In a few hours the year 2005 will officially end. I’ll be (hopefully) asleep when the event happens. I’ve come down with a case of the flu and I’ve been feeling worse today than yesterday. I don’t like being sick. I went to the doctor after work on Thursday where she confirmed that what I had was the flu that’s going around. She also commented that this was one of the sickest Christmas seasons she’s seen in the last twenty years. I’ve been in the house since then and sooner or later I’ll start feeling better. However, I will be starting the new year feeling lousy!

On the whole we’ve had a pretty good year. We’ve done a lot of traveling including:

• Belgium in January (business trip) — home for two days and then:
• Orlando in January (business trip)
• Chandler in February
• Manila in April, returning in May (business trip)
• Grand Tetons in June
• Belgium in July (business trip)
• Pennsylvania and a drive back home in August
• Seattle at the beginning of October
• Mediterranean Cruise in mid-October followed by a week in Belgium (business trip)
• Back to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving

We did stay home in December and will likely be home the full month of January. Next year will be much closer to home than 2005 was!

We will spend a very quiet evening here. Nina will do her normal Sunday duty at the prison, but I’ll be staying home. I’m expecting that we’ll have a very quiet beginning to the new year. We did get a fair amount of snow yesterday followed by a lot of rain today and most of the snow is gone. More snow is forecast for tonight, again changing to rain tomorrow. Snow or rain either one is OK — we need the water regardless of how it comes. I’m quite happy with rain — it doesn’t need to be shoveled!!!

Happy New Year!

Pocatello is also home to Idaho State University. The university sits kind of tucked away on the southeast side of the city and for the most part is generally contained into its own world. My personal observation is that the relationship between the University and the City is often strained. Today’s headline on the sports section of the local newspaper reads:

Taking a look back at 2005: ISU looking to clean up its image

The off-the-field antics of the University athletes over the past year is the main point of this opinion piece (presented as a news item). For certain, Paul Bubb, the newly minted Athletic Director, has his work cut out for him — both on and off the athletic field. But, I digress. The article just highlights in my mind the fact that the community and the University are not often on the same page and quite often simply ignore each other.

The University President has also not enjoyed a good year. Earlier in the year, the State Board of Education let it be known that they were ready for a new university president. Shortly thereafter, Richard Bowen, then president of the University, announced that he would be resigning when a replacement had been found. A couple of months later, another tempest broke out when the classified staff (that is, those not in teaching positions at the University) were given a significant salary increase while the teaching staff was not. That was followed by a vote of no-confidence by the Faculty Senate. The result was the president resigned and the post is now vacant.

So, a search for a new University President is underway. A week or so ago the University announced that the candidate list had been shorted to four people of whom one is a clear leader. No further information or identification was provided. A few days ago the University announced that they would identify the candidates on January 3rd, 2006. They would be coming to the University and would be meeting with various University and community leaders.

That announcement triggered a question: What if corporations followed a similar process to select their Chief Executive Officer? The process followed by most companies seems to resemble sausage making: the results are generally palatable but the “how it’s done” is not. In most companies, the Board of Directors makes the final decision. Quite often, this is a rubber-stamp of what the current CEO recommends — particularly since the CEO selects the board members (somewhat of an incestuous relationship).

So, what if a Board of Directors narrowed a candidate list down to three or four people and announced them to the world? They would then be vetted by the shareholders, the public, company employees, and anyone else with an interest. The Board of Directors could then make the final selection, but with significantly more input than they have today. I think this would be a Good Thing.

Meanwhile, I’ll be following the process to select the new Idaho State University President with some interest. Will this process work like I have it envisioned? Or will it turn into a political sham? We’ll see.

