I’ve come down with a wicked cold. Sunday late afternoon it was clear that I was catching cold. However, I was also set for a trip to Milpitas, CA on Monday morning. In hindsight, I should have cancelled the trip and stayed home. I slept the entire flight over here, went into the office for a few hours, and then went to the hotel room. I slept from about 4:30 p.m. through to 6:30 a.m. the next day (today). I came back to the hotel room and noon between meetings and slept for another couple of hours. I left the office at about 4:30 and slept again until 8:30 p.m. I’ve been up since then reading e-mail and now writing this short blog. This’ll get posted in a few minutes and I’m off to bed once again.

The cold is accompanied by a horrid cough that seems to just tear me up inside. I’ve been living on cough syrup which only helps marginally. I hate being sick!

As I was growing up there was a popular song by Merle Travis titled "Another Day Older … And Deeper In Debt." Tennessee Ernie Ford had the most popular recording of the song which he called "Sixteen Tons." I suspect that most people would associate the song with him.

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store.

I turned another year older yesterday. Best part about it is, we’re not deeper in debt! In fact we’ve been able to reduce a significant amount of debt over the past year and other than some smaller balances on a couple of credit cards and a mortgage, we’re pretty close to debt free. Since war started with Iraq last night, that could turn out to be important! Yup — we’re liberating/disarming Iraq and I sure hope it goes quickly and smoothly.

Birthdays are pretty much non-events for me. I’ve had enough of them that I’m not particularly interested in counting any more. What ever happened to the days when people had to stop and think about how old they were? My wife Nina has her birthday one day before mine. We’re a day short of being a year apart in age. So, one day out of the year, we’re the same age. Then we go to sleep and I wake up a year older and she wakes up a day older. Doesn’t seem to be much justice in that!

The storm did come. Lots of wind and some pretty miserable weather arrived with it. Points north of Colorado Springs took the brunt of the storm on this side of the mountains. Around the house we picked up between four and six inches of snow, most of which got distributed quite unequally by the strong wind. On the west side of Pikes Peak, however, snowfalls were three to four feet in depth. Jared got about three feet at his apartment in Denver. The weight of the snow at the Denver International Airport caused one of the canvas peaks making up the roof to tear and dump a lot of snow into the terminal. Nina would like to know why the worst of the storm is always somewhere else? Personally, I’m quite happy to just be a year older with not much snow to shovel.

According to the National Weather Service, we’re in for a real storm:

… Late Winter Storm Affecting Southeast Colorado…

Starting To Take Shape This Evening Over Southeast Colorado. The Storm Will Bring Heavy Snow To The Southeast Mountains… And Parts Of The Southeast Plains Over The Next Few Days. Tonight And Tuesday… The Airmass Associated With This Storm Will Probably Keep Snow Levels At Or Above 6000 Feet. By Tuesday Night And Wednesday… Snow Levels Will Likely Drop Closer To 5000 Feet Or Possibly Even Lower. At This Time… Snowfall Should Become Much More Widespread Across The Lower Elevations… With Significant Accumulations Becoming More Widespread. The Low Pressure System That Is Bringing The Winter Storm To Colorado… Is Very Large… Very Moist… And Very Slow Moving. Due To The Prolonged Nature Of The Storm… Significant Storm Total Accumulations Will Be Likely.

Past experience is that a storm as heavily forecasted as this one is never lives up to the hype. It’s the weather that kind of sneaks up that leaves the longest impression. However, we need the snow and the rain and as much as nature wants to serve up.

I’ve turned on the ability to add comments. The process is quite simple — just click on the "Comments" at the end of the post and it should work. There’s some funky programming that translates your IP address into a domain name that may not work as planned. If so, then let me know and I’ll take that code out. It’ll be quite obvious if it doesn’t work!

It looks like we’ll be at war with Iraq in two day’s time. President Bush was on TV tonight to address the nation and gave Saddam Hussein two days to go into exile or we would make war. It doesn’t seem possible that Saddam has enough brains to leave the country. I certainly hope it’ll be quick. I don’t think our economy can withstand much more.

