cc: file, Grandma Hafen via Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner. Diane Cluff, Andrea Shirts, and Heather and Nate Pace
"What a week. I'm glad it is over. In some ways it was like being in an exotic location with a bad earache. Everything around is wonderful and exciting and there is no way to enjoy the moment.
Monday I had nothing on my calendar except lunch with my x-officemate, Scott Bowman. He called up first thing in the morning and told me he had an earache and a bad cold and wasn't going to be able to make lunch. Scott was who I subleased my office from for several years after I had to almost shut down HyperMedia Corporation. It was the office where Roice worked the summer after his first year of college. Scott's company was `Marco Polo Software,' which is now called `PetroDynamics.' He asked if we could postpone lunch until Thursday. Jeff called from London and I found myself very busy putting together some information on the different amounts of time to load different types of data in an immersive environment. Monday evening Rob joined me and our Family Home Evening group for a special Relief Society music and slide presentation about the birth and life of Christ. It was very nice.
Tuesday was one of those rare days, where several meetings happened which were, to use an overused phrase, paradigm shifting. I forgot my calendar at the office, and so I went down Westheimer to the office, than over to the VETL for an 8:00 meeting. I just made it on time, and several others were late. Dr. Loftin has done a very nice job of starting the packaging of his new fund raising program for the next phase of the VETL. He off handed mentioned he was going to get me an honorary PhD from the University of Houston. I chuckeled to myself, and said `Sure.' Following this meeting Roger Anderson and Dave Monk joined us for a discussion about different ways of interacting with the immersive environments. It was an idea session for Bowen's research, and gave Continuum some ideas how we can better work with the VETL. Then I talked to Bowen and his administrator Pat Hyde for a while. There is so much more I would like to do for the lab, and it is always hard acknowledge limitations. It is sort of like having a bad earache. Then Tuesday afternoon was one of those once every 20 year meetings. Roger, Blaine Taylor, and myself went to a meeting with the Director of Strategic Research for a major oil company. It was a truly exciting experience. We thought we were going in for an half-hour or maybe an hour meeting, and it turned out we were there from 1:30 until after 4:00. It also turns out this oil company has been talking about reinventing the company, and specifically creating more of an entrepreneural spirit in the company. The logistics, inventory control, 20 MegaByte per second transfer from seismic ships directly to seismic processing centers, the Knowledge Backbone (sm), and other stuff Roger, Blaine, and I have been working on fits right in the middle of their strategic pathway. For example they have an interest in investing $5-10 million in new startups in exchange for 25-33% ownership in the new entity. We have set up a dinner meeting with The Executive Vice-President of Research and Environment, who is the person to give the go-ahead on pursuing these kinds of opportunities, on March 17th. Tuesday evening Roger, Gary Crouse, and I had an enthusastic dinner at Guadalahara's by the Town & Country Mall, to work through different options of proceeding.
Wednesday was a long awaited meeting with Stewart Lowery, my Landmark Graphics salesman who is helping sort out the perpetual licenses Landmark gave me for their geophysical software. Melanie, I told him I heard he had met a beautiful young lady at UT, and he just ignored me. Looks like he can tease, and doesn't want to be teased. Maybe he had an earache. Wednesday night was laundary, Star Trek, and working with Marilyn Grua on finances.
Thursday there was a lot to get done at the office. In addition, Tom Wright, my Sciencetology friend who was Landmark Graphics' first Advertising Agent, came by to talk to Steve Hunt at Continuum. It was the first time I have talked to Tom in 15 years. We exchange Christmas cards, and so I knew he and Bonnie have done well with their business. He spent last summer doing video documentation of a freedom of religion march in Germany. He is trying to protect the freedom of all religions, like the Mormons, in places where there is religious persecution. It was a fun conversation, and there was a lot to catch up on. In fact, too much for the available time. Scott called and said he was still sick and we postponed our lunch until Monday. My throat started to hurt in the afternoon, and I realized I was probably coming down with a cold. I hate to travel when I have a cold, because I have had a couple of times when flying with an earache has probably done permanent damage to my hearing. Dave Ridyard gave me some throat lozenge. I caught the 5:30 Continental flight to Seattle with Blaine, who almost didn't get on the plane because of overbooking, and did not have any ear problems. I spent most of the way up working on getting my e-mail filing caught up. I made it to the end of September. It is the end of February! Oh well! Blaine and I met Roger at the Doubletree, as he had flown to Seattle by way of giving a talk to 500 depressed geoscientists in Denver, and we had a great planning meeting. I was starting to feel a little bit puny, and was glad to hit the sack after calling and talking to Andrea for a few minutes.
Friday was a great day, and yet I wasn't really focused on the meetings because I was stuffed up, my head throbbed, and I was afraid I was getting a bad earache. We made a lot of progress on the Business Plan we have been hired to put together for Boeing, and continuued working on it over dinner. There was a really interesting discussion about some of Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction. He invented geostationary orbits, which are the basis for some of the high speed data transmission stuff we are working on. He also wrote about connecting a geostationary satellite with an elevator cable, and because centrifugal force keeps the line taut, just using this elevator shaft for lifting toxic and nuclear wastes into outer space and then putting them on a spaceship and sending them to the sun for natural disposal. Fun conversation, and I was wiped out by the time I got back up to the room. just as I was ready to turn out the light Andrea called and told me she went to see `October Sky' (.../9908.html) and how much she liked the movie.
