Today is a mixed rain and snow day, just right for staying indoors as much as possible.

1. On April 9th dad had his 88th birthday. The folks at the nursing home helped make it a good day for him, including the Pink Ladies dressing him up in a purple hat! We celebrated his birthday on Saturday with all my siblings. In the midst of the party, just before cake and ice cream, bingo started at the nursing home, so festivities were postponed until that was over and he came back with his stash of candy.
2. The new car is being undented as this is being written. It would be nice if all mistakes were that easily erased! This one just cost money.
3. The Area Single Adult Fireside on Sunday Evening featured Nina as one of two speakers. She’s the Relief Society President at the Kinport Branch which serves the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center. The other speaker was the Kinport Branch President. Nina gave a very moving talk about the women at PWCC including reading from some letters she’s received from some of the women. I about wore out a handkerchief while she was speaking. The attendance was poor because of a competing fireside twenty miles south of Pocatello featuring a very famous Mormon songwriter and because of Easter.
4. It takes a lot of time and effort to write a user manual for someone who hasn’t used a piece of software before. It’s quite difficult to see the software system through the eyes of someone experiencing the system for the first time.
5. Today and tomorrow are supposed to be very wet with a foot or more of snow forecast for elevations about 5,000 feet. Yellowstone Park has been advising that they’ll have the road from West Yellowstone to Canyon, to Mamouth, and to Old Faithful open on Friday, April 17th. Were planning to drive there for the day. Hopefully the road will be open even with this storm.
6. One of my currently favorite programs is Pandora Internet Radio. It’s playing right now on my laptop and it’s my most used application on my iPhone. This morning while taking a stroll on the treadmill listening to Pandora I thought about my first transistor radio back in 1957. Transistor radios were only a year or two old when I got one for a birthday present. The wonder of these radios were that they operated on batteries and could be taken anywhere. I spent many hours riding on a tractor in the fields that summer listening to music on that AM radio. Forty years has seen an enormous change in our ability to consume music.
7. Having music ubiquitously available is making a significant upheaval in the music business. The business model is completely disrupted and I’m very interested in what the new business model(s) will become. The same thing is happening to newspapers. I’ve been very disappointed in the local newspaper’s reaction to their failing business methods. Unless something happens soon, within the next two years we won’t have a local newspaper. They’re listening to the wrong people giving them advice and can’t hear anything else. I wonder if the buggy whip people had the same experience?
8. I used both H&R Block’s Tax Cut and Intuit’s Turbo Tax programs to do my federal taxes this year. They both came up with the same number (that was goodness). Tax Cut was easier for me to use, though, as it seemed a bit more logical going through the interview questions. Turbo Tax had the better help when I had questions about a 1099-B barter form. Both worked well on my MacBook with no noticeable glitches.
9. For some reason the number of page views my blog is getting has gone up significantly in the past month. Who’s doing all this looking at my blog? The number of comments hasn’t changed, though. On the other hand, my writeup about my Garmin GPS system on a different blog continues to get comments. Lots of people seem to have heartburn with Garmin GPS units!
10. I’m very happy with how social media (Twitter and Facebook in particular) is helping me to stay connected with far-flung family members. The Internet definitely removes the feeling of distance.

Several weeks ago I decided to start using the treadmill that’s been sitting downstairs for several years. I could do thirty minutes a day five days a week, and that has generally worked out. Fortunately there’s a makeup day on Saturday if I miss a day during the week, which I did this week for the IT Breakfast on Thursday.

We have a very high-tech bathroom scale that has also been in a lonely hiding place. I dug it out on the first day on the treadmill, stepped on it, and the blinking display said, “OL”. That’s it. Nothing more. I was thinking that means something like Over Limit. The book to the scale has long since disappeared so I just put the scale back into its hiding place until today.

Today I got a real (big) number. I’m no longer over the limit! At least it’s going the right way.

I needed to go to Georgetown on Wednesday to attend their City Council meeting, get some pictures, and on the way stop in to see mother and dad. In the process of making a right turn into a driveway, I encountered a boulder I didn’t see and put a dent into the car we’ve had for less than a week.

Such things are not new in my life. I think for the past ten years every new or reasonably new vehicle we’ve had has incurred some kind of a problem caused by me. The most marked one was our brand new trailer in Colorado Springs. On the first big trip out of town turning around in a big parking lot I managed to hang the trailer up on a light post while making a right turn. The tradition continues.

