Roger's E-mail Diary from 1998
This diary starts on 26 July 1998 and runs to 5 August 1998. It is a good example of the kind of news I would write home about in my stays in Korea. Some of it is in orginal e-mail format (short lines) and some I've modified to be more compatible with web page size.
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From: Self <Single-user mode>
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Subject: Weekly update 28 Jul 98
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Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1998 14:22:11
28 Jul 98
Salt Lake City -- What strange weather. Two weeks ago, Utah was under a mountain of hot air. The high pressure ridge was huge, stationary, and really high in pressure. The high pressure ridge had spanned the continent for weeks, and Utah days were hot and cloudless morning to night.
The forecast was for more of the same this week, when unexpectedly
the high pressure just "blew it's top." The hot air was not swept
out by cool air from the northwest (the usual end of a hot weather
episode), instead the upper air transformed from hot and dense to hot and thin, and the upper air became a low instead of a high. This "popped the lid" on the lower air, it started rising, and Monday night we had spectacular thunderstorms with great thunder
and great lightning displays over the Wasatch Mountains. Since
Monday we've had unstable, humid air. The air is ominously misty,
the clouds are low, and there are surprise thunderstorms popping up every so often during the day.
Friday was a holiday in Utah: Pioneer Day. It celebrates the Days of '47 when the first Mormon settlers arrived in Salt Lake Valley
(July 1847). This state holiday is a twin to the 4th of July
national holiday, there are parades, picnics and fireworks.
Everyone loves a parade, I do, but I dislike crowds, so I don't
see them in person very often. This year one of my students invited me to watch the parade from his home, which is on the parade route. That sounded like a golden opportunity, so I did.
Salt Lake City hosts good parades. People come from all over the
state to see them, and some spectators will camp out on the side of
the street the night before so they can have a good view spot in the morning. This parade was no exception, but I did note some changes in this parade from the one or two parades I'd seen previously.
The most notable change was there were no soldiers marching. There
was a float from the national guard, and some policemen on motorcycles, and some postal workers marching as a band, but there
were no soldiers marching. Another change was none of the marchers
were tossing candy to the kids.
The parade had a lot of floats, and a lot of high school bands. Thefloats and bands came from surrounding cities, such as Provo, whichhave their own parades on the 24th. This left me wondering: who wasgoing to march in their parades? Or, were their parades going to beconducted later in the day, and these people and floats would now rush from Salt Lake City to other places?
The parade also had lots of politicians: the governor, the state
senators, the city mayor, and others. The politicians would ride in convertible cars and wave at the crowds. They love the exposure.
There were celebrities in the parade: radio and TV personalities, and some Utah Jazz basketball players. They were riding on floats. There were clowns and classic old cars from the '20's and '30's.
There were some horse formations, but just a few because there is a separate Days of '47 horse parade that takes place three days
earlier.
There didn't seem to be anything really oddball in this parade, which is unusual. There is usually something unusual that will be part of a parade. One year there was a group of marchers dressed in business suits and doing precision maneuvers with black brief cases instead of rifles. Another year I saw a cart drawn by two shetland ponies get out of control, and the ponies started galloping off.
It was a serious matter, a runaway wagon, just like in the western
movies. The cart was carrying a mother and child, so if it tipped
over, there would have been injuries. But when the runaways are a
pair of tiny shetland ponies, and their full speed gallop is just a
little faster than a person can jog, it's hard to take the matter
seriously. I couldn't help myself, I started laughing when I saw
it. The galloping runaway shetlands managed to pull the cart a half
block before a couple men got them under control. No injuries, so
the incident ended as comically as it started, and it was the
highlight of the parade for me. Nothing like that happened this
time, so I had a good time watching, but it was just another parade for me.
Marty and I took advantage of this ominous weather to travel to
central Utah looking for photo opportunities. We traveled up Nine
Mile Canyon. Nine Mile Canyon is a mostly dirt road that winds
through the central Utah mountains to connect the small towns of
Wellington and Duechene. It's never been a major road, but it has
seen better days and more use in the past when it sported the first
telegraph line through central Utah and it was a cattle trail. It's now used mostly for local travel by a handful of farmers.
There were cooling rain showers as we drove, and the sky was overcast most of the time. There were no good landscape shots to be had, but, we did see lots of wild life. We saw deer, rabbits, several elk, a fox, and some antelope. All the animals were remarkably relaxed, we got very close to all of them before they skittered off. I guess the cool, humid, quiet afternoon was as relaxing a weather break for these animals as it for humans.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
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Subject: Weekly update 16 Jul 98
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Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 23:39:30
16 Jul 98
Salt Lake City-- Spring was cool and wet, summer has turned hot and dry. The skies are cloudless and the thermometer is soaring into the high nineties (mid thirties).
Work is going quite well. I'm teaching Netware classes at a nice
school in Draper, Utah, about 20 minutes drive south of Salt Lake
City center where I live. Class is conducted for half a day in the
afternoon. The students listen to me lecture part of the time, then warm up their computers and practice doing projects with Netware the rest of the time. They're learning, and I'm learning.
And I'm learning a lot these days. There's a big transition in the
works this summer. Netware is updating to Netware version 5, and
Microsoft is updating to Windows NT version 4 and Windows 98. This
means that the classes I teach now are not going to be taught much
longer, and I'm going to have my hands full getting up to speed on
all these new products.
I have added a new section to my web site: the RBW Consulting
section. If you haven't seen that, take a look.
I have a nice break on my drive to class. I'm traveling against the flow of traffic, so I get to be one of those people that other
people jammed up in rush hour traffic seeing motoring along the
empty side of the freeway. It's neat.
The freeways all around Salt Lake are still being massively rebuilt, it's clear that when the job is finished we Utahns will be driving on essentially brand new freeways, which will be nice. In the meantime, there's all sorts of construction jam-ups still going on from one end of the Wasatch Front to the other (the Wasatch Front is the three valleys near the Great Salt Lake where most Utahns live.) So, even though my drive to class is OK, there are lots of other trips that can get bogged down.
Updated freeways are only part of the transportation change in the
valley. There's also a light rail system being installed. Most
people in the valley are happy about the freeway, but the light
rail system is another matter. Three times light rail supporters
have put supporting light rail up for a vote in the state
elections, and three times the voters have voted against it.
Voters vote against it because it's too expensive and the way Salt
Lake Valley is laid out (in a very spread out way) it's not clear
where the light rail can run that would produce heavy, profitable
ridership.
Well, light rail is now being built anyway because most of the money being put up is federal money. But it's still not clear who is going to ride it, and for months now roads crisscrossing the down town area have been closed and torn up to lay the track. <sigh>
One of those streets is Main Street. It's now known as "poor old
Main Street" to those in the retailing trade. This is the third time in thirty years that downtown Main Street has been closed for months of remodeling and beautification. Each time it happens the retailers on Main Street, those who are supposed to gain the most from this remodeling and beautification, are essentially put out of business for the months of remodeling. Few survive, and their successors don't seem to learn: they ask for more. State Street, the next street over, never gets selected for these projects, and it's retailers are doing quite nicely, thank you.
So for now, navigating through the Salt Lake environs takes a lot
more skill that usual.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
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Subject: Weekly update 29 Jun 98
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Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 00:48:23
29 Jun 98
Dillon, Montana -- CTI is on break for a week, and CompUSA has no
classes I teach in the queue, so it's break time for me. I've got a
week, and I'm spending the first part on the road. I'm headed for
Glacier National Park, in the northwest corner of Montana.
This is a long trip for me. I can drive to Yellowstone National
Park in a day, and that's about halfway to Glacier. There are two
ways to Glacier from Salt Lake, the eastern way approaches Glacier
from the prairie side, the western way approaches Glacier from a
valley in the Rocky mountains. Both routes follow I-15 to I-90
which takes me about 2/3 of the way to Glacier.
I struck out from Salt Lake City at 4PM, just ahead of rush hour,
and didn't get slowed down badly in Ogden, either. North of Ogden
I-15 goes through rural areas and small cities clear to Billings,
Montana, so congestion isn't a problem... unless there's road
construction going on... which there was... but once again I got
lucky and encountered no serious slow downs. The worst slow down
was following a middle-aged man in a pickup truck who couldn't read
speed signs. The posted speed on this 10 mile long, one lane
section was 55mph, and he was doing 40mph. I know his problem was
illiteracy because as soon as the construction ended and I could
finally, finally pass him, he sped up to 70mph <sigh>.
On the first part of the trip the most notable thing was I saw a lot of "Thelma and Louise" types on the road: pairs of attractive women in their twenties or thirties traveling together. I started
noticing when I got passed by a pair of nice looking blonds in a
new, red convertible Chrysler of some sort. When I wasn't watching
for good photo scenery, I found myself watching the road carefully.
The next noticeable thing was I-15 got deserted after 6PM. It was as if I was driving on a Sunday morning. Then I remembered, southern Idaho is Mormon country, and Monday night is family home evening night. If you need to drive through southern Idaho in light traffic, and you can't do it early Sunday morning, do it Monday night.
The next event of note was the change in weather as I crossed the
continental divide going from Idaho to Montana. For the last couple days Utah has been in the grip of a very strong high pressure ridge. There have been no clouds, morning or evening, for two days -- very unusual. In addition, the temperature has soared. It was 91F this afternoon. Spring is gone, and summer has finally come to Utah, and it's come on strong. I experienced similar hot cloudless conditions driving north through Idaho, but at the Idaho - Montana border, there was a line of evening thunder storms. The continental divide seems to be the edge of the high pressure ridge.
Another note: "the Federalis" seem to be continuing to loosen their
grip on highway rules and regulations. Seven years ago the speed
limits in all the states were pretty much the same. This bugged the western states people to no end because their roads are straighter and not as heavily trafficed as roads in the East.
The Federal government took over setting speed limits during the oil crisis of the mid-seventies justifying their intervention as
promoting energy saving. About seven years ago the states finally
started getting back the right to set the rules of the road in their own states. The speed limit in Montana on rural interstate is now "reasonable and prudent" during daylight hours, and 65mph at night.
But DOT (Department of Transportation) hasn't given up every
intervention. They recommended doubling the traffic fines in
construction areas, and now every state I drive in has that
regulation. <sigh>
This is ideal driving season because the sun is out the longest. At Montana latitudes the sun is setting about 9:30PM and there is glow in the sky until 11PM.
30 Jun 98
Choteau, Mont. -- I chose to come into Glacier by the west route
which is US 93. US 93 from Missoula, Mont. to Glacier is non-stop
resort area -- about 100 miles of resorts. This is the Montana that Hollywood stars are moving to. It's a mix of tall timber and glacial lakes. The only problem is that US 93 is only a two lane road, and this is the start of 4th of July weekend. It was moderately crowded.
Glacier National Park itself is remarkably undeveloped. There are
only two paved roads into the park, and only one of those goes
through from the east side to the west. Glacier is also a misnomer: there may be Glaciers in the park, but they're hard to see and hard to reach. I saw only one -- five miles distant -- and if I wanted to walk to one it would be an eleven mile hike.
Glacier is famous for three "G's": Glaciers, Grizzly bears and
mountain goats. No glaciers... no grizzlies... but I did see five
mountain goat up close. These five hung around the parking lot at
Logan's Pass (the highest point on the road). They are looking for
handouts from tourists and, strangely, ethelyne glycol (anti-freeze). We saw them rooting through gravel where car radiators had spilled some. They were shedding their winter coats, and they looked very scruffy.
The mountains of Glacier were spectacular examples of glaciated
geology. They reminded me of Milford Sound in New Zealand, only
drier and colder. It was a hot day, but there were deep snow banks in many places near the top. Thunderstorms started brewing in
the late afternoon, but dissipated at sunset without ever really
getting started.
I left Glacier from the east side. As I left the park, Alberta
Canada was only 20 miles to the north, so I drove there and crossed the border for a moment. Now I've been in Alberta.
I headed south for Helena, and had another unusual experience. As I drove south out of Glacier I passed three small towns that were
roughly 40 mile apart. All three were closed up tight for the night. As I left the third I looked at my gas gage: 1/2 tank. This is the first time I've had a full 1/2 tank of gas, *and* been worried that I might run out before I could find an open gas station.
I had three choices: a) keep heading south hoping that in one of
these towns I'd find an open station, or I could make it to Helena, a larger city. b) head 50 miles east for Great Falls, a larger city, and look for a 24 hour truck stop there, c) stop at the first motel still open, bed down, and continue next morning when the gas
stations in these small towns would be open.
I found an open motel in Choteau and chose c).
1 Jul 98
Salt Lake City -- The final leg going back was uneventful. I
started early, hurried through Helena and Butte, Montana, and made it back to Salt Lake City at 5PM.
Trip statistics: Distance: 1500 miles, Time: 73 hours, Rolls of
film shot: 7.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
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Subject: Weekly update 23 Jun 98
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Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 23:00:45
23 June 98
Salt Lake City-- It's been a Fortunately/Unfortunately week for me:
Unfortunately, I was hit by a golf ball while walking off the 8th
hole of Bonneville Golf Course Sunday. This is a beautiful course
that Marty knew about. In the past Marty hasn't been much of a
golfer, but he went out last week with the kids and me to Fore
Lakes, and decided it's not so bad, so we went out for nine holes
Sunday.
Fortunately, the golf ball hit me in the center of my back on a
first or second bounce. I'm well padded there, and I felt hardly
anything. In fact, I had to check to determine what had happened. I heard the distinctive noise of a golf ball bounce, barely felt it
contact, and had to look back to confirm that what I felt was now a
golf ball lying innocently on the ground behind me.
If I was destined to experience a rare event at that moment, getting hit lightly by a golf ball sure beats getting struck by lightning. But that was only the last of my fortunately/unfortunately events this week. The big one was...
Unfortunately, my summer-long series of CNE classes at CompUSA was
cancelled three days after it started. By day three there weren't
enough students to keep the class going. This was a surprise and
makes for a big change in my plans, I was counting on the revenue
from this class series to carry me through the summer, and the
experience to polish up my somewhat-rusty Netware skills.
Fortunately, I quickly located a partial substitute. There was an
immediate opening to teach two classes at Certified Technical
Institute (CTI) in Draper, Utah.
CTI is a very different place from CompUSA. CompUSA is primarily a
retail computer store that has a training department attached. CTI
is primarily a high-end computer consulting organization with a training department attached. There is quite a different feel to the staff, the program, and the students.
The training program CTI offers is an eighteen month program that
combines learning about Microsoft Windows NT, Novell networking and Cisco routers. This year Windows, Novell and Cisco are the "big
three" of networking as larger organizations find more and more ways to use personal computers and the Internet for business. So, I'm impressed with the program, and I'm getting to do my share to help out by teaching Novell networking classes.
Finally we have the third of my fortunately/unfortunately
experiences for this week.
Unfortunately, my computer hard disk is acting up. A few weeks ago
is suddenly developed a slew of bad sectors. More unfortunately,
SCANDISK, Microsoft's standard utility for fixing disk problems
freezes up as it starts finding these bad sectors. It's not fixing
the disk. Even more unfortunately, the Real Help, the 3rd party disk fixing utility I bought this week to solve what Scandisk can't fix... simply calls Scandisk when it diagnoses a disk problem! <sigh>
Fortunately, except for failing the Scandisk test, the computer is
working just fine. What's happening, I don't know. But as soon as
I can round up enough spare money, I'm going to end the mystery by
replacing the disk.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
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Subject: Weekly update 17 Jun 98
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Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 17:27:53
17 Jun 98
Salt Lake City-- Rain, rain, rain. The Nino twins -- El Nino and La Nina -- have both blessed Utah with stormy weather this year, and June is the most blessed yet. The ducks are happy, the farmers are beyond happy, and us city folk are dealing with endless huge puddles as the ground saturates from rain and more rain.
Yesterday and today the storm was cold as well as copious, and
Parley's canyon, the major route east out of Salt Lake City, was
covered with a foot of snow at the summit. During the winter a
foot of snow on Parley's summit is significant, but not a traffic
stopper. But this is June! The snow plows are supposed to be
getting ready for "hibernation" now.
Sunday was a busy day. I took the kids golfing (I got my first
birdie golfing 2 strokes on a 3 par.) and then we visited Mirror
Lake. Mirror Lake is east of Parley's Canyon, and higher. We were
there when the snow started. We left without incident, and then went to Butterfield Canyon, where we had an incident.
Butterfield Canyon is a high pass in the Ocher Mountains on the
*west* side of Salt Lake City. The Butterfield Canyon road is a wild dirt road. Marty and I were trying to reach the Bingham Copper Pit overview, which is on a side road that winds even higher than Butterfield pass. We encountered a snow drift spread across the road. The drift was big: about six feet across and four feet high, and that should have been the end of our effort to reach the
overview.
But someone had crashed through the drift and there was a truck-size gap in the middle. We stopped for pictures. As we were shooting, another person came driving up the road with a flatbed truck with dual rear wheels, and as we watched he ground through the gap.
I figured, "Well, these two have churned up the snow in this gap
plenty, there's no reason why I can't make through now." So I reved up the Oldsmobile and took a run at the gap. I decided follow my friend Marty's advice about driving through muddy and snowy terrain: "Let momentum be your friend." So I didn't try to churn through the gap the way the truck did, I hit the gap doing ten miles an hour.
Vroom, VROOM, vrrrrrr, CRUNCH!
Oops! I got half way over the gap and I was high centered-- neither of my front wheels was touching the ground. These two trucks had churned up the tire tracks just fine, but the snow between the tire tracks was untouched and *very* solid. Those trucks had high clearance, my car has low clearance. That center snow was now holding up my car.
We tried rocking the car, and it simply didn't rock-- not forward or back, not sideways -- it was solid. I wish I had restaurant tables that sat as solid! I didn't have a shovel or rope. If no one showed up, Marty and I were there until the snow melted out from under my car-- probably one or two days, if the weather stayed warm...
Fortunately, people did show up, and they were very helpful. It
took about a half hour to assemble the right collection of tools and bodies, but we finally got a tow cable on the rear of my car and pulled it back off the drift. There were about twenty people
watching by then, and everyone cheered as it crunched off.
We thanked everyone who had helped, and decided we'd come back in a week. By then the snow drift should be melted away, and we'll make it up easily.
I dropped Marty off and that evening I met my good friend Daniel
Lee who was visiting from Korea. Korea's president Kim visited the US last week, and Daniel was part of the delegation. As Kim headed back over the Pacific, Daniel stayed for a while in Salt Lake to
visit friends, including me. It was great to see him again.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
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Subject: Weekly update 8 Jun 98
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Date: Sun, 7 Jun 1998 23:15:49
8 Jun 98
Grand Canyon, North Rim-- I got out of the apartment this weekend
and followed my nose south. It lead me through Spanish Fork to the Grand Canyon, on to Cedar Breaks, and back home.
I don't have early classes to teach this week, so I'm in my, "I get up when the sun starts going down."-mode. Ah, what luxury! I got up at noon and drove to Ed's house in Spanish Fork Saturday afternoon to watch videos and try some fencing.
I'm as good as Ed at watching videos, but Ed is getting really good
at fencing. We went through a drill where I tried to swat him with a glove. It was amazing, it was as if there was a yard stick stuck
between us. Every time I advanced take a swat, Ed was backing up at
exactly the same rate. When I stopped, he stopped, when I backed,
he advanced. I swear he was reading my mind. When it was his turn to take a swat, I didn't stand a chance, he's gotten really fast at scuttling forward and back.
