cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Diane Cluff, Maxine Shirts.
"It is already the second of September and it is hard to catch up on writing the Thoughtlets after having missed writing one on the 19th, the 26th of August, and now the 2nd of September. However, there is too much momentum to stop, having written one of these thoughtlets consistently for 256 weeks now. Hard to believe isn't it? This is a detailed personal and family history covering 1,792 days, or 43,008 hours or 2,580,480 minutes, or 154,828,800 seconds. And just think, within 100 years everyone of us these e-mails were originally sent to will be looking across the time-space continuum and will consider each of those seconds to be worth at least a million dollars, almost as if for each of these seconds we were being held under water and were fighting with all of our heart, might, mind, and strength to get another breath of air.
I've talked to a couple of you about what is happening. And I find it sad that there has not been one call to find out why there has not been a Thoughtlet since August 12th. Maybe like water, the Thoughtlets have become so ubiquituos, they are not recognized as worthwhile for either good or bad (satisfying thirst or drowning). And if you sent an e-mail, it just got bounced back.
And this all calls for a brief history of my relationship with the Internet. I first heard about the Internet from Roger Anderson at the Global Basin Research Network, back in about 1988. Landmark had gone public, and we had money, and I had John Amason find out about it. SMU is the local hub for the Internet in Houston. Landmark ran a dedicated T3 line direct from Rice to our offices on Cypress Run, over by Kingsland and Barker Cypress. This was one of the first, if not the first dedicated business Internet business connection in Houston. I learned about the Internet, about ARPANET, about Bill Bavinger's early work with both of them, and we started doing some experimentation with using the Internet to send files to Roger at Lamont, etc. When I was forced to shut down HyperMedia Corporation, and consolidated HyperMedia Corporation, Walden 3-D, Inc., Dynamic Oil & Gas Corporation, and China Cattle Corporation into the offices at 11767 Katy Freeway with Scott Bowman and Marco Polo, I was hooked and wanted to be connected to the Internet. So we went out and found out who was providing services and joined up with NeoSoft, setting up their first dedicated T3 business connection to Scott's offices. We ran a wire down the hall to Bob Sneider's offices, which ultimately ended up with him sending me a letter saying he could no longer work with me because he thought the Internet could spy on him. When we completely shut down HyperMedia and moved the computers back to the house, we got NeoSoft to move a dedicated line to the house, and the HyperMedia server Roice helped me develop became www.walden3d.com.
There are sad things that resulted from having the Internet in the house, which I'm not ready to write about yet. When I was working in Austin, I set it up so I could come into the computers at the house remotely and monitor what the computers were being used for. All I want to say at this stage is that the technology can be used for good and for bad, just like water. Then we upgraded to DSL, and cut costs. In the meantime, NeoSoft sold their company to Internet America. Ed Rogers was the lawyer who closed this deal, and the principals made millions. However, Internet America went bankrupt recently, and just as I left for the High Adventure (0131.html) there was a letter describing how Earthlink was going to provide a smooth transisition, and how they are picking up the Internet America accounts. However, the transistion has not gone smooth.
The transistion day was Thursday, 16 August 2001. My e-mail has been down from that day until yesterday, and the web server was down from the 16th through the 31st. There were long calls made from Southern Colorado, and I thought everything was done right. Nope! Ended up we had to get a new IP Address (if you don't want to use walden3d.com you can use 66.149.88.122, where as it used to be 206.109.69.100). And a whole series of steps made and people talked to. Every time I call Earthlink I have to wait for about a half an hour to talk to a real person. I am much more patient in my declining years, and in case you can't tell, I was frustrated to death by all of this stuff. Especially since I was wrapping up our big study Offshore Texas, getting all of the displays ready for AAPEX, and attempting to get customers to log onto our web site to sell them on working with us. Oh well! Last time I wrote about being vulnerable, and I certainly have felt vulnerable the last few weeks. I would appreciate it if each of you who receive this and read this would confirm you received it, so I know for sure e-mail is working again, before I write out the other two Thoughtlets I'm behind on.
