Flitting about the country is an interesting exercise in patience. The airlines coupled with TSA (Transportation Security Agency) make travel a very wearing experience. In the past couple of weeks I’ve been on several different airlines and around much of the country. Northwest Airlines, Continental, Delta, Sky West, and United have all carried my body and stuff to Dallas, Atlanta, San Jose, and Idaho in the past couple of weeks. Amazingly enough, in the end everything got where it was supposed to be and home again.

In that course of events, I’ve been in big airports (Atlanta), mid-sized airports (Colorado Springs) and very small airports (Pocatello, Idaho). Security at these airports continually finds ways to amaze me. Some thoughts:

• I went through the Colorado Springs Airport security when it was very busy and again when I was almost the only passenger in the area. I zipped right through on the busy time of the day trip. However, when I came through a few days later at a very slow time of the day, TSA took the opportunity to go through everything — and do it several times. I sure hope they were training folks. It took a long time and a lot of patience.
• The security setup in Atlanta is the one seen most often on TV as CNN has their offices in Atlanta. Everything is set up for masses of folks, yet it is the slowest security of any place I’ve been. From the time that I’ve got my stuff ready to go into the scanning machine and I’m standing in front of the metal detector until I’m through and have collected my things takes at least twice as long as at every other big airport. There are simply too many chiefs and not enough indians for that operation.
• At Pocatello, security is only open just before flights depart. The rest of the time the door into the concourse is closed and locked. A good system in my opinion. Their method for handling checked luggage is also very efficient. After checking in at the counter and getting the bag tagged, you take it to the TSA counter and turn the bag over to them. The bag gets scanned and then goes down the chute to be loaded on the airplane. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve ever had my small suitcase more thoroughly examined than in the Pocatello airport. The security guy took everything out, and then took every thing out of the toilet bag, checked all the pockets, and thoroughly examined everything. It wasn’t just me, either. He did the same thing to everyone boarding the flight.
• Suspenders are an interesting item. I take everything out of my pockets, take off my watch and rings. I take off my glasses. I take off my shoes. The only thing metal left on my body anywhere are the suspender adjustment devices, the zipper in my pants (sometimes this is plastic), and the clasp on my pants. Some places let me take my arms out of the suspenders and let the suspenders dangle. Others won’t let that happen. Most of the time if the suspenders are dangling, the alarm doesn’t go off. It always goes off if I have to wear them normally. Occasionally even dangling suspenders sets of the alarm, but then only after I’m completely through the metal detector and have taken a step away. It is just crazy. This shouldn’t set off the detectors!

The government is going to test a smart card this summer. It will have on the card some biometrics so they can verify that the person holding the card is physically the person the card was issued to. Getting the card will require having a background check made and coming up clean. Some folks don’t like this idea at all. Personally, I think those folks are all screwed up. Airport security is about the only place where normal people are routinely treated as though they are criminals, almost having to prove that they are not. But since they don’t know what they’re looking for, they have to subject everyone to the same scrutiny. Some civil libertarians think that we’re giving up our rights to privacy if we allow the government to make these background checks. That is all unadultrated baloney. The government already knows literally everything about me. Any law-abiding citizen is in the same category. Issue the cards — let normal law-abiding citizens proceed quickly through security and save TSA’s energy for the few who are not willing to subject themselves to a prior background check. I can hardly wait until the government gets this program implemented and rolled out. Bring it On!

I’ve spent almost no time in Dallas, Texas before. In fact, I think this trip will likely double the amount of time over my lifetime that I’ve been in or around this city. I flew in this morning to meet with a sales guy from IBM (he probably doesn’t think of himself as a salesman, more like an account rep or something). I’m staying at the Embassy Suites and I’ve not much of an idea where I am in this city. I think I’m somewhere just west of downtown Dallas. The picture was taken from my hotel room balcony this afternoon. It was very overcast today, making it hard to tell directions here. It’s supposed to rain tonight but so far, no rain.