When I'd finished taking my licks on the fencing field, I headed
south. It was after sunset, about 9PM, when I started. It's now
high tourist season in southern Utah, so motel rooms will jump from
costing $30/night to $40 or $50--which is more than I want to pay.
So I decided to try a cost-saving technique I'd been planning for
quite a while.
Rather than stay in a motel room, I slept in my car, but not a whole evening at one time. Instead I drove and catnapped, drove and catnapped. The goal is to get in enough catnaps to avoid getting so tired I'd have to stop and sleep in a motel room or campground.
At first, it wasn't working. I stopped to rest twice, but I wasn't
catnapping, instead after a minute or two my feet and legs got
twitchy and uncomfortable, and I gave up on sleeping and start
driving again. But the third time... I found myself waking up. I
had slept, I don't know how long. It was working. I drove until I
was tired, then I catnapped.
I made it to Imperial Point, North Rim, Grand Canyon, just at
dawn (about 4:30AM). But I was tired, and the wind was blowing
ferociously (about 20mph/12kph) so I catnapped through the actual
sunrise, then I got out to take pictures. The air temperature was
cool, but the wind made it cold. I bundled up in coat, hat and
gloves.
The light was curious. It wasn't ruddy sunrise light, it was white, as if the sun was already high in the sky. I think this is because the air is so clear, and the plateau so high (3000 yards/meters) that there are very few redding agents in the air between the sun and the plateau even at sunrise. I didn't like the effect because the pictures didn't look like sunrise pictures.
In the western mountains a stiff wind in the morning is unusual,
unless it's a canyon wind. I didn't figure it would last, and I was
right. The second stop going around the rim was not windy. But
whoops! out came the mosquitos--big swarms of them! Luckily, I
bought bug repeller the night before. As they were flying about me I was reading on one of the information signs that the weather on the plateau top was much like Canada's. "That would explain the mosquito swarms." I mused, "Canada has a lot of mosquitos, and the mosquito is Alaska's unofficial state bird."
More seriously, I've been wondering why mosquitos seem to thrive
better in northern climates. My current guess is that those things
which eat mosquitos and mosquito larva do even worse in in the cold
than mosquitos do, so the mosquitos do better. Anyway, this "little piece of Canada" was supporting a thriving mosquito population, so I moved on quickly to Royal Point, further south on the Rim Road, using my drive/catnap technique.
Imperial and Royal Points are on the far side of the park from the
Visitor Center. This was Sunday morning, and I shared the road with only three other cars, all carrying serious photographer-types like myself.
I finished, and headed for the Visitor Center. I had chosen well
to start on the far side, the Visitor Center was packed, there were
at least three hundred cars parked when I got there. I didn't stay
long, I headed out almost immediately (about noon) so I wouldn't get stuck behind some slow-moving RV on the way out--it's sixty miles/one hundred kilometers of narrow road, and road construction, from the Visitor Center to the park entrance.
I got out quickly, and as I was leaving, the wind was picking up and clouds were gathering overhead. There were going to be
thunderstorms over the Grand Canyon that afternoon, and they had
already started north of the Grand Canyon in Utah.
I traveled north, and decided to stop at Cedar Breaks National Park. Before this trip I hadn't visited Grand Canyon for a long time because it's so far south. I hadn't visited Cedar Breaks for a long time because it's so high that it's snowed-in much of the year.
I headed north and up, and as I did the rain got harder, then just
outside of Cedar Breaks, the rain turned to snow! When I got to
Cedar Breaks there was nothing to see--the thick falling snow was
mixed with fog and it was making a whiteout.
I saw that there was still six feet of snow on the ground, and I saw one place where the road cut through a twelve foot-high drift. It's June, but spring thaw is still a few weeks away for Cedar Breaks.
From Cedar Breaks I headed home through Parowan and on to I-15. The heavy rain continued all the way to Point-of-the-Mountain, and while I was driving north I was worried that the Salt Lake freeway would be flooded and traffic jammed. But it wasn't, so I got home safely and conveniently.
How did the driving/catnapping technique work out? Well, I got kind of tired while I was doing it, and I felt like I was losing some ability to multi-task as the day wore on (multi-task as in drive and look for good pictures at the same time.) But now that I'm home and finished driving, I feel quite refreshed. So, all in all, I squeezed an extra half day out of a weekend, saved the price of a motel room, and I don't feel worse for wear. I think I'll have to try this again some time.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
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From: Self <Single-user mode>
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Subject: Weekly update 6 Jun 98
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Date: Fri, 5 Jun 1998 22:42:12
6 Jun 98
Salt Lake City-- Flash! Floods in Salt Lake City!
Wednesday evening I was eating dinner with my friend Richard. I was looking out the window as the sun set; I noticed the clouds looking odd. The clouds were afternoon cumulous, common in Salt Lake any time of year, but they were lower altitude than usual, and had a roiling look about them, they where not just puffing up high and lazy in the late spring sunset sky, they kept their heads down and were headed east like they had some place to get to in a hurry.
Finally, there was no ceiling of cirrus clouds over the cumulous.
Lazy afternoon cumulous that grow to isolated thunderstorms will
build a veil of cirrus by evening, and a storm blowing in from the
Pacific Northwest signals it's advance with high cirrus clouds.
There were roiling mid-level cumulous clouds at sunset, and no cirrus clouds.
I noticed these things as I was having a pleasant evening
conversation with Richard and remarked, "There's odd weather coming, Rich." A few hours later I was safe in my apartment when a big thunderstorm with hard rain came rolling through the valley. The hard rain and occasional thunderstorms continued off and on all the following day and night. By Thursday afternoon Salt Lake valley was experiencing moderate flooding.
I was right about the odd weather. No storm had come from the
northwest, but the remnant of a tropical storm had blown into Salt
Lake valley from the southwest--something that happens about once
every four years or so, usually in the fall, not the spring.
Most years moderate flooding would be a nuisance, no more. This year Salt Lake is in the middle of completely rebuilding I-15, the main expressway running north-south through the center of the city. I-15 runs elevated through the city. As part of rebuilding, the engineers are enlarging the earth ridge that I-15 runs on, and there are thousands of tons of new, raw earth piled up on one side of I-15.
These thousands of tons of new earth soaked up some of this heavy
rain, and turned the rest into mud which ran off on the nearby
roads. On Thursday every underpass under I-15 from city center to
45 blocks south of city center was closed because it was flooded. The east of the city was cut off from the west. How do I know? I live on the east side, and my 2nd oldest daughter was graduating from high school on the west side. I was an hour late getting to graduation, but it worked out because the graduation was an hour late starting.
At work I'm preparing to teach a CNE course (Certified Network
Engineer). This is a long series of courses that's going to take
most of the summer to teach. The goal of this series of
classes is to produce students who can understand, administer
and install computer networks based on the Novell
networking system.
Teaching this class series is part of my migration up the computer
teaching "food chain." These classes are more complex than teaching the week-long A+ series of classes--designed to produce technicians who understand how to fix standalone computers. And much more complex than teaching the one- or two-day long classes--designed to help end users get familiar with standard computer applications such as word processing, spreadsheets and graphics design.
This also brings me back into my old areas of expertise: I have
worked with Novell products ever since there was a Novell.
Today Richard and I went computer window shopping. We walked into a neighborhood computer store, and I came out of the store with a neat tool: it's a network board that can be set with either Plug and Play, software, or jumper blocks. <Hot Dog!> and it only cost $30. Doesn't sound like much, but these kinds of network boards are hard to find.
This is one of those finds that makes having small computer stores
worthwhile. The owner of this small store has worked on computers,
and he or she recognized the value of this small feature on this
small board. It's a great tool for diagnosing problems with
connecting a new style of computer to a network.
This is where a small store can distinguish itself from a big store. A buyer for a computer super store is not likely to do much work on computers. He or she is more likely to spend research hours on marketing plans and customer surveys, and is going to be sensitive to the value of the coop advertising plan the board maker is offering. The components offered in the big stores tend to fall into two categories: those selling on their brand name, and those selling on their low price. Products selling on their quality-to-price ratio and good blend of features are harder to find in the big stores because the buyers don't quickly recognize their value.
It was fun to get this neat tool, and it warmed my heart to see
another small example of where diversity, big and small computer
stores in this case, is benefitting our society.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
-- End --
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From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 24 May 98
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Date: Mon, 25 May 1998 00:23:13
24 May 98
Salt Lake City --
May has been busy, but not newsworthy. I've been spending a lot of
time adapting to my new relation with CompUSA, I'm working as an
independent contractor rather than an employee.
This is not the first time I've worked as an independent, and it's
always a lot of work. The good news is that I'm teaching some of
advanced classes instead of the basic classes.
There is a hierarchy of classes in the computer teaching world. The basic classes are called the applications classes. These are classes where students learn how to use basic computer programs such as Microsoft Word, Excel spreadsheet and Access database. The
classes are typically one or two days long. Over the last six months I taught about 30 different basic classes, and as a result I've become fairly proficient in programs from Lotus Notes to Corel Draw.
But, there are many people willing and able to teach basic
applications programs, so, thanks to the laws of supply and demand, the pay is low.
Next up the hierarchy are basic technician classes. These are
about a week long and teach a person how to diagnose and repair
standalone personal computers. I'm teaching one of these classes this month. This is something I'm really good at because the course emphasises obsolete technology (three- to six-year old technology). They do so because there are still lots of computers using this obsolete technology, and a good technician must have some familiarity with these systems. Well, it turns out those obsolete systems were just the ones I spent hours diagnosing as a freelance writer after I left Novell. They don't feel obsolete to me at all!
Next up the feeding chain are classes for networking technicians:
Novell and Microsoft networks. Networks are complicated compared to standalone PCs. The courses are longer, several weeks, and a lot more expensive. There are a lot fewer students, but even fewer
qualified teachers. I'll be teaching a Netware series over the next
two months for CompUSA.
Higher on the chain are products where demand has skyrocketed
recently. Two examples are instructors for Cisco routers, and
instructors for the new generation of "client server" Human
Resources (HR) applications software that replace the HR packages
that run on mainframe computer systems.
The laws of supply and demand move fast in this area. Neither the
teachers, the schools or the product makers are tightly organized,
so demand, class prices and teacher fees fluctuate from month to
month. Also, the products keep changing, so expertise has a short
half life (about three years), and an instructor must constantly
study to keep up. There's money to be made teaching these advanced
classes, but it takes a lot of work and disipline.
It's Memorial Day weekend, and true to my long-standing habits, I'm being contrary: the highways are jammed, so I'm being a home-body.
In fact, I'm curled up with a new computer game: Starcraft. This is the first time in many months that I've curled up with a computer game. Just like the rest of the computer industry, there's been quite an evolution in computer games. The games coming out now are mostly real-time, multi-media intensive, and most can be played against other human opponents over a LAN or the Internet.
I find this good and bad. The good part is the polish of the games has improved steadily. The bad part is the variety of game styles
seems to be diminishing: if a game plot concept can't be packaged in a polished way, it won't be published.
It's similar to the problem that TV brought to news publishing: if a news item can't be packaged in neat sound bytes, it's hard for TV
news producers to get interested. Computer games are now slaves to
the multi-media, multi-player format, and at this stage of the cycle that is diminishing the variety of viable plot concepts. If a few years, as developers fully master this new technology, new plot concepts will appear, and I will be happier.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
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From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 5 May 98
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Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 11:03:48
5 May 98
Changes at work have been the center of my life for the last few
weeks. The old training manager left last month, the new one is on
board, and their management styles are quite different.
The old manager and I were charter employees of the CompUSA store in Salt Lake. With the generous help and teamwork of many other people working at CompUSA, we created this store's training business from scratch. The new manager is inheriting our legacy.
I heard the news that Mike (the old manager) was leaving last month, and I heard who his replacement would be a couple weeks ago. Mike was a very people-oriented manager. He did a lot of cheerleading and he did a lot to keep the crunching and grinding inherent in CompUSA's centralized, top-down management style out of my little corner of the training department environment. I could concentrate on learning to teach the 30 or so applications courses that CompUSA offered over the last seven months, and teach them so that the students enjoyed the classes and came back for more.
The new manager is much more of a company man, and when he has a
question about how to do something, he looks in the CompUSA
management book about how a training department should be run, and
consults with higher-ups rather than lower downs. CompUSA is strong
on hierarchy and policy, so there is such a book, and the higher ups are full of strong advice.
The net result has been a dramatic change in the training department environment. One of those changes is that I'm no longer lead trainer, I've moved out of the CompUSA organization into an
independent consultant and trainer status. Basically, Joe and I
went over what the Training Department Manual said a Lead Instructor was supposed to be doing. I wasn't doing it, and I didn't want to, so I'm giving the position up.
Moving to independent will allow me to concentrate on projects that
require higher technology skill levels than I was using as an
applications trainer at CompUSA. Making that happen in practice
over the next few months is going to keep me plenty busy.
Gotta rush off and hustle up some business,
Roger
-- End --
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From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 28 Apr 98
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
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Date: Mon, 27 Apr 1998 19:14:58
28 Apr 98
Salt Lake City--If you get a chance, take a look at www.whiteworld.com. I have been updating the pictures.
Spring has come to Utah, and I've been out on the driving range
pretty regularly. This is good exercise. It makes up in part for
the walking I don't do when I'm in the US. My feet, by the way, are thanking me for the reduction. When I came back from Korea they were achey most of the time, now they are not. The rest of my body isn't complaining, but I know I need some more activities, and one of my summer resolutions is to find a steady one.
I visited my Dad in Phoenix. He's doing well. We played golf on
Easter Day, and had the course to ourselves. I was averaging about
seven strokes a hole, par didn't seem to matter much.
Dad introduced me to a new game: a high-tech version of shuffleboard. In regular shuffleboard you have a flat concrete surface and a big plastic puck to slide over a scoring triangle at the far end of the concrete. The high tech part of this new version is scattering tiny glass beads over the concrete. These beads are like little ball bearings, and once started the puck hardly slows down. The result is a very delicate version of shuffle board, with slight variations in drag across the concrete surface. (The tiny glass beads were a mystery. Where would they come from? It wouldn't make sense to make them just for shuffle board courts. I examined them closely, they are the beads used to make highway paint reflective.)
I drove to Phoenix going straight south, and spent the night in
Kanab, Utah, gateway to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Unfortunately, the North Rim is a mountain (about 300 meters higher than the South Rim), and snow still had the roads closed into the
park. The next day was windy, so windy I was almost driving through an Arizona dust storm.
These storms are famous because the wind gets so strong and the grit so thick it can sand-blast a car driving through it. A car coming out the other side of one of these storms will have thinner paint, and a windshield that sparkles ever so beautifully every sunset and dawn from the pits blasted in it. I saw lots of dust as I was driving, but always in the distance. If one of these clouds had blown across the road, I would have had to stop and wait it out if I didn't want a pitted windshield.
On the way back to Salt Lake City I zigged a little west and went
through Las Vegas. The road from Phoenix to Las Vegas is desolate,
but it was sure crowded with campers the Monday I returned. At
Hoover Dam the traffic came to a complete halt. I thought it might
have been an accident, but it was just the thousands and thousands of tourists wandering around the dam. I was surprised. I've been by Hoover Dam twice before, and both times I remember it being close to empty. I must have been through at very off times those two previous times.
It took me over an hour to get through, and when I did, it was 5PM in Las Vegas: rush hour. I was going to stop, but the traffic on the city streets looked thick. I hurried through, and stopped in St. George instead.
The weather Tuesday was very strange: it cycled through sunshine,
rain, hail, snow and back to sunshine as I drove north. This strange weather continued for a couple days. Utah's spring weather at it's most intense.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
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From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 30 Mar 98
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Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 19:45:03
30 Mar 98
Zion National Park, Utah--Good things come to those who are
patient--especially those who are waiting for a change in spring
weather in Utah.
Last weekend was road trip time again. Marty and I headed south,
with a guest passenger from England, Celine. The forecast was for a big storm to blow through Utah--a really big storm this time, it
would cover the whole state with snow. I was a surprised and
skeptical: it's almost April. But Satuday afternoon found us headed south under lowering skies, snow flurries and a strong south wind.
We decided to go south by a little used route: Utah Route 10. This road slips it's way south east of the Wasatch mountain range and
west of the San Rafel Swell--a region of low hills and plateaus cut through by deep, deep canyons. When you see cowboy movies that show the stage coach riding over a flat plain, but headed for a
preciptious cliff, this is what the San Rafel Swell region is all
about. The land is so cut up that no one has found a good use for
it, and it's an uninhabited, almost untracked wilderness in the
center of Utah.
We didn't go there, but we went next to it. There's a scenic
overlook called The Wedge Overlook that I'd heard of, but never
visited. As we headed south through the town of Emery, I saw the
sign for The Wedge Outlook, and off we went on 20 miles of dirt
road, under lowering skies that now were showing traces of showers in the distance.
We got to the overlook, and it was a spectacular view of the San
Rafel river valley. This spot was called the Little Grand Canyon,
and justifiably so. But, ooh, was it COLD! The wind was blowing
out of the canyon at twenty miles an hour. About ten minutes after
we arrived, the high cliffs on the far side of canyon started
disappearing in clouds and showers of rain or snow. Five minutes
later we found out it was snow as it swirled all around us, and the
photo opportunity at The Wedge Overlook ended.
Celine drove us back, and as she did the snow got thicker. It never got more than a couple inches deep, but at one point even that little bit of moisture turned the road into a slick mud patch. The rear end was sliding back and forth, but Celine got us through like a champ.
We headed south for Panguich, the gateway to Bryce Canyon, and on the way, the storm let up. As the sun set in the west, the skies were clearing and a while afterward we saw stars. Southern Utah is one of the world's greatest places for star watching, the air is dark and clear. The Milky Way jumps out at you, but the Little Dipper can be hard to find because there are so many other stars nearby of nearly equal magnatude.
The goal for Sunday was to see Bryce Canyon at dawn, and Marty vowed to get us up at 5AM so we'd be in time. Well, the next morning I get a tap on my shoulder and Marty says, "Time to get up,
sleepyhead, it's 6:30." so much for Bryce at dawn. We did get there at 7:30, and it was foggy and lightly snowing. There was also a park ranger in the booth expecting us to pay money. Marty and I decided to mend our ways: we often sneak into these national parks before the park ranger shows up in the morning. We decided that this year was likely to be a busy year of park touring for us, so we shelled out $50 for a Golden Eagle Annual Pass rather than pay just $10 for the one time pass.
In the park we stopped at two overlooks, and both were overcast
<sigh>. We headed out of the park and had a wonderful brunch at
Ruby's Inn just outside the park entrance. While we eating... the
clouds parted and the sky turned blue! We finished eating and, using our brand new Golden Eagle pass, we headed back in to the park. This time we got world-class photos. Everything was perfect: we had red rock, we had white snow, we had blue sky, we had puffy white clouds, and we had sunshine to add shadows and highlights. Perfect!... for an hour, then the storm came back and the snow started again. At 2PM we headed south for Zion National Park.
