The Auburn Journal profiled the innovative Mechatronics program at Sierra College, where we combine learning about software, hardware, robotics, mechanics and pneumatics into an integrated program that equips students with amazing job skills.

Robotic arms and automated manufacturing systems — along with jobs for graduates — come to life in the Mechatronics Lab at Sierra College.

Professors and students of the Rocklin-based community college say the forward-thinking program offers students an avenue to learn real skills for jobs that are in high demand.

The seven-course program teaches students how to build and maintain programs that fuse electronics, mechanics and computer systems, according to Michael Halbern, Sierra College Mechatronics Professor. He said it’s easy to find working examples of mechatronics all around. A few include ski lifts, automated manufacturing machines and robots.

Sierra’s program, which started in 2005, is one of only a few like it in the nation. Because of that, graduates often go on to work at companies like Telefunken, a microchip manufacturer in Roseville, and Schilling Robotics in Davis.

Halbern said the program’s hands-on approach to teaching makes graduates a target for employment.

“The fundamental part of our program is to turn students into taxpayers,” Halbern said. “Because it has such a broad range of skills involved, it prepares our students to apply for quite a number of employment paths.”

These students have put their skills to work building and repairing hybrid cars, gasoline pumps, ATM machines, gaming machines and any other complicated machines that include both computer control and mechanical technology.

In fact, before the recession started, we couldn’t even get kids to graduate from the program. They were all getting high paying jobs before they finished!

Bravo, Michael and team. Turning students into taxpayers is awesome work.

This is a striking graph, using numbers from the White House Office of Management and Budget, to demonstrate the size of our nation’s budget deficits as a percentage of GDP.

While you can’t completely ascribe one President’s deficit to that President’s policies…after all, much of the economy and the policies driving spending are in place when a President takes office…the question we ask ourselves as voters is “are this President’s policies making us more fiscally sustainable, or less fiscally sustainable.”

The second President Bush clearly took a number of steps that pushed us in the wrong direction. And President Obama has clearly accelerated us in the wrong direction.

The next President – whether elected in 2012 or 2016 – will be hitting the brakes and changing direction.

In fact, one could argue that even if President Obama is re-elected, he may be forced by the laws of fiscal gravity to do the same.

Time will tell.

Due to a state worker’s itchy trigger finger posting it on the web early, Governor Brown released his 2012-13 budget proposal yesterday.

He is again recommending that everyone plan on money magically falling from the sky. This year, the new funds will supposedly come from his new proposal to raise taxes, which he claims will raise $7 billion dollars.

Of course, the last time we tried to raise taxes, it was projected that the higher rates would give us $10 billion, and tax revenues ended up dropping $9 billion. I don’t see how we can “afford” another tax increase at that rate, but maybe the Governor has some kind of magical powers I’m not aware of.

If the tax initiative is voted down by the voters (likely), or the revenues don’t materialize after the rates increase (even more likely), the 2012-13 budget triggers will cut community college funding by $525MM (the effect on Sierra would be another $5MM to $6MM).

So we have a big challenge on our hands. Fortunately, we spent 2005 to 2009 aggressively building our reserves, so we have a chance of navigating our way to a safe landing.

One thing is clear: it is a moral imperative that we don’t take these cuts out on our students. Focusing budget reductions on cutting courses for job training, degrees and transfers is the equivalent of amputating your leg because you stubbed your toe.

Instead, we’re going to have to take the hard steps to reshape how we deliver education, so we can serve more students with the funding we have.

This isn’t complicated; it’s just hard. Change is hard. But change is here whether we like it or not. And let’s remember that most of our community are paying more in taxes than they ever have before. It would be wrong to take out our budget problems on them.

Board Meeting Details:

• January 10, 2012 at 4:00PM
• Sierra College Rocklin Campus, Room LRC-133
• Main agenda items begin at 4:00PM, public comment for items not on the agenda at 5:40PM or earlier
• Meeting Agenda
• Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
• Warrants

This meeting will focus on a presentation from the college staff on workforce partnerships through the Sierra College Center for Applied Competitive Technologies (or “the CACT”, pronounced ‘CACKED’ since we tend to develop acronyms for everything around here).

We’ll also be doing the first revision of the college’s 2011-12 budget. We expect a $4.6MM deficit this year, which will bring our reserves down 11.59%, still just within the range of the Board policy to maintain prudent reserves of 8% to 12%.

On Monday, I’ll be posting some thoughts about Governor Brown’s budget proposal for 2012-13. It presents some major challenges and some opportunities to shape our future if we choose to seize them. Time will tell.

If you’re in the 530/916 area, I hope you’ll join us to share your perspective. Or you can comment here and I’ll do my best to carry your input into the meeting.

One of our longtime friends is a book review blogger and is a passionate opponent of e-books. She recently posted this adaptation of Winston Churchill’s famous quote in support of her position.

