The other day it became necessary for Dawnmarie to finally (!!) get her Pennsylvania driver’s license. She later sent us an e-mail describing her experience in working with the public servants, some of whom could use some training in the idea of providing service…. Here’s what she wrote:

Okay, I’m back, finally, from getting my license. And I just have to say, this is a completely ridiculous process. It took me an hour, and I’m not even having to take a test, written or otherwise. You have to bring your Social Security card, two forms of ID with pictures on them, two pieces of mail with your address on it and your out of state license. Sounds simple, right? HA HA HA!

So I get there, I show them my stuff, and he says, “No can do.” I wonder why not. He says, “Well, you didn’t talk to us first did you?” I tell him that I’ve been to the license center in another county, got the paper work and then went online, got the same info, so here I am.

He repeats, “Well, you didn’t talk to us.” I look at him like he’s insane! It’s a state run organization! Do I need to talk to the city people when I’ve gone to the web site? Who knows. So I ask him to look at it again. He says that he cannot use my birth certificate (orginal, with raised seal, not a copy, thank you very much) because it does not have the same name on it as my license and social security card. I point out that it does indeed have the same name, it’s just that I’m using Smith as a middle name now. Does not fly. So then he conceeds that he can use my military ID after much contemplation over whether or not it is the same person. Much comparison of the photo to me. The picture was taken 30 days ago. I think it looks like me. So then I’m off to another room where another guy looks at the same stuff, makes two copies of each and says “No can do as the address on the mail is a PO box, not a street address and I have to have a street address on the license and don’t I have anything mailed to me with my street address on it?” I say, “Well, you’d have to have a mailbox at your street address in order to get mail there, and as I’ve already explained, all our mail goes to a PO box.”

So then I have to go out to the car to check the registration and proof of insurance and show them that to see if that will qualify. Only problem being that the car is registered in Kirk’s name and I don’t have my marriage certificate with me to prove that I’m married. So he asks if Kirk is here. I look at him as if he’s insane. Why would I be shoveling gummi bears into Jillian and Kate’s mouths and having them climb all over me if their dad was here to watch them? “No, I say, he’s working.”

So after what seems like a bit of internal conflict for him, he allows it. I verify that the form is correct and am told to go across the lobby to get my photo taken. I get there, and I have to prove yet again that I am who I say I am and that no one has accosted me in my walk of 30 feet to get my precious driver’s license form. Finally I get my picture taken and am released yet again into public life.

I shudder to think what would have happened if I actually had to take a test! Amazingly enough, 19 of the 911 terrorists managed to get US driver’s license. I barely was able to switch mine from another state! It seems a bit extreme. It’s always the assumption that you are trying to lie to them, or pull something over on them. If my name on my birth certificate had been “Daniel Simpson” I’d be able to understand why they would need additional proof that I am who I say I am! But to tell me that Dawnmarie Smith and Dawnmarie Smith Lunnen are too dissimilar is a bit of a stretch to me.

Oh well, I have my license, now I get to go deal with the police department. Will my fun never end?!

Thanks, Dawnmarie, for a great story. It’s now recorded for posterity! When I asked her if I could post the story, she replied, “Have at it! Kirk reminded me that the most important thing to come from all of this was a much better photo on my license!”

A Picture Share!

Originally uploaded by Roland K Smith.

I’m trying to make posting from Flickr work. I took this picture from my office window earlier today. Eventually it’ll end up on my weblog. When it does, I’ll stop tinkering!

The blogging spirit has touched several people and I’ve enjoyed the reading. Nina’s sister Pam (links on the right side of the page) has written a couple of delightful posts in the past few days. It is good to read a bit out what is going on in other people’s lives. Nina talks fairly often with our daughters, but not all of that conversation filters through to me. For instance — Dawnmarie and Kirk have upgraded their car! That was interesting news to me. Dawnmarie just went through a frustrating process with her driver’s license. It’s a great story so I’ll be asking if she’ll let me post it on my blog. You’d think that would be an easy task…. Wrong. Jim, Heather, and Jaelene all have written on their blogs with more interesting tidbits. My brother Perry has a new post with some additional information about his treatment program. I’m liking this new world of communication.