There is, naturally, nothing on TV. I’ve seen the cycle on CNN Headline News several times through. Everything else on the few channels available in this hotel is so inane as to be unwatchable. Austin Powers is not anywhere on the list of movies worth my time. I think the TV selection is so sparse on purpose — so guests will spend the money watching pay-for-view movies. We had an early dinner at a local steakhouse and have retired back to the hotel room for the night. So, I’ll spend time on the computer catching up on all the things that I haven’t had time to do on the computer.

I’ll fly back home tomorrow about noon, just in time to have the Priest-aged boys over for a video game night at the house. That should be a lot of fun — I certainly don’t have the hand-eye coordination needed to play these games but it sure is fun to watch. The upper picture is of the skyline in the afternoon, the lower picture about the same shot at night. Downtown Dallas is quite pretty at night.

Last week I was invited to spend a few minutes at Otera Elementary School with Mrs. Vogler’s Math, Engineering, Science Achievement group (MESA) — 5th and 6th graders who are interested in these subjects. If you ever want an ego trip, spend a few minutes with these bright kids! I had a great time! I talked with them a little about the process to make computer chips. They asked lots of good questions and were really engaged with the discussion. I was impressed with these kids!

I was also very impressed with Mrs. Vogler. She is an excellent teacher with delightful patience. She started the group out with a small puzzler while the kids were having a small snack of Capri Sun juice and animal crackers. The puzzler was a two-person game of connecting lines between numbers arranged in a six-sided circle using felt-tipped markers. Each team had two colors and the person who drew a line and completed a triangle would loose. It was fun to watch the kids as some of them had the "aha" moment when they realized they didn’t have to use the same marker each time it was their turn. After my short presentation, she took them through the process of figuring out how to build a bridge. She knew the right questions to ask to stimulate their thinking. It was clear I was watching a master at her trade. You’ve my vote, Mrs. Vogler, for my favorite teacher. Thanks for letting me be there for a few minutes.

I spent some time Sunday afternoon making a short movie. I shot some video on the camcorder, captured it into Pinnacle Studio 8, edited it, and finally wrote it out on several different media. I made an S-VCD, a Video CD, a DVD, and a Windows Media Player AVI file. It takes a long time to put something together and it was quite the learning experience.

I started by taking about 15 minutes of video in the house, in the back yard, and in the front of the house. After importing it into Pinnacle Studio 8, I then started editing the movie. I didn’t make very many changes, mostly shortening up the clips, taking out long pauses, and such. Most of the clips started too quickly — I need to put more lead-in and lead-out on each clip to allow for room to arrange clips and put transitions or titles between them as needed. The tripod I was using is made primarily for still cameras and I learned it doesn’t work as well for video as I wanted. I’ll be going out to find a better tripod with more fluid movement.

About half the video has shot hand-held, so it jumps around too much. There’s too much pan and zoom in the video as well. After I make two or three of these, I should start learning what works and what doesn’t.

Editing took a long time, mostly because I was learning the program at the same time. When I tried to put titles and chapters (a menu) in place, that didn’t work very well at all. That needs to be the very last thing done and isn’t all that straight forward. The program has a large number of transitions to put between clips, but I ended up taking most of them out as they were too distracting. I didn’t try to put any music behind the video — that’s a future task.

It takes a long time to render and write out the resulting video. I ended up with thirteen minutes of video — not all that long. Writing it to a DVD took more than an hour. Writing a Windows Media Player (AVI) file took even longer. Since DVD’s cost about $1.50 for each blank disk and CD’s cost about $0.25 apiece, it seemed to make more sense to put this movie onto CD than onto a DVD disk. However, while the CD file plays just fine on my home computer, it is very jerky on my work laptop. The DVD, however, plays just fine. The Video CD won’t play in my DVD player if it’s recorded on CD-R media, but plays just fine if it’s recorded on CD-RW media. Go figure.

But, it’s been fun and educational. I want to take the video camera with us to Alaska in June, so this is the time to learn how the whole system works so maybe I can do something with the video we take on that trip! I can now say, however, that I’ve made my first movie. It won’t get much of a release…. it’s too soon to buy cigars…. what kind of clothes should I wear on the Red Carpet at the Oscars????

