cc: file, Grandma Hafen via Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner. and Diane Cluff.
"Maybe the second time it will be better. I started writing this Thoughtlet at 9:00 Sunday night, and at 12:30 I must have been tired, because the wrong button was pushed and the Thoughtlet disappeared into cyberspace. Oh well! Then I started again last night and it was 10:00 PM and I was too tired to rethink the little thoughts.
Before I start, I thought I would point out something which is obvious to me, and might not be obvious to some of you, about how I organize each week's Thoughtlet. I have generally tried to pick a topic as a theme, which can be recognized many times throughout a lifetime, a year, a month, a week, or even a day. So even though this week's topic, Space Center Houston, is pretty specific, it comes up in my life regularly. Weekly there is an article in the Chronicle about NASA, which I cut out for my files, or someone mentions going down to Clear Lake to visit NASA. I'm not saying that every week over the last 169 weeks that I have been writing Thoughtlets I have talked about Space Center Houston. However, the topic has probably been brought up 100 different times. For instance, the last time I was at Space Center Houston was as part of the IEEE 1999 Virtual Reality Conference (9907.html), and I didn't even mention in the Thoughtlet about the social night down there, even though there has been a picture of the attendees at: http://www.walden3d.com/photos/IEEEVR99combined_19Mar99.jpg since February. The fact that these topics come up again and again and again is why I hope these Thoughtlets become a useful reference source for each of you at some point in your lives.
So before I talk about our trip to Space Center Houston, let me review the week. Monday started with forgetting a breakfast meeting at JoJo's. Oh well! The other three people met and did fine without me. Then we had the sales staff meeting at 9:00, and it lasted until about 10:30. We have a lot of potential business in the pipeline, and every week the closing schedule pushes further and further out. It is very frustrating. And if we don't close some business and get some revenue the company will not make it in its present form. Oh well! I had lunch with a long time friend, Tom Wright, at The Goode Company BBQ on I-10. Hadn't been there in a long time. Tom was Landmark's first advertising agent. His ads included the `Landmark' series, with little icons of the pyramids and the date they were built, the leaning Tower of Pisa and the date it was built, the Taj Mahal and the date it was built, etc. One of his best ads said: `Just Plug It In!' Tom positioned Landmark, which was a key component of the success we enjoyed. Tom is still working in advertising, and he was just fired by Continuum. Oh well! He was glad to reconnect with me and wanted to go to lunch just to start doing some stuff together for fun. He's trying to convert me and I'm always willing to bare my testimony to him.
Tom is a flat tax zealot. I tell him I agree and it is not my battle. He is also very active in Scientology. I do not know much about Ron Hubbard's `cult,' other than that John Travolta and Tom Cruise are both Scientologists. Tom told me about spending last summer in Germany on a freedom of religion protest. They made a video of the march through Berlin. It turns out Sciencetology has been disenfranchised in Germany, members have been fired and they can not vote, and several other neo-Nazi controls have been put in place. Tom says that the `Mormon' church is not in much better shape in Germany, and that we need to pull together, to keep religious freedom alive. He is really good at selling his ideas. I forgot to ask him if he did the ad campaign for Space Center Houston. On a much more personal note, his wife, Bonnie, has a lump on her breast. They are getting ready for the biopsy, and it was obvious faith is being tested. I encourage each of you to remember Bonnie in your prayers. We are going to go out to dinner when she gets back from Florida in a couple of weeks. Monday evening we had a small group at Family Home Evening. Alma gave the lesson, and it went well.
Tuesday morning started with a presentation by Spectra Precision. They have software used by civil engineers and related fields. For instance, it reads GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) coordinates and feeds them to an EDM (Electronic Distance Measuring) device (like the one Roice and I used to survey the ruins at Oaxaca Mexico when we took the Planetarium Trip to see the Eclipse), and can feed data directly to a Caterpiller to control the up or down position of the blade cutting the topography. They texture map satellite images and air photos on topography, and create beautiful images that fit directly into Continuum's environment. It is stuff like one expects to see at Space Center Houston.
And this demonstration set a great tone for a series of phone calls that started on Tuesday afternoon and hopefully will continue for the rest of my life. The phone calls were follow-up on the meeting a few weeks ago with Wes Curtis at SUU (9923.html). The phone calls have included: Steve Slawson, who is heading this project up for Continuum; Rick Duran, the principal of Archinomics who lives in Chicago and was involved in the early Walden 3-D planning meetings back in about 1990; Jeff Winston, the principal of Winston & Associates out of Boulder, Colorado who is a planner and who went to school with Tom Gardner - Ray's older brother and partner; Scott Truman, who is the director of the Utah Rural Development Council and the Utah Center for Rural Life at SUU [he was also my scout leader after his mission in the Cedar 3rd ward]; and Wes Curtis, who works half time for SUU and half time on Governor Mike Leavitt's Senior Staff responsible for rural issues. It looks like I might be coming to Cedar to give a talk to an annual Rural Development Conference the Thursday evening after Labor Day. Creates a travel problem, in having to go back to Cedar or stay in Cedar for an extra few days. Oh well! We are talking to Wes and Scott about about building an immersive envionment at SUU, using a Rural Development Technology Center as a catalyst for the project. Hopefully we would bring in other groups, like physics (Des are you interested), geology (Is this too far out for Blair Maxfield?), business, local industry (Andrea's old boss Dave Grant at MetalCraft), the Forest Service, the National Parks, and specifically planning commissions. The talk will be based on work Jeff Winston did for Washington County and specifically the cities of Ivan, Santa Clara, St. George, Washington, and Hurricane. It is amazing how cities do not look at what is happening just beyond their borders. Anyway, if we get it all tied together it should be a pretty neat presentation. Sort of like going to NASA's Space Center Houston. Tuesday evening Alan Peterson and I went Home Teaching. We had good visits with each of our three families.
