I opened my Facebook stream of updates this morning to find this notice amongst others… Sigh! :-( BTW… One of the many, I am sure, gatherings of friends for drinks took place yesterday! (Thanks to Kendra for the photo) Read more [...]
People started posting their condolences on Lee’s Facebook timeline so I guess it’s ok to post this note now. Earlier this morning I received the sad news that my good friend and colleague at Microsoft, Lee Dirks, and his wife, Judy, were killed in a tragic accident in Peru. Their …
We spent 5 days on the road. Mary, Tini, Nuno, and I went to Zion and Bryce canyons in Utah. We flew to Las Vegas, stayed for a night, got our rental, and then drove by lake Mead and Hoover Dam, before settling at Ponderosa ranch for few days. The …
Jim Gray (1944-2012). Here’s to a wonderful human being, an amazing scientist, and a great role model. I am so honored to have known, have worked with, and have had him as a mentor in Microsoft. Jim was the one who advised me to move to the US and join …
It was more than 18 months that I moved to the Technical Computing organization inside Microsoft. I had joined a startup team that worked on building a platform for large-scale compute and data processing on top of Azure. It was an amazing experience. We worked hard, produce great results, and …
The last weekend of January I traveled to California to meet with Jim and Emil for a weekend of skiing at Squaw Valley. We were treated with an excellent weather on Saturday and amazing new 20-30cm snow on Sunday. Soooooo much fun! I hadn’t seen my pal Jim for a …
/**/ Well, after feeling extremely honored as a result of the Visiting Professor appointment, I thought it might be good to bring myself down to earth as fast as possible. So I asked my family to send me few photographs from my childhood. It’s always good for one to remember …
I arrived at home after a fantastic weekend in New York. Since my cell phone had run out of battery while I was still at the JFK airport, I was only able to check my email after I got home. The first message in my mailbox: Subject: Professor Savas Parastatidis …
Few interesting things happened today: I received my copy of “REST in Practice”. It wasn’t as a big moment as when my PhD thesis was printed (despite Jim’s attempts to stress me out at the final moment with his “tick tock tick” soundtrack) but it was still quite a significant …
/**/ It’s been two months since my last travel/music post. I am in a hotel in Athens waiting for the hours to go by before my return flights to Seattle tomorrow so I thought of recording some of my activities/travel/festival highlights over the last couple of months. There was that …
/**/ It’s been two weeks since Coachella 2010 but I only now got the chance to blog about the experience. Work and the focus on finishing “REST in Practice” have kept me really busy. The Coachella festival is definitely not Glastonbury, not even close! It occupies a very small space …
/**/ Remember the “No pants light rail ride”? This time we did a “Choo Choo train” in downtown Seattle :-) Like before, it was organized by the “Emerald City Improv”. That was last Sunday and it was soooo much fun. There were so many surprised and/or laughing faces of people …
/**/ It’s been some time since my last “travel” blog entry. I still plan to write about the fun/skiing week in Italy but I am not finding the free time to finish the video I am editing :-( Last weekend, I rode my motorbike to Vancouver to experience some of …
Today at yoga (yes, I woke up at 5.15am again for a 6.30 class ), our lovely instructor Jen shared a poem with us that I really liked: “To laugh is to risk appearing a fool, To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach out to another is to …
I use my social streams and digital recordings of what I do in real life as part of a personal mutli-year investigation into semantics and digital memory. For some time now, my Twitter steam was mirrored to my Facebook one and archived on my blog, as part of “life as …
/**/ Last Sunday, Michele, Dave, and I participated in the “No Pants Light Rail Ride” event. Similar events take place in major US cities every year. This one was the first one in Seattle. It was an absolute blast. We had such a good time! Just looking at the expressions …