I guess you could say I was `sleepless in Seattle' over my little cold and stuffy nose. So why am I so worried about a little earache? It goes back to a trip I made to Oman several years ago. The trip was a sales trip for Landmark. As we got on the plane in London, I started to come down with a cold. By the time we landed in Muscat, I was sick. As we went though customs and waited for visas to be stamped I just laid down on the benches. The architecture of the airport was absolutely wonderful, and I felt terrible. My traveling companion, Morris Covington, got me to the hotel where I went to sleep for 16 hours. He got me out of bed to go to PDO to give a technical presentation, which I stumbled through and then went back to bed. Then we flew back to London and I was absolutely sure my eardrums were going to burst. It hurt sooooooo bad. We got to London and I remember walking down the street by our office in Kennsington when we heard the news about the Challenger explosion on take-off, and the loss of the school teacher. I remember going to the hotel and sleeping. I remember calling one of the elders in the Hyde Park Ward, Ray McConnell, who was there when I served my mission, and talking him into getting one of his friends and coming over to the hotel and giving me a blessing. I remember going back to sleep and staying in the hotel for a couple of days. And I remember getting better and not having serious damage I could recognize to my eardrum. I remember swearing I would never travel by air again when I had a stuffy nose, and particularly when I have an earache.
So Saturday we worked all day on the business plan. Paul tracked me down with a couple of questions, and helped me realize I didn't do a very good job of leaving word on how to get hold of me. I was using nasel spray, eating throat lozangers, and Blaine was feeding me Zinc pills by this time. In some ways, I was kind of out of it. We went to an Appleby's for lunch, just like the one Ben and Sarah took me to in College Station several times. My ears did not feel clogged up, and so I went ahead with my plans to fly out Saturday night at 9:45 PM. We got on the plane and there was a maintenace problem. The plane was fairly empty, and so I laid down across three seats, put a seat belt on, and went to sleep. I guess we were an hour late leaving Seattle, and so I missed my flight to Houston in Las Vegas. However, they rebooked me and gave me a First Class seat, 2F, the first seat next to the window on the right side of the plane. It is a great seat because of the nice, big, comfortable chair, and you can put your feet straight out against the bulkhead. I slept well to Houston, except for when I would wake up for a nasel spray or a throat lozange. This was the first time I have flown First Class in years.
I remember my first time to fly First Class. I was sent to Nigeria by Mobil Oil to give a project review for an interpretation project I was doing for Mobil Producing Nigeria (MPN). My traveling companion was Dr. Wes Gardner from Mobil's FRL (Field Research Laboratory in Duncanville, by where Sarah and Ben live). I remember the trip because my friends at Mobil gave us such a bad time about Mobil sending 2 Mormons First Class all the way to Nigeria and wasting all of that booze (Wes was a Bishop in the Dallas South Stake). I also remember the trip because it was such a boondoggle. FRL had done a major study of satellite image data, identifing circular features deep in the interior of Nigeria, which were interpreted as salt domes. They wanted to check these anomalies out from an airplane, and MPN was unwilling to do it unless someone from SEP (Special Exploration Projects) was accompanying the FRL scientists. I got the job. We flew way back into the interior and refueled at Enagu. Then we flew to the encounter and as the anomally was identified, the pilot said, `I know what that is. It is only cultural. When the slavers would come into a community, they would all scatter from the camp, and trees were left along these radial escape routes.' These trees left a circular image on the satellite photo. As I thought about our business plan, and the projections we were coming up with to have a $2.5 billion operating revenue by 2002, I wondered if we were seeing circulars, which weren't salt domes and were simply cultural anomalies.
I got into George Bush Intercontinental Airport at 6:00 this morning. I was sooooooo glad my earache had not caused any serious problems. I drove to the house, looked over the mail, pulled in the paper, and went to sleep. Got up at 9:30, helped Paul clean up the kitchen, went to church at 11:00, talked to the Bishop about the letter he is just finishing up for me to get a clearance for a temple marriage to Andrea, had a Personal Periesthood Interview about Home Teaching, attended High Priest Group Leadership Meeting, fixed dinner and put it in the oven, got my temple recommend renewed by President Pickerd, went Home Teaching with Alan Peterson to Haden Hudson and the Ostera's, fed the missionaries and Rob and Joe Amason dinner (Paul wasn't hungry as he ate lunch with Ryan Cahoon who just came home from his mission), went Home Teaching to the Salts (Melanie, Sister Salt asked about you, and told me how you once volunteered you want to go on a mission), cleaned up the kitchen, went to Paul's `Show-Me Fireside' about his mission to Russia (it was really well done and each of you should get a group of friends together when Paul visits and get him to repeat this for you), got hold of Ken Turner and got him to come by to package Roice's painting for Paul to take to California this week, called Grandma, Mom, and Andrea, talked a little to Paul, and wrote this thoughtlet. Now here it is 12:48 AM, and I still have a little bit of an earache. I am very thankful for throat lozange, Sudafed, and Nasal Spray. Hopefully you kids will never have a problem with an earache like I have had, and if you do you will learn from this Thoughtlet."