On the way the storm came and went, then came again. Zion is about 3000 feet (1000M) lower than Bryce. I was concerned that the snow we experienced at Bryce would be falling as a dreary, drizzely rain at Zion. The good news was the snow was still snow at Zion, the bad news was it was snowing hard, so hard there was a whiteout, and nothing to shoot. As we drove through Zion Marty and I were telling Celine, "Oh, you should see this view." and "Oh, over here are spectacular cliffs over 300 meters high." and always there was
nothing to see but white.
We stopped at Zion Lodge for an afternoon snack. The place was
nearly deserted as the thick falling snow created a winter
wonderland, but no view. <sigh> It was time to head out. Marty
said, "We need to see the end of the road, the Virgin Narrows." I
said, "Why, so we can *imagine* we're looking at more spectaular 1000 foot high cliffs?" Marty prevailed, and we continued up the road.
As we drove, the snow stopped, the clouds parted, and blue sky
appeared once again! What luck! (and patience, and planning) We
were there at just the right time and just the right place to get
world class shots of the main cliffs of Zion covered with traces of show, with blue sky, with slanting sunlight on the cliffs, and with whispy white clouds dancing around them. Spectacular!
We headed home that evening three happy people. We had gambled. We figured that the storm would produce either spectacular results or nothing. At both Bryce and Zion we had arrived when the storm was producing nothing, but we stayed long enough for the weather to change, and we got the spectacular we were hoping for.
This is the fun of Utah in the spring time. Give it a chance, and
the weather will give you a thrill a minute.
Roger
-- End --
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From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 24 Mar 98
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Date: Tue, 24 Mar 1998 00:30:23
24 Mar 98
Salt Lake City-- A couple of weeks ago my kids invited me to a Utah Grizzlies game. The Grizzlies are a hockey team, and this was my
first experience with a "modern professional sports presentation",
and I was amazed. Things have changed a lot since I went to see the Browns and Indians play football and baseball in Cleveland stadium. That was what... twenty to thirty years ago.
Cleveland stadium was a huge open air concrete-and-steel half circle of a building facing Lake Erie. It could seat 80,000 people, and it took forever to walk from the parking lot to the stadium. I don't remember the games very much, but I do remember being cold. It seems there was always a cold, wet, north wind blowing during the game. It came straight from Canada, howled through the stadium and sucked heat out of me clear down to my bones no matter what I wore.
The games themselves were pretty straight forward. The spectators
would cheer, and the players would play until the referee blew the
whistle. Occasionally the game would stop for no apparent
reason--until my mom pointed out the man with the red cap standing
on the sidelines. When his cap was off, there was a commercial going on TV. When he put it back on, the game resumed. That was about the only commercial interruption I remember. Oh, you could buy programs, or balloons or hot dogs as you were walking in, but that was about it.
Flash forward to last week:
The Grizzlies play at the "E Center" in West Valley City. This is
the planned site for hockey in the upcoming 2002 Winter Olympics, so we citizens are busy paying off this Olympic site already. This is an indoor stadium with a capacity of about 20,000. This was a nice change from Cleveland--no more north wind.
But the most interesting thing was just how much commercialism
could be packed into this two hour experience. I was truly
impressed! On the way in the corridors were lined with booths
hawking not just food, but travel agencies, cellular phones and
hearing aids. In the arena itself there were electronic billboards lining every wall scrolling though innumerable advertisements, and
that was just the beginning.
Hockey has two half times, and for each there was a half time show
that would put a circus to shame. On the center ice were spectators trying to win some contest or other. Another spectator got to ride the Zamboni (ice making machine). There were spectators that watched the game in a hot tub. There was a radio controlled blimp that flew over the fans and dropped prizes of some sort. There were interviews on the closed circuit TV with hockey celebrities, and all of these were advertising something or other.
When the Grizzlies were playing a power play (one of the visiting
team is sitting out a penalty) it was announced as an "Airtime
Cellular Power Play" (advertising cellular phones). When one of the Grizzlies was sitting out a penalty it was announced as a, "SOS short hand situation". (SOS is a temporary employment agency). And the stops for TV commercials are now traditional. What was new, was we could watch the commercials, too, on the big screen TV at one end of the arena.
It took my breath away. As I was walking out, I realized that if I'd watched this game on TV, I would have seen one quarter the
commercials I saw in person, and I wouldn't have paid $10 for a seat! (Well... truth be told, I paid nothing for the seats. As I was waiting in line, a nice man came up and gave me his tickets for
free. His friends that he was going to see the game with had not
shown up.)
Going to this Grizzlies game reminded me of visiting Disneyland.
People think they are visiting Disneyland to ride the rides, but if
you look at how the average person spends his or her time at
Disneyland, that person is paying most of their admission to stand in line. The real skill of Disney's designers is not ride design, it's skill keeping people contented while standing in line waiting for a ride.
This hockey game felt the same way: I was paying most of my money to see advertising, not people playing hockey.
That was my feeling. The kids, on the other hand, had a great time
watching the game. They were cheering the good guys, but to no
avail. The Grizzlies were outclassed, and lost 5-3.
So, I learned a lot about modern sports, the kids saw a good hockey
game, and a good time was had by all.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
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From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 16 Mar 98
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Date: Sun, 15 Mar 1998 16:30:32
16 Mar 98
Salt Lake City--What was likely the last snow storm of the season
rolled through Southern Utah last weekend, and I was there to catch
it. The first part of the storm rolled through Friday, and it was a blustery rainy storm. I headed south to Moab Friday night hoping that the night's cooling off would change the preciptation to snow.
I was rewarded the next morning with a slim two to four inches of
powdery snow outside my window.
I drove into Arches National Park at daybreak and was rewarded with
some eerie scenes of snow blowing through red cliffs, dead juniper
logs and sage brush. I had two of the three elements I needed for
world-class pictures: red rock and snow. The missing element was
sunshine: it was still storming and overcast that morning. It was
also really COLD! <Brrr> I was shooting eerie shots of blowing snow because the wind was blowing hard.
I had a surprise on the way out: someone was at the park gate to
take my money. My habit is to drive into these national parks so
early or so late that no one is manning the toll booth when I come
in, and no one takes notice when I drive out. But there has been a
restructuring in national and state park managment over the last
year, and both state and national park managers are getting more
vigilant about collecting fees. <sigh>
I stayed in the Moab area all morning. I traveled part way up Castle Valley, but had to turn back because there was six inches of unplowed snow on the road, and I was running into whiteout conditions, not sunshine. I tried Island in the Sky, Canyonlands, and encountered the same thing. Both of these areas are in the mountains surrounding Moab, and the storm was still going strong at these higher elevations.
In the afternoon I headed back for Salt Lake, and as I left the Moab area, the clouds cleared. I looked back, and there were clouds behind me: the storm was centered over the Moab area.
Unfortunately, all the snow on the ground cleared up too, so I had
red rock and sunshine, but no snow. When I got to the mountains
north of Price, Utah, I got back into plenty of blowing snow and
strong winds--and sunshine! The mountains had sunshine and blowing
snow, but no red rock. It was a two-out-of-three day all around.
This week I've been teaching A+ classes. A+ is a technician
certification, so these classes are about fixing personal computers
rather than using application programs on them. The good news for me is that the class centers on technology and applications that were current five years ago: DOS and Windows v3.1. These are the systems I was working with just before I headed off to Korea, and I know them like the back of my hand.
As a result, I'm adding a lot of value to the class. I talk about
why things are the way they are, and how what happened five years
ago affects what we live with today.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
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From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 5 Mar 98
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Date: Wed, 4 Mar 1998 17:34:58
5 Mar 98
Salt Lake City--Take a look at www.whiteworld.com if you haven't in the last month. There are new pictures and new articles.
This week I started experimenting with Front Page 98, a new web page builder from Microsoft. It was one of these cases where Mike, the training manager, came up and asked, "Roger, do you know Front Page?" and I replied, "Hum a few bars and I can fake it. <g>"
Now I've taught Front Page, but can I use it? I'm now experimenting with it on my web site. The results so far are guarded.
Front Page is a scripting system. You build up a web page from it's templates and editors, and it writes HTML code into files which you can then put on a web server.
I've discovered that it can build a fine, moderately complex web site from scratch, but, as with most scripting systems, it has a hard time integrating existing work into it's web site if that work was built following a different scripting system.
My web site, whiteworld.com, is hand crafted. I've used a variety of simple editors to develop it. I built it emphasizing speed of
loading and ease of maintenance: I want my pages to load fast, and I don't want to spend a lot of time on updating them when it's time for a change. The result is a site emphasizing simplicity, but short on eye-candy and cross links.
Front Page has the potential for keeping maintenance time down as a
site grows larger and more complex than mine. It can also make
cross-linking and eye candy easy to maintain. So it has a place in
the web page developing world.
This week I tried transforming my pages into a Front Page site.
There have been the usual problems: my cross links aren't the same
as Front Page crosslinks, so the two are fighting each other.
The goal of this experimenting is to understand how much I can modify the basic Front Page look, and how much Front Page will "fight me" when I make modifications to the HTML script without using Front Page. Some scripting languages are tolerant of outside changes and pretty much leave them alone, some are orthidox and try to rebuild the outside work as standard script code, and some are neurotic and simply go nuts when they encounter it. Front Page is currently hovering between orthidox and neurotic.
I'm discovering that I will need to know more than I taught in
beginning Front Page to make practical use of it. Maybe I'll get to teach Front Page Intermediate soon. <g>
Other news
Salt Lake had a giant snow storm last week. It finally was cold
enough to snow in the valley as well as on the mountains, and two
feet of snow came down in 24 hours. The city locked up for a
morning. I got out of my parking lot, thanks to the new snow tires
I bought this fall, and had a ball driving to work. I enjoy snow
driving, and so few people could get out on the roads that
morning that they were pretty empty, and I had them pretty much to
myself driving to work. My only disappointment was that the snow was too deep to do "donuts" in the parking lot at work. I had to settle for trail blazing through deep powder on the roads to and from the parking lot.
Not everyone had such fun, only about 1/4 of the staff made it to the store that morning. Some stayed home, and some took all morning to just to get through the traffic jams that developed in the south valley.
The snow stayed on the ground through the weekend. Marty and I shot some snow-on-trees pictures Saturday, but surprisingly few. We were looking for good shots, but didn't see as many as we expected given the deep snow that had fallen.
Marty and I thought about heading south into central Utah for
some snow-on-red rock pictures, but Utah weather was showing it's
usual quirkiness, this snow was deep, deep, deep in Salt Lake City, but just a couple inches deep in Utah valley 50 miles to the south,
and a light rain in Central Utah--<sigh> no snow-on-red-rock pictures this time.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
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From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 15 Feb 98
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Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 19:57:57
15 Feb 98
Salt Lake City--Teaching at CompUSA continues at an intensive level. I'm busy learning at networking classes and teaching applications classes. (I've given up chewing gum, I'm out of bandwidth.) As I master the networking and pass the networking tests for MCSE, I'll move to teaching those. They are a lot more lucrative than the applications classes.
This week I taught Photoshop. Photoshop is one of my favorite
programs. This class gave me a chance to show off some of my work,
and my students were duly impressed as I tranformed some of my
"vacation quality" pictures into "National Geographic quality"
pictures right before their eyes using various Photoshop tools.
I learned from this course, too. I learned there's a lot more to
dealing with images than simply looking at what's displayed on the
screen. How you treat an image depends on where the final output
will be. There's a world of difference between optimizing a picture for a web page and optimzing it for a magazine page.
Teaching Photoshop made me long for my "digital darkroom"--the
computer system I will get someday that has the accessories and the
"oomph" to handily transform my photo library into commerically
usable products. On paper, It's a surprisingly octapusal-looking
system (looks like an octopus).
I'll be inputting pictures from CD's and downloading pictures from
the Internet. I'll need to buy a flatbed scanner for photos and
magazine pictures, and a film-and-slide scanner to access the bulk
of my photo library. Most film scanners I've seen are built for
35mm film. I would like a film scanner that can handle 120
size film as well as 35mm film, but 120 size film is considered
such an anacronism these days that I can't find anyone designing
scanners for it.
Pictures are big... well pictures destined for hard copy output are. So this digital darkroom system should bulk up on RAM and hard disk space. These days that's not hard to do, prices are going down and capacities are going up. So I'm looking at 60-100MB of RAM and about 5GB or more of disk space.
The output side has lots of legs, too. There's a color printer
(mostly for making draft copies of pictures), a black and white laser printer (for text work with other applications besides Photoshop), a writeable CD drive, a JAZ drive (for input, output and backup), and an internet connection (the same one as for input).
I'm pricing the hardware for this system at about $7,000 these days. Then there's the software. Photoshop is great for photo
manipulation, but what should I use to catalog my pictures? I've
been thinking about how I want my photo library program to work. I know I'm going to want to access my library in many many different
ways. I don't know if a good library program is available, that's
something I'm still researching.
But, I must be getting old. I see that after I get the system I'm
going to face another problem: How am I going to find time to use it?
Choices, choices, choices...
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 28 Jan 98
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 07:19:56
28 Jan 98
Salt Lake City--Busy, busy, busy... The training job is kicking in
to become full time work, and more than full time. I'm enjoying the
teaching, and I'm enjoying the challenge of getting back up to speed
on so many applications.
My goodness, the computer world just keeps on changing! None of
the packages I use regularly on my notebook computer are current.
I'm using outdated word processors, spreadsheets, web browsers and
e-mail packages. But thanks to my long background in personal
computers, I'm finding I can successfully teach all these new
versions. I can even teach new versions of programs I've never
used, such as Access database! (That's a kick.) At the introductory
level these classes are teaching a lot of common elements of using
programs in Windows 95. I can do this for beginning level classes,
but for intermediate level, I have to study the course throughly
before I teach it.
I did meet my match this week. I had to spend a day teaching
beginning Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes is a groupware package. I've
heard about Notes for years, but never actually encountered it. I was
planning on a day of aclimation, but that day got spent cleaning up
classroom computers instead, and so we didn't have Notes running for
me to experiment with.
So, the morning of class I had spent zero time with the application.
Unlike these other applications, Notes is not a purely Windows 95
implementation. The user interface was developed in parallel with
Windows 95 back in the early 90's. It looks a lot like Windows 95
and has similar functionality, but it's not Windows 95, so I
couldn't get away with just teaching basic Windows 95. I had to
wing it and get help.
Fortunately, this crisis was no surprise to the training manager,
either, we had seen it coming for two weeks. So he and one of the
sales team helped me team teach the class. They had used Notes, so
they showed the class how to accomplish various tasks, I talked about
the theory of groupware (which I know well, I've written magazine
articles on it) and I lead the class through the text book
excersizes. By day's end the students had learned a lot, and they
came out happy with the class.
Whew! I don't want to do that again! But it's doing things such as
this that are making me valuable to the company, and it's fun both
being that valuable, and being recognized as that valuable.
The weather the last couple weeks has been perfect: perfect for
skiers and perfect for non-skiers. We had a series of big winter
storms come through, but they blew in on unseasonably warm air. It
was so warm that the valleys got several inches of rain, but the
mountains picked up several feet of new, fresh, skiing snow. In
between the storms we've had clear, mild sunny days.
The only complaint I have is I haven't been able to shoot many
snow-on-red-rock pictures because most of the red rock areas are in
lower elevations.
I took Roger III cross country skiing this weekend. We had a good
time. This was my second time out, and his first. We skied across
all this new fresh snow. I took lots of pictures of snow and pine
trees while Roger was practicing falling down and getting up again.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 11 Jan 98
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 22:01:20
11 Jan 98
It's been a week dominated by work. I taught five full day and two
half day classes this week--which is... which is... character
building, I guess is the best way to put it. A full load for computer
classes is about three-and-a-half to four full day classes a week.
I was teaching all applications programs, no networking, no
maintainance. I taught beginning Microsoft Word, Access and Excel;
Corel WordPerfect, Internet, Windows 95 and Act. The good news is
it's not quite as different as it looks: 70% of all these classes is
common ground: navigating through the work screens, opening and
closing files, entering data and cutting and pasting. Thanks to the
common Windows 95 interface, all of these activities are very similar
on all these programs. But it's still a lot of work, and I'm getting
a lot of "attaboys" from my manager. The better news is next week I
should get some help: we're hiring some new instructors.
Also next week I start training for teaching more networking classes:
Microsoft networking. These are more challenging, and more demanding,
so I'm looking forward to preping up for teaching them. But the
classes are all-day classes, so this coming week I get to be a
student all day instead of an instructor all day, and I still have to
teach two evening classes. <sigh> A teacher's work is never done.
I tried a couple new sports last weekend: fencing and cross country
skiing. Ed introduced me to the fencing. It's something he's been
doing for about three months now, and he showed me some basics and a
few tricks. It's kind of fun, and it turns out my winter coat is
enough padding to practice "foil"--the lightest and quickest form of
fencing. I was wearing one of those wire masks and my coat and
learning to lunge without leaning forward. If you lean forward, you
can't recover and back up quickly to get out of the way of your
opponent's lunge.
The cross country skiing came about because I wanted to get some
winter snow shots up at the Brighton ski resort, but as I was walking
to where I could see good shots, I was breaking through the snow crust
and sinking in up to my knees, or sometimes my hips. I found myself
climbing out of the deep snow and walking away on all fours looking
for sturdier crust. As I was muttering under my breath about what a
pain it was to get around (and a wee louder at times), I saw a sign
beside me saying, "Nordic Ski Area." It turned out I was breaking
through in the center of the cross country ski area at Brighton. Last
week I dragged Marty along and we rented some cross country skies for
$15.00 each. It was a lot more fun to glide over the snow rather than
trudge through it, and the skiing was as fun as the picture shooting.
As I'm writing this, some strange weather is blowing in outside. All
day the weather has been fresh: wet and on the warm side, clear air
and a few mildly gusty winds. Now there's a sudden change: my front
door is rattling, I feel a draught of cold air flowing in under it,
the light flickers as the electricity falters. It's a winter
thunderstorm--bringing strong gusty winds and dumping a thick, grainy
snow. There is lightning, and a little thunder. It's getting cold
fast, and it feels like a big storm is moving in. There's going to be
black ice on the roads tonight, covered by thick snow, and it's
probably going to be slick tomorrow morning when I go to Provo for
class. It's going to be a long night for the highway patrol, and I'll
have to leave real early tomorrow. I'm going to really appreciate my
warm, comfy apartment tonight.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Check your address book
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Date: Sat, 6 Dec 1997 16:37:38
Check your address book!
Make sure you have my e-mail address as rwhite@whiteworld.com. If
you have something else, such as rwhite@intermountain.com or
rwhite@theonlynet.com, those addresses will no longer work (I have
changed the physical location of whiteworld.com).
If you want to check your e-mail address for me, please send me a
message asking for a reply, and I'll be glad to send one back.
Roger
PS my compuserve e-mail address RogerWhite1@compuserve.com is
unaffected by this change. It still works.
RBW
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 3 Dec 97
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 11:46:24
3 Dec 97
Salt Lake City--Well, Christmas must be coming because I finally got
my annual change-of-season cold. Pretty much each year, some time in
the fall, I will get a bad head cold. It seems that my "blood thins
out in the summer heat", and recovering for winter's rigors requires
a cold. It's a pain in the ass, but I haven't figured out how to
avoid it.
