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!