I like puns. I like words that almost sound like other words. However, I seldom have the opportunity to actually make one up. I also like Twitter and after a little more than a month I’m liking it more as time goes on.

Today was the “vicious winter storm” (so said the National Weather Service) that wasn’t. That is, the snow did not arrive as predicted, the winds did, though not with the predicted intensity. It has been windy enough, however, that copious amounts of snow have been blown into my driveway. With any luck the snow will get blown out by the wind overnight…. Yeah, right. I’ll be running the snowblower in the morning for sure.

My good friend Duane Slocum posted his “bucket list” on his Christmas Day blog entry. The name comes from the movie by the same name coming soon to theaters near you. It refers to a list of “must do” things before one “kicks the bucket.” Then a couple of days later, Duane chided me for not commenting on his list. Well, Duane, I thought everyone over the age of 40 already had their “bucket list”! I do, it’s rather lengthy, and things are getting added faster than they’re coming off. It is a good idea for a future blog entry, though.

I also have another list … a list of people I wish to meet and talk to after I die. For instance, Willis Carrier is on the list. Several times each summer I bless him for having invented air conditioning. Thomas Crapper used to be on the list until I learned from Wikipedia (a sometimes authoritative source) that he was not the inventor of the flush toilet…. Now my list has next to his crossed-out name an entry that reads “Inventor of the flush toilet”, meaning that I still have some research to do in the next life. The public latrines in Ephesus, for instance, used running water to wash away the effluent, so the flush toilet had to come somewhat later than that. I have vivid memories of treking outside in the snow to the two-holer when I was about four years old and we were living in a small out building in Cleveland (Idaho … only a cemetery remains) at Aunt Ann and Uncle Rulon’s place. That and carrying buckets of water down the hill and to the house (because the building where we were living had no running water) are my only two memories from that time.

Well, it’s time to start thinking about the “best and worst of 2007”. Tomorrow is the last day of this year and that could easily be another “blog beween the tweets…”!

Yesterday afternoon everyone at Heather’s house except for mother and Heather went to the movie National Treasure II at the Gateway Mall in Salt Lake City. That Megeplex has twelve theaters, I think, and the movie was playing in two of them (it has been a pretty popular movie this holiday season). Along the hallway where the theaters are located were advertisements for upcoming films. Danielle (aka Dani-girl) posed for a picture by the advertisement for Water Horse. The ET-like creature must have something to do with the movie and Danielle looks quite cute with the creature.

When we came out of the movie the promised snow storm had moved in. It was snowing and blowing and definitely ensuring a white Christmas in the valley. Back at the house Heather had prepared a delightful turkey dinner which we enjoyed by candelight. After dinner they enjoyed a couple of other family traditions. We gathered around the piano to read the Christmas story and sing the traditional Christmas carols. Heather had put the program together and everyone had a folder with the story and music. I really enjoyed singing and hearing the story again.

The other tradition at her house is that the kids all buy gifts for each other and open them on Christmas eve. Heather buys new pajamas for everyone, they all put on their new pajamas and bed down for the night together in one of the bedrooms. The whole family had a great time and enjoyed the entire evening. So did I!

This morning dawned white and clear! The storm is gone (but another should be here by Thursday, just in time for us to drive home). This picture looks north from Heather’s front door across Bountiful towards Ogden. The air was clear … a marked difference from the past week or so, thanks to yesterday’s storm.

We got to bed about 1 a.m. this morning and the grandkids were up and ready to open presents by 7 a.m. They were all well gifted, as were Nina and me. Stephanie had to go to work in mid-morning but the rest of the family has been just hanging out, playing with the new games, watching movies, and generally having a very laid-back day. I managed to get an hour-and-a-half nap in the late morning.

Ty has decided he needs a snowblower (and I would also agree). He’ll probably do that shopping tomorrow. I’ve got another appointment at the Genius Bar in the Gateway Mall Apple Store to see if they can really fix the problem with my Macbook where the keyboard suddenly and randomly stops working and the computer has to be rebooted. Last time they replaced the keyboard. Perhaps there have been enough other people having this issue that they’ve finally got the problem figured out. Apple has been the topic of conversation in the blogoshpere the past few days. One of the people I follow and admire is Dave Winer who recently had a problem with with his Mac computer and with the repair policy of the store where the problem was fixed. Robert Scoble picked up on that and a few other complaints. It’ll be interesting to see how Apple responds to the bad publicity!