This year, the cold started after I played 18 holes of golf on a
windy, stormy day. Mr. Kim from JAFLI was visiting from Korea. He
loves gold, and we played at Wingpoint, the golf course on the
approach path to SLC International airport. The temperature was in
the low 50's and a stiff, pre-storm south wind was howling around us.
I thought I was wearing enough clothes to stay warm--a jacket and a
knit cap--but I guess not. By evening I was starting to sniffle.
That was Tuesday before Thanksgiving. The cold has been progressing
since then until Wednesday a week later, as I'm writing this. Now
it seems to have broken at last.
My cold rememdy: lots of rest and keeping warm. I let the
"little doctor" in me do his work in his own good time. Keeping warm
is important because it helps promote the fever response. Children
fever up easily, so in children you watch to make sure it doesn't go
too high. The body of an older adult, such as myself, is reluctant to
put out the effort it takes to raise it's temperature, even though
high temperature helps the body fight off the invading pathogens. So
making sure I get a mild fever is my goal. I make sure I stay
bundled up, and I take naps when I can.
Given the speed with which this cold came on after the golf game, I
feel sure I didn't pick up the cold causer while I was playing golf.
I acquired the pathogen sometime before, and it had been lurking in
my nose tissues for a long time, waiting for a opportunity to grow
out of control. It was something that, prior to the golf game, my
immune system could contain, but not fully control. The exposure to
the elements let it loose, and then the immune system had to deal
with it as a full-fledged cold.
Now it's over <I hope> and my body is "winterized" so I can go about
enjoying Utah winter without a lot more head cold problems.
Project 220
Last week I started Project 220 (Project 100 for those of you
measuring in metric). The goal is to get my weight down to 220
pounds. It's a simple plan: I will lose a pound after each meal.
Once I eat a meal, I must weigh a pound less before I eat my next
meal.
The plan is simple, the key is dedication, and having a scale nearby
to keep checking when I'm eligable for my next meal. I think I have
the dedication, but I know I don't have the scale. I went to the
department store for a scale. There were ten models on display, and
they all measured up to 300 pounds. "<Sigh> that's not quite high
enough... well maybe it's close enough." I thought. I bought the
biggest and heftiest.
I took it home. I got on. It creaked and groaned when I did, and
measured 360... no 300... no 320.... It turned out I could weigh
anything I wanted from 290 to 360 simply by rocking my feet while I
stood on the scale. This would not do! I took it back.
I searched for a scale, a week later I bought a doctor's scale from
an industrial scale company. Ouch, those doctor's scales are big,
bulky, and not cheap! But they go up to 350 pounds, and even at the
top range they are stable. I got on with trepidation... 348! Only
two pounds to spare!
I'm happy to report that even with the disruptions of my cold and the
beginning of the holiday season, I'm now down to 340, and keeping to
plan.
At work the class load has been light, which means my work time has
been light. CompUSA could line up thousands of people for the Grand
Opening, but now we have to build the day-to-day traffic, and that
includes those wanting training. So far the light load hasn't been
bad: I've been using the time for cold fighting and future planning.
I've been teaching word processing, Internet surfing and beginning
database using. I've also been complaining about the condition of
the training LAN network, and proposing some enhancements we can
make to the class offerings. All-in-all, having a good time.
I've also discovered a new fun computer game: Age of Empires by
Microsoft. Normally I pooh-pooh Microsoft offerings, but this time
they have bought themselves a winner--especially for multiplayer
gaming. It's unique multiplayer gaming feature is that two or
more players can play the same team. This is the first computer game
where two players have been able to manipulate the same units at the
same time. This gives our gaming group a chance to experiment with
what sorts of divisions of labor really are effective. It's great!
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 3 Dec 97
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 1997 19:06:30
3 Dec 97
Salt Lake City--Well, Christmas must be coming because I finally got
my annual change-of-season cold. Pretty much each year, some time in
the fall, I will get a bad head cold. It seems that my "blood thins
out in the summer heat", and recovering requires a cold. It's a pain
in the ass, but I haven't figured out how to avoid it.
This year, the cold started after I played 18 holes of golf on a
windy, stormy day. Mr. Kim was visiting from Korea, and we played at
Wingpoint, the golf course on the approach path to SLC International
airport. It was in the high 40's and a stiff, pre-storm south wind
was howling around us.
I thought I was wearing enough clothes to stay warm--a jacket and a
knit cap--but I guess not. By evening I was starting to sniffle.
That was Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 24 Nov 97
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 11:52:57
24 Nov 97
Salt Lake City--There's a shift going on in my life, a pleasant one.
None of us can ever get enough done in a day, but what limits us can
change from time to time. When I look at my world I see three
independent limiting factors: time, opportunity and resource (also
known as money). These three form a triangle, and whichever is on top
is the most limiting factor.
When I was in college, I was limited by the time I had in the day. I
had plenty of things I could be working on, and, while there were some
constraints on my financial resources, they didn't limit me as much as
just the number of hours in a day.
My triangle looked like this:
*Time*
Money
Opportunity
When I entered the Army, things were different. I experienced "hurry
up and wait." There were many times when I was sitting around waiting
for the next step in a sequence of events over which I had little
control, and all I could do was sit and wait. While I was in the Army
I had plenty of time and money, but limited opportunities to use them
efficiently. My triangle looked like this:
*Opportunity*
Money
Time
Boy! I'll tell you I was *so* happy to get out of that environment!
I hate wasting time.
The opportunity constraint of the Army environment changed my life. I
couldn't advance my business or professional career much while I was
in the Army, but I could learn to play the banjo. So that's why I'm
now a banjo player today, and not president of Microsoft <grin>.
My professional life up until 1990 was much like college. I was
working in engineering, business and computers. I had lots of
opportunities come knocking, a fair amount of money, and time was the
limiting factor. Then came my "time of troubles", and once again the
triangle shifted. Opportunity and money collapsed, and the triangle
looked like this:
*Money* *Opportunity*
Time
I had plenty of time on my hands, but little money or opportunity to
use that time on.
Each time the triangle shifts, it means a big shift in my lifestyle.
The 1990 shift ultimately lead to my adventures teaching around the
Pacific Rim. (I wouldn't have been doing that if I was president of
Microsoft.)
Now, I feel the triangle shifting again. Since I've returned to the
US and started working for CompUSA, I find I'm once again in a
lifestyle where I'm running out of time before the day ends, so to
speak. Time is the constrainer.
It's a good feeling, and I'm hoping it presages yet another dramatic
shift in my lifestyle. (Maybe this time I finally will become
president of Microsoft.)
The CompUSA store in Salt Lake had their grand opening this week. It
was as hectic as expected. The CompUSA staff seem to have this grand
opening technique down to a science. CompUSA is a big company; the
Salt Lake store is big; and the company wanted a lot of people to show
up for the grand opening. They advertised heavily, gave away lots of
freebies, and thousands of people did show up.
I was part of the freebie section: the training department was giving
away free Internet classes for grand opening. Brad Paye and I (Brad
is the other trainer) conducted one hour classes all day on both
Friday and Saturday. Whew! By Saturday night I was totally taught
out. The lesson plan was sketchy, so we both talked pretty much about
what we wanted to talk about. Each class came out differently, and
the students were very happy about what they heard.
Getting ready for the grand opening has been consuming most of my
brain cycles for the last couple weeks. That's why the weekly update
came out late this week. Now it's time to get back to a more normal
pace. At least I hope so. But if the triangle is truly shifting, and
more opportunities are coming my way, I'm going to have to go through
the aches and pains of rebuilding my time discipline. Just like
exercising to get my body in shape, exercising to get my time
management in shape is also a frustrating task that takes too long to
complete... until the results start showing up, that is.
I had an interesting experience brushing off an old skill a couple
years ago. I was driving to Dallas from Salt Lake, for a trade show.
In addition to attending the trade show, I decided to brush up on my
camera skills. I brought my cameras along. Prior to that drive I had
not picked up a camera and done any serious shooting for ten or twelve
years. During my Computerland/Novell years I had no time for
photography. But, just before that trip, I had just seen a digital
darkroom demonstration that fired my soul, and I felt that in the near
future I would be able to make time for digital darkrooming, so I felt
it was time to dust off the cameras.
I parked the car in Cinder Craters National Park in northern New
Mexico, and hauled out my Mamiya twin lens reflex, and started
shooting pictures of interesting rocks and plants. Within a half hour
I was beside myself in rage. RAGE, I SAY! I was alone in the park at
the time (thank goodness), and I was yelling and cursing and generally
very unhappy. Half of me was enraged; the other half was looking on
trying to figure out was the first half was so upset about? All I was
doing was shooting pictures of rocks and plants.
I didn't figure it out that day, but later I realized that my brain
was going through the equivalent of sore muscles when you take up a
sport that you've let lapse. I knew how to shoot those rocks and
plants... at least I knew I knew how. But I hadn't done this activity
for so long that huge pieces of my expertise were buried deep, deep in
my brain archive, and I couldn't get them out of the archive fast
enough to feel efficient about the pictures I was shooting. I was
fumbling the cameras; I was forgetting things; I was driving myself
craazzy! And even though I wasn't feeling any brain pain, I was sure
feeling frustrated and enraged.
I scared myself that day, but fortunately I didn't stop taking
pictures. On the way back from Dallas I stopped that the park again
and shot some more pictures. I started kind of timidly, but this
second time was pure pleasure. Things were happening pretty much as I
expected them too, and there was no rage. While I was in Dallas, my
brain had pulled my photo expertise near the surface, and things were
happening about as I expected.
It was an interesting experience. Now I know that bringing skills out
of archive too quickly can hit the emotion circuits the same as when
I'm pushing muscles too hard.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: (Fwd) Weekly update 13 Nov 97
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Date: Fri, 14 Nov 1997 09:35:55
13 Nov 97
Lansing--I'm finishing a wonderful long weekend visit with my brother Toby
and his family. It's always good to see family again. Toby and Robin are
doing well. Courtney, their daughter, is away, studying at Notre Dame
University. She is a freshman there, and doing well, but worrying about if
she's doing well enough. Chris, their son, is home and growing tall. He's
almost taller than Toby.
Toby, Chris and I, and some of Chris's friends played Axis and Allies the
first evening. I got Russia, Toby got Germany, and Chris got USA. Toby
went for a long game winning strategy by devoting lots of his money to
technology improvements and lots of his armed forces to consolidating
Africa. I went for a short game strategy. I spent nothing on technology,
built a few planes and a lot of infantry, went offensive against Germany
right away, and played a delaying action against Japan. Christ invested in
technology and stockpiled a big fleet in the Pacific ready to move on
Japan.
The Allied strategy worked. The Russian early offense upset Germany's
production shedule. England joined in on attacking Germany rather than
protecting Africa or India. After several bloody rounds of attacks,
Germany collapsed. Japan grew mightily in the meantime, but not mighty
enough to save Germany or face three Allies who now controlled all of
Europe.
Toby's house is in a picturesque part of central Michigan. It's heavily
wooded and dotted with small lakes and steams. During the days we walked
around and enjoyed the scenery. The maples have lost their yellow and
light red leaves, but the oaks are holding on to their deep-red, mostly
brown leaves. Toby's back yard borders on a small lake, and wild ducks and
geese have been stopping there on their way south. I watch them through
the back window, it's a very peaceful setting.
Sunday we saw the movie Starship Troopers. It was pretty bloody, but not
bad, and it followed the book more closely than I was anticpating based on
what I'd seen of reviews and previews. I think it's a movie that will
"have legs"--be popular for quite a while.
The biggest problem I had with the movie was the primitive and light-weight
weapons technology portrayed. These troopers didn't have power
armor--which figured promiently in Heinlien's book. Power Armor is an
armored exo-skeleton that the soldier can slip into--sort of like a space
suit. The exo-skelton protects from enemy weapons and boosts the soldiers
strength. Power Armor makes a soldier who can act like Superman: he runs
fast, bullets bounce off, and he or she can leap tall buildings in a single
bound. In the movie there was no power armor, the soldiers were using 90's
technology assault rifles, they had minimal air cover and no artillery
support at all. The movie showed no heavy weapons shooting bugs--no
mortars, just a few grenades, and a handful of airplanes.
As a result the soldiers ended up moving and attacking in huge bunches like
WWI infantry men, and dieing like them, too. It made for great visuals,
but it was stretching credibility a lot, and it changed the nature of the
soldiers. It made them too much like the caricature of Marines as
"jugheads"--soldiers too willing to feel good about simply shooting
straight and dieing honorably for mother and country. The soldiers in
Heinlein's book, with their power armor and good heavy weapon support,
operate in a highly dispersed pattern, rather than bunched up, and fight in
a smart, heads-up combat style. They are trained to think as well as
shoot, and so it made more sense for the character to think deep thoughts
between battles, such as how society should be structured.
The producers have created a consistent movie, but it's even more "Sands of
Iwo Jima" than Heinlien's story. (Starship Troopers was the first science
fiction story I read, way back in middle school. I loved it, and it hooked
me on science fiction and Heinlien. I reread it as an adult a few years
ago, and the story felt much different. During the second reading it felt
much more like "Sands of Iwo Jima in Space" which was not a feeling I got
out of my first reading.) The movie would have been more interesting
intellectually if the director and producers had stuck with power
armor--and the special effects feats would have been just as spectacular.
Wednesday morning I headed home... through the worst driving conditions
I've seen in five years. During the night winter had come to
Michigan--cold winter. Temperatures plunged to well below freezing and a
light powder snow fell. As I headed to the airport at 6:00AM, the second
half of the freeway ride was jammed tight, bumper-to-bumper and crawling
along. The traffic headed for Detroit was heavy, and there was a ten mile
stretch covered with a sheet of slick ice. The salt trucks usually don't
have any work until December, they weren't ready, so this ice was pristine,
and as slick as a skating rink. I expected to get to the airport at
7:30AM; I arrived at the airport at 9:30AM, ten minutes after my flight.
Aggrivating the problem was the radio: I found dozens of stations, but at
that hour they were all talks shows either talking about the terrible road
conditions, or running advertisments. scanned dozens of channels as I
crawled along, but I couldn't find more than 30 seconds of music to listen
to before it ended and talk started. It was driving me as crazy as the
road conditions!
So, I had a wonderful trip, and a memorable return home.
8 Nov 97
Minneapolis airport--I'm on my way to see my brother and his family in
Lansing Michigan. Minneapolis is a hub for Northwest Airlines, so I'm in
the waiting room waiting for my connecting flight. The trip from Salt Lake
was smooth, but I was flying over a lot of cold, cloudy weather. It's
curious, the dark, drizzly rainy clouds are typically very low and very
shallow. I was looking a long way down to see the tops of clouds that were
producing a dreary winter day over north central US.
The CompUSA store opening in Salt Lake City is hectic. The coordination on
this opening is impressive. The store building has been built by CompUSA,
and it's being completed on time for a November opening. This week the
building people have been putting up the final touches: the wiring for the
intercom system, the signage, and the telephones. Even US West, the
telephone company, seems to be getting things done in time (maybe not on
time, but in time) for the opening. This particularly impressive because
for the last couple years US West has become notoriously slow. CompUSA has
either anticipated that slowness in their planning, or pushed the right
buttons within the US West corporate structure to avoid it.
This week I have been humping big boxes around, opening them, and putting
the contents on shelves. It's impressive. For two days I watched and help
move three-to-five million dollars of merchandise from trucks onto store
shelves. That's an immense quantity of stuff, but the process was fast and
efficient.
Friday I attended a training class at the CompUSA store in Orem to watch
training done "the CompUSA way." It's straight forward and the subjects
being taught are basic computer subjects so I see no big problems ahead.
The classes are designed for one day, six hour sessions, which will make
them much easier to teach than Novell Education standard classes which are
two or three day, eight hour a day classes. The Novell pace "burns out" a
lot of trainers, but Novell Education hasn't figured this out yet. And
they don't have to--there are still a lot of people going through the
Novell training programs to become Novell teachers. There's still lots of
new blood.
Saturday, 11 Oct 97
Salt Lake City--A winter storm is rolling through Northern Utah today, so I
decided to look for photo ops in the Mirror Lake region. Mirror Lake is 50
miles east of Salt Lake and 2,000 meters/yards higher. The pass to Mirror
Lake rises just to the top of the timber line, and it's always good for
some spectacular shoots... if you can get there. The pass is closed in the
winter, so one of these days soon, the "road closed" gate will end the
picture shooting season at Mirror Lake. But not today, the road was still
open.
This storm is a classic Utah fall storm. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday,
there had been stronger and stronger warm winds blowing from the south.
Friday at sunset the winds were so strong they were tipping over camper
trucks on Interstate 80 west of Salt Lake City. I-80 was closed to trucks
for a few hours. Then suddenly the wind stopped, and turned into a gentle,
cooling northwest wind. That wind continued through the night and brought
rain-laden clouds.
In Salt Lake Valley Saturday morning it was dark clouds and raining, as I
drove east through Parley's Canyon and beyond, the rain got lighter--which
was surprising, weather is supposed to get worse in the mountains. By the
time I got into the Unita mountains, there were only patchy clouds. It was
perfect picture weather. By the time I got to Bald Mountian Pass, the pass
to Mirror Lake, the weather was clouding over again. I shot a few pictures
of pines and snow, then the storm caught up with me, and it started snowing
hard--end of picture session in the pass.
As I came down, the high part of the road was snow covered and just a touch
icey, and I could only see about 50 yards/meters in front of me. This was
a quick change, when I'd driven up just an hour earlier it had been wet but
clear. No trouble... but wait... what's this huge shape lumbering across
the road 50 meters in front of me... A MOOSE! I saw two moose, closer than
I've ever seen them before, but they were moving so quickly that I didn't
have time to unlimber a camera before they disappeared into the pine
forest. I guess I'd sort of heard of moose in the Uintas, but this was the
first time I'd ever seen any in Utah. I was surprised.
The lower part of the road was warmer and just wet and slushy. The snow
also let up again, and I headed back into Salt Lake without incident...
execept it was still snowing hard over Salt Lake City itself. The city was
experiencing "lake effect". The Great Salt Lake is still warm this time of
year, and the cold winds blowing from the northwest were picking moisture
from the lake as they blew over it. When these moisture-laden winds are
forced up by the mountains east of the Great Salt Lake, they dump extra
rain or snow. Today those winds were aimed at the heart of Salt Lake City,
so the city center was going to get an extra couple inches of snow or rain.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 28 Oct 97
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
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Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 19:09:13
28 Oct 97
No news means... I'm busy. Sorry about being so long in getting out
an update. The last couple of weeks I've been busy with settling in
projects: unpacking and repacking my stored goods and finding work.
The good news, very good news, is that I've signed on with CompUSA
as a trainer. CompUSA is a fast growing retail computer super
store. CompUSA sells all sorts of personal computers from
huge retail stores scattered across the US, there are about 150 in
place now.
CompUSA is opening a store in Salt Lake next month, and I'm part of
the charter employee group that will open the store. (It reminds me
a bit of opening Computerland, but the scale of what is happening is
so much larger that I feel very little deja vu.) This week I'm
attending orientation classes. We're getting ready for the store
opening. As we get beyond the store opening (17 Nov), Grand opening
(21 Nov), Thanksgiving (26 Nov), and into the holiday season crush, I
will be conducting computer training classes. It's going to be a
wild and crazy ride for a few weeks.
