Greetings from San Francisco. Rather than taking a Linux Cruise this year, I’ve decided to attend LinuxWorld for the first time. In past years, this conference was absolutely huge — today it is much more realistic in size and hype. The conference got underway this morning, but was preceeded by some labs and tutorials yesterday. So I took advantage of that opportunity to attend a Samba class in preparation for Samba 3.0 being released. It was very interesting. Jerry Carter, who has perhaps one of the better jobs in the world, lead the tutorial and instruction. He’s a fellow who really knows how to work in front of an audience and never needs to be reminded to repeat the question.

I’m sitting in the first keynote speach, featuring HP. He’s doing quite a job of touting HP’s capabilities. Several other folks will have the opportunity to do the same for their companies and products during the week. I’ll attend most of those just to see what they think is happening in the Linux world.

For my part, I’m interested in the ability to deploy some fabulous functionality at a very low cost. I really want to significantly upgrade my home capability (perhaps the connection as well as the wireless broadband has become more and more flakey) and put in a good Family History application (which I’ll also need to build). This will require some additional computers and building at least one rack to house the systems. Having the computers underneath the desk has worked, but heat is a problem. I’ve put a fan under the desk to move air around and keep the boxes cooler than they were before. Getting the systems out from under the desk and into the open air will help with the cooling significantly. I still may need a fan, however. It has been very hot in Colorado Springs the past several days and I’m sure the processors suffered as a result.

Finally, I’ve got to find the time to do all of this. I’ve just gotten a new Church calling which will take a huge amount of time. I don’t want to give up the Temple, but I may need to reduce my committment up there. Where does all the time go? Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the conference and not having to worry about time, at least for right now….

In 1998 Nina and I took a vacation to Bangkok, Thailand. We had a delightful time and thoroughly enjoyed the country and people. When we visited the National Museum in Bangkok, we were privileged to have as a tour guide an American woman who was in Thailand accompanying her husband who was an oil company executive. She volunteered at the museum as a docent tour guide and was very knowledegable about Thai Buddhist Temples and the artwork to be found in these temples.

We learned that the type on Buddhism practiced in Thailand, Theravata Buddhism, was more conservative than that practiced in Japan:

… there are four major forms of Buddhism which seek to reach the goal of Nirvana through various routes. The Theravata Buddhist seeks to take responsibilty in his life by inculcating habits of disciplined simplicity. This would involve simple rituals, meditation, and moderate asceticism. The Mahayana Buddhist meditates under the direction of a disciplined teacher, who in his own wisdom and achievement is able to guide the student in therapy wisely and with discretion towards enlightenment. The Amitushu and Zen Buddhist also submits to a teacher, who guides him on the path to satori through overcoming the enemy of words and concepts which confirm and foster the illusion of self. A Zen teacher might supply a koan, a self-contradictory or illogical statement, to help the student along this path. Tibetan Buddhists often seek more immediate and sudden enlightenment through visualization, the use of mantras (repeated words or phrases that accompany meditation), or the art of intricate mandalas (see wywy.essortment.com/buddhismhistory_reyf.htm).

A characteristic of the Theravata Buddhists are the colorful and ornate temples found throughout Thailand. Adorning the walls of every temple in Thailand are a series of panels with paintings depicting the life of Sidhartha Guatema, the man who became Buddha. This is an fairly poor picture of four of these panels on a temple near the bridge over the Kwai River (it was taken with my first digital camera). These pictures are essentially scriptures for the Theravata Buddhist. Each panel will have several images, all symbolic of Buddha’s life and teachings. Each panel has one major, overriding picture. That scene will have red jagged lines over the top of it. In these panels, the jagged lines are all parts of rooftops. The panels are not necessarily in order. Inscriptions below the panels helps to guide those who can read to the order in which the panels are to be considered. Buddhist priests teach from these panels to help folks in their search for enlightenment.