Not only is it already March, the month seems to be almost half over! I wasn’t even ready for 2004 to start let alone be almost a fourth finished. Someone remarked the other day that "The older I get, the faster I’m getting older!" I can certainly sympathize with that sentiment.

I spent last week in California. This is the time of year when California is quite pretty. All the hills are green and lush, the trees are blooming, flowers are growing, and it just looks to be wonderful. Too bad it can’t last. By late May everything will be brown unless it’s getting lots of irrigation in some fashion. Nevertheless, this is a good time to visit the Bay Area in California. There were several reasons for being in California: meetings with some key vendors, my boss’s staff meeting, and annual reviews. The company I work does an annual performance review process. While I was in California, I met with my boss so he could review with me my performance over the past year. That was a good review meeting (perhaps one of the better meetings with him on this subject). I also met with my two managers in California to deliver to them their annual reviews. I’ve got three more to do here in Colorado Springs, which I’ll get finished this week.

We have also rolled out a new process for managing spam at LSI Logic. After struggling with this scourge for about eighteen months I finally decided to contract with someone to provide the service for us. After doing a quick evaluation of several service providers, we elected to contract with Postini Corporation. I’ve now had my work e-mail filtered through Postini for two weeks and am very pleased with the result. They have a good product and it captures and quarantines some 50-70 spam messages per day that now no longer get to my inbox. I get a daily spam summary from them which I can quickly review to decide whether any of these messages were falsely quarantined (if so, a couple of mouse clicks causes the e-mail to be delivered to my inbox). I’d sure like to have the same capability for my home e-mail! Earthlink — take notice!!

For some time I’ve been trying to get my computer to write DVD’s. It’s been a very frustrating process, but I’ve finally been able to get the right combination of jumpers, drivers, and hardware. I was finally able to write a primitive DVD movie just before heading to California. Now I’m reading through the software manual as I’d like to begin reducing some of the video tape we’ve taken over the years into DVD’s. I’ve also got a couple of reels of Super 8 movie film that it’d be good to get it onto DVD as well. I never paid to get that film onto VHS tape, so I’ll now pay to have the film transferred to a DVD as that’ll give me digital images to work with. Some of these technical things take a very long time to get working and are pretty complicated. I’m having similar complications with setting up an e-mail server that both Nina and I can access from anywhere. In this process, I’m thinking I might also be able to send our home e-mail through a service like Postini and get rid of all the spam. That’d be very interesting to me and I know that Nina would like to get rid of most of this crap. But, setting up the e-mail server is turning out to be quite the saga. Daryl would be able to whip right through this stuff with ease! It’s taken me a month and I’m only part way through the process. I’d like to think I’m learning something as this all is happening. I just know that documentation in the Linux / Unix open source arena is just horrible.

We’re having a magnificent 50-degree afternoon in Colorado Springs. Thursday night and Friday morning saw several inches of new snow on the ground. It’s all gone now (except for some shady areas). We seem to have some massive temperature differentials in this area. Yesterday was incredibly windy. It’s calm today with no weather anywhere in the intermountain west. It’ll be in the upper 50’s and lower 60’s until Thursday when the next weather system is forecast. In the early 90’s I was at a meeting in Boston with a computer manufacturer (no longer existent) that was rolling out a new, superfast computer (which also didn’t gain much market acceptance). The company president was extolling the virtues of the computer by talking about weather forecasting. He told us that the National Weather Service had some very good computer models of the weather, capable of telling us precisely what the weather would be on any given day in the next 4-5 days. Only problem was, the models would take about 15 days to run. Of course, with his new computer that would be cut in half — we could know tomorrows weather in 5 days. We’ve now got desktop computers with that much horsepower and more, and we still don’t know for sure what tomorrow’s weather will be. On Friday morning the ABC affiliate in San Francisco was doing their morning show. Their weatherman was apologizing for a fast-moving cold front that blew through the San Francisco Bay area late the previous afternoon accompanied by some rain showers. The front was completely unexpected, he said as he made his apology. Unpredictability is good for the soul as it brings on confession…. Meanwhile, March has arrived pretty much like a lion here in Colorado Springs. We’ll see if the pithy saying holds true as March exits all to soon from now.