cc: file, Mom, Sara and Des, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Darrell and Nancy Krueger, Diane Cluff, Tony Hafen, Claude and Katherine Warner, Forest and Amy Warner, Ivan and Chell Warner, and Eric and Renee Miner
"When Roice took me out to dinner Tuesday night he said, `Well, you have had two good weeks in a row!' Based on that comment I spent spare time today reading over each of the 32 Thoughtlet's I have sent and found 7 were downers, 7 were personal depreciations, and 18 described good weeks. Maybe someone else would classify the weeks differently than what I chose to remember. Considering all that has happened over the time frame of Thoughtlets, I feel like this is a pretty good record. Some weeks were like this week, with both high's and lows, but my remembrance was mostly for the high's. I believe in abundance and not scarcity.
For instance, Walden 3-D co-sponsored the second annual `Virtual Reality in Geosciences' with the Virtual Environment Technology Laboratory (VETL) on Thursday and Friday of this week (see http://www.vetl.uh.edu/vrgeo97). I had spent Monday in meetings at Mobil Oil and was at the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) in Austin Tuesday and Wednesday. A year ago I gave a Virtual Seminar to 50 attendees at The VR in Geosciences '96 conference in Halden, Norway from my home office. The VR in Geosciences '97 Conference on Thursday and Friday had about 60 attendees from places as varied as Australia, Norway, Germany, South Africa, California, Oklahoma, Louisiana, New York, Texas, etc. It is very exciting to me to see big companies starting to look at, and, in a couple of cases, starting to put fair amounts of research dollars into this new technology. We were able to announce there is an alliance between the BEG and the VETL. Several of the papers were very good. I was the summary speaker and filled two slots since Bill Bavinger's father passed away earlier in the week and the `celebration service' was on the day of his talk. I used some of Bill's slides to describe his work, and the first slide got stuck in the slide projector. It took 5 minutes to fix the problem. I did not think of this at the time, but Bill defines reality as `the electromagnetic spectrum,' and it would have been nice to have been as virtual as an electron cloud and to have disappeared from the scene.
Then I started to give my own presentation, which was a series of downloaded web pages (located at http://www.walden3d.com/papers/vrgeo97), only to find the Silicon Graphics we were using did not recognize some of the web links (or maybe there was a hardware problem with the mouse). Bottom line is I stumbled through the talk, missed several of the images I planned to show, and felt like I did really bad. Embarrassed is a good descriptive word.
The whole experience reminded me of an 8th grade talent show when Randy Shirts and I played in for the whole Junior High School. We played `Sukuaiki' and `Chim-Chim-Chiree.' This was a year before the Beatles played on Ed Sullivan, and thus just before we formed `The Keynotes.' I played a six-string electric Gibson guitar and Randy played the Accordion. I thought I knew the songs, but when the curtain came up I completely forgot what to do. We started twice, stopped twice, and finally I signaled for the next act to come on. I think it was Charlie Garfield or Doug Grimshaw on a skate board. They lost control and the skate board almost hit Lance Whetton's drum set. Talk about being embarrassed. I had the music for the Walt Disney song, and we did that one ok. Bottom line was it turned out to not be a complete failure, and I even had a couple of guys tell me they thought the whole thing was done on purpose.
When the Director for Upstream Information Management for Conoco came up after my talk at the Virtual Reality Conference and asked for the web site because `it seems like there are some significant ideas there,' I felt just like I did in 9th grade. Made me wonder how many years I have been repeating this `faking it' process? Whatever the `truth' is the way I have reacted inside is to feel like it turned out pretty good even if there was a significant hiccup in implementation.