I’ve got the upload function working with this setup, so now for the picture! Somewhere around here is the picture of Nina and Dawnmarie at the airport. Nina had just surprised Dawnmarie and I managed to get this picture just before the batteries in the digital camera went dead.

Several weeks ago our daughter Dawnmarie called me to arrange a surprise visit to Colorado Springs this week. My wife and I both have birthdays next week so this was to be our birthday present. Surprise visits are almost a hallmark in our family. Some examples include:

• Before we moved to Germany in 1972 we paid a surprise visit to Idaho to spend Christmas with my folks.
• Our oldest daughter announced over the phone from college that she was getting married, we drove from Ohio to Utah (straight through the night) to help get some wedding arrangements made. The daughter was astounded to wake up and find us in her apartment!

• While we were living in Japan, I arranged for our son and daughter to make a surprise visit to Japan for a week or so (the surprise on Nina’s face when these kids came up the stairs was priceless).
• There are numerous "local" surprise visits, just to make life interesting, such as last Thanksgiving when one of our sons showed up on the doorstep looking for a bite to eat.

So arranging for our daughter to come out for the week as a surprise visit is kind of a normal thing. The unusual part was that her husband, who is a real gem, was quite happy to spend the week at home watching the kids while our daughter came out. He teaches at a college and this week is Spring Break, so he didn’t have to take any extra vacation. However, with four very active kids under the age of seven, he definitely had his hands full. What a guy!

Dawnmarie and I made the arrangements. Rather than have her spend money on an airplane ticket, I used my frequent flier miles to get her here. That would allow her a little more financial freedom in the matter. We had a few other phone conversations getting things arranged and were quite happy with the impending surprise visit.

But, I forgot one important thing. Because I used my frequent flier miles, Northwest mailed a confirmation to my home address. Nina saw this strange thing from Northwest, stripped off the perforations, opened up the envelope, and saw the travel schedule. She tried to figure out how to glue the perforations back on the notice, had no luck at all, and finally gave up. She then told me that she knew Dawnmarie was coming out.

After some discussion, we decided to turn the tables. I wouldn’t say anything to Dawnmarie letting her continue to think that she was the "Surpriser" and that Nina was the "Surprisee." Rather than have Dawnmarie take a taxi from the airport and just walk into the house unexpectedly, I would pick her up at the airport. Nina would come with me, and while we were waiting at baggage claim, spring the reverse surprise.

It worked. Dawnmarie’s flight was to arrive on Sunday evening a little after 10 p.m. We got to the airport about 9:30 to find her flight was delayed by about 25 minutes. We waited until the airplane arrived and the passengers started coming off the plane. Nina went down by baggage claim and became inconspicuous. I met Dawnmarie at the security checkpoint and we went downstairs to baggage claim. She was so excited to be here and was looking forward to a very relaxing week. As the bags were coming out on the conveyor belt, Nina walked up behind Dawnmarie and tapped her on the shoulder. Her shriek of surprise was just delightful. They hugged and danced around the baggage claim area. The tables had been well turned.

Dawnmarie flies back home this afternoon. We’ve had a very nice week with her here. She got a lot of sewing done, some shopping completed, spent a day in Denver with Nina and Jared, took a couple of naps, and is ready to get back home with the husband and kids. It was indeed a very welcome visit.

Some time ago on one of our cruise vacations, I made it a goal to take a hundred pictures every day on my digital camera. This plan came from a couple of thoughts:

1. If I were to conciously take pictures at every available moment, one or two of them might just be reasonably interesting. It’s kind of like the idea that by throwing enough mud on a wall, eventually some of it sticks.
2. Taking pictures is like any other skill … good practice makes for better results. By taking lots of pictures, reviewing them, deciding which of them I liked, and then determining why I liked them, perhaps I’d get better at taking pictures that I liked. The mechanics of the digital camera would become easier to use. I’d better understand the relationship amongst several of the digital camera features, such as white balance, ISO, and sharpness.