As we visited Church History sites in Kirtland and Winter Quarters a couple of weeks ago, my visits to these Thai Buddhist temples came to mind. In both places, the tour started with a very new video presentation. These were wonderfully done with excellent photography and material. I was disturbed, however, that we in the Church are indeed progressing from Reality to Legend and perhaps boardering on Myth. These video presentations used actors and props to depict scenes from the 1830’s and 1840’s as the Church was driven first out of Kirtland, then out of Missouri, and finally out of Nauvoo, Illinois. The acting was good, in fact, too good. People were depicted as smiling all the time and were happy, even in the most dire of circumstances. The clothes were new, clean, well kept, and plentiful. A missionary leaves carrying three brand new, nicely tooled leather pouches, well outfitted with warm clothes, new boots, and more than sufficient clothing. The snow was only a couple of inches deep and melting quickly. The oxen were well trained and responded properly to every command. What was knee-deep mud for forty or fifty miles in Iowa was depicted as small puddles that splashed when the iron-clad wagon wheels went through them. I had the feeling that those early saints would not be all that pleased with how their enormously difficult circumstances were portrayed. They in fact struggled mightily (and with enormous faith) in their extreme poverty, through epidemic illnesses, and murderous persecution.

If I were to tell a Thai Buddhist that the true story of Sidhartha Guatema has evolved from Reality to Legend to a Myth of heroic proportions, they would consider me to be a heretic. To them, the idea that Sidhartha’s mother was walking across India while she was pregnant and when it came time for delivery, she held onto to a tree branch and Sidhartha issued from her side, able to walk and talk is truth and nothing but the truth. One of the panels (and I unfortunately don’t have a picture, even a poor one) depicts the scene. There was no labor, no pain, no blood or water, no incision, just one moment pregnant and the next conversing with a newborn son. It would be interesting to see what this story has evolved into in another hundred years or so.

I would hope that we can avoid this slippery slope. Perhaps depicting life as it really was is too depressing, too graphic, and would drive people away. But, perhaps not. It would certainly be better than making the story into a heroic myth which would cause any thinking person to question the story and all the doctrine associated with it. Meanwhile, I’m not terribly interested in sitting through another one of these visitor center video presentations.

On the other hand, visiting Kirtland and Winter Quarters and touring the facilities and museums is absolutely worthwhile. The material, exhibits, restored photographs, and models are delightful and very educational. I didn’t know much about the ashery until this visit. I thought it was just a soap making facility and learned that it was a major money-making venture, paying much of the cost of building the Kirtland Temple. The information about Winter Quarters and then Kanesville and Council Bluffs was outstanding and I learned a lot. I could have easily spent more time there. We’ll be back, but I’ll be skipping the videos. I’d much rather become better acquainted with the reality rather than the legend.

We pulled into the drive on Tuesday afternoon a little after 4:30 p.m. It was good to be home! However, it was Dang Hot in Colorado Springs. Fortunately, a storm blew in shortly after we arrived cooling things off somewhat. Wednesday and Thursday were more of the same hot temperatures. It is right now 99 degrees, down from a high of 101. The only good news is that the humidity is only 16%. Anything much higher would turn us from roasting into being broiled.

The server is back up and running. The UPS power supply had failed. Consequently, even if I had remote access, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about the problem. I’m going to look for options that would continue to provide city power when the battery UPS fails like this one did.

On Wednesday I hauled the trailer to several places to get estimates for the repair. One place estimated $1400 to fix the front of the trailer. The place where we bought the trailer doesn’t fix fiberglass and wants $4800 to replace the front of the trailer. I’m pretty sure that the insurance isn’t going to fund a replacement….!! Repairing the awning ranged from $420 to $525. The insurance adjuster will be at the house on Monday afternoon to tell me what they will fund. It’s been an interesting experience getting the estimates! Fortunately, the folks who will likely get the work to do are not the folks who took the longest to do a simple estimate and are also booked full until mid-late August.

Ashlyn seems to be enjoying herself and Kendra is quite happy to be home. Kendra flew back yesterday (by herself) and has finished her three-week vacation. Ashlyn is out seeing the sights in Colorado Springs. She’ll fly home next Wednesday, given that she hasn’t been roasted (or broiled) in the meantime!

Saturday, July 12, 2003

Baraboo, Wisconsin! What an interesting place. The Ringling Brother’s Circus started here in Baraboo, Wisconsin. They would winter here and get ready for the next season’s show. That practice continued until 1919 when they bought out the Barnum and Bailey Circus, which was a much bigger operation. From that time forward, the winter home was in Sarasota, Florida. But because of the Ringling Brothers roots, the World Circus Museum is here in Baraboo. Even the name sounds like something that should be associated with the Circus.

