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.

Nina and I made a quick trip to New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, last weekend for a couple of very important family events. Madison was to be baptized into the Church and Jillian was to receive a name and a blessing. We spent a delightful weekend in New Wilmington.

We flew from Denver to Pittsburgh Friday evening and flew back on Sunday evening. While there we stayed two nights at the delightful Jacqueline House bed and breakfast (check the link! Click on "Virtual Tour" and then "The Master Room". We slept there!). All the arrangements worked out very well.

The baptism and blessing took place on Saturday afternoon February 22nd at the New Castle Branch building. Jim and LeeAnn and family drove up from Kentucky for the festivities. Our niece Vanessa along with her husband and boys drove over from Ohio as well. Kirks parents Boyd and Jo were there from Montana. Family was well represented.

We got there Friday night to find that Rachel was sick with the flu. Saturday morning, most people were feeling OK. It turned out that doing the blessing together with the baptism was a Good Thing! By Sunday morning, Dawnmarie and Spencer were both down with the flu which has since spread through most of the family out there. By doing everything Saturday afternoon everyone was able to be in attendance.

We enjoyed the trip. It’s so amazing to be in Colorado at 4:30 p.m. MST and then be in Pittsburgh at 8:00 p.m. MST that same evening. New Wilmington is in very rural countryside. The roads meander through rolling hills, across small streams and bigger rivers. Trees are everywhere and on cloudy days it’s very easy to loose my sense of direction as there are no big mountains to act as landmarks. We’ve lived many years in that part of the world and it still feels like home. I think I could live there again!

We stayed for the first time at a bed and breakfast on this trip. Dawnmarie’s house is small and her inlaws were staying there for this week. So we decided to stay somewhere nearby. There aren’t any motels in New Wilmington and the nearest accommodations of that sort were about twenty minutes away. Dawnmarie located two bed and breakfasts and scouted them both out. Her recommendation was for us to stay at the Jacqueline House which was about five minutes away, just south of the college. It was a lovely choice. The house itself is about ten years old. The owners had an old farm house on the property torn down and then built a modern home built on the foundation. The home was built to look like an elegant old farm house but has all the modern conveniences built in. They then built an addition to the house for the family living quarters. The current owners bought the property about six months ago. There are four rooms available for rent. We could come and go as we wished. Breakfast was served in a common area at whatever time we wished. The room itself was nicely decorated with a bathroom almost as big as the bedroom, including a claw-foot tub. Nina enjoyed a morning bath each morning we were there. We will definitely stay there again on a future trip to New Wilmington.

In the next few days I’ll post some pictures from our trip, including some of Jillian. She is a delightful baby. She wakes up and grins with beautiful dimples! All of Kirk and Dawnmarie’s children a delightful. It sure makes raising Dawnmarie worth it (grin)!

Early Wednesday morning the snow started. By Wednesday evening we had about four inches of snow on the ground. It wasn’t much snow but it sure has been cold. The low last night was about -4 and the high today was 19. It’ll be a little bit warmer tomorrow. These are good days for staying indoors.

Nina probably wishes she had stayed indoors on Wednesday morning! She had an appointment with the physical therapist at 7:30 a.m. She left the house about 7:15, about the time the first inch of snow had fallen. Not quite a mile from the house she lost control of the car and slide over the curb and up onto the sidewalk. While the car survived the incident unscathed, she did not. She wrenched her back and was in quite a bit of pain. She went to the therapy appointment anyway and barely missed being hit on her way home as another couple of cars went out of control in the same spot! Needless to say, she stayed on the recliner most of the rest of the day yesterday. She’s feeling much better today, but it’ll be a couple more days before she’s back in good form.

Even Bradica (the dog) thinks that staying indoors is a Good Thing. Persuading her to go outside, and in particular to get off the back deck before doing her business, is difficult when it’s this cold and there’s snow on the ground. Meanwhile, she’s developed this curious mannerism of standing under things like plants (as in the accompanying picture), or under the edge of a table covering or a bed covering, anywhere that something falls across her back. She’ll stay there for a long time, peering out at the world. It’s quite amusing and seems to have no known purpose. Chuck Sale, our Home Teacher, suggested that it was her jungle instincts coming out. Do dogs get Alzheimers?? She’s a very good dog and fun to have around (even if she is more work than any kid of similar age). She’s now a lurking dog as well.