Heather was wearing a interesting shirt today … her blog is at heather.rnsmith.com and she’s always very interesting to read. I’m hoping she got plenty of material to blog about from this Christmas holiday … Ty’s search for a snowblower can definitely be a topic, in my opinion.

We’ll be at Heather’s house until Thursday morning when we’ll head back north. The webcam pictures from Pocatello show that the storm left some snow behind there as well. I’m sure our snowblower will get a workout when we get back home. That will be followed by the next visit to the dentist on Friday morning. Despite that, it will have been a great week.

Merry Christmas!

This morning I needed to see a piece of data that would only run in Windows Media Player. So, I fired up my trusty Parallels app which then launched Windows Vista. I don’t use Vista very much at all, so it had been a couple of weeks since Vista was last run on my Macbook. So, it wanted to download a bunch of updates. Unfortunately, I let that happen. A bit later I had to reboot Vista. When it came back up, it said I was running an illegal version and that I needed to “validate.” Exiting or validating were the only options, so I elected to validate which promptly said that I was running a duplicate version of the key, and that I only limited functionality would be available. And limited it was! So, I went to get some customer service. Microsoft won’t talk to you anymore for free. If I wanted to talk with Microsoft, I had to pony up $59.00. Otherwise I could post a question on one of the forums and hope that someone (who wouldn’t be Microsoft) would respond. I spent the $59 and got connected with a woman in India. She started an app which I allowed to take over my computer and she went through a number of steps, including two reboots, to revalidate my installation. It now works again … and proves once more how much I don’t think of Microsoft customer service. But then, Apple isn’t any better. If I want phone support I can either pay for it by the drink or sign up for AppleCare for $249 for three years. I long for the days of quality customer support!

After blowing two hours getting Vista to work again, we drove to Soda Springs for the rest of the day. My favorite brother Perry and his wife Chris were visiting there from Green River, Wyoming. A couple of weeks ago Perry scored a deal on some used computers, so we bought two. One of them will be mother and dad’s new computer replacing their Windows 98 computer they bought about six years ago. The other computer I’ll use here to replace an old Pentium II computer that works as my email and domain naming services server.

So, we loaded the operating system (Windows XP!) and the necessary device drivers on their new computer. I’ll migrate their data from the old computer after they get back home from Christmas. Mother is very happy to have a new computer with a nice flat-panel screen. I’m happy to get them moved into a more modern setup where I’ll be able to support them from home.

We had a great visit with Perry and Chris and mother and dad. They’re still driving through some fairly bad weather back to Green River, Wyoming. The wind is blowing pretty hard and the snow is really drifting. They’ll be happy to be home for sure.

So what are up to over Christmas? We’re picking up mother and dad on Monday morning and dropping them off at my sister Terry’s place in Farr West, Utah. We’ll continue on south to North Salt Lake and stay with Heather and her family through Thursday morning. Then we’ll pick up mother and dad and take them back home to Soda Springs. That will be our Christmas and I’m looking forward to the time off. Merry Christmas!

Yesterday afternoon Nina and I drove over to Soda Springs to spend a few hours with mother and dad. As is usual, Nina put together a meal (very yummy meatloaf this time) to take over with us. We had a delightful visit and dinner. Dad was having some trouble getting the snowblower to start, so we worked on that and got it running. I ran it on their driveway clearing off about four inches of snow that had accumulated. Nina and mother put up their Christmas tree in the living room (Dad didn’t think they needed a tree this year since they weren’t going to be home for Christmas. Nina and mother, of course, had a different idea).

Just before we left, I had mother and then dad sit down with me to make a couple of short Seesmic videos with their Christmas greetings. I thought they came out quite nicely. Mothers video is at http://seesmic.com/uFghwAJD64 and dad’s video is at http://seesmic.com/3LLcekQhOA. I posted the videos and we packed up to come back home to Pocatello.