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday included more phone calls about the talk in Cedar City. There was a lot of maintenance and catching up on e-mail. Wednesday evening David Kessler came over for a couple of hours and we reviewed his new business plan. Looks like David is my first entrepreneural child. He is raising $800,000 plus a $700,000 line of credit, and plans to leave his current job to start his new company in a couple of months. He has his PhD, has worked in industry for several years, has prototyped eveything he wants to do in his new business, and is ready to strike out. Thursday evening we were suppose to have High Priest Group leadership meeting. Corey and Marilyn came over for dinner, and we ended up talking too long. Sister Grua's Mother died last week, and she is not doing as well as normal. Corey has been out of work for four months, and he is also not doing as well as normal. Oh well! Please remember them in your prayers.
Friday evening was Matt's 12th birthday party. It was a Star Trek version of Space Center Houston. Andrea made jello, tons of speghetti, and ice water, put them in different big tupperware containers, labeled them Sebobla's saliva, Naboo slime, and Anakin's ice. The kids had to step though these buckets blindfolded as a trial in order to become Jedi Knights and get their 50 cent light saber. At 4:00 Richard Uden gave Continuum's first interactive presentation on stratal-slice technology (9929.html), and so I didn't make it to the house and the festivities until it was time to bar-b-que the hamburgers and hot dogs on the new grill my Mom gave us for a wedding present. It was still fun watching the kids in the pool, and watching Hercules on TV with them. It was my first ice cream birthday cake from Dairy Queen, and that was really good. After cleaning up (which wasn't easy with all of the speghetti in the back yard), Andrea and I drove to Humble, and went to see the movie `Entrapment,' which I had not seen before. Enjoyed it. We went from there to the airport, and picked up Heather and Nate. Their plane was an hour late and didn't get in until 1:05 AM. Oh well! It was good to see them again.
Saturday morning Andrea and I went for a run around the inner block - out to Kingsland, down to Greenhouse Road, and around Crescent Green. We ate breakfast and then we went to Space Center Houston for the day. It was fun. I wish Rob and Sara would have been able to join us. Sara was in Mexico and Rob didn't know about it enough in advance and had made other plans. I enjoyed the movies the most. There was a review of the space program, and an IMAX about becoming an astronaut. The review of the upcoming Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, which is scheduled to go up on the 16th of September, was particularly neat. They will be mapping 90% of the earth's surface with a vertical accuracy of +/-57 feet. The resulting 3-D images have tremendous potential use for Continuum and the theaters we have established. Matt was having so much fun he didn't go on the tour of Mission Control with us. So Matt is not in the picture they took of us as we got on the tour bus: http://www.walden3d.com/thoughtlets/gifs/SpaceCenterHouston03Aug99.jpg The new Mission Control is interesting. The X-38 assembly room is more interesting. Amazing technologies. It really excites me to let my mind wander and to think about the impact of the steps being taken now in 100 or 500 years from now. Think about what has happened as a result of Christopher Columbus' exploration. We are standing at the same place in time, and by the time the millenium is over, the groundwork being laid today will be as significant as his discovery in 1492.
We went out to a Cagun Restaurant next to Clear Lake for dinner. It was fun, and the atmosphere was thick. They have a Utah license plate that says `BYU GUY' which the kids said I should take for Paul. We came back home via the Tollroad, and spent the evening swimming and then watching `Apollo 13.' It was a fitting conclusion to a week filled with NASA technology. Then, when the paper came Sunday morning, the article that intrerested me most was on page 9A, and is titled `No sign of water yet as craft hits moon.' Similar to some of the experiments in growing plants in lunar soil as shown at Space Center Houston, the Lunar Prospector was crashed into the south part of the moon with the hope of finding traces of water in a vapor plume expected to be created by the impact.
As a closing note, and off the subject from Space Center Houston, I learned earlier tonight that A.J. Swope is getting married in the St. George Temple the week before the Hafen reunion. Looks like Roice will not make it to the reunion in Pinto this year, for those who were hoping to see him there. He is going to St. George for the reception, and has a truck rented to go on to Austin from there. If any of the rest of you who were planning on going to the reunion are not going to be able to make it, we need to talk so the airplane tickets can be turned back in. I hope everyone has a great week. Send me an e-mail and tell me you are still alive, and when a good time is for me to call and more directly learn how you are getting on."