Speaking of Perry, he had his first chemo treatment today. The doctor told him the first treatment would take between six and eight hours because they would have to knock down all of the allergic reactions that he would have to this first dose. It didn’t sound at all pleasant. Here’s hoping that he recovers well from this round. Some year people will look back on how we had to treat cancer in this day and age and will shudder at how barbaric it sounds, just like we look back on how dental work was done before anesthesia (wooden teeth and all). However it is getting much better. My grandmother Mary Smith died from stomach cancer when I was a senior in high school. There were very few treatment options available and she essentially starved to death. Again, not very pleasant.

With that I need to get back to something much more uplifting. It’s snowing outside! We’re ahead of normal in the water budget for the year. We’ve had much more than normal rainfall which has been filling up the ponds, lakes, and reservoirs. This is very good. Let it snow!

I’ve uploaded a few pictures to Flickr and am trying out some of the capability. The picture itself is a link, so if you click on the picture, it’ll take you to that picture on flickr.com. The picture is of the main square in downtown Brugge in Belgium. Nina and I went there on Tuesday, November 1, 2005 and spent the morning sightseeing. That day is a holiday through most of Europe — All Saints Day (similar to our Memorial Day) so we had the day available to do whatever we wished around the area. We first stopped in Brugge, then drove out to the coast and back to Gent.

I’ll be doing quite a bit of experimenting with Flickr over the next while. It’s currently getting quite a bit of buzz in the Internet community and it should be able to coexist and perhaps even work together with my blog. There is a capability to insert a blog entry from Flickr. I’ll be trying that sometime in the near future!

I’m wondering if it is possible to write in a blog everyday and have anything to say to myself? It’s worth a try for a few days, anyhow. It’s about 9 pm and Sunday is coming to an end. In another hour or so I’ll be making my way to bed and before I know it, another workweek will have arrived. For not having much on the agenda for this weekend, it surely has gone by in a hurry. While I’ve gotten a few things done, there doesn’t seem to have been enough hours for everything I wanted to do. So what did I do over this weekend?

Most of the time has been spent working on the weblogs and picture album software. I fixed a problem with managing passwords on the picture album software and also fixed a problem in properly reading and handling e-mail posts to my weblog. The upgrade of WordPress 1.5.2 introduced a problem where an email post could not have an apostrophe or quotation marks. If it did, the posting process would error out. Both of these problems took a while to get fixed. I also upgraded Jim’s software for his blog and made several new themes available for him to try. Perhaps we’ll get a new look from him! Heather wanted the picture album capability so I’ve put that software in place for both her and Jim. I really like the pictures from the family and perhaps this will get more of those photos online. Also, I modified the picture album software to display tooltips when the mouse hovers over the navigation bar. It may be presenting a too-busy look and feel. We’ll see how it works out.

I also did some playing with Flickr. I’ve been trying to decide if I should store the actual pictures on my own website or if I should put them on Flickr and then reference them from my website. I paid the $25 for a year’s subscription to Flickr and will do some more experimentation. Flickr looks to have the ability for me to put up a fairly large-sized image and then have a compressed version referenced from my website, but if someone wanted the picture with better resolution, it would be available on Flickr. They also have the ability now to print photos and that might be interesting as well. Anyhow, it is an interesting possibility. So far my only reservation has to do with what happens if I decide not to renew the subscription? Do the pictures just disappear? Have I locked myself into that service when I might want to do something else?

In the process of working with pictures, I found some 400 pictures on my web server that I had uploaded some years ago but had not put them into picture albums. I started doing that and have about 200 more pictures to go through. These were pictures that used to be on my Earthlink web page (which I haven’t updated in a couple of years). In those days I used to have to delete the pictures from Earthlink from time to time because they had a limit on how much disk space I could use. Now that I’m running my own web server, I don’t worry very much about space. I’m paying for about ten gigabytes of network bandwidth, but rarely use more than a quarter of the allotment. Of course, moving the pictures to Flickr would reduce the bandwidth I’m using as well. Perhaps another advantage?