Thursday morning, after our monthly IT Breakfast at Perkins Restaurant (they serve a great breakfast!), I took the car to a body shop recommended by one of the guys at the breakfast to get an estimate. Since we have a $500 deductible, if the cost was going to be less than that, no reason to bother the insurance company. He rang up a total of just over $2,100. A new door shell, labor to take everything out of the current door and put it in the new door, a new sill below the door, painting, blending the paint, etc. and etc. I questioned him on a new door and a new sill. I thought they could be straightened. He assured me that would not be possible.

At that price, I decided to go talk to our Allstate Insurance Adjuster. He went through the process and said the total bill to fix the door and sill would be about $680 … a rather substantial difference. I showed him the other quote and he kind of chuckled and said, “That’s why you should always talk to your insurance.” They have deals and arrangements (which is probably true) and, as I expected, the current door shell does not need replacing, only un-denting, and the same with the sill.

The car goes into the shop (a different one, an Allstate “approved” shop) on Monday for about three days. We’ll be back to a one car family situation during that time. The result is we’re out another $500 and have a car that looks like new again. As my mother said when I told her about it, “At least it’s now broken in…!”

Early in the evolution of the Internet, a messaging system developed which allowed connected members to send text messages to each other. Instant Messaging, ICQ, SMS, and eventually Twitter all spawned from those early text messaging systems. During technical conferences and conventions an instant messaging channel would be setup for connected attendees to converse with each other in the background during presentations at the conferece. This background communication is called a “backchannel”.

Twitter has opened up a new backchannel. Now people don’t have to be at the conference or convention to participate in the background conversation. Yesterday’s LDS General Conference sessions were a marked example of this backchannel. Twitter generally works in a subscription model. That is, I choose to receive someone’s Twitter messages, or in other words, I choose to “follow” them. I receive the short messages sent out by those that I follow and do not receive any messages from those that I do not follow. However, all Twitter messages are broadcast on Twitter’s public timeline. Several programs designed to facilitate receiving and sending Twitter messages have incorporated an ability to “search” the public timeline for specific words. Any messages that meet the search criteria get displayed and the rest continue to be ignored. Through some kind of a general agreement, the community of Twitter users interested in LDS General Conference used a special tag #ldsconf in all their Twitter messages (called “tweets”) about conference. And in that way a Twitter backchannel came into being during the General Conference sessions.

All that is just background!

I sat at my computer yesterday during the morning and afternoon sessions of Conference, watching conference on a TV and watching the Twitter backchannel on my computer. It’s was a very interesting experience. Most of what was on the backchannel was people quoting snippets from the talks. For instance:

lutez The 6 destructive d’s doubt, discouragement, distraction, diligence (lack), disappointment, disobedience. #ldsconf

fringies RT @bjhomer: “Net Usable Faith = Total Faith – Doubt and Disbelief. Interesting concept. #ldsconf (Said better than I did!)

somethinggirl “You don’t have to spend time as a Laman or Lemual to know that it’s better to be a Nephi or Jacob.” -Ballard #ldsconf #ldsconf

myldsnotebook We can not do a Google search to gain a testimony -Elder Ballard, I love it! #ldsconf

somethinggirl “We live in an area when boundries of decency/good taste are being pushed to the point where there’s no boundries at all.” #ldsconf #ldsconf

cboyack “The commands of God have taken a beating in the vacillating marketplace of ideas.” – E. Ballard #ldsconf

cougartex We need strong Christians who can defend the gospel of Christ against moral relativism and militant atheism. – Elder Christofferson #ldsconf

These were interesting in that they quickly showed what was important to the people watching the conference. More importantly, I was quickly supplied with a delightful list of quotes with little work on my part. The program I was using (from Yahoo! called “Sideline”) gave me the ability to “favorite” any of the tweets in the stream and collected them in a separate tab. I could later export this list of favorites and have my own quotebook. I really like that capability.

