Sequoia Hills Stables

My wife Jenny and her sister Marily are in process of opening a horse facility on Marily's place in Elderwood (a 200 person 'suburb' of Woodlake, CA).   This, all in, is a 20+ acre facility, with mare motel, riding arenas, hot-walkers, a vet hospital facility, and innumerable pastures, paddocks, and other parapherrnalia that horses like or require.  I'll post the website when it goes 'live' next month

Where it sits is at 600 foot elevation (the sea rise with global warming won't affect it) twenty miles northeast of Visalia, at the fork in the road for the main entrances to two spectacular National Parks, Sequoia and Kings Canyon.

Address = 37997 Millwood Road, Woodlake, CA 93286.  

Here's a picture of the back pastures, showing the High Sierra Kaweah range (13,000+ foot peaks, just west of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 states.)

ISI access and topics

Okay, shoulda mentioned how to find the ISI blog.   Type  Innovascapes.blogspot.com  and you'll find it.  I think....

What you might also find is "why", stated something about like this:

InnovaScapes is a contraction of "Innovative Landscapes" and a play on the idea of Innovation Ecosystems.  I think of innovation much more often as a local and specific set of activities than a broad sweep on the historic pantheon, and "landscape" captures that mood and perspective better than the all-embracing "ecosystem". 

ISI has several topics underway at the moment, some with commercial sponsorship, and some with a personal vector.  We'll have some active discussion, and some stimulating debate.  Topics might include the wonders of location-sensitve devices (your smart phone, tablet, and camera) which help you with social media, but give both authorities and 'bad guys' the chance to find and finger you. 

Or the idea that our emerging medical instrumentation for gene tracking and molecular measurement can help change the AMA (American Medical Association) fiction that COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) is 85-90% caused by smoking, when in fact smoking has been on the decline in America for three decades, and COPD is on the rise, now the third leading killer in America, higher than strokes or auto accidents -- and virtually no research into its true causes or treatments.

Similarly, the rise of the InterNet, while fueled by Tim Berners-Lee and his URL work at CERN, the brilliant TCP/IP work of Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Len Kleinrock, et al fifty years ago, and of course Netscape with Marc Andreasson (now on the HP Board, right?), was really installed and made nearly ubiquitous by much more prosaic work in the trenches (or would it be in the Hubs and Routers and glass fiber in the ground).  We will examine how the trench warfare unfolded, which elements mattered the most, and why and how they got done.

Why are these things important?  Who will care?  Can we in fact provide some useful service?  Time will tell, but I for one am as excited as I've been with any project I've ever undertaken.  Here's an invitation to ome along and join in....

Long time NO HEAR, or is it NO HERE

Well, somehow I got locked out of this blog by misunderstanding how gmail accounts shift around.  Haven't got it solved but I can get into this now to post.

The exciting news in the intervening 2 and 1/2 years could be summarized as --- "whoops, whew, WOW, whoops, WHEW, and Oh boy, here we go again"

I had a great five year run at Stanford, running the Media X program, leaving in July 2011 to become Chancellor of Cogswell College.  After getting an honorary PhD there in May 2012, and getting the school up from 130 full-time to 380 full-time students thjis term -- which got the school from desperate funding difficulty to 'break-even', I resigned from Cogswell to launch the InnovaScapes Institute ISI).

ISI will focus primarily on issues of technology and society, hopefully in general from a public stance, although I'll be seeking corporate and grant funding for much of our work.

Family-wise, lots to catch up on also.  The biggest news probably is that two of our grandchildren, Madi Hyde and Orin Orlopp, have entered college this year.  Madi, a lifetime Minnesotan, is enjoying a warmer winter in Portland, at Lewis and Clark College.  Orin, born in NJ, living in CO and AR, has selected a small liberal arts college, Lyons, in AR, about three hours drive from home in Bentonville.

Jenny and I are healthy (knock on wood), and eagerly anticipating more challenge and excitement in 2013.  All the best to you all