We’re driving through Brigham City on our way to Orem, Utah and Heather’s house. It’s about 4 p.m. on Christmas Day afternoon. We’ll spend the night there and come back home sometime tomorrow. It’s a mostly cloudy day with the temperatures in the mid 40’s. Most of the snow has melted, so we’re right ready for another batch. Nina is driving and talking on the phone, calling all of the kids and grandkids. I’m surfing the net and now writing in my blog, courtesy of the SprintPCS wireless modem I have from my laptop computer. These are very handy devices making it possible to be connected at a little better than dial-up speeds as we’re travelling around.

We’ve had a very nice day and weekend. Heather, Ty, and family came up Friday afternoon and spent the night. They left on late morning Saturday morning. While they were at the house, I set up a weblog for Heather. She’s put her first post up and hopefully there will be many more to follow. After they laft, Nina and I went uptown and finished off the last little bit of Christmas shopping. Mom and Dad came over about four in the afternoon and spent the evening and night with us. We enjoy having them with around. Nina and I had ordered in a couple of Strumsticks for Christmas. We opened them and I promptly broke a string on mine. Nina’s works great, however, and tomorrow I’ll go downtown and get some replacement strings. They look like a lot of fun and a reasonable challenge to learn how to play. After dinner we read the Christmas story out of the Bible and eventually we all went to bed. This morning we opened Christmas presents and the went up to the Women’s Prison for their Christmas program. The inmate choir put on the program and they did a very good job. Eighty-one inmates attended the program and thirty-one visitors were there to hear the choir perform. Mom and Dad went up with us and they also really enjoyed seeing the facility and meeting some of the girls. I really enjoyed the program and I’m sure that the girls appreciated having an audience for their performance.

Our Ward’s Christmas Program was at 12:30 p.m. this afternoon. The Ward Choir was performing along with some other musical numbers. I substituted on the organ and, for once, my feet and hands cooperated and the organ sounded reasonably well. After Church we made a quick change and are on our way south. It’s been a busy weekend, but very pleasant. The church-related activites have been very nice. It has been a delightful celebration of the birth of our Savior. Merry Christmas to all!

Today is December 23, 2005. Two hundred years ago today Joseph Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont. We humans like to celebrate things like this and today was no exception. The Church put on an hour and a half special program tonight broadcast to 81 countries around the world commemorating the birth of the Prophet and Founder Joseph Smith. The program was delightful and the music by the Tabernacle Choir and the Orchestra on Temple Square was exquisite. Since we get the BYU channel on our Dish Network satellite system, we were able to watch the program in the comfort of our own home. Plus — we have visitors! Heather, Ty, and their family came up this afternoon and will stay until tomorrow mid-morning. They watched the program with us and afterwards we had another sumptious turkey dinner. It’s about 10:30 at night and folks are now fading fast. Turkey does that to you!

The work on the blog is finished. I’ve also set up a blog for Heather and will show her how to use it in the morning. I’ve got blogs for all the rest of the family in testing and will make those available to those who want a blog over the next few days. It’ll be interesting to see how well this works. The purpose of these blogs is to let family members write about what is going on in their lives and share it with the rest of the family (as well as anyone else in the world who might be interested). A blog is only as good as the frequency of posting. For a while I had to remind myself to go write in the blog. It’s become pretty much a habit in the meantime and it has also gotten much easier to write since I don’t have to think about making each post some kind of a world-shaking event. It’s been a good evening and I’m looking forward to the rest of the weekend!

I upgraded the software I use for the weblog to their latest version. Along with the upgrade, I also downloaded several "Themes" that change the look of the weblog (the content doesn’t change, just the look). I found one that I liked and have implemented this new look on the weblog. The picture at the top is of Nina and me that we had a passer-by take of us when we were in Mykonos, Greece last October. I kind of like the new look. The font seems to be a little easier to read on a computer. There’s a couple more minor fixes I need to make, but this will be the new look for the next while.

