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.
"Jared and Bridget I have made home addresses and added your .forward files to them, so you each now have a permanent e-mail address at walden3d.com (assuming you tell me when your regular e-mail address changes, so I can update the .forward file). Audrey and Melanie I fixed your forwarding addresses so they should work now. I would appreciate if the four of you would drop me a note and tell me you received this Thoughtlet. Also, I forget to mention last week, Bridget and Justin have moved their wedding date to November 22nd. There is a reception the night before in Salt Lake and Andrea and I plan to drive up from Cedar City, where we are going to spend Thanksgiving.
I have decided to see if the newsletter will fly. I have had positive comments from Exxon-Mobil and Shell. If those two companies sign up I should easly be able to get another dozen, which is want I need to make it work. I'm charging $1,000 per month per company, or $100 per month per individual, payable up front at least quarterly, and with a 20% discount if the first 5 quarters are paid for up front (I will take out a life insurance policy to pay off any weeks of non-delivery due to death or disablement. If I am able to get several dozen to sign up, I'll be able to pay off Ben's, Paul's, and Melanie's cars, and replace Andrea's 120,000 mile Grand Prix.
In conjunction with the newsletter, I am going to ressurrect The HyperEdge Expert Association as The W3D NetWork-of-Minds (you can read about this at http://www.walden3d.com/network). One of the rules is no consulting will be available through the NetWork unless the company seeking assistance subscribes to the newsletter. To further sweeten the pie, for the first four companies to sign up for the newsletter and prepay for the first 5 quarters, they get 50% off the normal W3D consulting rates (mine is published at US$200. per hour) until they recover the newsletter subscription cost. The next four subscribers to prepay get 25% off of consulting rates, and anyone else to prepay gets 10% off of W3D Network consulting rates. I believe this is close enough to normal practice in my industry to be acceptable and to not be confusing.
I like the name Observelet (0034.html), as a little discription of an observation of the world I am involved in. I like the name Newslet, as a little newsletter. I like the name Phamplet, as a description of new products and services of interest to subscribers. I like the name Techlet, as a little description of technology. Needless to say, I like the names Lovelet and Thoughtlet, and have been trying to play off of these names. However, Melanie's advice and common sense prevailed, and I have decided to call it the Wallstreet Journal; opps, I mean The Walden 3-D Journal.
I spent Thursday writting the first issue on the topic: The Walden 3-D Design Process. This derives from some work we did back in 1988-1992, with Ray Gardner, Bill Bavinger, Mic Patterson, Rick Duran, Tom Gardner, and others. I believe it is some of the most revolutionary thinking I have been involved in, and has the potential to make a profound impact on our manufacturing technologies and data reduction or interpretation processes. I am sending this issue, and over the coming weeks other appropriate issues, out to selected individuals from the 8,026 names in the W3D Contact Database, as a marketing exercise. Melanie, maybe you can help me market the W3D stuff once you get your corporate communications degree. Then again, maybe you can help me market it now, and use this as supplemental income to get you and Jared through school.
Any of you are welcome to copies of the Walden 3-D Journal for free. However, because of Intellectual Property issues, you will need to sign a copy of the License Agreement, which will be downloadable from http://www.walden3d.com/journal by the middle of this next week. For your reference the following topics are planned:
On reflection, I doubt if these topics will be of much interest to most of you. I expect I will mention what I write about in these Thoughtlets, and so if there is something of interest you can download and sign the License Agreement and ask me to send you a copy. Paul, the Models topic will be related to your studies. Ben, the indexing topics relate to accounting. Nate, the edition on Continuous Improvement relates to the changes you are seeing in the celluar industry. Andrea, Audrey, Bridget, Heather, Jared, Matt, Melanie, Rachel, Sara, and Sarah maybe we have nothing in common over the next three months? Sort of like Rob and Roice? Putting my wierd sense of humor aside, I am just sharing this so you know what I am up to, and so you can decide if you are interested in another weekly epistle from me.
This week was pretty quiet. Gary Jones gave a wonderful fireside presentation to the youth last Sunday night. Matt and I did not get our Home Teaching done, and so we need to do it this week. Monday Phillip Miller came over and we talked about his plans and also about the NetWork. He is very interested in what we are doing. Hopefully this will progress. In the evening Andrea and I went to Climbers. Good advice. It is hard for me to be aggressive and not enabling, to exercise tough love (0033.html) and realize tough love really is unconditional love (0032.html).
Tuesday I went and listned to John Lienhard talk at the GSH lunch. He is really good. He talked about the age of the earth and how geoscientists have historically changed the perception of reality through changing perception. He didn't mention virtual reality nor immersive environments by name. Yet he talked all around them from a historical perspective. Met a lot of my friends, and it is interesting to watch people's reaction to my change in employment. When I got back to the house, I called Marti and talked about Rob. I am very pleased with the steps being taken. It still hurts, Rob wants nothing to do with me right now. Oh well!
Wednesday morning was the next to the last planning meeting for the GCAGS lecture and tour. I went from there to downtown and took Wulf Massell to lunch. He gave me an `old' PowerPC Macintosh 8100/80, and I picked it up. I stopped to talk to Rick Zimmerman, and he was not in. So I talked to Sam, the guy doing his divestiture. Sam spent a couple of days with Sara when she worked for Texas Independent this summer, and he said `she really has her head on straight.' Several of the others women Sara worked with were at the front desk and they all wanted to tell me what a wonderful daughter I have. Sara, it made me feel really good. I went from there to a meeting with Sam LeRoy about water wells in Washington County, Dynamic Oil & Gas (http://www.walden3d.com/dynamic), the Persian Carpet Survey, and other important topics. Then I stopped at CompuServe and Best Buy to look at digital cameras. Sony has one which writes images to a small CD which can then be read directly on the Sun or the Macintosh. This will work very nicely for some of the reports I am working on, and so I plan to buy it Monday morning. Wednesday night was a planning meeting for the Venturing Scouts. We have a new Venturing Team Captian, Adam Salt.
Thursday was spent working on the first edition of the Walden 3-D Journal. Friday morning Andrea and I made our first trip to the Houston Temple to do an endowment session. It is neat. I look forward to repeating this trip every couple of weeks. in the afternoon I sent the `Walden 3-D Design Process' to 45 friends. Half a dozen were returned, and several could not read the attachment. Oh well! There were some great comments from Tracy Stark. It will be interesting to see what ends up actually happening. Friday was spent working on the GCAGS (0015.html, 0018.html, 0029.html, 0035.html, 0037.html, and 0038.html), OTC 2001 (0016.html, 0025.html, and 0038.html).
Andrea was judging a debate tournament at Taylor High Friday night and Saturday, and I spent most of the day working on the Infinite Grid (SM) idea (see http://www.walden3d.com/E). It is really turning out neat. I also went to the funeral service for Carl Reis, who used to be in our ward, whom Roice and I home taught for a while, and for whom the young men did several service projects for. Bishop Butler from Maplewood II ward was there, and it was good to see him. Rachel, thanks for helping capture data for the infinite grid all afternoon and evening. Matt, thanks for mowing the lawns. I had a bad allergy attack last night and my eyes puffed up and I was sneezing up a storm. Therefore I slept in this morning. Ryan Camp had his missionary farewell today, and he is going to Melbourne, Australia. Riley, Linda, Cassie, and Paige Skeen came and had dinner with us tonight. There is a chance Riley is going to finally move to Houston, after quiting 6 jobs to avoid getting transferred here. I expect our exploits over the years fit more as stories for Thoughtlets, rather than as entries in the Walden 3-D Journal. Hope all of your exploits this week fit in one catagory or the other."