About Steve
HEA is now five years old and continues to innovate in the field of residential smart meter analysis. Steve spends much of his time figuring out how to improve the accuracy and efficacy of the online service, then managing the engineers who implement the ideas, and then debugging the new features.
Then the cycle repeats.
The best & worst aspect of running a home-based virtual business along with your wife is that home life and work life blend pretty seamlessly. Overall this works out really well (Lisa and Steve met & worked closely together at a startup in 1983) but sometimes when work is stressful it bleeds over into the home.
Thankfully when this happens the dogs know to ask for a walk.
Other activities below...
And they even let him drive for a while...
Caught up with lots of old friends at his
30th Stanford reunion.
Lots of trail running, including his second Double Dipsea race. This one in Yosemite, up to Glacier Point with some good friends.
Another shot taken in Yosemite, during our
trek around the High Sierra Camps.
Steve has become fascinated with Bitcoin (BTC), a new type of global currency. Last summer he bought a single Bitcoin for about $100. Since then the price has gone way up, and he has used it to pay small debts to friends and give it away as small gifts. After distributing $69 worth of BTC his remaining 0.87 BTC was worth about $700 at the end of the year! But who knows where it will go from here...
With best son Eric, above Grand Junction Colorado.
Steve regularly attends interesting talks at Stanford and other venues, but enjoyed four particularly interesting tours this year:
- Our town -- Los Altos Hills -- has one of the highest waste diversion rates in the nation: over 95%. This is made possible primarily through our waste management company, GreenWaste. Steve got a tour of their Material Recovery Facility and was amazed at how much treasure can be extracted from garbage.
- Electric Car Company Tesla is headquartered about a mile from our home, and their highly automated manufacturing plant is 45 minutes away. When some friends bought a Tesla Sedan, they were kind enough to invite an awe-struck Steve on an owner's tour of the factory and its hundreds of robotic workers. Steve had visited the same plant in 1991 when it was run by GM and Toyota. Huge changes!
- Steve joined a carpool for the nearly 3 hour drive to a fascinating tour of California's electric grid operator (Cal ISO). The tour was great, but Steve got a bonus: he was allowed to drive the Tesla Sedan all the way back to Palo Alto. Best car Steve's driven.
- Lisa and Steve joined a tour of a new power plant arranged by the MIT Club of Northern California. The state-of-the-art combined cycled 600 MW natural gas plant was amazing; one of the cleanest such plants and the first to voluntarily monitor its GHG emissions.
Steve shed a bunch of extra weight early in the year after an injury prevented running for several months. His diet plan of choice: lots of carrots. He's now back below his college weight and feels great. In addition to running and biking, he's been doing the "7 minute workout" fairly consistently, with good results.
And also finding time to read a bit... and new adventures with Lisa.
