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HumourIf at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you. A closed mouth gathers no foot. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same day. [Gratefully received from Holger Lubotzki] 50 Years in Libya!I have been notified of a forthcoming Slb publication to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Slb's activity in Libya. I understand that they are looking for anyone with personal memories or especially photographs from the late 50's to 70's, and are also interested in personally interviewing anyone with stories to tell. If you would like to contribute please contact Dominic Haughton in UK or Gianluigi Moroni in Tripoli Use of the My Brothers list
On BrothersReunited you cannot send emails to large numbers of members, unless they are in your My Brothers list. This is a deliberate restriction to reassure members that joining Brothers will not increase their Spam count.
There was an instance recently where someone added a large numbers of members to his My Brothers list purely for the convenience of using our mass email facility.
I would like to request that members do not follow this example, as it is a misuse of the feature - if there is something you want to broadcast please contact myself.
Obituaries
No news is good news!
I have not been notified of the passing of a single Brother since our last Newsletter! If you do see a profile of a Brother on the site that you know to be Deceased please do let us know, so that we can update the profile and notify his/her Brothers.
Windows XP on Macintosh!Further to my long discussion on Search (see right) the good people at Apple have included search in the operating system (OS X) in the form of Spotlight, and I hear that Windows Vista may do the same. I may soon get to try all these options - Apple recently launched a range of Macintoshs based on Dual Core Intel Chips. Initially they could not boot Windows but a competition was created to solve that problem, and a team just collected the prize of $13,854. (The prize was sponsored in part by Jawasoft - our name is on the third line of sponsors). The instructions (not for the faint of heart) are Here. When I joined Slb all the engineers had Macs - maybe it is time to go back...:-) Lost your Password?If you have forgotten your password and are unable to access the site, there is a simple solution. Go to the home page at http://www.brothersreunited.com and click the link where it says "Click HERE to reset your password". Enter the email address we have as your private email address (the one this newsletter was addressed to) exactly as shown. Your password will be reset and the new one sent to you. However if you have changed email providers (or changed employers) drop us a line and we will update your details and reset your password for you. Of course you should not be reading this if we have an obsolete email address for you... |
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Slb Alumni in the Oscars!  It is not often that I get to lead with a headline like this, but I was notified by new member Charlotte Lin that in the 2006 Oscars in February, not just one but several Slb Alumni were recognised, in connection with their work with animation company Pixar.
The Variety news release is available as a PDF Here or you can find it online Here.
The following mentioned names are Alumni:
Before you ask - no this was not an unusually talented Well Test Crew (not that all Well Test Crew's are not talented of course) but these Alumni worked at a short lived Schlumberger Palo Alto research lab originally called FLAIR.
Intrigued I fired up Google and found that FLAIR stood for Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research (wow - that long ago!), later renamed to Schlumberger Palo Alto Research. It was founded in 1980 and was a neighbour to the more famous Xerox Palo Alto research facility that developed dozens of innovations in computer graphics (not least the idea of a mouse and onscreen windows 'borrowed' by Steve Jobs and later 'borrowed' again by Bill Gates...)
Thinking back I do remember being instructed at RISE-2 by Jon W Roestenburg around 1988, regarding a Schlumberger artificial intelligence package for dipmeter interpretation, that was written entirely in LISP and ran only on a dedicated Xerox Lisp machine. Of course this was when a CGR bubble jet printer cost $80,000 and I thought little of it at the time, but now it all comes together - a tenuous link between the glamour of the Oscars... and RISE-2 in Medan, North Sumatra!
I am sure that many, many ground breaking innovations came out of the Palo-Alto lab - but how can they compare to being honored at the Oscars? I am surprised (and honoured) to find so many of our illustrious Brothers as members, and apologise if any of you are taken aback to be featured in this way. I do hope that you all made a Squazillion dollars out of the much deserved success of Pixar?
Only Geeks Past this point...
At the risk of being deafened with cries of 'get a life', check out this bit of Internet History (found while researching FLAIR above). It is a 1985 document describing the then ARPA-Internet (later to become the Information Superhighway or plain Internet). It contains the IP address range of every single organisation then connected to the internet (including Schlumberger in several forms). Can you imagine? Every IP address on the net in a printable document! How things change...
PS
I nearly forgot - you can find Andy Witkin and Michael Kass's names in the credits for The Incredibles. How cool is that?
Schlumberger LAS Marketing Team I was sent this shot of the LAS Sales Team by Frank Kelly:
Things have certainly changed since the I was an employee - well done Marketing!
Growth not Affected by AlumniHub Over two months since the Slb alternative to BrothersReunited came on the scene membership growth continues unabated:
Which is surprising since AlumniHub recently announced that they are growing at over 100 members a day, with 4300 members as of March 1st. It would appear that we are complementary as many members must be signing up for both sites.
Software of the Month Yahoo Desktop Search
Six months ago I raved about the Google desktop search tool. However it has some limitations (especially when searching my Gigabytes of email archives) and even the new Google Outlook toolbar doesn't solve that problem.
Enter Yahoo Desktop Search based on the popular X1 search engine, gives you a tabbed interface and lets you search on any combination of fields. Results are listed as you type, letter by letter, and it previews the contents of most file types within the search interface which means that often you do not need to launch the application.
When searching for emails I can limit searches by From or To names, while it has a whole separate tab for searching for documents that are attachments in emails. I can't imagine how I survived without this...
The long boring bit...
Search is in the news almost daily it seems. Back in the very early days of the internet, and right through the .COM bubble, pundits all over the world were trying to work out what would be the 'killer app' - what revolutionary application of web technology would change the way we live and work, as the spreadsheet had, or email after that?
To support their theories, whether it was supermarket shopping from home, telecommuting or the more bizarre .COM offerings they were constantly searching the internet, and increasingly relied on the search engines like Alta Vista, Excite, Yahoo and later Google. At first the Index type sites like Yahoo and Excite seemed to have the edge - there everything was indexed manually or semi manually into subject areas taking a lot of the errors out of searching. Alta Vista (an offshoot of DEC back then, when all our logging systems were also DEC based) was perhaps the first site to show the power of text search as we know it now. Then Google appeared with their 'Page Rank' algorithm and the rest is history...
Still until very recently nobody realised how important search was; how search was the next killer app, since they took it for granted. However with the improvements in search accuracy brought by Google, the internet was redefined. I can now turn to my PC and expect to find the answer to almost any question - any qestion at all - in just a few clicks! When everyone got excited about knowledge management in the '90's it was never like this - back then the experts were busy creating databases, defining knowledge taxonomies and categorising information as a library does. Yet Google puts Petabytes of knowledge at my fingertips with just a few words!
Now that people are accustomed to having almost any answer at their fingertips they have started to demand the same on their own PC. As well as Google desktop and Yahoo Desktop Search there is also a tool available from Microsoft (MSN), but the reviews were not glowing and I have not tried that.
Rgds
Ewan Makepeace
info@brothersreunited.com
http://www.brothersreunited.com
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