cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Diane Cluff, Maxine Shirts via mail.
"Notice the e-mail addresses at the top of this Thoughtlet. A new file, called a .forward file has been set up for (in alphabetical order) Andrea, Audrey, Ben, Heather, Matt, Melanie, Nate, Paul, Rachel, Rob, Roice3, Sara, and Sarah. I actually attempted to get permanent walden3d.com addressess set up for each of you kids last January, which is my excuse for missing Jared, Kate, Bridget, and Ethan. This morning, as I started to write this I realized I had not thought to ask Sara and Des, Uncle Tony, Claude and Katherine Warner, Uncle Lloyd and Aunt Lauana, Diane Cluff (who have been getting copies of the Thoughtlets), and others who might be interested in a permanent home for their e-mail, if they wanted a permanent e-mail address at walden3d.com.
E-mailing of this Thoughtlet, using the .forward file, is a test. I would appreciate if each of you who receive it would respond this week, saying yes I received the thoughtlet using the e-mail address: "my_first_name@walden3d.com", or if you are one of those I haven't set up a .forward file for, and you would like to have a permanent home for your e-mail address, then let me know what name you would like it to be set up as, and we will set you up a .forward file. Also, if any of you do not want to have your walden3d.com e-mail address as your first name, let me know what you want it set up as, and we will change it. For right now, I am forwarding andrea, matt, info, hgol, and ishmael@walden3d.com to me at rnelson@walden3d.com.
Permanent is a funny word in the world of e-mail. If I die in the next few months or years, I expect walden3d.com will go away, and permanent will be pretty short. However, if I succeed in my dream, and am able to establish the Walden 3-D Foundation as a perpetually funded operation, dedicated to `continuing to make a positive difference', then the walden3d.com address will outlive all of us. In fact, I fear having a permanent address at walden3d.com might even become a snooty, prideful, arrogant thing. Oh well! Right now all I can say is `Please don't throw me in that briarpatch,' and if we end up there, we will work on addressing the pride which seems to naturally comes with success, yet again.
I had a very busy week. It was 09:11:24 PM last Sunday night when I mailed `#2000.37 Please Get A Real Job' (0037.html). By the time I moved two Thoughtlets to web pages (you will recall I also sent `#2000.36 Hafen Millennial Reunion' [0036.html] last week), printed copies for Grandma Nelson, Grandma Shirts, and my files (Matt I'm sorry I forgot to print your copy until today), wrote brief notes and addressed the envelopes, it was past time to go to sleep. It was not an evening where I thought about permanent e-mail addresses.
Monday and Tuesday were my only days to work on the computer this week. Most of both days were spent on the phone working on my three outstanding professional volunteering operations: the RC-SIG later in the week in London, Ontario; the GCAGS on October 24th and 25th; and the OTC in May of 2001. There were problems with all three. Pat Hyde had not done her session for the RCSIG. GCAGS needed final site visits for the bus tour, as well as abstracts and bios for the web site. OTC-2001 wanted abstracts, and it turned out that the original invitation letters had not been sent out. It is a lot of work to put together a meeting of several tens or hundreds of people. Talking on the phone is not my favorite activity. I do OK if the conversation is with someone I know well and am on a similar wavelength with. Needless to say, anyone I know is not someone I would jump up and offer a permanent e-mail address at walden3d.com.
Then again, maybe I would. I also spent time this week redoing the home page for walden3d.com for the first time in over 4 years. I am interested in comments from each of you about this effort. There is no one more important than family to me, and so it would be nice to see those I love involved in what I do, which can always be found to be directed towards making the world a better place for you and your descendents. There are opportunities at Shell, Exxon, and Schlumberger with the Knowledge Backbone (SM), and there were a series of six new web pages added at: http://www.walden3d.com/knowledge_backboneSM. I also started working on reviving the HyperEdge Expert Association as The W3D NetWork-of-Minds this week. You can check this out at: http://www.walden3d.com/network. I anticipate members of the NetWork will be interested in having a permanent e-mail address at walden3d.com. However, they will have some identifier, in addition to their first name, like: w3dC_joe_smith@walden3d.com, w3dA_bob_adams@walden3d.com or w3dP_susan_jones@walden3d.com, where C stands for Consultant, A stands for Associate, and P for Principal.