In between job hunting I'm organizing my life again. This month the
project is to get my stored stuff reviewed. I've pulled most of the
boxes I packed years ago out of the storage shed, and I'm going
through them. I'm tossing irrelevant stuff, and repacking the rest
for easy access. Boy! As lean as I run, it's still a lot of work to
go through all my stored stuff and make sense of it.
I've been getting in some traveling. Marty and I have been
day-tripping to the Unita mountains about an hour east of Salt Lake.
The mountains are very high, so storms bring snow as early as
October, and the roads close around mid-November. When they do,
we'll move our trips south to red rock country in central Utah.
Winter is a fine time of year for scenic photography in Utah, so I
expect to be out on the road often.
Director Kim, the man I worked for in Korea, came to visit in Salt
Lake last week. I helped him interview some prospective teachers,
and we played some golf. I didn't do badly, but the better I get,
the more I can appreciate how good he is. He's really good!
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly Update
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
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Date: Mon, 13 Oct 1997 23:44:44
11 Oct 97
Salt Lake City-- Job hunting has been the work of the week. I went to
several interesting interviews, so I hope to have some interesting
news to report soon.
This next story comes from my good friend, Ed Liebing. Ed was raised
in Michigan, and most of his family still lives there. This week he
passed on to me this, perhaps true, story from Michigan.
It seems that one recent early spring a couple of Michiganners decided
to do some male-bonding by going duck hunting. These men equipped
themselves with the best: best guns, best camping equipment, best
hunting dog, and a brand new four-wheel drive vehicle, and they drove
into the wilds of northern Michigan.
Well, they were a little early for the duck hunting season, which made
them illegal, so they had to go about their duck hunting in some
unconventional ways. First, they went deep in the woods, far from any
Fish and Game Wardens who might be casually wandering about. When
they got to their chosen lake, they found it completely frozen over.
They drove to the center of the lake and made camp. This is common
practice for ice fishing in northern Michigan, so so far they are not
doing anything too out of the ordinary. However, a completely frozen
lake is a problem for duck hunting: ducks won't land on ice, they will
simply fly over and find some other place to land where there is open
water.
The next morning the hunters started to solve this open water problem
the quick way: dynamite--they would blow a big hole in the ice with
dynamite, the ducks would see the open water, and hunting would ensue.
One of the hunters got a big stick of dynamite, walked a good
distance from their 4WD, lit the fuse, and tossed the dynamite.
So far so good... except the hunters' dog saw this. The dog was a
good retrieving bird dog, and when he saw the hunter throw the "red
stick," he knew exactly what to do. He raced from camp, retrieved it,
and started heading back for the hunter!
The two hunters saw the dog head out. It didn't take them long to
realize that they had no idea what the "Don't fetch!" command was, if
the dog knew one, so they shouldered their shotguns, and as the dog
started back, they opened fire.
The hunters hit the dog, but they didn't kill him. The hunters were
shooting bird shot, and the tiny pellets are well designed to bring
down flying ducks while not killing hunting dogs who might get in the
way. They did scare the dog, and the dog ran for cover... under the
4WD! Some seconds later the dog was a memory, the brand new 4WD...
sorry, ex-brand new 4WD, was headed for the bottom of the lake, and
for a few hours there was a wonderful new rest area for ducks winging
their way north.
No, Ed doesn't know how many ducks the hunters bagged that day, but
later they did sue the dog trainer for defective workmanship <just
kidding>.
That's all for this week,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 11 Oct 97
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
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Date: Sat, 11 Oct 1997 10:06:03
11 Oct 97
Salt Lake City-- Job hunting has been the work of the week. I went to
several interesting interviews, so I hope to have some interesting news to
report soon.
This next story comes from my good friend, Ed Liebing. Ed was raised in
Michigan, and most of his family still lives there. This week he passed on
to me this, perhaps true, story from Michigan.
It seems that one recent early spring a couple of Michiganners decided to
do some male-bonding by going duck hunting. These men equipped themselves
with the best: best guns, best camping equipment, best hunting dog, and a
brand new four-wheel drive vehicle, and they drove into the wilds of
northern Michigan.
Well, they were a little early for the duck hunting season, which made them
illegal, so they had to go about their duck hunting in some unconventional
ways. First, they went deep in the woods, far from any Fish and Game
Wardens who might be casually wandering about. When they got to their
chosen lake, they found it completely frozen over. They drove to the
center of the lake and made camp. This is common practice for ice fishing
in northern Michigan, so so far they are not doing anything too out of the
ordinary. However, a completely frozen lake is a problem for duck hunting:
ducks won't land on ice, they will simply fly over and find some other
place to land where there is open water.
The next morning the hunters started to solve this open water problem the
quick way: dynamite--they would blow a big hole in the ice with dynamite,
the ducks would see the open water, and hunting would ensue. One of the
hunters got a big stick of dynamite, walked a good distance from their 4WD,
lit the fuse, and tossed the dynamite.
So far so good... except the hunters' dog saw this. The dog was a good
retrieving bird dog, and when he saw the hunter throw the "red stick," he
knew exactly what to do. He raced from camp, retrieved it, and started
heading back for the hunter!
The two hunters saw the dog head out. It didn't take them long to realize
that they had no idea what the "Don't fetch!" command was, if the dog knew
one, so they shouldered their shotguns, and as the dog started back, they
opened fire.
The hunters hit the dog, but they didn't kill him. The hunters were
shooting bird shot, and the tiny pellets are well designed to bring down
flying ducks while not killing hunting dogs who might get in the way. They
did scare the dog, and the dog ran for cover... under the 4WD! Some
seconds later the dog was a memory, the brand new 4WD... sorry, ex-brand
new 4WD, was headed for the bottom of the lake, and for a few hours there
was a wonderful new rest area for ducks winging their way north.
No, Ed doesn't know how many ducks the hunters bagged that day, but later
they did sue the dog trainer for defective workmanship <just kidding>.
That's all for this week,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 27 Sep 97
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
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Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 12:37:20
Thursday night, 25 Sep 97
--Panguich, Utah, (near Bryce Canyon National Park) I'm on my
first road trip since I returned to the US. It feels good to be on
the road again in my own car.
This is a shakeout cruise. I've been driving my newly purchased car
around Salt Lake but I haven't taken it far, and I haven't had it
checked over by a mechanic yet. I took the car into the mechanic's
shop Wednesday to check out the problems a week of driving
uncovered. These were:
o a slow leak in the power steering fluid,
o a mysterious rumbling sound--sort of like a bearing going
out--but the rumbling didn't synchronize with either the engine or
the wheels. Once I got it while parked.
o brakes that were sticking on when I let my foot off the brakes.
o a wheel hop when I go over 60 mph on the freeway
At the mechanic's shop I found I needed
o a new tire (and that solved the wheel hop, the old tire was
really bad).
o a new water pump (I hadn't noticed the water leak).
o the power steering leak is slow, and the leaking part is
expensive. I'll live with that.
o a spring adjusted on the brake (now the brakes release
smoothly).
That left the mysterious rumble. The mechanics couldn't make it
happen while they were checking, so it was still a mystery. I
decided to risk the road trip, anyway.
Well, the rumbling happened a couple times on this trip, and I have
traced it to the radiator fan turning on. The fan is electric, and
working fine, I have just never experienced such a low pitch fan
sound before. So, the car is in fine working order, and it's being
christened with a quick trip through the wild scenery of Southern
Utah.
I'm going south this evening because typhoon Nora is moving north
into Utah tonight. A big rain coming to this desert land brings the
possibility of unusual pictures. I want to be there to see if I can
land some one-of-a-kind shots.
I have picked Bryce Canyon to start with because:
o it's a pretty place at dawn, even in plain weather. And I'll
be starting my shooting with dawn light.
o it's high ground. If this turns into a spectacularly serious
rain, the water will be flooding away from me, not towards me.
o it's central. I can go west to Zion, south to Grand Canyon, or
east to Capitol Reef to follow the best shooting opportunities.
Saturday 27 Sep 97
I was up and at Bryce at dawn Friday morning, but fate rolled the
dice against me. There was heavy fog there from dawn through early
morning. I tried several view points, but always the same white
sheet of fog.
The rain Thursday night had been steady, but not heavy, there were
no reports of flooding nearby (although there was flooding much
further south in Arizona). I decided to head east for Capitol Reef
National Park and central Utah. The land there is drier and so a
little rain makes a big difference, and the fog is more likely to
break there.
I follow state Route 12, the road between Bryce Canyon and Capitol
Reef. It's a scenic route that goes through red rock valleys and
over pine-covered mountain passes. I get lots of pictures. It's
fall, and there are flowers in the desert and the leaves of the
aspen trees in the mountain passes are turning bright yellow and pale
pink.
Tourist season is not over, so the the motels and restaurants are
still doing a brisk business, but it's not high season, either, so
the roads aren't jammed with slow-moving RV's. It's a good time to
travel, and I meet lots of German tourists on Route 12--about half
the people sharing Route 12 with me seem to be German-speaking.
I reach Capitol Reef in the afternoon. The temperature is mild and
there are now just patchy clouds in the sky: perfect shooting
weather. I ask about road conditions at the information booth and
discover that while this storm has done no damage, there were some
severe thunderstorms about two weeks earlier, that did wash out
parts of the dirt road that connects Route 12 with the Burr Trail
road. Luck was with me this time, because I'd been thinking of
taking the Burr Trail road into Capitol Reef, and if I had, I would
have had to turn back.
After shooting pictures in Capitol Reef, I head home. It's been a
nice, uneventful trip--a great way to get my car and my cameras
dusted off and ready for new adventures in America.
There was one disappointing news tidbit I heard while on this trip.
Yellowstone National Park is going to be closed to snowmobilers for
the next three years--a moratorium to study their impact on the
ecosystem. This is disappointing because my snowmobile trip of three
years ago was a memorable one, and I was looking forward to another
in the near future.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly Update 20 Sep 97
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Date: Sat, 20 Sep 1997 17:44:43
20 Sep 97
Marty and I were having a bull session at my house, and "the vast
wasteland", TV, came up. After going through the usual platitudes
about how disappointing TV was as an education medium compared to
it's success as an entertainment medium, we started to talk about why
this was so.
Two ideas came up: one, TV programs are a lot of work to produce
compared to written media, and two, we aren't educating our children
on how to watch TV.
TV producing is a lot of work. To fill up a page of paper with
typewritten text takes an idea and about two thousand keystrokes.
This means that once an idea creator reaches even moderate typing
speeds, hammering out the idea becomes the major effort in filling up
the page. Producing a page of text is so simple that it's easy for
the imagination to run wild.
Give this same typewritten page to a TV producer and it becomes
roughly a minute of show time. To make that minute of show time will
require coordinating dozens of people and tons of equipment.
This means that the idea is a major part of the writing process, but
only a minor part of the TV show creation process. If a TV show gets
"idea heavy"--too much of the production effort is spent on the
idea--then it will be uncomfortable to watch. Viewers, critics and
other producers will complain that production values are not up to
par.
Idea density is a big difference between communcating by writing and
commicating by TV. Idea density is also different between radio and
TV, and that's why advertisements to advertise on radio often
emphasize word-based imagination.
Watching TV for entertainment is instinctive, watching TV for other
reasons, such as education, requires training. TV is a mass media,
even in it's 500 channel cable incarnation, so to change what TV is
watched for is going to require mass education. We should be
teaching TV watching in our schools.
Why do we teach reading and writing in school? We teach them as
tools for communication. If a person is going to traffic in ideas in
a literate society, that person needs to read and write. Why should
we be teaching TV? If a person is going to traffic in ideas in a
TV-literate society, that person needs to become TV-literate. We
should teach how to watch TV, and how to produce TV. This should not
be a "chess club" activity. These should be mainstream classes,
right beside English.
In TV watching, viewers should be taught how to appreciate various
producing techniques, and how to feedback their feelings to
producers and broadcasters.
There are a couple shortcomings about current TV that I attribute to
poorly educated viewers. First, the short attention span of TV
presentations. Sound bite news is popular with producers because
it's quick and easy to edit. When viewers demand "pictures at
ten" they are demanding sound bite news. Sound bite news is easy,
and viewers should know just how easy. They should learn this in
school. They should also learn that there are other
formats--formats that require more off-screen preparation, but can
present complex ideas better. They should learn and experiment, and
then demand a wider range of formats from producers.
TV gives us high technology "relatives." TV personalities are in our
homes every day, so there's a strong instinct for us to think of
them as relatives rather than strangers. The result of this is
that TV anchors and regular reporters gain enourmous credibility
with viewers simply because they are on TV a lot. This is a
weakness: TV commenators have "spans of competance" just as we all
do. They can't be experts in everything, but there's an instinct on
the part of viewers to treat them as "know it all" relatives.
This means that it's difficult for non-familiar faces to be treated
with credibility, even if their credentials are superior. The
stranger on TV is not believed, even if the stranger is well informed
and presents information well.
This tendancy to trust a familiar face is an instinct, much as
racism is an instinct. If racism is worthy of unlearning, so is
accepting familar faces on TV as the most trustworthy. TV 101 in
school should teach other ways of judging credibility, such as
analytical thinking about what the person is saying, and listening
to alternative points of view.
So, it was an interest bull session I had with Marty, and these bull
sessions are one of the things I really enjoy about being back in the
US.
--Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 7 Sep 97
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
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Date: Sun, 7 Sep 1997 16:26:55
7 Sep 97
*****Update information****
New address: Roger White, Apt M 250 S. 800 E., Salt Lake City, Utah,
84102, USA
New phone: 801-363-9597
Same e-mail: rwhite@whiteworld.com or RogerWhite1@compuserve.com
In the words of telephone directory assistance, "Make a note of it."
********
Salt Lake City--Wow! Everything *I did* wish for, in just four
working days! I flew into Salt Lake City a week ago Saturday with
three top priority items: a place to stay, a car, and a job. As of
Friday afternoon I had located an apartment, bought a car, and I had
*two* companies wanting me to come in for work.
I'm renting a one-bedroom apartment halfway between downtown Salt
Lake and the University of Utah. It's an older area of Salt Lake,
quiet, residential, and full of tall trees. It's now gowing more
popular for both students and young professionals who work down
town. I moved in Saturday. The address is Apt M, 250 S. 800 E.,
Salt Lake City, Utah 84102
Friday, I located a red 1988 Olds Cutlass Cierra in a used car
dealer's lot on State Street. The previous owner had scraped into a
tree or something so there's a big dent in the right side and a
small one on the left. Otherwise, it's in great shape (so far). I
got it for $1600.
Also on Friday I got an offer to come to work for the telemarketing
division of Access Long Distance. Access is a large company selling
long distance service. This is a commission job that involves
calling people up and asking them to change which long distance
carrier they use. At the basic level it's pretty mindless, and I
was interested in it because it's a quick and easy place to start
working.
However, as I was talking to the manager, I found out an interesting
tidbit of information. Most of their people are selling standard
service, but because I understand the intricacies surrounding
providing service for Internet use, I may be successful at selling
leased lines and T-1 lines to businesses. These cost more, the sale
depends on knowing technology, and the commission rate is a lot
higher. The top performers in this telemarketing division are top
performers because they are selling T-1 and other high performance
service to businesses getting on to the Interent.
So, the match of this job to my skill set may be much better than I
anticipated when I first walked in to apply.
The second job I located this week is computer training. New
Horizons, one of the large computer training schools in Salt Lake,
is growing and looking for new instructors. They put an ad in the
paper, I responded to it, along with about 35 other people who showed
up for an introductory presentation. I've been invited back to do a
"test teaching." I'll be doing that next week.
So, the "big three" of essential things I needed to get done as
soon as I got back in the US are pretty well taken care of. Now I
can move on to other things on the list. Such as fun things.
This weekend I had fun. My old friends and I got together. Ten
years ago this motely crew would have sat down for an all night game
of Dungeons and Dragons. This time we rustled up six computers of
various sorts, networked them, and played multiplayer computer games
'till 3AM. We played Mechwarriors, Hexen II and Warcraft II. I won
once at Mechwarriors playing a tiny, fast mech that survived by
staying out of the way as the bigger mechs bashed each other. I won
the first Warcraft II game using a similar strategy. I stayed out
of the way and grew instead of fighting, and when the dust started
settling I was the big boy on the block. I controlled the two
biggest surviving gold mines, and the game was over. The second
game my strategy didn't work. I got ground up early by my two
nearest neighbors--they said they needed my gold mine more than I
did. Ah, the good old days.
So, all in all, a very good week.
More later,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Tale of two Miracles
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
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Date: Thu, 4 Sep 1997 01:41:53
The Tale of Two Miracles
3 Sep 97 Salt Lake City--
As we were driving around Salt Lake yesterday, Richard pointed out to
me a tree that several people were standing under.
"See that tree." he said, "That's Salt Lake's latest miracle. Those
people standing under it are looking for the image of Virgin Mary in
the tree."
Seeing the tree was a ho hum event for me. It was mildly
interesting to see a bunch of people standing around a tree. Some
were smart enough to stand in it's shade, but a few seemed convinced
that only the sacrifice of standing in the hot sun while staring
intently at the tree would bring her image out.
Miracles of this nature seem to spring up in Latin American
communities, and when they do, they are nurtured. The
believers had already built a crude shrine around
the tree, and if the miracle story gets just a little bigger, it
will become suitable for publishing in a supermarket tabloid.
That's the story of the first miracle. Now here's the story of the
second miracle.
When Marty came home from work this evening, he came in just in
time to see a TV he wanted to see, but before he sat down in
front of the set, he rushed for the fridge to bring us a couple cold
Cokes. The Cokes were in a cardboard twelve-pack carrying
container.
Marty opened the refrigerator. "Strange." he thought as he touched
the container, "This container has been in the fridge for two nights
and it's warm, but everything else in the fridge is cold.
"Even stranger, I opened it two nights ago, and it's now sealed
shut."
What did Marty do when faced with this miracle? Did he fall down on
his knees? Did he thank God for a sign? Did he build a shrine?
No, he ripped open the case, muttered, "Why is it so hard for me
to find cold Coke?" and rushed back to the TV, two Cokes in hand.
That was the end of the "Miracle of the Reheating and Resealing Coke
container." <sigh>
How do I know this tale? Marty and I started talking about the
Virgin Mary miracle, as we were talking he noticed that I took a
Coke from the Miraculous Coke Container, then put it back and took
one from another place in the fridge.
"Why did you do that?" he said. He was looking at me a bit
wide-eyed. This event had now grown to something two people were
experiencing. I had now experienced the miracle of the Reheating
Container, and, like Marty the first time, I was also unfazed by
what I felt.
"Oh, I finished off the old case and put this new one in less than an
hour ago. It's still warm." I said.
"Oh! That explains it." and he told me his story.
Now, the interesting thing here is how these two miracles got
treated. Marty, a fully rational person, a strong believer in
science, is faced with a full-fledged mystery: a Coke container
which, to the best of his knowlege, has warmed and sealed itself
while sitting in the fridge. What does he choose to do when faced
with this clearly irrational event? This violation of basic
physical laws as we know them? He ignores it.
Members of Salt Lake's Latin community, when faced with an equally
irrational event, worship it.
It's the Tale of Two Miracles.
--Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 23 Aug 97
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
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Date: Sun, 24 Aug 1997 19:38:35
23 Aug 97
Suwon-- It's 5pm Saturday, and this time next week, I'll be on the
jet plane at Kimpo airport outside Seoul rolling down the runway to
start the long, long flight over the Pacific to LAX. After I
satisfy the curiousity of the customs people in LAX, I'll be on
another jet headed for Salt Lake City, and I should arrive just one
half hour after I left Kimpo: 5:30pm Saturday!
Crossing the International Dateline is a kick. When I go from the
US to Korea or Australia, I completely lose a day. It's gone,
there's a completely blank spot in my calandar. When I come back I
spend the day once inside a jet, then once again doing something
else after I land.
This third stay in Korea has been the most relaxed, but the most
diappointing as well. When I came I intended to stay a year or two
and save a lot of money to pay off debts and to give myself enough
money to conduct a sustained search for work in the US. But when I
arrived I found Korea starting it's worst recession in 20 years, and
regulatory barriers to starting English schools collapsing. Net
result: a crunch!--small classes sizes and few classes.
I found I was teaching only half the hours I had my first and
second years. This was unacceptable in the long run, so I let
Director Kim know, and, after a little moaning and groaning on his
part, I'm leaving on good terms after being here six months instead
of the one or two years I'd originally planned on.
Looking back, I don't feel bad about my stay this time... but I
could. In addition to the short hours, I had a knee lock up twice, I
lost my Nikon camera on the bus, and I had a pathological computer
repair technician trash my laptop so I had to buy a new one. This
has been an expensvie stay in Korea this time!
Whew! the money certainly hasn't flowed the directions I expected.
On the other hand, the short working hours were relaxing, the
students were as diligent as ever, and just as interested in
hearing what I had to say. And I started picking up golf while I
was here this time.
So, all in all, my assessment is that it was a relaxing stay, but
that's not what I wanted this time. I wanted a workaholic stay.
Now I get to go back to the US and find a US job. It's going to be
an interesting transition... and a tough one. I came to Korea to
build a solid financial base for conducting a job search in the US.
That didn't happen so the search this time is going to be quick,
messy and reactive instead of proactive.
It will be curious to see where destiny drops me this time.
This is wrap up week, but I'm pretty well wrapped up, so it's going
to be slow. I take out the phone and Internet account Monday or
Tuesday. If you need to reach me up until 30 Aug, use the JAFLI
phone number 82-331-251-9961. After 30 Aug and until you hear from
me again, leave a message with Martin Prier in Salt Lake City at
801-468-0804.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 17 Aug 97
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 1997 20:15:53
17 Aug 97
Suwon-- This has been a long weekend. Aug 15th is Indepdance Day in
Korea. This is the day the Americans came to Korea in 1945 to accept
the surrender of Japanese troops in southern Korea.
Koreans love and hate America for this. They love the freedom, but
they hate the fact that the country was divided by how the Japanese
surrender was conducted, with Americans accepting the surrender in
half the country and the Russians accepting the surrender in the
other half.
This weekend was hot, and the roads were jammed, so I spent the
weekend looking for air conditioning. I did some golf practice at
the driving range (they have fans there), and saw two movies:
Anaconda and Faceoff?
The films were medium good action adventure flicks. Anaconda's most
interesting point was John Voight. I haven't seen John Voight in
action for years, and he did a wonderfully convincing job of being a
cunning, hard-eyed, ruthless fortune hunter.
Faceoff was a John Woo production with Nicholas Cage and John
Travola. The story line was weak, as usual, but I forgive it in Woo
productions because I'm so fascinated with his camera work. He does
such a wonderful job of simulating "tenth of a segment" D&D action
with his camera work that I forget that the story he's telling
doesn't make any sense.
This week I finished reading a book on the Prisoner's Dilemma, and I
finished playing the computer game Command and Conquer. It felt like
the good old days. As soon as I finished the game, I wrote up a
magazine article on how to beat the same soundly. I'll be posting
that on my home page some time soon.
I will hear from Director Kim early next week, and firm up my plans
for returning to the states.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
X-cs:
From: Self <Single-user mode>
To: @LIST5B04.PML
Subject: Weekly update 6 Aug 97
Reply-to: rwhite@whiteworld.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: 8BIT
Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 05:42:23
Weekly update 6 Aug 97
The date of my leaving Korea is getting closer. I'll probably be
back in the US the end of August. If not the end of August, the end
of September.
My current plan is to settle once again in SLC to start with, and get
work quickly in an "easy entry" occupation, such as telemarketing.
In the meantime I'm helping Director Kim find some new teachers. He's
doing some conventional advertising in newspaper classifieds, and
I'm experimenting with the high tech approach. Last month I put a
page up on the Internet. It took almost a month for Alta Vista to
"digest" my page and show it in the Alta Vista search engine. I was
surprised it took so long.
The results from that Alta Vista listing were slim. From millions of
users around the world, I got four e-mail inquiries, that's it. This
is my first foray into commercial Internet, and it's proving
illuminating. Just being up on the next is not enough, and being
digested and displayed by a search engine is not enough.
This week I linked up with Dave's ESL Cafe, a server acting as
a center for people who are teaching English as a Second Language
around the world. There's a job posting area, and I got a link to
my JAFLI page put in there. That was yesterday. It took only 24
hours to get the link established, and three inquiries have come
in from the link already: quite different from linking to Alta Vista.
The next curiousity, which isn't so curious: Kim isn't doing much
with the leads the Internet is generating. I'm encountering a "Yes,
but..." reaction. "Yes these are nice leads, but [fill in with a
problem about the leads, such as they are Canadian, not American.]"
I think objections are floating up because the leads have new
characteristics that aren't the same as those he gets from Utah and
LA newspaper advertising, or from personal recommendations. They
sound different, and he's not comfortable with what he's hearing.
But, I'm sure happy about what's coming off the net, and I'm
learning: being linked into specific relevant sights is very
important when promoting on the internet.
I had an out-of-comic-book incident this week. For three weeks I've
been getting eaten alive evenings because it's hot and there is a
screen missing from one of our two apartment windows. One
window has no screen at all, the other has an old screen with lots of
small holes around the edges. I've complained about this screen
situation a couple times, to no avail. But last week Mr. Kim was
hustling me to stay some extra time so I brought up the screen issue
again. Director Kim hustled Mr. Byon off to fix it.
Mr. Byon said he would fix it in the afternoon. It was a really hot
day, so I was in heat-avoid mode--which means see movies in air
conditioned theaters and spend time writing and reading in air
conditioned offices. I didn't want to rush right back to the
apartment, but Bob, my roommate, was headed back. I assumed he could
oversee Mr. Byon's work as well as I could.
<Sigh> When I get back, the window with the old screen now has a new
screen, BUT THE WINDOW WITH NO SCREEN STILL HAS NO SCREEN. How
these two between them could overlook the giant hole and spend
better than and hour fixing the little bitty hole is almost beyong
me. I know Mr. Byon didn't want to work on the window with no
screen, but how Bob, my roommate, the person who shares the
mosquitoes with me, could miss this giant hole in our mosquito
defense... Anyway, when I first saw the still unscreened window I
felt like I was the villain in a Disney animation working with his
two bumbling assistants. I felt like running around yelling, "I'm
surrounded by incompetents!"
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
====================
28 Jul 97
Suwon--Well, the list of good movies gets longer. Last week The 5th Element headed the list. This week I saw Men in Black, and it gets an easy tie with The 5th Element as best movie of the summer. There's more humor in Men in Black, and more imagination in The 5th Element. Both have respectable story lines. It was also good to see a good story being told quickly. Men in Black was over so quickly they had time to put the video on the end and not ruin the effect at all.
This week I also finished what I hope will be my final game of Masters of Orion 2. I hope it's my final game because it took better than a week to play. Along the way I won it several times by council vote. After taking my applause and checking my score, I contined the game instead of accepting the victory, and the next time the vote came, I did even better!
I had something unusual happen this game: two of my enemies saw the end coming after my armada had rolled over about half their systems, and surrendered to other NPC's before I could deliver the crushing blow. The first time it happened I couldn't believe my eyes, I tried replaying the situation from a couple turns back a couple times, but it seems I had the computer NPC completely buffaloed, and I could never convince him to stand up and fight long enough for me to crush him personally. This cost me a few victory points in the short term, but it also gave me a respite between wars to rebuild the armada for my next opponent.
Finally, I had defeated Orion's Guardian, controlled three forths of the star systems and my armadas were within five turns of wiping out both my remaining neighbors when... a vote comes again! I had been playing such a diplomat that even at this late juncture one of my two neighbors supported me for emperor. I won with 2500 points, and called it quits. I'll have my winning tips up on my home page sometime next week.
Boy, I'm glad it's over! A project such as this one takes me over as I near the end. I was thinking of little else as I neared my final victory. I don't need that, unless the project is a paying one.
It's summer time here with a vengance: daytime temperatures and humidity in the 90's, night time drops to the 70's. I move from air conditioned building to air conditioned building. Unfortunately, that doesn't include my apartment, and since I'm leaving soon, I'm too cheap to buy a fan.
Speaking of leaving, my current plan is to leave the end of September, but I'll be talking with Mr. Kim this week about advancing that to the end of August. If I'm home for September, I may be able to land some sort of teaching job. However, I don't have anything lined up yet.
I've had an interesting experience with mosquitos in Korea this year. Some have become "stealth biters", I don't feel the bite as it's happening, and if it does become inflamed, it's a day or two later. I still get plenty of the old fashioned kind of itchy, swelly bites as well, especially on my knuckles. But I think my body has partly adapted to the local breed and not all the bites I get swell up.
Now that it's happened, I'm trying to decide if it's a good thing or a bad thing. It's good because I don't have to experience the discomfort, it's bad because I let myself get bit a lot more, and I wonder what minor diseases I'm picking up as a result. Yes, once again, I'll be happy when I leave Korea.
I had a couple interesting SF story ideas float by this week. In one class I asked the students where they would look for an alien that was trying to hide. The new idea that popped up out of the discussion was Chernobyl. It's fairly near an urban center, but who's going to go messing around inside the "sarcophagus" for long? I imagine an alien doing an imitation of Batman and his Batcar using Chernobyl as his Batcave.
Chernobyl is just a neat idea for now, but I'm in the middle of putting together a neat story about the other idea: a modern day liche.
That's what's keeping me busy this week.
Keep cool,
Roger
-- End --
======================
2 Sep 97
Contact information:
For the next few days I'll be staying with Martin Prier at his apartment. The phone number is 801-468-0804, fax number 801-364-3652. You can send mail to: Roger White c/o Phil Baum, 3420 S. 900 E., Salt Lake City, Utah, 84106. My e-mail addresses are unchanged.
And now, the news...
Salt Lake City--The flight back was crowded but uneventful. It's curious, I can sleep like a baby on the smaller planes, such as the plane I took from LAX to Salt Lake City, but the big 747's I don't sleep well on--which is a shame because the 747 leg is the long leg. I don't know what it is that makes the difference. It could be the shape of the seats, the size of the plane's interior, or the length of the flight. It may even be the way the plane shakes. Whatever it is, on the smaller planes I'm often asleep before we leave the ground, but I could only sleep fitfully on the 747 as it flew the long leg over the Pacific.
In Los Angeles I discovered that Americans are still praying diligently at the altar of "the most holy metal detector" in hope of a safe flight, and <sigh> I was forced to pray, too.
(Curious thought: since airport security is really a faith issue not a fact issue, maybe I could sue to bypass airport security on grounds that it impinges on my freedom of religion.)
The good news is security was a little more relaxed than when I left for Korea, and while the check-in person at LAX still asked me silly questions about my luggage, I could see her heart wasn't in it.
In addition, Customs has cut out requiring the silly little arrival form that tells them nothing that's not on the passport and airline ticket. It's been a time of quiet advance for convenience and rationality in flying procedures.
Now that I'm in Salt Lake, I'm working vigorously on the big three that I need to survive in America: a job, a car and a place to live.
The car is first on the list. I don't want it to be because it's expensive and I can't afford the kind of car I want or need right now. But last year I tried living in Salt Lake City for a while without one, and I was missing out on many, many work and pleasure opportunities. It's simply impossible for me to be a fully functioning member of the Utah community without a car.
Housing is next on the list, but once again I don't want it to be. I'd rather adapt my housing to my employment.
Employment is last only because it's likely to take so long to get started. I need it now; my pocketbook says I should have started working yesterday; but the reality is that it's likely to be a week away at least for even the easiest entry jobs.
I'll be bootstrapping for this next year: moving through a succession of jobs, housing and cars. At least I hope so! If I don't, I've stagnated at a pretty low level.
I've switched to an Amercian diet, and I'm in trouble already: too much to eat, and too much to drink. I've been eating celebratory meals all weekend, so my calory count is way up. The meals are heavier in meat and fat than Korean meals, so my fat and protein count is way up. (but no kimchee here so my spice count is way down!) And I drink a lot of water with an American meal--several big glasses of water with each meal--so my fluid intake is way up, too.
Right after I take care of the big three, I'm going to have to get my diet better organized.
What have I enjoyed the most since I've returned? Well, let see...
o good company with people whom I've developed a deep understanding. It's great to be back with friends with whom I can share rich multi-layered jokes and engage in other advanced English conversation gymnastics. It's mighty comfortable to just be taking English for granted again.
o good movie and video selection. I love movies. The first night back I saw Kull, the Conquerer. The second night I was picking and choosing things out of Hollywood video and loving the vast selection of stuff I saw there. American radio is also nice. I was listening to a nostalga rock station and really loving it. Pretty soon I'll get back into listening to the wide variety of stuff played on KRCL.
o good food. The first night was a prime rib of beef dinner. YES!... but that's a one time treat. It's so rich that I can't do prime rib very often. Junk food, on the other hand... well, I shouldn't do it often, but... anyway, yes, the best place to get American food is in America, there's just no two ways about it.
o the roads. This weekend was Labor Day weekend and Salt Lake City center was nearly deserted. The roads were just fine. I loved it. But, the state of Utah has begun a massive rebuilding program on Wasatch Front roads (Wasatch Front is the Ogden, Salt Lake, Provo-Orem area, where about 80% of Utahns live.) The freeway system is old, and it's become time to bite the bullet and complete a massive refurbishing before the 2002 Olympics. So for the next two years there are going to be a lot of inconveniences in traveling the road network that weren't there six months ago.
So, I'm back, and bootstrapping my way back into a life in America.
Roger
-- End --
=======================
2 Sep 97
Salt Lake City--The flight back was crowded but uneventful. It's curious, I can sleep like a baby on the smaller planes, such as the plane I took from LAX to Salt Lake City, but the big 747's I don't sleep well on -- which is a shame because the 747 leg is the long leg. I don't know what it is that makes the difference. It could be the shape of the seats, the size of the interior, or the length of the flight, but I suspect it's the way the plane shakes. Whatever it is, on the smaller planes I'm often asleep before we leave the ground, but I could only sleep fitfully on the 747.
Americans are still praying at the altar of "the most holy metal detector" in hopes of a safe flight, and the check-in person still quizzed me about who packed my luggage, but security was more relaxed than when I was flying over, and even customs had cut out requiring the silly little arrival form that tells them nothing that's not on the passport and airline ticket -- a couple of small, quiet advances for rational and convenient traveling procedures.
Now that I'm in Salt Lake, I'm working vigorously on the big three that I need to survive in America: a job, a car and a place to live.
The car is first on the list. I don't want it to be because it's expensive and I can't afford what I want or need right now. But last year I tried living in Salt Lake for a while without one, and I was missing out on many, many work and pleasure opportunities. It's simple impossible for me to be a fully functioning member of the Utah community without a car.
Housing is next on the list, but once again I don't want it to be. I'd rather adapt my housing to my employment.
Employment is last only because it's likely to take so long to get started. I need it now; my pocketbook says I should have started yesterday; but the reality is that it's likely to be a week away at least for even the easiest entry jobs.
I'll be bootstrapping for this next year: moving through a succession of jobs, housing and cars. At least I hope so! If I don't, I've stagnated at a pretty low level.
I've switched to an Amercian diet, and I'm in trouble already: too much to eat, and too much to drink. I've been eating celebratory meals all weekend, so my calory count is way up. The meals are heavier in meat and fat than Korean meals, so my fat and protein count is way up. (but no kimchee here so my spice count is way down!) And I drink a lot of water with an American meal--several big glasses of water with each meal--so my fluid intake is way up, too.
Right after I take care of the big three, I'm going to have to get my diet better organized.
So, I'm back, and bootstrapping my way back into a life in America.
Roger
-- End --
=======================
24 Aug 98
Salt Lake City -- I had a hot time on the old network this weekend. We had seven -- count um -- SEVEN computers connected together in my apartment playing Starcraft and Age of Empires (AOE).
Ah, it's like the good ole days, only updated. In the good old days my friends would bring over armfuls of notebooks and we would play Dungeons and Dragon all through the night. Now they are bringing over armfuls of computers and we are playing networked computer games all through the night.
These new games can be networked so that many human players can play each other, and you can have multiple players playing on a single side. Two or more players on the same side is particularly valuable with the real time games (as versus turn-by-turn). These real time games grow so complex that a single person can't keep all the pieces busy all the time -- time management and prioritization become key gaming skills.
With teamworking, two heads (and two mice) work the resources of a single side, making it more efficient. With two or more people playing the same pieces, the pieces are handled more efficiently when there are lots of pieces on the board.
A fascinating feature of these games is discovering that teamworking is not an inherent skill -- it must be learned. Due to historical accident, teamworking is an area my friend Marty and I excel at.
The historical accident is that ten years ago those few networked games that existed were only two player, but there were often three of us at a game session. Marty and I would play as player-coach on one side, and the other person would play solo on the other side. We got some early teamworking practice.
The high point of this player-coach style of play was when I became, momentarily, the best Command HQ (CHQ) player in the world.
Richard, Marty and I entered the first CHQ tournament hosted by Compserve. I made it to the finals. For the final game I was playing Grasshopper, a man from Alabama whom I had played regularly before the tournament. He had not made it to the finals by accident, he was hot, and it would be an even match.
When I play CHQ over the phone lines I play as Roger-Tzu, an entity which is me and whomever is watching me play at the time. For this final match Richard and Marty were with me coaching -- we were notorious in CHQ circles as The Gang of Three. Even with the three of us, it was a hotly contested match. I won the first game, Grasshopper won the second. I was burned out when we started the third--so burned out that I gave the mouse to Rich and took over coaching position.
The game went long, and mid-game Rich burned out. He made a memorable error -- launching a nuclear strike just as the mouse slipped, and the bomb went off east of Greenland -- hitting absolutely nothing. (He is now famous for this "nuking the narwhales" incident.) If any one of us had been playing solo, it was a fatal error; Rich got up and walked away. As he did so, Marty smoothly sat down in his place and started damage control. In five minutes it was clear that the game wasn't over, Rich recovered, and, with Rich and I carefully coaching Marty, we won!
The moral of this is that multiplayer computer games can lend themselves to teaching teamwork, but standard playing circumstances won't do it. If a person plays the game sitting in front of a computer screen at home with no other players to talk to, he or she learns solo play. Teamwork training flowers only when the players can be very vocal while the game goes on -- when players are in the same room with each other, or connected to each other by a voice line as well as the computer data line.