Another important part of the backchannel were the snippets of additional information. For instance, Sterling Fluharty (tweeting as PhDinHistory) sent out a couple of very interesting sets of statistics as the historical report for the Church was being read in General Conference’s afternoon session:

Increase in Children of Record during 2008 was up 24% over previous year – this could be the largest annual total since early 1980s #ldsconf

Annual growth of LDS wards & branches: 1.65% in 2004, 1.56% in 2005, 1.43% in 2006, 1.28% in 2007, 1.01% in 2008 #ldsconf

Converts Baptized per Missionary: 4.32 in 2003, 4.72 in 2004, 4.67 in 2005, 5.13 in 2006, 5.3 in 2007, 5.06 in 2008 #ldsconf

I was pleased that he had the data at hand and was able to quickly calculate these interesting statistics. It certainly added a new dimension to what was going on in the conference.

In another example, when President Monson announced that Elder Neil L. Andersen had been called to the Quorum of the Twelve to replace Elder Wirthlin, the official Church twitterer LDSNewsRoom sent out a link to Elder Andersen’s bio information. Later when the new Young Men’s Presidency and the new Sunday School Presidency were announced, links to that information were tweeted by LDSNewsRoom. While it was information that was fairly close at hand, I didn’t have to go look for it, Twitter brought it to me.

I’m looking forward to today’s General Conference sessions … and to the Twitter backchannel. It definitely adds another dimension to the conference!

Nina and I drove down to Orem today and picked up our new (to us) Toyota Avalon which was bought for us last Friday at an auction in Las Vegas. It was a good day to be somewhere besides outdoors as it was cold, windy, with rain and snow squalls.

We drove the Tracker down and drove two cars back … with two nice respites. We stopped on the way back at Heather’s to show Ty what he had done for us. They left almost right behind us to go to California for Spring Break.

The second stop was in Ogden at Maple Garden Chinese restaurant. This was one of our favorite restaurants when we lived (many years ago) in Pleasant View and the food was as good, or better, than we remembered. Nina ordered take out to bring home!

We’re back to being a two-car family … one car for each person. While it hasn’t been a problem, I think we both appreciate the ability to not have to coordinate every trip out of the house with whether or not the car will be available!

Yesterday I bought a car that I’ve never seen from a person I’ve never met using text messaging and Twitter. I still find it amazing. Nevertheless, in a few days we’ll be a two-car family once again.

I usually go down to Salt Lake around the last Friday of the month for a couple of meetings I enjoy attending. This time both meetings were on the same day with a podcasting conference during the day. The monthly CTO Breakfast (hosted by Phil Windley) started the day at 8 a.m. The podcasting conference was interesting, put on by another friend Thom Allen. Then the day was capped off by the monthly Geek/Blogger dinner arranged by another good friend, Laura Moncur and her husband Mike. So, I drove down Thursday evening to stay at Heather’s place in North Salt Lake. I sent Heather a text message on Thursday to see if the guest bed was available. It was, she replied. I got there about 9 p.m. Ty opened the door…

“Father! I didn’t know you were coming down!”

Then he turned to Danielle who was at the computer, “Did you know grandpa was coming?”

“No,” she replied.

When I saw Heather the next morning as I was leaving for the breakfast, she told me she was sitting in the Bountiful Temple in a session when she suddenly remembered she hadn’t told anyone I was coming. I appreciate the use of the guest bedroom. Someday I need to fix the hole in the wall that’s pretty much my fault….

The breakfast and conference were held at Neumont College in South Jordan. Both were a lot of fun and I enjoyed the day. Kudos to Thom Allen for putting together a very good podcasting conference. About 9:30 a.m., my iPhone rang and it was Ty. His friend Greg was in Las Vegas at an auto auction and there was a Toyota Avalon coming up on the auction in 9 minutes. It sounded like it would be a pretty good deal. I called Nina and we agreed on a price that we’d go up to. Several text messages and tweets later, we had bought the car. It looks to be a very good deal … we bought the car at about what a dealer would have bought it for, so we saved the dealer’s markup. Greg, who does this car buying regularly, will have the car thoroughly checked out and can return it to the auction if everything isn’t in good order. If all checks out, we’ll go down to Salt Lake next week, hand over the check, and come back with the car. It was just that easy.

What an amazing and emotional time we’ve had for the past couple of weeks. Lots of family visiting a week ago (including a surprise visitor) and then a wedding and a funeral this past week. It seems there’s been no time to do much with the blog, so today has been pretty much dedicated to getting pictures posted in the picture album and to writing up a bit about the events.

