area, of course. 

So with time things change stores close, and other occurs mark signs of 'old age' increasing.

Another aspect of my biography in the first link above also mentions retro computing. I have regrettably accumulated an original IBM portable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Portable_Personal_Computer, a 21264 Alpha server, an HP dual-socket Itanium, .... and too many more to mention. These computing devices also remind me of the arc of technology. I still recall how I was in awe of companies like DEC in 1988 or so when I was a electrical engineering student at Cornell and many DEC engineers were allowed to take a year off to study for a 'master of engineering' degree at Cornell. I also read about the accomplishments in IEEE journals and even acquired my first IEEE 'student' membership while an undergrad.  Below is a status from my present IEE profile history:

Start Date: 01-Nov-1990 | End Date: 31-Dec-1992 Fast forward to the 21st century and paper https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9218694    Date of Conference: 20-24 July 2020 Almost 30 years from 'student member' to having a publication hosted by an IEEE venue.  Quite the span of time. Given that span of time, you'd think I would generate the energy to apply for 'senior member' or somesuch, but like my career, advancement in that domain seems sluggish these days. Speaking of spans of time, I also just qualified for Intel's 'rule of 75' https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/program/employee/documents/irmp-serma-spd.pdf  Or one of the benefits for 'retiring.'   So now I'm setting on 30 years of retro computing and a tech career with things like 'retirement' options sitting in my inbox.  Quite the passage of time indeed. Speaking of time, better quit blogging here and get back to work.