What is learned in teamworking is the skill of multi-tasking the brain to talk, listen and think at the same time. A player must play the game, be able to communicate his own crises to other players, and be able to listen and respond to crises being reported by other players. The new games, Starcraft and AOE, lend themselves well to teamwork-style play.
Teamworking is a different skill than basic game-playing skill. The seven people we had together Friday night where all good AOE players, but they had very different backgrounds in teamworking, so watching the play was facinating. Marty and I were the kings of teamworking, and we "chattered" all through the game talking about what we saw, what we needed, and coordinating builds.
We have found that breaking the work into "domestic infrastructure building" and "external war making" works best. One of us keeps the home fires burning while the other looks for enemies to confront.
Greg and Phil are strong solo players, and they have seen us teamwork. They don't teamwork as well yet, but they are learning fast; they know what it means, and what they can expect to see in the way of style from a teamworked side. They didn't chatter as much as Marty and I because they haven't practiced as much on the skill of keeping mouth and ears functioning while thinking about the game, but they were talking.
The other three players that night hadn't experienced any teamwork play before, and while they were good AOE players, they didn't have a clue what they were up against from a teamworked side. They played silently most of the time.
All but one of the new players fell away very quickly. The last one was an exceptional solo player. He was excellent at finding the time to sneak units around the main lines and run disrupting raids in the back country of his enemies. He had Marty and I off-balance for quite a while until we figured out what he was doing, and one of us took on back-country patrol duty. Then it was all over for him in spite of his excellent solo play.
So, the new generation of computer games is teaching new skills. Last decade computer games taught us mousing skills and how to pilot aircraft and spaceships. This decade they will teach us communication and interperson coordination skills. This kind of change is the fun part of living in this age and watching the computer revolution unfold.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
=====================
20 Aug 98
Salt Lake City -- In spite of the sunshine and blue skies, it was an indoor week. I'm still studying for Microsoft tests, and looking longingly out the window at the blue skies and sunshine. Well... not all the time. I snuck out for some golf and took Roger III up Butterfield Canyon to see the Bingham Copper Mine overlook.
The overlook is a neat place. The road up Butterfield Canyon is dirt, steep, and blocked by snow much of the year. (This is the same road I tried to get up in June, and ended up high centered on a snow drift.) The overlook itself is the top of a ridge line with views into the pit, northeast to see part of the Great Salt Lake, east to see most of Salt Lake Valley (Salt Lake City and suburbs), southeast to see much of Utah valley (Orem and Provo), west to see Tooele valley (Tooele), and northwest to see Grantsville and the Great Salt Lake again.
The copper pit itself has changed noticably since I last saw it. The most notible feature of the pit are the horizontal terraces. I often imagined turning those terraces into a giant apartment complex when the mine was played out -- a 21st century version of the Anasazi cliff dwellings that dot the southwest. This time I could see that the horizontal terraces are no longer being used for mining, and they are filling in at a rapid rate. The rock that the pit is being dug into must be very unstable and crumbling rapidly. So rapidly, that I suspect the terraces will disappear completely in the next ten years. So much for my giant condominium plans.
The mine is still being worked, but instead of many horizontal terraces, there are a few steep roads winding around the inside of the pit from a crusher to the active extracting areas. This is one of the world's longest running and richest mines, and it's still being worked.
It's been a movie week, too. I saw X-files, The Avengers and Saving Private Ryan. Saving Private Ryan was good. Spielburg is certainly an accomplished story teller, and he sure shows people how to use the movie medium.
X-files was ho-hum. Nice sets, nice acting, nice pacing, but a story line shot full of holes.
The Avengers was disappointing. I loved The Avengers on TV, it's on my All Time Top Ten list of TV shows, and I was sure hoping for more from the movie. The cast of the movie was good, the sets were good, and the writer pulled over the quirky characters aspect of the TV series well, but he or she fell down on moving the essence. The writer moved the format, but not the essence. The essence was Emma Peel as a competant progressive mystery solver, and John Steed as a competant conservative mystery solver working in a quirky England, dealing with small scale mysteries. What we ended up with was two competant "retro" characters, in a sterile England, dealing with a large scale mystery. The change in scale didn't work. Another failing was the sound track: it was a little muddy, and much of the entertainment in this movie was verbal fencing. The sound track needed to be crisp.
My only hope for The Avengers is that the first Star Trek movie was even worse, and yet more and better came from the concept. Now that they've paid homage to the ghost of The Avengers past, maybe the producers can produce something entertaining in it's own right. I'd sure like to see it.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
=======================
24 Dec 98
<glub>.. <glub>, <glub>, <PHEW!> <Pant, pant, pant.>
That's me coming up for air.
I've had my head down and drilling exclusively at two goals: getting my courses taught and getting certification tests passed.
There has been a lot of synergy between these two goals: one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it. But these last few weeks I have been teaching material that's newer to me, so I've had to concentrate even harder. So it's been study, study, study to prepare for teaching the courses and study, study, study to prepare for taking the certification exams. Whew!
But, I taught the last course tonight. Over the last three months I have refreshed myself on products ranging from basic uses of Netware 4 to advanced topics such as using Netware to be a gateway to the Internet and an Internet web server.
At the same time, I've been studying to master intermediate skills using Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, and I've been taking certification exams for Microsoft.
Well, chickens are finally coming home to roost. I've passed many exams, I've added "Intranetware CNE" to my list of CNE certifications, and I'm one test away from gaining Microsoft MCSE and MCT certifications. In January I should add Microsoft certifications, and perhaps another Novell certification.
----
Utah weather has turned crackling cold. Up until now fall and winter have been mild and picturesque. But a couple of days ago Mother Nature sent a huge cold air mass straight from the arctic to settle on the Rocky Mountains. It came quietly, only a light snow announced its coming, now we have pipe-freezing weather. I know because I lost my hot water this morning. Christmas is going to be white, but it'll be hoar frost as much as snow.
----
<glub>.. <glub>, <glub>, <PHEW!> <Pant, pant, pant.>
That's me coming up for air, again.
I've started a new exercise regimen -- I'm swimming every other day for a half hour -- and it's doing great things for me. I started a couple months ago as the weather started cooling too much for golf. And WOW! It feels great!
Other exercise activities I've been doing, such as golf and walking, have been limited by the strength of my leg joints and tendons -- I have to stop when my feet and knees get too sore. With swimming it's my muscles and circulation system that set the limit. I swim hard until I'm panting and my arm muscles start to ache -- my joints and tendons feel no stress.
The result has been I can exercise vigorously, and my body is thanking me. My hips and legs have gained a lot of flexibility -- I'm walking more steadily. Thanks to my growing circulatory powers, I'm staying alert longer and more easily.
<Sigh> there's a dark side to all this. My appetite as grown as fast as my vigor. So, my vigor and weight have both surged up. Now I have to figure out how to keep the one up while beating the other down.
That's what has been keeping me busy for the last couple weeks.
Have a happy holiday season,
Roger
-- End --
=================
16 Nov 98
Topaz Mountain, Western Utah Desert -- Some places are named whimsically, such as North Pole, Nevada. Some places are named ironically such as Hunting Valley -- there's no hunting allowed in Hunting Valley. A few are named literally, and Topaz Mountain is one such place: there is topaz on Topaz Mountain, lots of it.
Sunday was expedition day, time to explore the wilds of Utah again. Four of us went on this expedition: Marty, Donna, Page and myself. Page came up with the idea to do some rockhounding. None of us are rockhounders, so we were the blind leading the blind. But Page researched it on the Internet, and she found that Topaz Mountain in Utah was world famous as a place for amateur topaz collecting, and found some maps leading to the good sites on the mountain. So, we decided to give it a try.
Phil, another good friend, couldn't come, but offered some more advice about where the hot sites on the mountain were. Phil hasn't been their either, but his brother had been there before. "You want to go to the third valley, the one filled with juniper trees." This advice agreed with what we found on yet another internet site, one that included pictures of the site. We started collecting rockhounding tools: hammers, chisels, screens and screwdrivers.
The drive would be a long one, and take us to some of the remotest landscape in Utah. Topaz Mountain is near Delta, Utah. Delta, Utah is a small farming town that is the last town in Utah along the stretch of US 6-50 leading from Utah to Nevada -- often called the loneliest highway in the US. (Delta will also be familiar to you if you've heard my "Fortunately, Unfortunately" story involving a flat tire on my Audi.) Topaz Mountain is not on US 6-50, it's a forty minute drive north of the road, deep in to the western desert of Utah.
Sunday came and we headed off into the sunrise. The trip to Topaz Mountain went smoothly. (I don't get to add a sequel to my Fortunately, Unfortunately story.) The road was good all the way there, and when we arrived we found number three valley to be full of juniper. We found "Hump Hill"--the hot spot of hot spots, parked and had a quick lunch.
Geologically, Topaz Mountain is a fairly young volcano, 10 million years old, composed of an odd mineral. Most volcanos erupt some variant of a dark rock called basalt. The Topaz Mountain volcano erupted a light-colored rock called rhyolite, which is part of the granite family rather than the basalt family of minerals.
In addition to looking different, the mix of trace minerals in the rock that are soluble or slightly soluble in water is quite different between the two families. When the volcano was young, Utah was lowland, not high, and the land was well watered. Rain water percolated through the rhyolite, and topaz crystals grew in the little holes left behind by gas bubbles in the rock. These little holes are called vugs.
Sunday we came to do some "vug hunting", although we didn't know it at the time. What we did notice as we were eating lunch was that two people were up on Hump Hill already, and they were studying the rock face carefully -- clearly topaz hunters.
We climbed up and engaged in some friendly conversation, and these gentlemen filled us in on some on-the-spot topaz hunting secrets. They had some topaz already and showed us what it looked like in the rock. This was great!
And, it turned out that topaz hunting beat fishing by a long shot: I found my first topaz in ten minutes. It wasn't big, it wasn't flawless, but it was "the real McCoy." That got us all to working the mountainside diligently.
There are several ways to hunt for topaz. I started out using the "chain gang method". There were lots of rocks lying around, so I got a sledge hammer and broke big rocks into little ones looking for topaz that might be hiding inside. (It's a good thing it was a cool day.) Using this "manly method", I found a couple small, clear specimens.
While I was doing that, Page took a screwdriver and simply fished in vugs that were exposed on the rock face. About twenty minutes later, she found a medium-sized topaz with deep yellow color.
I looked at the work I had put out, I looked at the work she had put out, and I decided that I'd been manly long enough. I grabbed a screwdriver and started poking at vugs in the rock face.
Through the afternoon we hunted vugs. We all found pieces, and learned there was an art to this topaz hunting. When the sun passed behind Topaz Mountain, and a chill breeze started blowing, we all had a dozen or so topaz pieces ranging from about .5cm - 1/8 inch to 1.5cm - 1/2 inches long.
Like fish, the topaz in the rock always seemed bigger than what finally came out. I would fish in a vug and uncover one face or one corner of a topaz, and it would sure look to me as if this was going to be part of a piece at least an inch long (2cm). I'd chip away, and what finally came out was a quarter inch long <sigh>.
But, all in all, it beat a fishing expedition, and we had a great time.
In retrospect, Topaz Mountain rock hunting is definitely a not summer activity. If we'd been doing this on a summer afternoon, it would have been hot, hot, hot. As it was, the cool air and warm sun made it a most pleasant day to spend sitting on an exposed rock.
On the road back we were treated to a spectacular sunset. Marty and I hopped out three different times to shoot the golds, pinks and finally deep reds the sunset produced. It was a fine expedition: fine topaz and fine photos, and the company of fine companions.
Everything one could hope for on a fine weekend adventure.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
==================
2 Nov 98
Frisco, Utah -- This was a "well done" week for me. All week I studied hard for two certification exams (one Microsoft, one Novell) and Friday morning I passed them both! Saturday, as a reward, I headed south for another photo tour of southern Utah. Marty was also coming off a "well done" week, so he came along, too. This was Halloween weekend, we spent it on the road, but it turned out that even on the road the spirit of Halloween can come through.
Friday was the day before Halloween, and it was two days before the full moon, but strangeness was in the air already. Friday afternoon and evening I saw lots of strange driving: people weaving, people making U-turns in the middle of the street, sudden lane changes, and lots of police handing out tickets. (That was unusual because usually the police aren't around when people are driving in strange ways.)
Saturday the strangeness continued, the traffic was heavy in places where we thought it would be light.
The start of our trip was not rushed, we headed south out of Salt Lake about 2PM. The first stop was a small extinct volcano beside the I-15 freeway. The volcano is not marked as such, it's labelled as a view area on a small hill in the middle of a wide, bowl-shaped valley. But if you get out and investigate the rocks of the hill, you find they are red, lichen-covered lava rocks. This was a small cinder cone volcano that formed within the last few thousand years, I would estimate.
At the volcano we saw a spectacular sunset. The weekend weather was unsettled. There was a huge mass of cold, winter air flowing into Colorado from Canada. A cold air mass like that has a hard time flowing west over the Rockies into Utah, but it tries, and in trying it will often create a warm front that brings eerie weather to Utah: strange storms, low clouds and fog. There was also a conventional storm flowing into Utah from the Pacific northwest, so the weekend weather was a grab bag of sunshine, fog, cold, warm, odd clouds at all levels, and overall eerie -- very fitting for a Halloween weekend.
Our second stop was Cedar Breaks National Monument. Cedar Breaks is very high, 3,300 yards/meters, so winter comes early and leaves late. Earlier this year in May, and again in June, I tried to visit Cedar Breaks, and both times I was kept out by deep snow. This time I made it, but the snow was a foot deep already. I got some great snow and pine and snow and red rock shots. We got to Cedar Breaks at 8PM, so the pictures were all taken by the light of a fat, gibbous, moon riding high in the sky.
It was cold up there. Marty's camera stopped working a couple times because the batteries couldn't put out enough power. I found myself walking back and forth between the car and the viewing area a couple times to get more camera equipment. This kept me warm, but for the first time in my life I experienced big blotches of color parading across my eyes while they were wide open. I've seen these blotches often enough when I'm going to sleep in a dark room, but never before while my eyes were wide open and I was walking along on a moon-lit night!
This is a phenomenon I've heard about in my pilot training. It's a symptom of low oxygen, probably caused this night because I was exerting so hard while I was at this high altitude. The blotches stopped shortly after I stopped tramping through the deep snow. It was weird and scarey! Halloween strikes again.
We left Cedar Breaks and headed for Bryce Canyon to see if there was snow there. Bryce Canyon is just under 3,000 yards/meters, and that was just enough lower that there was only a trace of snow
at Bryce, and I had no more vision splotches. We shot some more moonlit pictures, then called it a night and slept at a very nice place called Ruby's Inn just outside of Bryce Canyon.
The next day we shot dawn pictures at Bryce, then went back to Cedar Breaks to shoot afternoon pictures of the snow and snow - covered pines. The weather worked with us and we had a wonderful kaleidoscope of blue sky and white clouds all day.
We figured we'd end the day going somewhere neither Marty or I had ever been before: Lehman Caves on the Utah - Nevada border.
We headed out west from Cedar City on Utah 21 -- a road that's lonely even by Utah standards. On the way to Lehman Caves we stopped at perhaps the only other place in Utah neither Marty or I have ever been: the ghost town of Frisco, Utah.
Frisco is not San Fransisco by any means. It's located at the foot of the San Fransisco Mountains, a smallish mountain range in southwestern Utah. The area is so dry that there are no nearby rivers, and local wells can't produce enough water for farming or industry. The town was founded in the 1880's when a rich vein of silver was discovered nearby. It grew to 4000 people and the mine produced $60,000,000 in silver and other metals. That $60,000,000 could pay for hauling in a lot of water. When the silver vein played out, there was no more reason to stay in Frisco. People left quickly at first, then steadily, and by the 1920's no one lived in Frisco anymore.
Most ghost towns in Utah are open grass-covered fields -- there is very little to look at because anything of value has been carted away, and anything not of value has been torn down to keep people sueing the owners if they hurt themselves while exploring the abandonned structures. Frisco is unusual in that it's so far away from population centers that it's ruins are not considered an attractive nuisance. No one has compelled existing owners to fence off, board up, or tear down the ruins.
So when we arrived we found a few standing structures and a few open mine entrances. And we found we had run of the town! For about an hour Marty and I were "the new law" in Frisco (and the new citizens). We had lots of fun imagining what it was like when Frisco was a booming town, and shooting pictures of the ruins.
We had so much fun that we used up the afternoon, and never made it to Lehman Caves. We headed back to Milford, Utah and got some wonderful pictures of a full moon rising over sunset-lit mountains "floating like a phantom ship on a sea of clouds".
From Milford we headed home on the back roads west of I-15 that skirt Utah's truely lonely western desert country. In Delta we discovered that Halloween weekend weirdness wasn't over yet. We stopped for gas, and while we were stopped an attractive young
lady drove up in her car and caught Marty's eye. "I want to thank you for helping me get my car fixed." she said.
"You're welcome... I did?" said Marty, looking puzzeled.
"Aren't you the one I met a way back on the road? Don't you have a tongue stud?" she said.
Marty is not the tongue stud type, but finding this out didn't stop the lady. For the next fifteen minutes or so, she carried on a conversation with Marty that covered ground from finding lodgings in Delta or Wendover, to visiting Lehman Caves and getting fixed up for a tour with a very knowlegable very blond, very single tour guide there, to finding crystals under the full moon at Topaz mountain, and on and on.
Marty finally politely pried himself lose from this conversational monologue and we continued on our way. This lady became the conversation topic for the next few minutes of our journey through the night.
We concluded that she was not on drugs or alcohol at the time, but that she was definitely "over the top" in offering friendliness and advice, and that while she was attractive and friendly enough, she was definitely trouble waiting to happen.
Having concluded that I asked, "Suppose she was acting this way, but she was drunk, would that affect her attractivenss?" "It would make her more attractive." Marty replied.
"I agree... why?" I said.
We concluded that if she was drunk, then she could "turn off" the over-the-top wierdness by becoming sober. But because she's not drunk, then maybe she can't turn off the wierdness. We decided that the fact that she may be permanently eccentric was the scary part, and why at a gut level we felt she was "trouble", even though she was being very friendly and outgoing and didn't seem to have a hidden agenda -- some secret motive for acting like she did.
The young lady was the cherry on top of an all-around interesting weekend. Halloween came through for us, even though we didn't think we were celebrating Halloween.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
=================
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 22:48:46 -0700
20 Oct 98
Logan Canyon -- Another trip into the hills this weekend. This time to Logan Canyon, about seventy five miles north of Salt Lake City, and this time with some unusual guests.
Marty and I often travel south into central Utah for photo expiditions, or east to the Uinta mountains. South takes us to red rock desert country, and east takes us to high alpine country filled with green pine, white snow, and deep, deep blue skies. We don't travel west or north as often.
West is gray, desert country dominated by the mud and salt flats west of the Great Salt Lake. We travel west to shoot spectacular flatness, or when we want to travel hours without seeing a soul. It's also the direction of choice if we want to gamble: Wendover, Nevada is only two and a half hours away to the west.
North is farmland cut through by high mountains. It's great for farmland shots, and not bad for mountain shots, but not quite as spectacular for high mountains as going east and not quite as spectacular for rock formations as going south. So, we don't travel north that often.