Uncle Lloyd's last e-mail from Pakistan covered the same concept with different words. On Tuesday he wrote:
`Dear All-- We write this last note with some very mixed emotions. We are excited about going home, However, we will not be able to receive any more E-mail letter because we are shipping home the modem and probably the computer tomorrow. So as of early in the morning (April 30)we will be off line till we get home and establish another E-mail address. We close on a sad note. Yesterday we had an attempted armed robbery. They thought we were not home at the time. It was much to their surprise that we were here. The sad part is that it was led by the Branch President. I visited with the Mission President, and it was decided to close the Branch until the new Missionary couple arrive around the first of June. Our District President moved to India so we are without one until the person who has been selected arrives back from a visit to the USA. Its far too long a story to relate here, But hopefully we will have much time later to visit about it when we get home. It was such a shock for us, and it makes it hard to leave Pakistan so soon after this set back. Many of the things we had worked hard to develop seemed to evaporates over night. If People could just live the Gospel of Jesus Christ it would make such a difference in their lives. Know that we love you all, each and everyone. D/M Warner'
I feel I understand what Uncle Lloyd was writing about. I received a copy of your Mom's proposed Divorce Decree on Thursday, the night before my talk. As Melanie and Sara know, my reaction was to go in the bedroom and beat the mattress with a tennis racket until the anger got out. It was hard to concentrate and finish writing the paper, but I did, and I even got compliments for it the next day. As Uncle Lloyd probably unintentionally encouraged the robbery, I definitely recognize I hold significant responsibility for your Mom feeling she has no other choice in regards to divorce. I just have to look at how I reacted with your Mom about choices Sara made earlier in the day to see a glaring example of my errors. Maybe some day I will be able to do feedback directed role playing in Virtual Reality, so I can better learn how to act and not react. And despite the emotion behind this paragraph, I have had a pretty good week.
In fact, I am quite excited about how several of the projects are going. BHP (Broken Hill Proprietary of Australia), Arco (in Plano), and The BEG have started what look to me like will become big projects at the VETL. There is a good chance of seeing new projects with Chevron (LaHabra Research Center in California), StatOil (in Norway), and Shell (in The Hague of The Netherlands) start up within the next few months. Then there were great discussions with Phillips (Bartlesville, Oklahoma), Conoco (Houston), Oracle (San Francisco), and others.
I remember my first significant exposure to Virtual Reality at the SEG Convention in San Francisco. We held a one-day research workshop on `Scientific Visualization' back in October of 1991. We had principals from VPL research bring their data glove and head-mounted display devices over to the Marriott Center for the workshop. Here I learned about one of the downside of the technology, namely how VPL researchers were experimenting with virtual sex, via full body suits with appropriate stimulation devices. When learning of something that is personally repulsive, it is easy to bury your head in the sand and refuse to have anything to do with a particular technology. However, you can't do away with offices because a colleague lets down their emotional and spiritual guard and `falls in love' with someone at the office. If you take the time to look through my presentation, I hope you will see how important the upside potential good Virtual Reality can be for geosciences as well as other industries. There is risk of misuse and wrong choices in all of life, and what we each must do is make sure we have grounded our personal values on principles solid like a rock and not shifting like sand.
Roice's acceptance of a job at Advanced Structures Incorporated (ASI) this week highlighted this concept for me. Your Mom and I were the only investor in ASI, back on 31 July 1991. This year they did $9.5 million worth of business. They have not made any profit yet, since everything is being reinvested in growing the company, and so they haven't been able to pay us back for our investment yet. But they will. Roice visited them over Spring Break a year or maybe two years ago, and got very excited about the technology, the people, and the work. He accepted a job with them at 1/3 less pay than some of his classmates are getting. And he is the number one student in his graduating class. In fact, as he was visiting ASI suppliers one of them offered him a job at $9,000 per year more than the offer he accepted. He turned them down too. I can not tell you all how proud I am of Roice. I know that if he is doing something he really enjoys and is receiving sufficient compensation to meet his needs, he will over time accomplish order's of magnitude more than those who go to work based on the `big bucks.' And more important he will enjoy work and life more, finding more fulfillment and energy to pull out of the normal trough's accompanying life.
It was very fulfilling to be invited to attend The Inaugural Cockrell Scholars Dinner with Roice and 120 other UT students who each received a Cockrell Scholarship on Tuesday night. I had a Jr. on my name tag and one of his classmates asked him how his son was doing. It was a very nice evening. After dinner we went to Book Stop and I bought him three Covey books to supplement what he has learned in school as he enters the workforce. Despite the negatives, it has been a good week. I hope each of you have a wonderful time this coming week."