Getting a house ready for people to look at and want to buy it is a big task. The main floor and the upstairs have been pretty much sterilized. The basement is now the big task — and I do mean a big task. We’ve got some forty years of stuff down there! Every move we throw a little bit away and in between we accumulate twice as much as was thrown away. We’ll be giving the trash collectors a sizeable tip tomorrow — and next week again.

Stuff is hard to part with. Most of it has no tangible value, just memories and "just in case". I’ve got my car full of stuff to go to Goodwill and hopefully we’ll get another load to them early next week. Our realtor will be over on Sunday to finalize getting the house priced and hopefully we’ll then figure out what else we need to do before listing the property. We’ve had one inquiry so far, a hopeful sign.

Travel plans are finally in place. Nina and I will drive over to Heather’s place in Orem on Friday, May 7th. I’ll drive the RV pulling the Tracker and Nina will bring Bradica in the Toyota. We’ll stay in Orem until Sunday morning so we can go to the play that Stephanie is in on Saturday night. Monday, May 10th I’ll report for work at AMIS and do all the inprocessing and paperwork. I’ve made reservations for us at a campground in Pocatello starting on Sunday, May 9th for a month.

Meanwhile, I’ll make my last trip to Milpitas (as an LSI Logic employee) this coming week. I’ll fly out Tuesday afternoon and back Wednesday evening. There’s a farewell dinner on Tuesday evening and I’ll have a farewell luncheon with all my employees in Milpitas on Wednesday. After that I’ll attend my last staff meeting and return to Colorado Springs.

The next trip will be to Belgium to spend some time with my new boss over there. Travel arrangements are set up for me to fly out on Saturday, May 15th (arriving on Sunday). I’ll be flying back the following Thursday. It’s a short trip, but should be very interesting. Now we just have to figure out what to do with all that Stuff in the basement!

The deal is done. The paperwork is signed and delivered. Notice has been given. We’re headed to Pocatello, Idaho, in one of life’s interesting twists.

I’m changing jobs and companies. I’ll be going to work for AMI Semiconductor in Pocatello, Idaho, in charge of their information services department. It’s a very good job, an excellent title and position, along with a set of very interesting challenges. I’ll start there on Monday, May 10th.

I had really thought I’d retire from LSI Logic, even though that job was becoming less and less interesting and challenging. I felt that looking for another job would just be frustrating and perhaps somewhat demeaning, as seasoned professionals at my age just aren’t very much in demand. However, events proved to be somewhat different. Towards the end of March a recruiter called to see if I was interested in this new opportunity. We talked at some length and she was still very interested. They set up a video conference interview for the next day which went very well. They called later that day and set up an interview trip to Pocatello, Idaho. I flew in on a Wednesday night, spent the day in interviews, and flew back to Colorado Springs that night. I felt the interviews went very well. I spent the next week on a business trip to Milpitas, California. Mid-week the recruiting company called and set up another meeting with the recruiter who then told me that AMI was very interested and wanted to know what kinds of issues and questions I had. I gave them a long list of questions and concerns. I didn’t hear anything else for more than another week.

Meanwhile, I had a couple of conversations with my management about future job possibilities. One such opportunity might be an assignment in India. Someone will definitely be needed in India to manage the work being outsourced over there, but when that will happen and whether or not I would be the right person were decisions that would be made some time several months or more from now.

My job has been getting smaller and smaller since we came back from Japan. The company has been downsizing dramatically. The areas of responsibility have been adjusted and reorganized. While all of that made sense from a company point of view, it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. Further, the company is spinning off a third of the business into a new entity, a transaction that’ll happen in the next couple of months. I was once again faced with another significant reduction in budget and possibly another reduction in people. I’d pretty well resigned myself to this continuing unpleasant situation.

About the time I had decided that AMI was going to do something else, the recruiter called to talk through the outline of an offer. Compensation was good. Relocation was included. The job content was everything I expected. The company has operations in Pocatello, Belgium, and the Philippines, good places to spend time (and I’ll spend significant time there). I told the recruiter that if AMI could put together the offer substantially as he outlined it, I would seriously consider it.

The official offer arrived two days later and needed only some minor alterations. I sent that information back to AMI and on this past Monday I got together with my boss to tell him that I had a good offer, there were some details to work out, but if those details did work out, I was planning to accept the offer. He asked for some time to see what might be done at LSI Logic to convince me to stay, beyond his asking me to stay.

There just wasn’t much the company could offer other than the prospect of an assignment in India sometime in the future, if everything worked out. AMI came through with the needed changes to the offer, so I’ve officially given notice to LSI Logic Corporation after nine years of service.