We’re here on our way home from Ohio and Nina’s family reunion. The website at home has stopped working and I haven’t been able to make connection with it through any other means, either. I’ll need to put a dial-up capability on a system at home so I can dial in and figure out what the problem is. I also need the ability to remote start a system — perhaps by cycling power. That would by most helpful when I’m not physically there. Why do these systems go down when I’m some huge distance away??? So, I’m writing this using WordPad and will post it when I get home next Wednesday.

It’s been a fun and interesting trip. We’ve been in Pennsylvania with Kirk and Dawnmarie and their family, then in Kentucky with Jim and LeeAnn and their family. On Sunday past (I think that was July 6th), we all began congregating at Salt Fork State Park in Ohio. The park is located east of Cambridge, Ohio, near the I-77 and I-70 interchange. As we were setting up Sunday evening the heavens opened and we got drenched. That pattern continued the rest of the week. Lots of rain — and rain in copious quantities. One of the storms was accompanied on Monday evening by heavy, gusting winds. The winds did a couple thousand dollars damage to the camper. The front awning was ripped from its hinges resulting in a huge crack in the front of the camper. That is currently covered with duct tape to keep the rain and wind out. The storm also ripped the awning along side the camper. I’ll be checking with the insurance when we get home to see what help they can give me on getting thing fixed. Today is the first full day without rain in a week — and that’s probably because the Nettleton’s are no longer congregated in Ohio and we’re north of Madison, Wisconsin.

Tomorrow we’ll go to church at the Baraboo Branch and then drive westward ending up somewhere around Rochester, Minnesota. So, there’ll be more added tomorrow….

Monday, July 14, 2003

Tomorrow turned out to be Monday evening. We’re in a KOA campground near Grand Island, Nebraska. We’ll be home sometime late tomorrow afternoon or early evening, so long as everything works out OK. I’m tired – not really sure why as we’ve done nothing but sit in the car all day today. We decided to head straight home from Wisconsin and have Wednesday to get things cleaned out of the camper and such before I go back to work on Thursday. Besides, there isn’t a whole bunch of stuff worth spending much time on between Wisconsin and Colorado Springs – at least not in this heat.

We’ve traded rain for heat. It’s dang hot here – about 95 degrees at 8 p.m. Colorado Springs is very hot as well. This may be the last summer with no air conditioning at home.

The reunion was a lot of fun. The Salt Fork State Park was a nice venue. Nina’s younger brother Ralph made reservations for us in a cul-de-sac part of the campground so that we were all together at the end of the road. That certainly kept the traffic down in our part of the campground. Sites in state parks are spacious and spread out. There was plenty of room for tents (we were the only ones there with a trailer). By families — Marsha and Billy were there along with Marsha’s daughter Robin, husband Haldor and daughter Elenor and Marsha’s son Brett with his daughter Hanna. Nina’s sister Pam along with all of her kids and grandkids were there. Unmarried Matt and Serena came over. Benjamin and his girlfriend Stephanie were there. Vanessa, her husband Dean, and kids Skyler and Colby were there. Marilyn, her husband Al, and children Lauren and Seneth spent most of the week there. Jordan and Ashlyn were there with Pam for the week. Pam’s husband Ed came down for an afternoon. He’s working at a summer camp and needed to be there each evening. Nina’s younger brother Ralph along with his kids Ashlynn and an (unnamed) boyfriend along with a baby daughter Kelsey, and his son Shawn came over from Columbus. Ralph Jr. was not able to be there. Ralph’s wife Marion was also not able to be there since she was in Connecticut with her family as her father is very ill.

In our family, LeeAnn, the twins James and Steven and daughter Shaundra came up with us on Sunday and stayed through Tuesday night. Jim had started a new job and was only able to come up for a few hours on Tuesday evening. Heather and Jaelene flew into Cleveland on Monday and then flew back home Wednesday afternoon. Dawnmarie, husband Kirk, and children Madison, Spencer, Rachel, and Kate drove over from Pennsylvania. Daryl and Jared drove out together and left Thursday afternoon to drive back. We also brought Trevor’s daughter Kendra out with us so she could spend some time with her cousins. So we were well represented. With all that, we had 52 people there plus two dogs, Bradica and Zoey.