I did some playing around with soldering irons and power supplies. Even though the power supply went belly-up when I turned it on, I learned quite a bit (including how hot the soldering iron is!) and want to get that project finished. I read a couple of years ago about a fellow who used a vacant high-rise building in New York to make a message board. He put flood lights in the windows in an arrangement so that messages could be shown. Someone could then send an email to a certain address with a message they wanted displayed. They would get an email back telling them when the message would be scheduled for display. Then at the appointed time, the message was scrolled across the windows in the high-rise building. One of the favorite uses of this system was fellows scheduling a message for their girl friend, and then taking her where the message could be seen. I thought this was pretty cool and would like to come up with a much less expensive and much more interesting capability. Message signs are still pretty expensive, but are coming down in price. I’d think I could build one for under a hundred dollars. I wonder what the neighbors would think if the traffic in our neighborhood increased so people could see their scheduled messages? There’s a picture on Make in their 4th issue with a loudspeaker attached to a trailer pulled by a bicycle. This is a similar capability…. Using a cell phone, one can call a special number and leave a message up to a minute long. This fellow rides the bike into some public place, turns on the system, and all of these one-minute messages get blasted out the loudspeaker — anonymous free speach.

Church meetings took up a good portion of the day today. Nina is at the Womens Correctional Center every Sunday morning. She leaves about 7:30 am and gets back about 12:30 in the afternoon (unless she’s scheduled to do an additional meeting and then she gets back about 1:30 pm). Now that our ward meets at 9 am, I’m going to church by myself. Last year she’d go to the Correctional Center in the morning and then meet me at the church (doing double duty!). This year that won’t happen. It’s kind of strange being a church all by myself in our home ward! This afternoon at 4 pm we went to the Stake Center along with the other members of the Stake Sunday School Presidency to get set apart. That will now begin taking some time, but also will be interesting. As a result of that calling, I’ll be speaking in Stake Conference in the 21st of January for 15 minutes. I’ve started preparing, but have much more preparation work to do.

So that was the weekend. Plenty to do and it certainly filled up the available time. The weekend is ending and we’ll see if anything interesting enough happens to be able to write much more often in this blog. I think that’s a good way to reduce the readership!!

Happy 2006! I’m already having problems remembering to write that date — so this is no different than previous years. Tonight I’m enjoying the Rose Bowl game between USC and Texas. We’re at the end of the 3rd quarter with Texas setting up to kick a field goal to go ahead by two points. It’s been a good game and a fitting championship game. Since I’ve been going through a year-end cold / flu, I’ve had plenty of time to watch football games on TV. By the time tonight’s over I’ll have had all the football I want for several months.

Heather and Jaelene now have blogs (see the links on the right) and it’s been enjoyable reading what’s going on in their lives. Blogging isn’t for everyone, however, as it does take time out of a busy schedule. I often find that I have to remind myself to sit down and write in the blog. If there isn’t fresh content on a fairly regular basis, there’s no reason the come back and check out the site.

The fourth quarter has started in the Rose Bowl and Texas just missed a field goal so they’re still trailing by one point. This one likely will go down to the wire as a good championship game should.

In other news, the selection committee at Idaho State University has announced the four finalists for president of the university. I’m very interested in how this process will go. I’ve kind of picked my guess for who the frontrunner is. I’m not sure if I’ll ever know who that person was going into this final process. We’ll see.

The mine explosion tragedy in West Virginia is just awful. It looks to me like the company did not have a plan for how to deal with the public, families, and the press in the event of an underground disaster. If it was possible to handle the situation more poorly, I don’t know what that would be. Thirteen miners trapped about seven hundred feet below ground and about two miles from the mine entrance with limited survival capability. Many, many hours later when the rescue team finally digs through to the trapped miners, somehow the word gets out that twelve of the thirteen survived. The town and the families of the trapped miners begin a major celebration and all the major media report the miracle. However, the real story was that twelve had died and only one had survived. Within minutes of the wrong information getting out, company officials knew what the real story was. However, for some unfathomable reason, they waited for three more hours before breaking the news to the celebrating families and townspeople. Those folks were, as one would expect, devastated and very angry. Shoot — I’m angry! This is another news story worth watching and I’m sure it’ll be in the courts as well.

The new year is well underway. It doesn’t seem any different than the year it replaced. Happy New Year!