Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s
Stanford
The semi-annual Board meetings were held every spring and fall, fantastic times to be in Palo Alto, near the Bay Area where Stanford is located. The meetings would start at noon on Thursday, allowing members to fly in that morning and end at noon on Friday, so they could fly home. However, since my wife and occasionally our son would join me, we’d spend the weekend heading off to the many wonderful tourist destinations in northern California. But that meant first spending the night in Palo Alto at a quaint hotel called the Garden Court. It’s our favorite hotel ever, with suites overlooking the courtyard and wood burning fireplaces in each room. We never fail to stay at this memorable hotel whenever we’re anywhere close to the Bay Area.
The hotel included a fantastic Italian restaurant called Il Fornaio, which we always enjoyed on the evening of our arrival. My wife relished in the shopping along University Avenue near the hotel, and our son loved the pizza at a place down the next block called California Pizza Kitchen, one of the first restaurants in the chain founded in 1984. I noticed with the advent of Covid, University Avenue is now walking only so the local stores and restaurants can expand outdoors to provide their wares in a safer environment.
While my wife and son were exploring Palo Alto, I’d be engaged in some very interesting and innovative technical subjects being undertaken by the researchers at Stanford. Our advice would be solicited about the need and usability of the new technologies and how to make then more customer oriented and user friendly. I can recall presentations and demonstrations on early speech recognition & translation techniques, artificial intelligence, stealth radar avoidance, robotic surgery, self cleaning ovens and of course their ground breaking research on the internet as described in last week’s blogpost. The university was even building a satellite to prove an Einstein theory. Touring the build site was very interesting as was seeing Stanford’s linear accelerator, aka atom collider.
During my stint on the Board, Stanford's Center for Integrated Systems was part of the School of Engineering and in charge of all the internet-related research on campus. I noticed during my prep for this blog that the Center has been renamed to Center for Internet and Society and transferred to the Law School! This move surprised me, until I watched part of the recent Senate testimony from the Big Tech CEO's about election censorship by Facebook, Twitter and Google. Lawyers follow the money! Check out this ex-Google exec about the social dilemma of the internet manipulating our minds.
But the best part of my Stanford relationship was learning from Silicon Valley’s best as they shared their insights: Apple founders Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Bill Hewlett, of HP fame, Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder who conceived Moore’s Law (computing power doubles every 18 months), etc. etc. That group sure beats the shameless threesome who testified during the recent Senate hearing.
Next week’s blog will delve into our sightseeing trips around northern California once the Stanford Advisory Board meetings were over.
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