Monday evening was the start of PAIRS, and I had hoped Andrea and I could take the course together. However, the $3,000., and, even more, the time commitment, do not fit where we are right now. So I went to LifeWay's Climbers Monday night, while Andrea went to an Open House at Taylor High School for Rachel. I really like John Cates, and he is helping me understand the disease of addiction. On the way home there were two major wrecks on the Katy Freeway, both of which involved cars rolling multiple times, and both of which had several ambulances, police cars, and wrecking trucks on site. I do not want to go to the funeral of one of my kids, and I am going to do my best to buckle down and follow John's experience based advise on how to attack the disease so there can be the opportunity for long-time use of a permanent e-mail address.
Marc Roulston spent most of Tuesday working on the system. I had found out just before my Labor Day trip to the Hafen reunion, that the mail system on oak.walden3d.com (DSN Location 206.109.69.100) had what is termed an `open relay,' and at least since 12 August 1999, the Sun system in my house was being used as an untraceable address for some unscrupulous folks spamming the world. Needless to say, I was upset about being used. Marc replaced the mail system with a system that also allowed us to set up permanent e-mail addresses at walden3d.com.
Wednesday morning I left for the airport at 6:50 AM, forgot the map to where I was going, and got off the second time at 6:55 AM. My intention had been to get out the door at 6:30 AM, for a 9:00 AM flight at Intercontinental because of traffic on the Katy Freeway. It was raining for the first time in months, and traffic was at a complete standstill. As I finally got off the Beltway, and started up the road to the terminals at 8:35 AM the signs said all terminal parking was full. So I went to my usual parking place at Park 'N Fly, and asked them to hurry. I ran down to the gate and was about the last person on the plane. I had a little blue rental car from Enterprise. The drive from Detroit to London, Ontario took about 3 and 1/2 hours. When I got to the NRC's VETC (Canadian National Research Center's Virtual Enviroment Technology Center), it was about 5:30 PM EST or 5:30 PM CST. They had a lot of really neat technology set up at the VETC, both permanent, and temporary for the RC-SIG meeting. However, Pat Hyde's husband had a relapse from his kidney transplant, and there was not a research session for the meeting. In my subtle way, I took control and created order out of chaos. We reorganized the agenda, redirected Cheryl Patterson of FakeSpace to making a new agenda, got Brian Corrie of the VETC to pull out a video tape of an urban planning project they did for the City of London, and I sat down and put together a PowerPoint Presentation titled `The Potential of the RC-SIG' to fill in a 45 minute gap in the agenda left by reorganizing the agenda. I was finished by about 11:30 and got to the hotel about midnight EST. There was no time spent thinking about permanent e-mail addresses.
Thursday was more than just interesting. The organizing committee started at 7:00 AM EST, and we were busy until 10:30 PM EST. I gave the welcoming introduction to the conference, my presentation (which was very well received and which I plan to post on the web for download at http://www.walden3d.com/rcsig), the concluding comments, and went through brief series of questions after an absolutely wonderful dinner at Waldo's in downtown London, Ontario (I had lobster and shrimp bisque, salmon covered with shrimp, and lemon pie with strawberry topping). I won't go into depth on the meeting presentations and the technology reviewed and demonstrated, other than to say it is really exciting, and represents a fundamental change in how human's interact with nature. If we are able to properly harness the technologies demonstrated and presented at this conference, we have the opportunity to recreate the environmental sensitivity of the Hopi, the Navajo, the Australian Aborigines, and other indigenous cultures around the globe among all people and all cultures. For example, the NRC is building steel manufacturing components one molecule at a time with laser technology and controlling the entire process with immersive reality environments. They are doing similar things with plastic molds for die casting, and the procedures have the potential to be scaled for housing and city creation with direct ties to nature.
Friday was more of the same. I was really glad Andrea and I decided I could bite the bullet and spend the $250 on a plane fare, $200 for a rental car, and $200 for a hotel room. There were a half a dozen folks there who expressed interest in their companies purchasing my weekly newsletter, which is currently described on one of the web sites I built earlier in the week at http://www.walden3d.com/nopt. Those expressing interest were FakeSpace, MechDyne, NRC, Silicon Grahics, Sun MicroSystems, and a major pharmaceutical company. Note that it costs US$12,000. up front per company to subscribe to the newsletter. This means I need to sell 10 in order to generate an income equivalent to the salary I was making at Continuum. I realize I came across as facetious when Andrea, Sara, Melanie, Jared, Matt, and I had dinner with Wulf and Georgeann Massell after going to the Houston Temple Open House (0034.hmtl). However, I do have a wonderful experience base, and I do not feel getting fired is going to put my family at risk in the least. In fact, I believe the change will lead to being able to insure permanent e-mail addresses at walden3d.com sooner than otherwise would have been possible to accomplish. For calibration, you might each consider that this newsletter will get much less thought, prayer, soul searching, and effort than these Thoughtlets get.