I’ve no idea whose fault it is (drunk drivers hitting telephone poles, ice breaking power lines, or activities by the power company, or whatever), but we’ve had more power outages at our house in Pocatello, Idaho in the past 18 months than we had in the entire previous five years in Colorado Springs. It’s a common occurance to come home to see the clock on the oven door blinking due to a short power outage. Most of them, however, happen at night. This past Thursday evening I woke up about 11:45 p.m. when my sleep apnea nasal CPAP machine stopped running. When that happens, I wake up within seconds (usually in a panic because I can’t breathe). Then there isn’t much more to do except get up and wait for the power to come back on.

The computers all have some kind of a battery backup, so they should be OK for a few minutes. When this outage lasted more than 15 minutes, I started shutting down the computers, starting with the two in basement (the web server and the development server) followed by the iMac Mini and my desktop Windows XP PC. I also, for some reason, turned off the Dell laptop which had a battery that should have run for another couple of hours. About fifteen minutes later, the power came back on. So, I then restarted all the computers in the right sequence and all was well — except for the Dell laptop. For some reason, the hard drive doesn’t power up. I have a spare hard drive with Suse Linux loaded on it, but the Windows 2000 drive is kaput. The Linux installation is fairly old, so today I ordered a new version of the Novell Linux Desktop. It’s supposed to work reasonably well with a laptop, so I’m leaving the darkside with yet another computer. By the way, when I went to order the Novell software, their top reseller link was to CDW. I went there and found that they didn’t have any prices on their website for the Novell products — they were all “call” pricing. I don’t call. Ever. I just did what I usually do, go to another website where the prices are listed and do my business there. So, CDW missed a small sale. Why do websites do that? Do they really think that it’s worth my time to make a telephone call and get hassled by some salesperson trying to make their quota?

I also decided that I needed to do something about being able to run my breathing machine when the power goes out. I had thought about buying another UPS (universal power supply) battery backup, but the problem with those units are that they start beeping rather incessantly when the power goes out — I guess to let me know that the power is out? Plugging the machine into one of those could be a good idea, because the battery backup would just keep working as the power went out, automatically switching to battery and then back to regular power when the power was restored. But I’d have to do some surgery to the UPS to disable the beeping noise. Meanwhile, I was at Harbor Freight to pick up a couple of tools for me and some stocking stuffers for dad, and I saw a Jumpstart unit on sale. Since I can also plug my machine into a cigarette lighter (12V), this would make a good backup and has other uses as well. So, I bought one. It doesn’t have the feature of automatically taking over if the power goes out (without beeping), but I do have the ability now to run the sleep machine should the power go out for any extended period of time. Maybe one day I’ll upgrade one of my UPS’s and use the old one as a power source for the breathing machine.

Being dependent on the machine can sometimes be a real problem. For instance, I can’t sleep on airplanes. When I doze off, a few minutes later I’ll start snoring rather loudly and then will have an apnea event and wake up startled (and sometimes in a panic). It’s just not worth it to try and sleep. So, on long overseas flights, I take enough stuff with me to keep myself occupied and just force myself to stay awake through the entire trip. I’ve read recently about a dental device that might help. I called around town and found a dentist who has had some success with this device and have had a first appointment with him. I’ll go back tomorrow to see what he thinks he can conjure up. The device isn’t covered by my dental insurance (but possibly may be covered by my medical insurance?), but having a backup device that I can also use on an airplane would be worth it. The device is kind of like a denture or an insert used to prevent people from grinding their teeth at night. It forces the lower jaw forward which opens up the air passageway. According to the literature, it is effective in light to moderate cases of sleep apnea and I’m in the moderate category.