“We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on Facebook, we shall fight on Twitter and the blogs, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength, we shall defend our old-fashioned way of reading, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight in the libraries, we shall fight in the bookstores and in the streets if we must; we shall never surrender our books.”

I’m a huge fan of my Kindle, for a variety of reasons. I love having my entire library come with me across countries, across continents, in my pocket, and in long lines. I read far more because of it.

At the same time, I still buy certain kinds of books in their paper form, particularly presidential biographies, which I love to collect.

What do you think? Do the benefits of e-books outweigh the drawbacks? Or do you love e-books so much that you can’t imagine buying dead trees any more?

This week, I’m writing about the goals that I set for 2012. Dave Ramsey’s book EntreLeadership recommended setting goals across seven key areas of life: career, financial, spiritual, physical, intellectual, family and social.

If you’re interested, you can read more about the process that Cacey and I used to set those goals here.

Today’s post is focused on the last three categories: intellectual, family and social.

Read 16 books. I’m not sure how many books I read last year, but this year I’m going to try and keep track. I want to read 1 book a month, plus 1 bonus book a quarter. I generally read business, history and fiction books. I do 90% of my reading on Kindle, though the first book I’m starting, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, was a gift from a good friend and mentor of mine in paper form.

Learn to play through one saxophone book. I own a saxophone that I don’t know how to play. There, I said it. I also own several starter saxophone books. I don’t have time to take lessons this year, but I’m going to teach myself to play through one of my sax books by the end of the year. First step: getting it out of the case and putting it in my office.

Plan 2 date nights with Cacey every month. I love hanging out with my sweetie and we need time away from our kids to talk, think and have fun together. I am hoping to overachieve this goal, but we wanted to set ourselves up for success. That’s 24 hot dates in 2012.

Do a 1:1 “kid date” every month. We’re both going to take one of our kids out on a one-on-one “date with dad” or “date with mom” every month. We’ll alternate so that each of them get to do this every month with alternating parents. This can be as simple as going to McDonald’s and getting $1 ice cream cones, or it can be going out to dinner. We’ll err on the side of simple.

Do 6 planned family activities on Sunday afternoons. With my job as intense as it is, it’s really easy to just zone out on Sundays. 6 times a year, we’re going to do better than that and plan an activity to make memories with our kids. Whether it’s taking them to Apple Hill or taking them to the park to play, we hope to do this way more than 6 times, but that’s an absolute minimum.

Have Spencer play t-ball this summer. One of the ideas I scratched down was “invest in developing our kids’ talents.” Emma is still only 2, so we don’t have a specific activity she’ll do this year, but Spencer will be 5 this summer. He just finished doing Taekwondo over the winter and really excelled in it. So we think t-ball will be a great outlet for him this year.

Host 10 dinners and a party at our house. We constantly say “we want to have that person over for dinner” and then it doesn’t happen. So we’re working on having 10 different small dinner parties and one larger barbecue party at our house (1 per month, except for December). We’re focused less on inviting good friends we see all the time and more on folks we don’t know well enough. I’d invite everyone who reads this blog, but we don’t have a very large house, so my apologies in advance if you don’t make it to one of these.

So there you have it: most of my intellectual, family and social goals for 2012. What did I miss?

This week, I’m writing about the goals that I set for 2012. Dave Ramsey’s book EntreLeadership recommended setting goals across seven key areas of life: career, financial, spiritual, physical, intellectual, family and social.

If you’re interested, you can read more about the process that Cacey and I used to set those goals here.

Today’s post is focused on the financial, spiritual and physical categories. This will be the least specific and shortest post because many of them aren’t things I would post online. But I’ve still got a few good ones to list.

Pay down debt by $x. We have some opportunities that could come into our reach in 2013, but only if we pay down our debt by a fairly audacious amount. So we set a pretty audacious goal with specific targets for how much we were going to pay down, and in what order. We’re going to monitor our progress twice a month.

Grow cash reserves to $x. It only takes having a “liquidity crisis” once to learn this lesson and I think that happened for me 15+ years ago. If we have to tap our cash reserve, we work to build it back up in a month or less. But most of the time, it just sits there and collects interest. When you have it, you don’t need it. (How much should this be? Ideally, enough to cover 3-6 months of expenses. I wish mine was that large. It’s not.)

Read through the New Testament. I’m a Christian, so reading the story of God creating a new covenant of hope and promise with mankind is meaningful and important to me. Cacey and I both use YouVersion on the web and on our phones, and they have an awesome daily reading plan. I picked one called Project 345 and I have it delivered by email (I’m anal retentive about clearing out my inbox so that will make it happen).

Work out 12x per month. This means I’ll continue to shoot for hitting the gym 3x a week. Working out at hotel gyms will count, too. I try to do 15 minutes of weights and 25-30 minutes on the elliptical. (This is the primary place I get my reading time in, too.) What changed? If I can’t get to the gym 3x in a week, I’ll have to make it up. I’ll either go 4x the following week, or I’ll make it up by going for a 30-minute run that week.