After getting home I plugged my Macbook back in and saw a note from our son James on Twitter saying, “You need to look at the replies to your posts!!” I opened Seesmic and found five replies to the videos I had put up:

1. http://seesmic.com/CI4wVBtThz
2. http://seesmic.com/MtxyX0uVO4
3. http://seesmic.com/XlIqW1qwpZ
4. http://seesmic.com/eNOPbv5UWd
5. http://seesmic.com/yPRDcGWLrh (Jim and kids — this one takes about 10 seconds before it starts)

Click on the links and enjoy the responses as well. It’s a nice set of Christmas greetings back from a delightful community. Hopefully the links will work. If not, please try again later. Seesmic is Alpha software and is going through some growing pains right now which I’m sure will be fixed Real Soon Now.

Merry Chistmas!

The big news in Pocatello, Idaho yesterday was the impending sale of AMI Semiconductor to Phoenix-based On Semiconductor. I got several emails from people that I used to work with at AMIS asking what I thought of the sale and what the impact on AMIS in Pocatello will be.

On Semiconductor bought the Gresham, Oregon fab from LSI Logic almost two years ago. I have some friends working at the Gresham fab and heard from them a little about the culture changes that took place as On Semiconductor took over the facility.

Based on that information, what I’ve read in the press (both print and online), and my own observations about AMIS, here are my predictions:

• AMIS has four fabs: a four-inch fab in Belgium which is in the slow process of being shut down, a five-inch fab in Pocatello which is doing fairly well, a six-inch fab in Belgium which is full, and an eight-inch fab in Pocatello which is running around half capacity. On will quickly shut down the four-inch fab and by mid 2009 there will be no fabs in Belgium and only one fab in Pocatello. I suspect the five-inch fab will stay and the eight-inch fab will be consolidated into On’s eight-inch fab in Gresham, Oregon.
• Currently AMIS employs about 900 people in Pocatello. By mid-2009 that will be less than 300 and most of them will be design engineers. That means more than 600 people will be laid off in Pocatello. Most of them will have to move somewhere else to find a job.
• AMIS has hired some pretty high-level talent over the past year or so, including a new President, a new CFO, a new Treasury person, and several others. These folks will be regretting having moved to Pocatello as their jobs will all go away.
• Most other corporate functions will move away from Pocatello, particularly finance and IT. That makes me very sad as there are some top-drawer IT people at AMIS.

This sale will not be good for Pocatello but it won’t be devastating or even have much of a lasting impact. For many years, GE would build plants in small-town America and staff them with lower-cost non-union labor found in these rural communities. Then Jack Welch came along. He initiated a huge consolidation resulting in shutting down most of these rural operations (for which he was nicknamed “Neutron Jack” in reference to the neutron bomb which eradicated people but left the buildings intact). These rural towns were devastated and the hulking shells of former GE buildings dot the landscape in the midwest in these small, almost ghost towns. The sale of AMIS will not have that impact on Pocatello, but it will definitely not be good for the city.

Shortly after AMIS recruited me to Pocatello, I came to realize that the values at AMIS were widely at variance with the values in general in the Pocatello area. The people in Pocatello are a bit more liberal than the Idaho average, but still quite conservative in comparison with the other blue states. They want stable employment with good benefits. They are interested in clean, environmental friendly manufacturing. They want some growth, but controlled and managed growth.

AMIS, on the other hand, has become a company that hires and fires constantly. Employment will ratchet up to about a thousand and then a couple hundred people will be laid off. One joke around town is that eventually everyone in the city will have been laid off by AMIS. The company has become very short-term focused rather than looking and planning for the long term. They’ve made several acquisitions in the past couple of years, spending a lot of money, for little gain (in fact, a couple of acquisitions have cost the company significant money). They have ventured into markets for which they were unprepared and have gotten spanked as a result. For instance, AMIS bought a company in Canada to make a move into the medical market. The main market for those products is in the United States and at the same time, some serious changes were underway in the U.S. about how products will be qualified and allowed to be sold. Those changes caught AMIS by surprise and the ballyhooed growth in the medical marketplace stalled, causing knee-jerk reactions when the quarterly results fell short. Rather than holding the executives accountable, the working folks got stiffed.

I’ve felt for a long time that AMIS was a company busy committing suicide. Yesterday they sold the gun to the company that will pull the trigger. Goodbye, AMI Semiconductor….