Last week on Friday the 13th, my nephew Bryan took his wife Sydnee into the hospital to deliver their baby. Bryan is the oldest son of my sister Terry. In the course of events, the baby Dana Arlene Harris did not survive long after the birth and Sydnee was also in pretty serious condition. She had lost a significant amount of blood and is just now beginning to return to health. An autopsy was performed on the baby (the results will not be known for a while yet, if there are any useful results) and the burial services were scheduled for this past Friday, March 20th, down in Salt Lake.

I took mother down for the services on Friday. We first went to the funeral home for a viewing at 11 a.m., then to the cemetery for a short graveside service about noon, and then went over to Bryan and Sydnee’s ward house for a luncheon put on by their Relief Society sisters. It was a beautiful spring day with temperatures in the upper 70’s. If I had to pick a day for a burial, that would have been the kind of day I would have chosen. Bryan and Sydnee were most gracious and, although this is perhaps one of the hardest things that parents can do, they were both rock solid.

Of course, the day and the events brought memories strongly to the surface from some 34 years ago when Nina went into the hospital in Neuss, Germany and after an emergency C-section, our daughter Traci was born and then died about twenty minutes later. The time after Trevor’s death eight years ago and all that had to be done in such a short amount of time came to mind as well. My heart really goes out to them and I understand a little bit about the emotional rollercoaster that Bryan and Sydnee are riding. You never forget. They are always close by in memory.

I’ve posted some pictures from that day in my picture album. Click on the link or click on Pictures! at the top of the page.

On a high note, this was also the week that Ashlyn got married. She’s Nina’s niece and has been attending BYU-Idaho and was kind of despairing that she’d never get married! Then all of a sudden the absolutely perfect guy came into her life and Eric and Ashlyn are now husband and wife for time and for all eternity.

Thursday evening, March 19th (my birthday!) we went up to the Rexburg Temple for the 6 p.m. session where Ashlyn and Eric took out their own endowments. It was a jam-packed session and a very lovely session.

Nina’s sister Pamela flew out for all of the festivities this past week and stayed at our house for the week. Her good friend from High School Anne also flew out last Wednesday and spent the rest of the week here as well.  We had a lot of fun with them here … and a lot of Very Late Nights for Nina. On Friday while I took mother to Salt Lake for the funeral, Nina, Pam and Anne went to Jackson Hole sightseeing and shopping. We all arrived home about the same time … me from Salt Lake via Pizza Hut for takeout, and them via Idaho Falls and picking up my MacBook computer that was getting an upgrade.

Saturday morning we left about 8:30 a.m. to drive to Logan where Ashlyn and Eric were to be sealed in the Logan Temple. Their sealing appointment was at 11 a.m. and we needed to be at the Temple at 10:30. We arrived quite nicely about 10:15 and by 10:45 we were in Sealing Room #1 in the Logan Temple. Lots of friends and family were there for a delightful sealing and marriage ceremony. The officiator gave them some outstanding advice (Eric’s sister did a good job of making notes later of that advice) and then pronounced them man and wife for time and for all eternity. We were very privileged to be there and to be a small part of their day.

I also took a bunch of pictures and have posted them to the picture album. Click on the link or click in Pictures! at the top of the page.

Finally, yesterday was another very busy day. In addition to normal Church responsibilities, I had an assignment as a High Counselor to speak in one of the Wards in our Stake at 12:50 p.m. Further, I had a meeting at 6 p.m. scheduled to begin the work on a Stake Preparedness Plan. Meanwhile, my favorite brother Perry had a couple of his daughters visiting (one from Las Vegas and one from Green River, Wyoming) and they were going to Soda Springs on Sunday to visit with dad. Nina and I also wanted to see our nieces and spend a few minutes with them.

So, Nina went with me to the Ward for my speaking assignment. We left directly from there at 2 p.m. and drove to Soda Springs, arriving about 3:15 p.m. We visited for about an hour at the nursing home, and then dashed back to Pocatello so I could go to my 6 p.m. meeting. We had a short, but nice visit with Mindy and Jayme and their kids. We also met Jayme’s new husband Joe for the first time. We were very happy we went over, in spite of the lousy weather! It rained most of the day here in Pocatello and when it wasn’t raining, it was snowing. However, the weather turned out to be a non-issue for all of us, which was nice.

There’s also pictures of that event posted in my picture album.