Develop and stick to a food routine (by Jan 31). I’m a creature of habit when it comes to food. I usually find my 1 or 2 things I order at a restaurant and stick to those. I want to create a better routine for how to make good food choices, especially when traveling.

So there you have it: most of my financial, spiritual and physical goals for 2012. What did I miss?

This week, I’m writing about the goals that I set for 2012. Dave Ramsey’s book EntreLeadership recommended setting goals across seven key areas of life: career, financial, spiritual, physical, intellectual, family and social.

If you’re interested, you can read more about the process that Cacey and I used to set those goals here.

Today’s post is focused on the “career” category and most of my goals are posted here. There are a few company goals around things that we aren’t ready to announce yet, so I won’t post those.

If I didn’t know how to make something measurable, I used the words “develop plan” so I can work on making it so. If there’s no deadline listed, the deadline is the end of the year.

Deepen my product design and management skills. To do that, I’m going to identify 3 books to read and 1 conference to attend on that subject. I don’t particularly love conferences, so unless I think it’s going to be a kick-butt one that will really be a game-changer for Riskalyze, I’ll cut that part and stick with the books.

Get really proficient with CSS + PHP. I wrote my first code in BASIC when I was 12 years old. I’ve written HTML, CSS, ColdFusion and a little bit of PHP. It’s critical to my job to understand the architecture of all of this technology I work with, and I’m pretty good at that. But I want to go a level deeper this year and be fully capable of coding a web app by myself, even if I never do. I’m convinced it will make me a better startup CEO.

Develop plan to do networking events more efficiently. I like meeting people. I’m a pretty social person. But networking events are very polarized for me: either I feel like I’m right at the center of the action the whole time, or I feel like I’m using my time inefficiently. I’m not the least bit interested in making superficial connections and firing off business cards like scatter shot, but I think I can approach this better.

Develop plan to deepen relationships with tech leaders and journalists. I have some great friendships in our industry, and I really value them. I want to deepen and broaden the friendships I have with great entrepreneurs and tech journalists. I think I can give more value than I take in a lot of those situations, and I want to be in a better position to do that in 2012.

Decide whether to run for re-election in 2012 (by June 15). I’m entering my eighth year as a Sierra College Trustee. I’ve been elected to the Board twice, and my colleagues have elected me Board President for two of those eight years. I’ve accomplished much of what I set out to do, but I love Sierra and am passionate about education. Is there something great I can add by running for another four year term?

Fix the Academic Enrichment policy and stabilize the budget at Sierra College. I have two major policy goals this year at the college. First, making some changes to our policy for academic enrichment students (high school students trying to complete college courses). Second, we need to get our budget on a stable track to return to balanced status. The state budget is undergoing a real reckoning and there are no easy answers.

So there you have it: most of my career goals for 2012. What did I miss?

Saturday was actually a really busy day, despite being New Year’s Eve. Cacey and I decided to dedicate most of the day to setting our goals for 2012.

As recommended in Dave Ramsey’s book, EntreLeadership, we set our goals across seven key areas of life: career, financial, spiritual, physical, intellectual, family and social. Here’s the process we used to set our goals.

1. Brainstorming. We started with a nice, clean whiteboard. I wrote the seven categories on the board with room to write ideas under each category. Then we brainstormed things we wanted to do or accomplish under each area. We didn’t filter for bad ideas or unachievable goals…any idea or concept made it onto the board. This took about 30-40 minutes.
2. Convert to Goals. Then came the hard part. I opened two Word documents on my screen (one for each of us) and listed the same categories. Then we went through and converted each idea into a specific goal. To make the list, the goal had to be very specific, and have a measurable way to see whether or not we’d achieved it. This took about 3 hours for us (with kid interruptions).
3. Review and Validate. Then we took that list of goals and really thought through each one. Was it really possible to do all of these things? Or were we setting ourselves up for failure? A few of our goals ended up getting cut. It’s not that they weren’t good or important…it’s just that other things were more important. This only took 15 minutes.

So that’s it…about 4 hours dedicated to building a more productive and purposeful 2012.

The rest of this week, I’m going to share some of the goals I set. A few of them are personal and will remain that way. On some of them (like financial goals), I’ll edit out the numbers for privacy.

But you’ll have a good sense of the choices I made. Maybe your comments will inspire me to add or change my goals, and maybe you can use some of mine for yourself.

I wrote a few days ago about the seven areas to set goals in life.

Today, my sweetie and I are actually working on setting our goals for 2012. Some of them are joint goals. Others are individual ones. It’s been a fun and challenging process…check out our whiteboard full of ideas!

Next week, I’ll be blogging about how we did this, and a few of the goals I set for myself.

Happy New Year! Here’s to a great 2011 and may your 2012 get off to a wonderful start tomorrow (or midnight tonight, if you prefer).