There weren’t any major activities planned, just visiting and whatever folks wanted to do. Since it rained from time to time in copious quantities, most people spent much of the time wearing wet clothes and sleeping in wet tents. Skunks were also present every evening. A couple of them got into Marilyn’s tent. One of them sprayed as they were trying to run the animals out of the tent. Scratch one tent!

The park is built around a very large reservoir and the beach was very nice. Late morning and early afternoon had a lot of sun on Monday and Tuesday so most of the kids went swimming. A couple of them got quite lobster-looking by Tuesday afternoon. Ralph brought plenty of food and enjoyed cooking the evening meals. Kirk made a marvelous breakfast on Tuesday morning for everyone. We didn’t lack for food. After the evening rain storms, sitting around the campfire was also quite enjoyable until the bugs drove us into the camper. Everyone agreed that we need to do this again in about three years – perhaps where it won’t rain every day???

We left Friday morning and drove just into Wisconsin and spent the night. We moved the camper to Baraboo on Saturday morning and spent the afternoon at the Circus Museum mentioned earlier. We went swimming in the “heated” pool long enough to cool off on Saturday evening. Sunday we got ready for church, packed up the camper, and drove over to the Baraboo Branch building. We stayed for Sacrament Meeting and then drove along the Wisconsin River, up the Mississippi River, and into Minnesota that afternoon. We camped near Austin, Minnesota, and left early this morning with the intent of getting as far into Nebraska as we could.

We did stop in Omaha at the Winter Quarters Temple and Visitors Center. We spent about an hour there. The Temple is beautiful. The grounds are exquisite. The Visitor’s Center was very interesting with a lot of artifacts. The film was very interesting, made up mostly of video to accompany journal entries concerning the time in Winter Quarters in 1846-1847. I think that was a much better film than the one in Kirtland.

We’re bringing two other souls back with us – Trevor’s daughter Kendra who has made the entire trip with us, along with Pam’s seventeen-year-old daughter Ashlyn. Both of them have been wonderful to travel with. Kendra is very easy. She does what’s asked of her without arguing or complaining. She seems to always be happy and she’ll eat anything. She’s almost 9 years old (going on 17). Ashland has been wonderful as well and a great companion for Kendra. Ashlyn has really wanted to do something outside of Ohio and this is her “chance.” She’ll fly back to Ohio a week after we get home. She’s a good kid – actively involved in the Church and very interested in doing right things. I’m impressed.

Internet connections using Sprint PCS have been spotty, much more so than I had expected. We had a poor connection in Pennsylvania at the campground, a little better connection at Kirk and Dawnmarie’s house, no connection at the campground in Kentucky but a pretty good connection at Jim’s house. There was no connection at the State Park. Even driving across the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes was spotty. The first campground in Wisconsin had a connection, the second in Baraboo did not. The site in Austin, Minnesota had a good connection. We occasionally had signal today and no signal in this campground. I’d sure like this service to be much more reliable and available.

So, tomorrow we’ll arrive back in Colorado Springs, 19 days after we left. It’s been a fun trip and for most of the trip, we really didn’t want to go home. Now that we’re a day away, we’re both quite anxious to get home. I think we’ll be out of here quite early tomorrow morning.

This is the most amazing thing. We’re driving across Missouri (just going through Columbia on I-70), Nina is driving, I’m in the passenger seat, connected to the internet through my Sprint PCS 3G wireless card, posting to my web log. It wasn’t all that long ago that my connection to the internet was a dial-up connection to a BBS turned Internet Service Provider in Salt Lake City. After connecting, I’d fire up a terminal session and run Pine to read and send e-mail. That was in 1989. We’ve come a long way and I’m looking forward to seeing what all of this looks like in another 14 years.

We’re headed for New Wilmington, PA. We’ll arrive there sometime late tomorrow afternoon. It’s about 2:15 p.m. local time. We’re about two hours from St. Louis and another three hours from the Indiana border. We should get into Indiana without difficulty before stopping for the night. We’re pulling the trailer and have Kendra, Trevor’s daughter, with us. She’s got the back seat all to herself along with the small TV and has been watching videos non-stop.

