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….

Today was another visit to the dentist’s chair. Actually, a bit beyond dentist as I was at the periodontist to have a “crown lengthening” done. I’m in the middle of a lengthly set of dental work being done to replace a long bridge in the upper left front of my mouth.

The dentist Dr. Akers (who hasn’t thought very much about a web presence, it seems) said as I got settled in the fairly uncomfortable chair, “This will be the easiest thing I’ve done in the past couple of days.” In the next breath he had his assistant call in an order for Vicodin to the pharmacy for me to pick up when he was finished. His assistant hooked up the nitrous oxide and off I went into la la land. Even though I know that the bones amplify the sounds going on in my mouth, it sure sounded like he was doing major work around #13 tooth. A couple of times he stopped and said that this was turning out to be a bit more complicated than he had originally thought.

After more than an hour in the chair, everything for this visit was completed. Dr. Akers then wrote out an prescription for Percocet! Vicodin wasn’t going to be enough, I guess. He told me to take a Percocet along with 800 mg of Ibuprofin when I got home and to repeat it when I went to bed, but not before 10 p.m. So, I’m on drugs tonight. Feeling no pain. In fact not feeling much of anything except that I’m a bit loopy.

We did get some snow yesterday but mostly we got COLD. Last night we went well below zero and the high today at the airport was 17 degrees. It’s going to be cold the rest of the week, but no more snow forecast for the next week. The snowblower got a small workout this morning. It’s working well. Now we just need enough snow for me to need it!

While were at the Messiah Sing this evening, a light dusting of snow came through. The radar map shows a cold front headed our way and the forecast says the high for the week will be 26 degrees — on Friday.  This will be a good week for staying inside, thinketh me.

This was a pretty busy Sunday. I teach the Priesthood lesson on the 2nd Sunday of the month, which was today, so I spent much of the morning preparing the lesson. Church services were from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. after which I had choir practice (and we definitely need the practice, don’t we Sister Christensen?). Nina came back down to the chapel at 4:40 p.m. so we could do tithing settlement. As Jim says, “All’s well in the kingdom.” After dinner at home we went over to the east side of town for the 23rd annual Messiah Sing. We got there early enough to sit near the front of the chapel and were soon joined by some neighbor friends. The orchestra did very well, the soloists were delightful (particularly one soprano and the bass), and the chorus was, of course, outstanding. At least the bass section was outstanding! By the end, though, I didn’t have much of a singing voice left and I’ve got a couple of those pieces rattling around in my head. There are lots worse things to go to bed with in my head, that’s for sure.

Music, cold, and possible snow. It’s definitely the season!

December is definitely the month for concerts. We went to two of them this week. Wednesday evening was the Idaho State Symphony and tonight was the Camerata Singers. Both of there were excellent concerts. Of course, the fabulous Jensen Grand Concert Hall definitely helps!

The Symphony featured a guest trumpeter, Ryan Anthony who is an incredible talent. He was with the Canadian Brass for a number of years and is now concertizing on his own.

Tonight’s concert featured the ninety-voice Camerata Singers. The first half of the program was fairly modern choir music including a set of Psalms composed by Leonard Bernstein and sung in Hebrew. John Jemmett, who worked for me at my last job (and is still working there as far as I know), had a solo part in the concert. He has a nice voice and it was fun to hear him “fill the hall” with his voice. The second half of the program included a number of Christmas carols and the audience singing along with four of them. Very delightful.

Christmas can come now. I’m getting into the spirit!

When I got up this morning we had about an inch of snow on the ground that had fallen overnight. About 11:30 I went out to get the paper and took this picture. It was still kinda snowing … that is occasional flakes were coming down. But the snow was melting faster than it was coming down. By late afternoon nothing was left. However, it was some much-needed moisture.

The national weather forecast says we should get four inches of snow or more overnight tonight. It’s 10 p.m. and so far, no other flakes have fallen. It’s going to need to really start snowing to meet that forecast. However, we’ve a number of errands to run tomorrow so having nice roads will be a bonus. It’s just that we really need the snow!