But last weekend, an unexpected attractor appeared in the north: women. For a couple of months now I've been using the Internet to widen my circle of acquaintances, and one of the delightful fallouts of that effort was making contact with Donna, a science teacher in Logan, Utah.
We have a mutual interest in science, photography and things outdoorish, so we decided to meet in person. Donna brought Cindi and another friend, and I brought Marty. We spent an afternoon traveling the backways that spring off Logan Canyon, and had a good time.
Logan Canyon is a steep walled canyon that connects Cache Valley with Bear Lake. I've traveled the Logan Canyon road several times before, but never bothered to stop. This time we stopped, explored and found there are lots of small dirt roads leading to interesting places in the canyon and high in the hills above. We saw leaf-covered glens, high mountain meadows, an interesting spring, and a couple of unusual items as well.
As we headed for our first high mountain meadow, we passed a pickup truck filled with men dressed in bright orange vests... then another. It only took two... "This wouldn't be deer hunt weekend?" I asked. Sure enough, it was. The hills would be alive with the sound of gunfire.
Deer hunt weekend is not an official holiday in Utah, but it's widely observed. Over 300,000 people spread into Utah hills for two weekends in October. Utah has a population of roughly 2,000,000 people, so better than one in ten of the state's population moves to the hills seeking to shoot a buck (male) white-tail deer.
Deer hunt is not a good time to be a buck white tail deer in Utah, or to look anything like a buck white tail deer. Legends abound about the terrible recognition abilities of rooky hunters when they get "buck fever."
We were up in mid-afternoon which is nap time for deer, so things were quiet. We did, however, come across the entrails of a deer some hunter had recently gutted, and this is when a strange thing happened.
Marty and I looked at the entrails, and once we had determined what they were, we admired the handiwork (the gutter had done a very neat job), and went on about looking for nearby photo opportunities. The ladies didn't. They clustered about the entrails oohing and aahing, and after a couple of minutes got out a garbage bag and carefully put the entrails into the bag.
It was only slowly I realized these women weren't going to simply walk away from these deer parts. I stopped shooting pictures, watched them, and looked at Marty. He had stopped shooting, too. He shrugged, he didn't have a clue, either. What was going on here? The hunter left the entrails behind because they are worthless. Were these women naive? Were they were wild west-style voodoo priests who use deer parts instead of chicken parts for rituals? Was this going to be part of a health food dinner? New Age Oriental medicine? I couldn't figure it out!
Donna looked up and saw our confusion. "We're science teachers, remember? We'll be taking these back and preserving them to use for science class." Marty and I grinned, these ladies were serious science teachers, indeed!
Greg, a friend of mine, was commenting on a TV program he saw the other day about the Y2K crisis. As much as I love trying to predict future trends, this one has blindsided me with it's popularity. For me it's one of those "had I only known..." situations. Had I only known, I could have started billing myself as a Y2K expert two years ago, and made a ton of money on this boom.
The damage potential of Y2K problems is about a million times less than it's conversation potential, so the question becomes why is the conversation potential so high?
Part of the reason is there is always a "crisis de jour" floating around the computer industry. Five years ago it was viruses. The crisis de jour generates about a thousand times as much talk as it warrants, but the interest in Y2K seems much bigger than the interest in viruses five years ago. Why is it bigger?
I suspect it's bigger because some of society's "end of millennium" fears are expressing themselves in Y2K: it's the computer crisis de jour, and an end-of-the-world crisis combined. So, why would an obscure computer problem get wrapped up in end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it thinking?
In the year 1000 religion was the prime explainer of the mysteries of life, so end-of-millennium fears expressed themselves largely through a religious format. In the year 2000 science is explaining as many mysteries as religion, so the end-of-millennium fears may be expressing themself in science terms as well as religious. It's an easy link to make after the fact, and it might have been profitable for me if I'd anticipated it three years ago... but maybe not, I find it tiresome talking nonsense, even if people will pay to hear it.
But I do enjoy second-guessing the future, so even now I'm looking around for the next crisis de jour.
Roger
-- End --
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 00:37:16 -0700
15 Oct 98
Salt Lake City -- Saturday found me high in the valleys on the east side of Mount Timpanogus, and it found me traveling high mountain trails I haven't seen before.
The trip started out as a trip to photograph the last of the trees turning colors in the high mountains. I wanted to travel the Alpine Loop, a paved road which winds and circles through scenic forests and valleys around the east side of Mount Timpanogus. The challenge is that as of last year the State of Utah is charging $3 to travel the loop -- it used to be a free ride.
Last spring, after begrudgingly paying my dues to get on the loop, I discovered that there was a dirt road that lead east from Cascade Springs, a stop on the alpine loop, down into the small town of Midway, and this dirt road didn't have a toll booth on it. This time I was going to reverse my tracks to see if I could get to the Alpine Loop and take my pictures without having to pass a toll booth.
So I headed east into the mountains before turning south. I drove past Park City, justly famous for some fine skiing areas, to the small town of Midway, Utah. Midway is famous for it's swiss heritage, the original settlers were mostly from Switzerland. Once I reached Midway, I started playing "right hand rule". I knew the road I wanted came out of the mountains on my right, but I couldn't remember exactly where, so I started driving up a likely dirt road springing off from my right that headed into the mountains.
The first road I picked followed a steep-walled canyon deep into the mountains, but it wasn't the right road. As it circled around from the warm, dry west side of the canyon to the cooler, wetter north side, the road got muddy and narrow... too muddy and narrow for my low-slung, 2WD Olds. I turned back while I still could, and back in Midway, I took the next likely dirt road. This one too lead high into the mountains, but instead of coming out at Cascade Springs on the east side of Mount Timpanogus, it came out at Brighton a ski resort on the north side of Sugarloaf Mountain, 30 miles north of Cascade Springs! By now it was getting late in the day, so I headed down from Brighton into Salt Lake City and headed home.
I didn't end up where I expected, but I got a lot of nice fall pictures, and I learned more about the warren of dirt roads that crisscross the mountains just outside my city.
I saw the movie ANTZ last week. It was a fun movie made by the same people who made Toy Story, and they have produced another winner. The most fascinating part was listening to Woody Allen play the neurotic city dweller constantly questioning his own self worth. This is a role he does excellently, but I haven't seen him play it so purely for over twenty years! This shows one of the strengths of animation. Woody is too old to play this role convincingly in person, but he can sure bring an animation to life playing this role, doing it just with his voice.
My work goes well, but that fact that it is going well is in some ways a profound disappointment. My work is training people to use Netware to make computer networks. The disappointment is that people *need* training to do this: the process should be so simple that no training is needed.
When I got into this personal computer business in 1977 it was revolutionary. It was going to take computers out of the "glass room" and make them accessable to all kinds of people. I was a revolutionary, I was a soldier of the revolution that was going to make this happen.
That vision of computer liberation has partly come to pass, but only partly. Personal computers are still succumbing to what I call "The Complexity Crisis": they have become too complex for people to understand, and they are getting more complex with time.
Microsoft, in their paternalistic wisdom, decided to hide the "plumbing" that makes the computer work from the average user behind the GUI front end that we know as Windows. This was never the right choice. The right choice was to keep the plumbing exposed and teaching the users what the plumbing meant. It was the right choice because keeping the plumbing exposed kept it simple.
The first people sacrficed by Microsoft's paternalistic choice are software developers and moderately experienced users. These people have to work a lot harder to understand what's happening. Users have to work harder to diagnose problems; software takes longer to produce and looks a lot more uniform when it does come out.
The second people being sacrificed are... all users! Look at how much RAM and disk space Windows consumes! I hate to sound like an old codger, but, "By cracky, I remember back in 1977, when an entire word processor fit in 64K of RAM!" RAM and disk drives are dirt cheap, but why am I, a user, forced to sacrifice all that cheapness just to sustain an operating system with a 64MB/5GB memory habit? (Windows 98).
I'm an old revolutionary, and it's times like this I feel like Trotsky: my revolution has been betrayed. <sigh> But I'm luckier than Trotsky, I've managed to turn this lemon into personal lemonaide, after all, I am making good money helping others cope with this complexity crisis.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
==================
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 23:13:45 -0700
30 Sep 98
Salt Lake City -- Took a trip up to Mirror Lake with the kids last weekend. Mirror Lake is at 10,000/3,300 feet/meters and winter is not far off. As we drove up we saw an interesting sight: the oak family trees were dark green, and the maple family trees were bright red. We had a brief cold snap the week before, and it was apparently enough to convince the maples to shut down for the winter, but not enough to convince the oaks. So instead of red and gold mountains this year, we're going to have red and green for a while, then gold and brown.
Mirror Lake itself was as pleasant as ever. It's a shallow alpine lake nestled in the pines with crystal clear waters. It's a mecca for fishermen and photographers. We arrived in late afternoon, and Bald Mountain's shadow had already moved across the lake proper, but the far shore was still brightly lit. The wind was stiff and cool, so the lake wasn't mirroring anything. The kids practiced skipping rocks while I shot their sillouettes in the bright light from the far shore. I'll be showing some of these later on the web site.
I saw the movie Rush Hour this week. I became a Jackie Chan fan while I was teaching English in Korea. His acrobatics stunts are always amazing. Ever since I saw Chris Tucker play the "over the top" talk DJ in The Fifth Element, I've kept my eye out for him.
I was curious about two things going into this movie: was this a Jackie Chan movie with Christ Tucker added, or a Chris Tucker movie with Jackie Chan added? And how would these two interact?
As the opening credits rolled by I saw no chinese names in the support crew. Jackie was apparently jetted over from Hong Kong and outfitted with an American support crew and an American accountant. It showed. His stunts were good, but not stellar. Compared to a "mainstream" Jackie Chan such as Mr. Nice Guy, the stunt segments were short and slow. The ending outtakes were telling, they were mostly missed lines, not missed stunts. Jackie had apparently done very little experimenting with stunts of the sort he does a lot of in his mainstream movies.
Chris Tucker, on the other hand, seemed fully up to speed, and I was happy to see his body language could keep up with Jackie's. The net result was a satisfying and entertaining movie of the Jackie Chan genre, but nothing stellar.
Work is going well. I've contracted to teach a series of evening Netware classes for the next couple months, so I'm teaching evenings and split my days between studying more Netware and getting preparations done for the classes. It's a pleasant mix.
I've been back in the US just a year now. I know because car registration came up this month. My red 88 Olds is still running fine... which surprises me a little. I'm surprised that it's running well, and I'm surprised I still have it. This was supposed to be a transition car, and it still is, but I've taken longer to transition than I expected.
This car has served me well. It's been from Phoenix, AZ in the south to Glacier National Park, MT and Alberta, Canada in the north. It's been from Greeley, CO in the east to Wendover, NV in the west. It's traveled on freeway, highway, dirt road and snow drift. So, someday I will transition out of it, but if it keeps going as well as it has, it won't be too soon.
Thats all for now,
Roger
-- End --
================
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 1998 03:08:08 -0700
20 Sep 98
September has been an ironic month. I set this month aside for studying, and the effort to study has consumed most of my attention. As a result, I have not gotten out-and-about nearly as much as when I'm working. So the news this time is mostly internal.
The hot news is that after a six year lapse, my office is no longer paperless. I have a printer, two in fact!
The first printer was a gift from a friend. It's a cranky ten-year-old Tandy Laser printer. It puts black toner on white paper... saying any more is a long discussion about what it *doesn't* do!
A week after I got it, one of the things it stopped doing was working. I could have given up on hard copy right then and there. But <sigh> I was hooked. Hard copy is like cigarette smoking: you can swear to give it up, and you can give it up for real, but backsliding is real easy. Here it was only a week since I got this nice printer gift, and I couldn't live without hard copy again.
I found a repair shop and carted the printer off. Three days later I got the good news: only one bad part, a $5 fuse. When I picked up the printer I got the bad news: I was being charged two hours labor to replace the $5 fuse. <Hmmm, I can't repair laser printers, but it turns out I teach laser printer repair, and I know enough to know this shop is not going to see a lot of repeat business from me. On the other hand, I've been in the repair business, and I'm sure happy the shop was there for me to come to... I get very mixed feelings in a case like this.>
When I took the printer in I vowed that if the repair bill was over $100, the Tandy's new job would be boat anchor. Total bill: $101. I'm such a softie; I paid my money and hurried home to start printing again.
But while the Tandy was being repaired, I got "printer shakes". I couldn't help it! I headed for CompUSA and prowled the printer department. I found an Epson color printer on sale for $275. Only $275! I'll ta... somehow, I walked away empty handed... for 72 hours. Then I came back, credit card in hand. Good news! The 72 hour delay saved me $50. The printer had gone off sale, but the list price was now $50 less than the sale price because a new model was coming out.
This new printer is a sweetheart! It does photo-realistic printing as well as a fantastic job of regular old black printing. It has paper settings: put in regular copier paper and it prints fast and light; put in "ink jet paper" (a heavier, whiter, less porous paper) and it prints medium fast with heavier ink density; put in "photo quality" paper, and it spends it's time slathering on layer after layer of ink... and the results are really nearly photo quality!
But expensive! <whew!> The photo quality paper is sixty cents a page, and it's probably using up several cents worth of ink when it's printing one of my scanned photos.
Net result: the cranky old Tandy is still valuable. I use it when I'm printing out fifty page technical specifications and other hard copy jobs where if I can read it that's all that counts. So in three weeks I've gone from the paperless office to keeping *two* printers busy.
Life is full of surprises. (and I'm sure glad I never took up smoking.)
More later,
Roger
-- End --
=================
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 1998 20:38:12 -0700
10 Aug 96
Greeley, Colorado -- Last weekend I visited my father. He lives in Greeley, Colorado, a small city north of Denver. I drove there.
It's summer and it's construction time, so I drove at night to avoid the heat and the traffic delays. I started at 5PM and slipped east out of Salt Lake City just ahead of the rush hour traffic to Park City. People who live in Park City are workaholics so they don't see the outside of their office until much later.
I took I-80 east through Wyoming, then I-25 south to Greeley. The route is a little roundabout, but it's the fastest because it avoids going up and down, up and down, over the four mountain chains between Salt Lake City and Denver. This part of I-80 follows roughly the route of the Oregon Trail that the wagon trains took to get to California.
I took a detour to see Flaming Gorge National Park. I haven't been to Flaming Gorge, and I apparently missed the best part because I didn't see any flaming gorges, even though I was there at sunset, which should be prime viewing time.
It's a good thing I chose night travel. Fully 20% of I-80 and I-25 were closed down to a single lane of traffic each way. I have never seen so much road construction in the US as I have experienced for the last year.
I arrived in Greeley at 3AM and crashed on my Dad's floor.
Dad is 87 years old, and he has decided it's time to write his life's story. He's been banging away on the word processor for weeks now, and he's looking for old photos to add to the story. I brought my old photo albums, and my photo scanner. I figure if Dad needs copies of photos, we should do it the high tech way. My old photo albums have pictures of when we lived in Cleveland, Ohio. We went through the albums and used the scanner to make computer files of those photos Dad found interesting.
Dad doesn't have a color printer, and neither do I. But Kinko's Copy Center does, and you can connect a notebook computer directly to their printer. I thought we were going to have photos while we waited, but <sigh> the true course of high technology never seems to run quite as straight as the concept. To make the printer work, we needed to get the printer driver (program) into my notebook. Kinko's has the driver on a floppy disk, but I didn't bring my floppy disk reader, it was at home in Salt Lake City. So, we'll have to wait until I get back to Salt Lake to get the photos printed.
I headed back Saturday night. I took US 37 through Rocky Mountain National Park to US 40, and then US 40 straight through to Salt Lake City. I went up and down, up and down over the four mountain chains between Denver and Salt Lake. But the full moon was out, and it was a nice drive, and I arrived home at 5:30AM just as dawn was bluing the eastern sky.
Just at dusk in Rocky Mountain National Park I saw two herds of elk. I not only saw them, I got within 30 feet of a threesome. They were hanging around the parking area. Having just seen mountain goats do this in Glacier, I suspect the elk were there for the same reason: they are licking up ethylene glycol spills on the parking lot pavement. Candy may be dandy; liquor may be quicker; but it appears that the sweet aroma of anti-freeze is a sure thing for attracting ungulates.
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --
==============
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 14:40:03 -0700
5 Aug 98
Salt Lake City -- It's been a computer-centric week.
It started with upgrading my computer. I've been considering an upgrade for many months, but I got a forceful call to action last month when I started having problems with the disk.
It was a mysterious problem: the disk wouldn't complete a SCANDISK because so many bad sectors were being reported, but other than that, the disk was working just fine. I felt like I was going to the doctor for a health checkup and having the doctor report, "I think you're in fine condition, son, but I can't be sure because I can't hear your heart beat."
So last week I took the notebook computer into a local store and had them boost the memory from 16MB to 48MB and upgrade the disk from 1GB to 4GB... A simple enough request, it would seem at first glance, and one that should be completed in half a day. Ah, but neither computer upgrades nor true love run as smoothly as they should.
I came back the half day later, and the technician told me he couldn't find a 32MB chip that would work in my notebook computer, so he had added only 16MB. I was disappointed, I have never had a computer with enough RAM to run Windows 95 at full speed, and I really wanted enough this time. I asked the technician if he had a 64MB chip that worked? 80MB total is overkill, but I would rather be overkilled than underkilled this time. He went back... and came out with yet another 32MB chip... and this one worked! <hurray> I got my 32MB upgrade after all!
The 4GB disk worked right the first time... but because of all the bad sectors the technican couldn't do a simple disk copy from my old drive to my new one. I had a new drive, with a new version of Windows 95, but none of my old data or old applications. I ended up taking the old drive home with me, putting it back in the notebook, and, using my Netware file server as a cache, I copied data files and applications from the old drive, then installed the new drive again and copied them back.
The data moved just fine, old DOS applications moved just fine, but Windows 95 applications didn't. Windows 95 applications must be reinstalled during a transfer such as this... an inconvenience since my applications come from a motly of sources. I got my core applications running in about two days, but about one in four of myold applications are now not functioning or erratic. I'm fixing them as I need them.
But the computer mysteries of the week weren't finished yet. Last weekend, my LAN card started acting up. It's a new card, and it
was working just fine before the upgrade. Friday was Starcraft day, with Marty and Phil. I took my computer and hub over to Marty's apartment and plugged everything together. Marty connected his desktop computer to the hub, Phil lugged over his newly upgraded desktop and connected it, and... nothing happened. The computers wouldn't talk to each other. We spent a couple hours diagnosing, then gave up and played single user Starcraft one each machine for a while. Saturday, I took my computer and hub to Greg's and we diagnosed for an hour, unsucessfully, before we switched to playing standalone Heavy Gear.
Sunday, I reconnected the whole mess back in my apartment... and it worked! <sigh> Computers: can't live with 'um, can't live without 'um.
These mysteries are all the more purplexing because last Monday I passed my A+ certification exam. I'm now an A+ certified computer repair technician. I took the exam because I'm teaching A+ certification classes, and some of the powers-that-be felt it was time for me to tangibly demonstrate that I knew what I was talking about. The test was a DOS-triva exam for me because I've been working with this kind of equipment for so many years.
But, in spite of the fact that I've been working with this stuff for years, and that I passed the A+ exam, this business is still full of mysteries for me! I love it, I hate it. <sigh>
That's all for now,
Roger
-- End --