For the next several vacation or cruise opportunities I did implement the plan and was able to take at least a hundred pictures every day on these trips. When we went to Maui I only took my digital camera with me and left the 35mm camera home. So what was the result?

I found that I did get better at using the camera, but also became much more frustrated at what the camera could not do that I could do with the 35mm film camera. From a mechanics perspective, the plan was indeed useful. Picture taking with a digital camera is very inexpensive. Once the camera is purchased, I can take as many pictures as my compact flash cards will allow with no other expense. I can download the pictures immediately to my laptop computer and make room on the camera for many more pictures. The only cost is time and wear and tear on rechargeable batteries.

I also confirmed that digital picture taking is much more involved than just using the digital camera. Almost none of the images from the digital camera were complete by themselves. They all required cropping, work on color balance, contrast, and brightness. They all needed to be resized to fit the intended end application, such as displaying on a web site or printing as a 4×6 or 8×10 picture. So just learning how to use the camera wasn’t sufficient. I also needed to have good computer software and a good understanding about how best to use that software. The digital camera has has a much narrower dynamic range than a film camera, so a picture with lots of shadows and a lot of contrast doesn’t come out well. Getting a good picture under these circumstances means taking two pictures — one set up for the shadows and the other set up for the highlights, overlaying the two pictures, blending them, and then collapsing the two layers into one image that brings out the detail in the shadows while not blowing out the highlights. That’s not straight-forward, out-of-the-box utilization of technology (meaning it’s not for the faint hearted) and requires some pretty expensive computer software.

I also found by taking all these pictures I was still "timelining" rather than picture taking. That is, I took a lot of pictures, but most of them were more like a travelogue rather than taking a lot of pictures of one item of interest from a dozen different angles, lighting, and exposures. I ended up with pictures of every few minutes during the day. That meant the screening and decisionmaking about what pictures to keep and which to throw away didn’t have much to do with whether or not I liked the picture, but whether I wanted to keep the documentation of that particular point in time. Rather than having a few pictures taken at various times during the day, I had dozens of pictures taken at different times during the day.

As a result, picture taking has reached another dilemna. The 35mm film camera inherently takes better pictures. The pictures from the film camera are quite expensive. If I also want the pictures scanned onto digital media, such as a CD-ROM, that further increases the expense. I could buy a film scanner and reduce the expense of getting film to digital media, but I need to calculate the cross-over cost. How many pictures do I have to take and have scanned for me before I would pay for a good, high-quality scanner? I tend to take more pictures of specific events or objects with a film camera for some reason.

The net result is that I’m going to put my digital camera into the point-and-shoot category or when I’m taking film specifically for my web pages. Otherwise, I’ll shoot 35mm film and try to get much more proficient with that capability.

Now, what does all this have to do with Blogging? Since putting this capability on my web site, I’ve tended to put an entry into the blog every once-in-a-while. I think I need to make sure that I make an entry more often than that and at least once a week on Monday. So the goal from here forward is to make an entry every Monday. Beyond that, if I some up with an thought needing some expression, that’ll get blogged as well. I’ve also no idea if anyone reads these things, and actually don’t really care very much. I write for me as the primary audience. This system has the capability of allowing folks to make comments and reply to these missives. Perhaps it’s time to turn some of that capability on as well.

It’s Monday and now I’ve BLOG’d!

We’re in that time of year foisted by corporations upon their employees: The Annual Review. Most of the time at the company where I work, the review period is followed by salary adjustments or merit increases. Not this year. For the second year in a row, there will be no merit increases and that policy won’t be reviewed until sometime no earlier than the third quarter. However, whether form should follow function or not, we are in the annual review season. Everyone must be classified into one of three categories: an outstanding performer (no more than 15% of the population can be in this category), successful performers, and those requiring development (5% of the population must fall into this category). The unfortunate in the latter class either have to clean up their act or get managed out of the company.