The trailer is heavy. The front is filled with the furniture and stuff for Dawnmarie, the stuff we went to Spokane to pick up a couple of months ago. So far it’s stayed in position and we’ve got the rest of the trailer available to us. We left Colorado Springs around 1:15 p.m. on Thursday and drove as far as Russell, Kansas. We pulled into a campground, put the feet on the camper down, hooked up water and electricity, and spent the night. We didn’t even unhook from the Suburban. Dinner was at Pizza Hut, Kendra’s favorite food.

We got away this morning about 7 a.m. local time and have been driving pretty much ever since. We stopped at a Kentucky Fried Chicken for lunch and are hoping to be able to drive until 7 or 8 p.m. tonight. That’ll put us at Dawnmarie’s house mid-afternoon on Saturday. It sure is a long ways across country!

It sure is green out here in Missouri. We’ve started getting into the country where trees are growing, although not nearly like Pennsylvania. The wheat fields in Kansas were being harvested. Here in Missouri they’ve still got several weeks left before the harvest. It’s dang hot — only 85 degrees, but quite humid. I’m glad to be in an air-conditioned car. I’m also happy that we’re not in Kansas any more…!

I’ve been scanning more slides into the computer. Some of these are quite interesting! One of them
was taken when we stopped by Mt. Rushmore sometime around August, 1972. We had been in Idaho visiting my family and were in our Volkswagen camper. On the way back we drove through Yellowstone and camped in a national forest campground where a huge thunderstorm raged for several hours in the middle of the night. All the kids slept through the storm — that’s how tired everyone was. We pulled into a campground near Mt. Rushmore the next night where it was very cold and raining. We were literally freezing in our little camper. A pickup truck pulling an Airstream trailer pulled in next to us, was set up within minutes, and they were cooking fried chicken within a half hour of arriving. We had a bit of envy that night.

The next morning we drove up to Mt. Rushmore. It was very cloudy and dark, but when we arrived the clouds parted for about a half hour during which time this picture was taken. You probably also need to know that the sweater I’m wearing is still hanging in my closet. It was a high school graduation gift from my parents.

The only other news is that my sister-in-law Christine is in the hospital in Salt Lake City with some pretty serious problems. Things are beginning to get better, however. She had a couple of heart attacks and threw off some blood clots which lodged in her legs cutting off circulation. She has diabetes which further complicated the situation. The medical staff has been able to break up and dissolve the clots and blood is now flowing properly in the legs. Tomorrow they’ll do a heart catheterization to determine what they can do about the heart attack. We’re quite concerned and hopefully things will continue to improve.

The picture shows Jim in the tiger-colored sweater, Dawnmarie, Heather, and me holding Trevor who would have been about 11 months old.

It has been a long time since the last post! Probably far too long. If I don’t do this regularly, the habit goes away and there’s no reason for anyone to ever look at the blog. I promise to do better in the future… (grin). I’ve received a new toy — a film scanner. I have some slides and pictures from when we lived in Japan from 1966 to 1968 and some of these pictures have really deteriorated. I’ve scanned a bunch of them into the computer and am getting them onto CD’s so that we can preserve them better than the film is being preserved. One of them is a picture of James and Heather along with Momo, our dog of that era. Heather was born in the fall of 1966 and she’s probably around six months old, so this picture would have been taken in the spring of 1967. We were living near a housing area called "Hyde Park Annex" just off base at Johnson AFB. At that time, Johnson was a shared base with the Japanese Self Defense Forces. The USAF used it as a housing area and as an emergency airfield. A few years later the base was turned over to the JSDF completely and the Hyde Park Annex is now a city park. A couple of the base housing buildings remain as offices. Just on base the Base Exchange and Commissary buildings are visible, but almost falling down. That part of the base isn’t being used by the Japanese at the current time. The base is open for visitors on the first Saturday of each month, but we’ve never been in the area at that time. I’d like to do that some day….

The house we lived in when this photo was taken still exists. During Heather’s visit to Japan a few years ago we went looking for the house and found it. A Japanese family lives there (of course). The roads have been rerouted and not much of the neighborhood looks the same, but the house was still there. The picture shows a patio area just outside a sliding door that lead into the living room. There were two bedrooms at the back of the house and a small bathroom. The kitchen and living room were essentially one large room with a small divider.

Momo means "peach" in Japanese. It’s also the main character in a famous Japanese fairytale. When we got the dog, a Japanese Spitz, it was just the tiniest fur ball and earned the name Momo. We gave the dog to another Air Force family with a number of kids when we left Japan in 1968.

