San Diego

Written: April 12, 2004
Last Updated: April 13, 2004

Joe, Steve, Sukumar and I check out the Tribal Digital Villages in San Diego County.

This weekend, I flew down to San Diego to check out the Tribal Digital Village project in North San Diego. Sukumar, one of the Fellows in the DVF Program, spearheaded the project when he was an executive at HP. Three years later, the Tribal Digital Village is blossoming and ready to take the next step on its own.

The headquarters to the Tribal Digital Village is home to a 45Mbps connection to the Internet. From there, Lucent radio systems broadcast Internet signals to various reservations across North San Diego Country. These signals are collected at and beamed across the reservations using 802.11b wireless technology. The entire network infrastructure was designed and built by tribal community members, including Matt Rantanen, a friend of mine from the old Blue Mountain days.

Earlier during the weekend, I hung out with friends from high school, including Jerry, Dave, Barrett, and John. I toured Joe around downtown La Jolla; he and I got a kick out of seeing the cute little seals at the La Jolla Cove. They are so fat and cudly on the beach; in the water, however, they are like guided torpedoes!

Geoffrey Chase sat next to me on the plane ride back to San Jose. He is the Dean of Undergraduate Education at San Diego State University. We had an enlightening conversation about the future of education and the importance of interdisciplinary classes for undergraduates. My most memorably classes at Stanford were those that had students from various disiplines such as mechanical engineering, computer science, business, and law. I feel strongly that incorporating interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary coursework into the undergraduate education will do wonders to help prepare students for work (and life) in the 21st century. We've got to get away from the old ways of didactic teaching from the lectern.

More to write later. In the meantime, enjoy the photos.


Jerry, David and me	La Jolla Cove	Joe at the end of the pier
Blubbery mass of seals at the Cove	Joe McCannon	So cute and blubbery!
Joe points at a seal	Is this why Bostonians love San Diego?	Clapping seal
Barrett and me (photo: Joe)	Sara and her cousin	John Blake
At the Tribal Resource Center	Ramesh Srinivasan	Sukumar, Joe, and Steve
Checking out the Tree	The lone iMac among a sea of HPs	The net op center and coffee room
Beyond Sukumar is the radio tower	Hiking up	The San Pasqual radio/wi-fi tower
Overlooking San Pasqual Indian Reservation	Radio tower	Joe and Sukumar
Ramesh	San Pasqual	The Tribal Resource Center
San Pasqual Indian Reservation	Rincon Casino and Resort	Me and Matt (photo: Joe)
Joe, Sukumar, Mia, and Matt	The NOC	Coverage map
Jeff and his PCs	Radio transmitter	Matt Rantanen
Tribal High School	Mary Ann, head of the Tribal HS	Pacheco Memorial
View of La Jolla Reservation	Going to the next tower	It will just be a minute!
Hiking up	Almost there!	This is where the signals go
No, this is where the signals go!	Solar powered	Palomar Observatory
Palomar Observatory	Geoffrey Chase of SDSU

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