The timetable requires employees to write a self assessment by the end of December. The manager then has to write a review by the end of January. Then there’s a few weeks of jockeying around to meet the quotas. The Human Resource Department has to give their OK on the ratings and bless the reviews being given to those requiring development. Finally around the end of February, we have the Annual Employee Review which is a one-on-one meeting with the employee’s manager.

I’ve yet to figure out how this process really works to anyone’s benefit other than keeping the Human Resource people gainfully employed. In the employee’s eyes it becomes even almost a joke. Further, in an era of "Shut Up, Sit Down, and Be Happy You Still Have a Paycheck," it’s no wonder that cynicism reigns.

Of course, some of this rant comes because of my own review. It is less than sterling … despite a very, very good year. To read the review you would get the opinion that I’m barely one step away from being managed out of the company. I shouldn’t let it bother me very much — the man I work for is just that way. I don’t think he is capable of writing a review in any other tone. It’s impossible to do any job and have it done correctly from his viewpoint. He would have done it differently. And, of course, doing the job isn’t sufficient, it has to be done precisely in the way he would have done it.

So, what kind of job did I do last year? In January, faced with a very bad financial picture, the company determined to reduce headcount by 20%. In the Information Technology Department, we went one better reducing staffing by just over 30%. The cuts were deep and painful. It left me one person deep at every skill position. If anyone were to quit, go on disability, or even go on a vacation, we would be very short staffed. Beyond that, I was to decrease my spending by another 15%. With that backdrop, we aggressively re-negotiated contracts taking advantage of our supplier’s equally difficult positions. We reduced maintenance coverage. We stopped travelling and put all training on hold. We achieved a 19% percent reduction when the target was 15%.

A major concern was staff burnout coupled with judgment errors since there wasn’t any ability any more to do peer reviews on proposed work (the peers were all gone!), much of the staff were on call every night and weekend, and the workload didn’t decrease even though the staffing had been reduced by a third. I personally felt that the company had to plan for one major system outage each quarter that would last eight hours or longer and so informed management.

To counter that, I implemented plans to recognize the good things that my staff did. We still had a small amount of discretionary money for small awards, such as a dinner for two, or a check for $500 or $1000 (before taxes, of course). Good work and good thinking would be seen by their management and appropriately recognized. We took a hard look at the on-call policies and shifted the workload around as much as possible to have as few people as possible chained to the office. A Microsoft systems adminstrator could be the first line of defense for both Microsoft and Unix systems and vice versa. We encouraged people to take their vacations and release workplace stress. The results were excellent. We had one system outage in SAP that lasted for a half hour and that was due to a hardware failure. The Oracle ERP system had two short outages in the year, both due to hardware. Uptime and reliability improved significantly over the previous year. No one quit, no one went "postal," and no one switched over to apathy mode. We have some personnel issues, but nothing beyond what would be expected in any normal IT shop.

We also accomplished several other very important projects despite severely constrained spending. We implemented wireless access inside all our major locations (which has been very well received) and had an outside firm audit it to verify its security. We built a disaster recovery site for both SAP and Oracle ERP using available hardware and did two successful failover tests. We put in place the ability for employees to access their e-mail and calendars through any internet-connected web browser. We brought up almost twenty new servers in the data center supporting collaboration, intranet search (the "Google" of the company, content management, product line management, and an employee portal. We acquired two more small companies and integrated them into our infrastructure. And we revamped our entire data network as part of renegotiating contracts to take advantage of the latest in wide area network capability.

All of that was well and good — I guess it was what was expected. However, according to my review, my fuse is sometimes too short. I don’t check the information given to me by my staff thoroughly enough before giving it to my boss. There are a couple of other things equally as dastardly.

So, I’ve been reviewed and found, well, somewhat wanting. At least I know that I haven’t reached perfection, yet. I have yet another year to work on it. I also got something to rant about…! But pardon me for a few minutes while I go be a bit cynical about The Reviewing Season.