There were several groups who spent time with me, specifying how good RC-SIG was. Three stood out in my mind. Wves Starreveld, a neurosurgen in London, and I planned out a proposal for a US$100,000. test of formal measurement of spatial intelligence using NMR brain activity measurement. We will be preparing a proposal and seeking oil company funding once the Dynamic Oil & Gas Prospectus is complete (0036.html). We had interest in funding the project expressed by both Pan Canadian and Anadarko. This project excites me a lot. Four young guys from the EDS Virtual Reality Center came up after the meeting and went on and on about how good the meeting was. I was so much older than the four of them, I felt like they were my scouts. Lastly, Robert Birrell of Niagara College in Canada has a C$3 million fund to put an immersive reality system in his school. I expect I will be consulting with them reasonably regularly. After the presentations, I conducted the business meeting. We did not talk about permanent e-mail addresses, yet we did talk about permanent web sites, how often to meet, and other stuff.
I left London at 4:00, and barely made it back to Detroit's Metro Airport to catch my 7:20 plane. On the way home I finished a book Andrea found for me just before leaving on Tuesday. Sara sent me the following note Monday evening:
I won't share my whole book report to Sara with any of you until you read the book. I started off with `Thanks. Good book. Enjoyed it a lot.' and ended with:
If I shared the middle of my book report it gives away too much of what the book is about. I encourage each of you to read it. You are welcome to check it out from my library if you don't want to pay $2.00 at a Katy Budget Books, like Andrea did. I called Rob from the Detroit airport with my new cell phone (713.542.2207) to see if he wanted to spend Saturday morning with me at Habitat For Humanity. He did not. I got home at about 10:45 PM CST on Friday. I stopped at Albertson's and brought home some flowers with me. It was good to be home, to get a nice hug and a kiss. The opening ceremony of the olympics was on, they had just lit the tourch, and it was fun to watch the fireworks and all of the fancy festivities. Rachel had a hard day at school, including a fight with a `friend,' and Matt had got beaten up by 6 neighborhood boys and has a 4 inch diameter bruise on his arm where one of them hit him with a plastic bat. Andrea had handled everything very well. I went and talked to the boys Saturday, and a couple of them ended up at our house with a mother to talk about it for a while. Matt was not innocent, and it is really sad to see this happen. It reminds me of when Rob was picked on riding the school bus, and I can not help but wonder if it is something I have or have not done that causes this type of meanness to my kids. I think we all left the meeting feeling better, and hoping to do better in the future.
Saturday morning we were up at 5:30 to get ready for a ward service party at Habitat For Humanity. By default I found myself in charge of it, even though ward leadership had asked it to happen. We only had about 10 participants, and I had called Habitat on the way to Detroit and told them there would be about 40 people. Oh well! The weather was absolutely beautiful, and there were more volunteers than at either of the other two times I helped at Habitat (0028.html and 0031.html). We did blocking, and were back at the house by 2:00 PM CST. I really enjoy this type of work. Andrea wants me to enjoy more of it around our house.
At 6:45 Matt and I went to a baptism for Gabe and Joy Perez and her son Thomas. Thomas' father was in attendance and he was angry to see his son's name listed wrong on the program. I understand, and maybe this is one of the unanticipated benefits of divorce. It was a very nice service, and I had great admiration as I watched Thomas' father support from a distance, as his X-wife took the first step towards a new and permanant e-mail address. After the baptism, our Bishop, and two in the Elder's Quorum Presidency were talking and one said, `What line do you take to get to Leister Square?' I piped up, the Black Line, which is also called the Northern line.' The Bishop said, `I don't even understand what you guys are talking about?' and we explained it was the London, England underground map. I described my experience at Leister Square last spring with the bomb (../9918.html) and we had a good laugh.
I spent the rest of Saturday evening writing my Book Report on Ishmael for Sara and working on the NetWork web page (http://www.walden3d.com/network). Also there was mail and papers to read. Paul, could you please tell Jay Deford I got both of his wedding announcements, and give my apologies for not being able to make either of them, even though they are both the same night and to the same woman. Andrea was chaperoning a Stake Dance, Rachel was at a football game and the dance, and Matt was rollerblading at the skating rink. It was nice to be able to spend some time thinking, and to reflect on the wisdom and the fallacy in Ishmael. It also gave me time to create the .forward files so that each of you now have a permanent e-mail address. Use it, let me know when the forwarding address or something else needs to be changed, and have a great week."