The deck is finished once again for another year. I’ve also mounted some flower boxes along the deck railing and we now have flowers planted there. It looks quite nice. As part of this project I bought a new table saw and had fun building the mountings. I’m now ready to tackle a larger project. I think the next project will be a gate for the deck to keep Bradica on the deck and the deer off the deck. I just need to decide how best to build the gate. A swinging gate is easier, but a sliding gate, kind of like a pocket door, would be much more practical. After that I need to build a set of nice-looking shelves to go alongside the desk in the computer room so I can get this tangle of cords and computers out from under the desk.

In about ten days we’re headed east on vacation. We always manage to make life busy and complicated for us! We’d like for our granddaughter Kendra to go with us so she can be with some of her cousins. So Heather will be driving up to Boise and Wendy (Kendra’s mother) will meet her there with Kendra. A couple of days later, Nina will meet Heather halfway between here and Orem, Utah and get Kendra from Heather. Then Kendra will go with us out east. On the way back, we’ll go north into Montana, meet Wendy, and give Kendra back. Quite a shuttle! Hopefully Kendra won’t get too homesick while all of this is going on.

We had a major catastrophe in the corporate data center last Saturday evening. It was one of our maintenance weekends and a lot of work was going on in the data center. Part of that work included the semi-annual preventative maintenance on the battery-backed universal power supply. This device provides a couple of minutes of battery power should we loose city power to keep things running while the generator comes online. When the preventative maintenance was finished, the maintenance man switched the UPS from maintenance mode to normal mode and the device completely failed. We lost all power to the front half of the data center, where about two-thirds of the servers and disk arrays are located. Of course, they all went down immediately. Realizing that there was a problem, without thinking, the maintenance man switched the UPS back to maintenance mode, which put power back into the room from the standby generator. Everything started trying to power up again, all 180 computer systems. Doing that did a fair amount of damage to a number of systems. When power went down, he needed to have left the system in that state so that we could go turn off all the power switches. Then we could figure out what was wrong with the UPS, get that fixed, and then start bringing systems back up again. However, that wasn’t the case. All of my folks supporting the data center in Colorado Springs were called in to work and most of the production systems were back to normal around 6:30 Sunday morning. One of the large disk arrays failed entirely, so we still have some systems (primarily supporting the development and software testing functions) that have yet to come back into service. The disk array was finally repaired late this afternoon and hopefully sometime tomorrow afternoon we’ll have the data restored and those systems will start coming back online. This was as bad a disaster as I ever want to see!

We’re back home and the busy life has consumed us once again. Does that sound melodramatic enough??? Good thing it’s not entirely true! The trip to Mueller State Park was lovely and very refreshing and very tiring!

We had a total of two days at the park. We arrived around noon on Monday (Memorial Day) and left the park just before noon and Wednesday. I spent Monday and Tuesday morning around the campsite unwinding and shooting some film (nothing much to show for it, however). Tuesday afternoon we decided to take a bike ride on one of the trails near the campsite. The trail map suggested that the trail was about 2.7 miles long of moderate difficulty. It turned out that the trail we wanted to take wasn’t open all the way for bicycles and the trail we took was definitely more than "moderate!" As we went along, it continued to go down and down and down hill — all of which we had to go back up. It was impossible to ride back up, so we had to walk the bikes back up. I was absolutely dead tired when we got back to the campsite. I’m definitely not in any shape for that kind of a trek. The next morning we decided to just ride around the campground on the blacktop. I started to mount the bike and the chain broke! Oh dang.

We did drive to another trail which was rated as "easy" and 1.8 miles long. It wasn’t too bad a hike and the views were quite spectacular, but if that was an "easy" trail, then I’m not interested in anything more difficult.

What is it about this time of year when everything gets very busy? Perhaps it’s because winter is over, the days have turned warm, and everyone is suddenly on the go. The traffic on the freeway last Saturday was dramatically worse than it’s been all winter long. People seem to be trying to get everything done all at once. I’m hopeful that this won’t last very long and by the end of August we’re getting back to something much closer to normal. Meanwhile, we’ve got a very busy summer ahead of us that is turning out to be somewhat complicated. Normal, if it ever happens, is really looking good.