Today I turned in all the reviews for all the folks who work for me as well as the folks that work for them. The employee one-on-one meetings have all been held. The season is over for another year. Something else to be thankful for, me thinks.

We’ve got about seven or eight inches of snow outside and it’s supposed to snow the rest of the night. This is the first snow of any significance in almost two years. It is very beautiful outside. I think I’ll try to do some camera work tomorrow morning and see what develops. There will be no shortage of subjects, particularly if it’s at all bright or sunny. The drive back from the Denver Temple was slow tonight, with lots of traffic most of the way. The Interstate was fairly slick and slush covered most of the way. I’m quite happy to be home, in my sweats, and able to take it very easy for the rest of the night.

Thursday was a difficult day. It started with a visit to the dentist which was punctuated with three or four telephone calls while the hygenist was trying to clean my teeth. In fact, I didn’t even make it in the door before the phone calls started. The company I work for was doing a "small reorganization" which was resulting in more than two hundred people loosing their job. My department is responsible for turning off remote access, forwarding phones and e-mail, and doing other cleanup work in the aftermath. As I was in the chair going through all of this, the hygenist remarked that this time in her chair just might be the highlight of the day. Now that was a very distressing thought!

The Shift Coordinator for our Saturday afternoon shift at the temple is either working or out of town today and the next two or three weeks. That makes me the Acting Shift Coordinator. The job isn’t particularly difficult, just needs reasonable amount of experience working at the Temple. The job involves the following:

• Somewhere around Thursday having the temple fax me the ordinance schedules for Saturday along with any family file work planned. The ordinance schedule includes weddings, sealings, and own endowments, the time that these events are scheduled, and any other parameters surrounding the events. The family file schedule indicates those people bringing family file work into the temple for baptisms or initiatory ordinances.
• Thursday night calling all the irregular temple workers to determine if they’ll be at the Temple on Saturday afternoon. We have about fifteen ordinance workers who are at the temple every week and another twenty-five workers that are scheduled one or two Saturdays a month. Based on these phone calls, I then know pretty well who will be available on Saturday.
• On Friday I make up the preliminary schedule. We conduct seven endowment sessions on Saturday afternoon and each session needs one or two brethren assigned depending on whether or not an own endowment is planned for that session. We also conduct two initiatory sessions and four brethren are assigned to each session. The rest of the brethren act as Own Endowment or Sealing Guides, and as presenters or receivers at the veil.
• On Friday evening I send a copy of the schedule to the Veil Coordinator for my shift. From that he makes up the veil plans.
• On Saturday morning I have the Temple fax me the latest revisions to their schedules. From that I make up the final schedule, make enough photo copies for each of the brethren on the shift, and the head for the temple.
• The day at the temple starts with a prayer meeting at 12:05 p.m. in the chapel. This meeting needs an opening prayer and a person to give a short spiritual talk. On some Saturdays, I assign these activities. On other Saturdays, the Sister Coordinator assigns sister ordinance workers.
• Following the prayer meeting we have a short training meeting followed by a look at the schedule. I then hand out the work schedule to all the brothers present (after making changes for people who didn’t show up and for people who were there unexpectedly).
• The rest of the day is spent handling scheduling and other issues that occur during the shift. Today we had plenty of help and a very light patron load, so there weren’t many issues and none of any import.
• Finally, I close up the back end of the temple, turn off the lights, check the closets and ordinance rooms, and make sure that everyone has left the back part of the temple. Then it’s off to home.

By then, I’m plenty tired and my feet are very happy for me to be sitting in the car for the hour’s drive home. Bradica (the dog) is also very happy to see us when we finally arrive home, but mostly so she can get outside to do her business and then get something to eat.

So that’s my end of the week. A downer day on Thursday, cleanup from that on Friday, followed by a very pleasant afternoon in the Denver Temple. The day was capped by coming home to find more than seven inches of snow! Only bad part is, because of the snow I’ll have to be at Church at 7:15 a.m. to help shovel the sidewalks. Ugh.