Why is Nina going to see a physical therapist, you ask? She’s been having a lot of trouble with her right leg. She saw the doctor on Monday who has ordered up a number of tests. Since the most likely cause is sciatica, he sent her to see a physical therapist to work on a better alignment of muscle and nerve in her leg. The first day at the therapist seemed to help. The second day, however, was marred by the wrenched back. She’ll have several more visits with the therapist in hopes of fixing the problem. Meanwhile, the rest of us here are just trying to stay warm!

I think I’ve got all of the programming done and the code working reasonably well. If anyone is interested, you can now subscribe to this weblog. What that means is this: anytime I post a new entry to the weblog, subscribers will get a short e-mail telling them that a new entry has been posted.

Subscribing should be fairly easy. Click on the "Subscribe!" link on the right side of the page. Enter your e-mail address and submit. You will receive an e-mail telling you about the subscription. From then until you choose to unsubscribe, anytime I post, you’ll get an e-mail message. Happy reading….!

I was reading in a magazine about the fellow who created a website called livejournal.com which was one of the early web logs. He developed the code over time from a command-line system to a web system to a multi-user system. He said that he sometimes entered information into his weblog thirty or forty times a day! I have a hard time getting one post a week onto my weblog so it’s difficult to imagine what someone would have to say when they posted thirty or more times in a day. Later on in the article I learned that most of these posts were something like "going downstairs to get a Dr. Pepper" or similar. After that I didn’t feel so bad. But, he did say that an early innovation he put on his web log was the ability for people to send messages to his pager.

Well, I have a cell phone that will receive text messages. So, I’ve added this ability to my web log. On the sidebar on the right side of the page is a new quick link: Send Msg to Roland. Clicking on that link will open up a new window. A text message of up to 80 characters can be sent to my cell phone. Try it out…!!

Now that this works, the next innovation will be to allow folks to sign up to receive an e-mail message whenever something new is posted to this website. Shouldn’t be too hard….!

We made a quick trip to Soda Springs over the weekend to visit with my mom and dad. We drove up Saturday morning and drove back Sunday late afternoon. It was a good visit in the middle of a business trip to California.

I needed to be in California on Friday, January 30th for meetings with AT&T and then be back in California on Wednesday for a dinner I’m hosting for a number of LSI Logic employees who are attending training in San Francisco. Since the Denver Temple was also closed for winter break at that same time, we decided to make a bigger trip out of the business trip. Nina and I drove to Orem on Saturday, January 24th. She stayed here during the week while I went out to California. I flew back after the AT&T meeting on Friday. That made it possible to drive up to Soda Springs on Saturday. Our granddaughter Stephanie went up with us and we really enjoyed her company and it was good for her to spend some time with my mother and father. After lunch on Sunday we drove back down to Heather’s to catch Michael’s tenth birthday party and the end of the Super Bowl. I’ll work from Heather’s on Monday and Tuesday morning and then fly back out to San Francisco. Nina will pick me up at the airport on Thursday morning and we’ll drive home. It’s been a busy, but good trip.

Mom and Dad are doing very well. The picture was taken with the camera on my phone while they were slicing the roast for lunch. The camera on the phone is only marginally useful. It has no flash and little capability. But, the picture is a keeper. Mother will turn eighty this year; dad will be eighty-three. They’re doing well, are in reasonable health, and are very active. We’ll go on the cruise to Alaska in a couple of months together and I’m really looking forward to the trip!

The week in California was most interesting. On Monday afternoon the fastest spreading virus yet to hit the Internet started coming into the company through e-mail. The vast majority of our employees didn’t click on the virus attachment and thus didn’t get infected. However, the virus did seriously affect our e-mail systems. The attachment was about 22k bytes in size which dramatically increased the average size of e-mail coming into the company. Every one of them had to be scanned for spam and have their attachments stripped. We had to bring on additional computer horsepower so we could begin to catch up and then rewicker the e-mail infrastructure to get ahead of the curve. We’ll be making major changes Real Soon Now. This one cost us, once again, real money.

Late last week my best friend’s mother-in-law passed away. She had been living with them for several years after her husband died in an apartment in their downstairs area. Her funeral will be this Tuesday and we won’t be able to attend. Meryl, I’m sure you are much happier now — no more oxygen tanks, being short of breath, pneumonia bouts, and all the other ailments. And, you’re back together with your husband. God Speed! We miss you, however. It’s a sad time for family and friends.