April 1, 2026 Breakfast Meeting Notes
Guests: today were Deb from the church, Ariana Roy from MVSB, and Michael Bellerose from Delaware.
The 50/50 was won by Phil, who donated it to the club.
We started a new deck for the card game. Guest Ariana Roy got to pull the first card but did not find the ace of spades. Denise, who won the last game, noted that she had been given an extra ticket for the drawing by Russ, and so she him gift certificate for him to use at the 6 Burner Bistro. She also noted that the Bistro will be closing its doors in June, so he must use the certificate before then.
Greg shared the unfortunate news that his wife had a subarachnoid hemorrhage while watching their their daughter compete in Minnesota. She survived and is slowly recovering at home. We all wish them the best of luck.
Services for our late member Omer Ahern will be on April 11 at 11 am at St Matthew’s Church. Donations can be made to the Rotary Foundation or our foundation.
We made over $1000 at the rabies clinic, serving over 75 animals.
Rotary clothing: Mike passed out order forms again. Please fill them out and return to Mike.
We welcomed Erica back from her stint in Maine. Sadly she has accepted a job in Maine and will be moving there. Best wishes; we will miss her!
Tony presented his famous NH Trivia: What’s in the air over NH?, part 2.
Citizen of the Year: Ben had suggested nominations should include groups. Tony suggested First Star Tonight and the Lions club would be worthy of consideration. Let Ken know your nominations by May 1. If we do nominate a group, try to think of a service project that we could do with that group.
Steve and Alex reported on their latest trip to Ukraine. They were away for 13 days; the trip involved a lot of time and many stops, starting with a drive to Boston,, followed by a flight with connections to Poland and the retreat at Zakopane. They visited the camp in this wonderful alpine village, where the Common Man for Ukraine sponsors counselors to work with children who have lost a parent in the war. They met the kids, who usually have a performance for them. Then they met with the staff, including a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a doctor, and a number of counselors.
The facility is like a ski lodge, the kids have lots of great accommodations, and they do a lot of activities. At the end of the trip, the camp hosted a followup retreat for the mothers of these children.
After their visit to the camp, our group went in to Ukraine with 18 vans full of food, 2 pallets of food per van (2 tons) . They visited small towns outside of Kharkiv and Zaporhizia. These towns had been occupied and are now liberated, but they are all damaged. Somehow people still manage to live there. There are very few young men in the villages because they are in the military, so the occupants consist of women (babushkas), children, and old men. The Common Man for Ukraine has started to spend down the global grant for $162,000 and will spend it all over next 4 months. Next month the cadre will come and inspect the program to be sure that we are doing it right. They will be meeting the president of Rotary International on their next trip! In May
Russ is our speaker today. He gave us a brief overview of networks and semiconductors. Before Plymouth, Russ spent 40 years using his electrical engineering degree to work in this field. He has worked in a number of companies with networks and semiconductors. He also worked in the family seafood business in Boston.
Networking is how technology gets connected via routers. Data can be in the form of video, pictures, or files but all of it is sent via “packets.” The internet got started as ARPAnet in the 60s and 70s as a way to connect all of the research projects at the large universities. In Europe, they had CERN data and before the internet it was very laborious to get the string of data transmitted from there to other researchers. ARPA came up with the World Wide Web, which allowed easy transfer of information.
Semiconductors allowed this communication; they were developed and funded by the telephone companies. Semiconductors are made on 11 inch wafers, with lots of dies, These are then cut into smaller pieces. but technology has allowed things to shrink. The shrinking is all done via a photo process. Transistors are made and put into these dies. Solid state transistors were developed at Bell Labs, to replace vacuum tubes. 90% of these are made on Taiwan.
Moores’ law says that every two years the density of data doubled. So cost per transistor went down and power goes down. As density goes up, speed goes up. However, transistors are now so close to the atomic level that they can’t shrink much more, but they are very fast and cost more.
Processor types: Intel was the original king of semiconductors. Nvida is now the king. Russ worked on network processors. ARM processor technology is a process that is licensed to other companies; it’s inexpensive but incorporated into almost all of the other technologies.
Russ worked recently on a chip that went into Dell laptops. It involved an ARM technology that allowed chips in laptops to run on very low power. This same technology is also used in card scanners, fingerprint recognition etc. Russ was also involved in very dense chips for Microsoft and Broadcom to use in their own technology like Facebook.
AI does use a tremendous amount of power. IT requires huge data centers with huge power plants in order to function.
Announcements: Sharon is pleased to announce that she is retired, effective today, although she still has some “final housekeeping” to take care of. All of her customers will have a new agent assigned by Allstate.
First Star Tonight will be having their annual fundraiser on April 10. They still have a few tickets.
Mike Bellerose is looking for someone to work on the deck at his new house; Phil suggested Jake Tuck.
On April 21 at 6 pm, Noyes Insurance will host an event for the Chamber of Commerce at the 6 Burner Bistro.
Happy dollars were shared by Sharon, Mike, and Ariana.
Respectfully submitted,
Lora Miller, secretary