Several years ago when I was on one of my around-the-world trips, the long leg from Hong Kong to Frankfurt was to be on Lufthansa. That airline was one of the first to equip business class seats with power for laptops and other small devices. So, I decided to take my breathing machine, hose, and mask with me on the airplane. I could put the blanket over me, plug in, put the mask on, and sleep a good portion of the twelve-hour flight. I got everything hooked up, arranged the blanket, put the mask on, and turned on the machine. It was great. I fell almost immediately asleep, turned slightly, and pulled the blanket off my head. The flight attendant saw me, eyes closed, with the mask and hose running down my body, and immediately called the head flight attendant. They woke me up and wanted to know what I was doing. The head flight attendant was actually quite angry! I hadn’t told them that I had a medical condition. Any medical devices have to be cleared by the airline. I was frightening the other passengers. etc. and etc. She really read me the riot act without once stopping for me to say anything. Since I speak pretty good German, I finally interrupted her in German and told her in no uncertain terms to go away and shut up. I put the machine away and read for the rest of the flight. I’m also not interested in flying on Lufthansa again. It was not a stellar customer service moment for them!

But, now I’ve put one more backup system in place. When the next long power outage happens at night, I’ll be able to plug in my machine and go peacefully back to sleep, no matter what the drunk drivers, ice storms, or Idaho Power does.

I’ve deleted all the trash e-mail, read what little e-mail remained, looked through the websites that I usually visit regularly, fixed a couple of upgrade problems on my blog, and now it’s time to do a little writing before the evening comes to an end. We’ve had some snow today — mostly a snow squall — that coupled with the wind deposited about eight inches of snow right in front of the garage door. The rest of the driveway was bare. It took about a half-hour to run the snow blower and clean off the front walk before having dinner. We could use a lot more snow but none is in the forecast for the next week. The continuing cold weather, however, is definitely still in the forecast. A high pressure ridge on Canada’s west coast, coupled with a big low pressure off the Oregon / California cost, has the jetstream going way south along the California coast before heading east. As a result, all the moisture is in the deep south and the frigid Arctic cold has the middle of the country in the very deep freeze. This pattern also shows no sign of changing any time soon.

My brother Perry (see his blog through the link on the right) and his wife Chris went to Soda Springs last weekend, so Nina and I drove over on Saturday to visit. We sure enjoy spending time with Perry and Chris. He will be starting chemotherapy in January. He’s been diagnosed with a treatable but uncurable form of a lymphoma. He’s young, healthy, and the disease was found in the very early stages, so the longer term prognosis is pretty good. It’s possible that a good treatment will become available in time to restore his quality of life. We certainly hope so. Meanwhile, he and I are in the process of putting high-speed internet into our parent’s home in Soda Springs. They don’t really do a lot with the Internet except e-mail and a very little web browsing, but when we visit we’re looking forward to being able to take our laptop computers and have a good high-speed internet connection. Their current dial-up provider has wireless available in town, but some trees in the neighborhood are blocking the line-of-sight to the two access points. DSL is not available anywhere in the town from Qwest (and probably never will be — as that phone company simply won’t invest in these small towns). There is a small independent cable company that offers a cablemodem option (they don’t seem to have a web page!) so that’s the option we’ve chosen. I’ll put a Netgear Wireless Firewall/Router in after the cable company completes their work and another household in America will have high-speed wireless internet.

Perry and Chris brought mom and dad with them on Sunday evening to Pocatello for the annual Highland Stake Messiah Sing-Along. We all took our music scores with us and spent two hours with a small orchestra, supurb soloists, and some 600 other people singing The Messiah. Perry is also a bass, so we sat together in the bass section and had a great time. It helped immensely that there were a couple of very strong bass voices behind us. The annual sing-along is a Christmas event that I thoroughly enjoy every year. When we were living in the Ogden area, the second Sunday of December was their annual Messiah Sing-in followed on the third Sunday with a Christmas Carol sing-in. A thousand or more people would gather in the Ogden Tabernacle on the third Sunday to sing almost every known Christmas carol accompanied by that lovely pipe organ with readers intersperced reciting Christmas poetry. That’s another event that I’ve longed for since we moved away from Ogden. It sure helps to instill a true Christmas spirit centered around the birth of our Savior rather than the commercial Santa Claus.

All else is very quiet (and cold). The day is done and so am I. Merry Christmas!