So, we’re busy uncluttering the house — making it a sterile environment for the Realtor to show. All of Nina’s wonderful collections are being put away. All of the pictures and other stuff that says "Roland and Nina Live Here!" are going into boxes and to the basement. When people look at the house, we want them to see the possibilities of how they would live in the house, rather than feeling like this is some kind of an eclectic museum. It’ll take until the end of next week to get enough done that the house can be listed. Hopefully it’ll sell quickly so we can really be "On the Move … Again!"

Last year about this time (actually April 14, 2003), I wrote about an April Fool’s edition of a college newspaper that caused the paper to be shut down and everyone associated with the newspaper to lose their jobs. Well, it seems that students at even the most prestigious colleges can’t seem to learn from the past. Today’s CNN web page carries a story about the April Fool’s edition of The Tartan, the student newspaper at Carnegie Mellon University. The edition featured a cartoon containing a racial slur.

The Tartan, the student paper at Carnegie Mellon University, fired the cartoonist, agreed not to publish again until autumn and decided to hire an ethics manager to review future issues. Two editors also resigned.

I’m continually amazed at the churlishness of today’s society that is being fostered at our colleges. The excuse offered by the newspaper was:

Editor in Chief Alex Meseguer said the cartoon made it into print because fatigue clouded editors’ judgment.

That implies that at some previous time, judgement was present…. I seriously doubt it.

Flitting about the country is an interesting exercise in patience. The airlines coupled with TSA (Transportation Security Agency) make travel a very wearing experience. In the past couple of weeks I’ve been on several different airlines and around much of the country. Northwest Airlines, Continental, Delta, Sky West, and United have all carried my body and stuff to Dallas, Atlanta, San Jose, and Idaho in the past couple of weeks. Amazingly enough, in the end everything got where it was supposed to be and home again.

In that course of events, I’ve been in big airports (Atlanta), mid-sized airports (Colorado Springs) and very small airports (Pocatello, Idaho). Security at these airports continually finds ways to amaze me. Some thoughts:

• I went through the Colorado Springs Airport security when it was very busy and again when I was almost the only passenger in the area. I zipped right through on the busy time of the day trip. However, when I came through a few days later at a very slow time of the day, TSA took the opportunity to go through everything — and do it several times. I sure hope they were training folks. It took a long time and a lot of patience.
• The security setup in Atlanta is the one seen most often on TV as CNN has their offices in Atlanta. Everything is set up for masses of folks, yet it is the slowest security of any place I’ve been. From the time that I’ve got my stuff ready to go into the scanning machine and I’m standing in front of the metal detector until I’m through and have collected my things takes at least twice as long as at every other big airport. There are simply too many chiefs and not enough indians for that operation.
• At Pocatello, security is only open just before flights depart. The rest of the time the door into the concourse is closed and locked. A good system in my opinion. Their method for handling checked luggage is also very efficient. After checking in at the counter and getting the bag tagged, you take it to the TSA counter and turn the bag over to them. The bag gets scanned and then goes down the chute to be loaded on the airplane. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve ever had my small suitcase more thoroughly examined than in the Pocatello airport. The security guy took everything out, and then took every thing out of the toilet bag, checked all the pockets, and thoroughly examined everything. It wasn’t just me, either. He did the same thing to everyone boarding the flight.
• Suspenders are an interesting item. I take everything out of my pockets, take off my watch and rings. I take off my glasses. I take off my shoes. The only thing metal left on my body anywhere are the suspender adjustment devices, the zipper in my pants (sometimes this is plastic), and the clasp on my pants. Some places let me take my arms out of the suspenders and let the suspenders dangle. Others won’t let that happen. Most of the time if the suspenders are dangling, the alarm doesn’t go off. It always goes off if I have to wear them normally. Occasionally even dangling suspenders sets of the alarm, but then only after I’m completely through the metal detector and have taken a step away. It is just crazy. This shouldn’t set off the detectors!

The government is going to test a smart card this summer. It will have on the card some biometrics so they can verify that the person holding the card is physically the person the card was issued to. Getting the card will require having a background check made and coming up clean. Some folks don’t like this idea at all. Personally, I think those folks are all screwed up. Airport security is about the only place where normal people are routinely treated as though they are criminals, almost having to prove that they are not. But since they don’t know what they’re looking for, they have to subject everyone to the same scrutiny. Some civil libertarians think that we’re giving up our rights to privacy if we allow the government to make these background checks. That is all unadultrated baloney. The government already knows literally everything about me. Any law-abiding citizen is in the same category. Issue the cards — let normal law-abiding citizens proceed quickly through security and save TSA’s energy for the few who are not willing to subject themselves to a prior background check. I can hardly wait until the government gets this program implemented and rolled out. Bring it On!

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)!