In fact, on the 12th when I wrote the last Thoughtlet, I must have been feeling particularly vulnerable, because I forgot to write about several different things. Besides the phone call from Melanie, on Friday night there was a phone call from Audrey, and she wanted to talk, and in my typical telephone manner, Audrey, I had a hard time finding words to say and saying how much I miss you and how much I worry about how you are doing and the choices you are making. When you called last week and I said `I don't know what to say,' and you responded with the same words, it cut to my core because I want to have words to say to each of you kids to show how much I care and how much I love you. Then Saturday morning Sara called and asked me to guarantee the rent on her apartment. I was just leaving for downtown, and, Sara, when you ended up not sending the fax and getting my guarantee, I felt cut off. I'm sure you feel the same way, and it hurts so much, because I want every second of your life, and each of your lives, to be full of sunshine and flowers and to never feel like you are drowning, or that I am not there to help you when you need my help. Oh well! At least you all know how, or are well on your way to learning how to swim in deep water, which is where I often find myself and expect many of you will find yourselves. On Saturday night the 12th of August Andrea, and I went to see Princess Diaries. Heather and Rachel had already seen it. It was sad that most of the key moments in the movie were in the previews. However, it is a good movie, and I encourage you to each see it, and to think about being vulnerable.
Monday morning the 13th, I went into Dr. Solis' office for a follow-up on my scout physical. My blood pressure was back down, and I drove out to Katy for a blood test, the results of which were all within normal ranges: PS=1.5; Total Colestral=183; Triglicerides=87; and LDL=126. Even though I felt vulnerable as I went in for the test, time shows it doesn't do any good to worry about this stuff (and there are thought completness advantages to not sending out Thoughtlets for a few weeks). I spent the day downtown working on the Offshore Texas proof-of-concept project. As I recall I got home about midnight, and the same thing happened on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday nights. Wednesday was the first day of school for Matt and Rachel, and I spent the day at Chroma. Again I worked way too late, because there was not Young Men's nor Young Women's with school starting up. When I got home there was a letter from Aunt Sara. It included a letter from Porter's saying how they are raising the price on Mom's room by 12% and how they lost money in caring for her last year. There was also an obituary for Pat Fenton, which I will share:
Sara wrote that he helped her a lot after Daddy died. I recall
Mom telling me how strongly he urged her to divorce Dad. I
recall when Dad was in the hospital for his operation and I was
in Salt Lake, that Pat Fenton had a heart attack, and I went by
the hospital to see him, but he had just checked out. Uncle
Tony was under Pat Fenton when he served in Korea. The bottom
line is that I have very mixed emotional feelings about the man.
He was always cordial to me, and yet I always felt like there
were things he wanted to say to me, which he never did. I
wonder how many feel that way about my interactions with them.
Thursday I was back at Chroma, then down to II&T. I went to Kinko's on the way home and printed out my first stereo images for the AAPEX show. I had hoped to make it back to Chroma in the evening, and it was after 7:00 before I could leave II&T. Having worked well after midnight every night, and going for a run most mornings, I was absolutly wiped out by Thursday evening. Friday we had a presentation to Mark Stephens of Juneau Exploration. It went well, except we did not have the well logs and could not show a correlation to known sands for the Prospects we have identified Offshore Texas. I left Chroma in time to go to the movie Rat Race with Matt, Rachel, Heather, and Andrea. This is a great movie, in the same spirit as `It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.' This is one movie I encourage all of you to go see. It gets wild, and then it gets wilder and wilder and doesn't stop until after the credits. I remember when I was in 9th grade and `It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World' came out. I think I went to it 3 or 4 times, and I think this is the only movie I ever went to more than once in the movie theater. I recall one of these was to meet Brenda Waters and sit by her at the movie theater. I was not old enough to date, Mom was encouraging me to date, and my seminary teacher was encouraging me to not date. Brenda's older brother had epilepsy, and he would get in whistling matches with other kids at school when he had an attack. Brenda refused to meet me again, because she was protecting me against the stigma tied to her family.
I remember it was a very emotional experience for me. There were several girls I really liked between elementary and graduating from High School, and Brenda was one. The others were Marilyn Reese (who had the same birthday as me), Jill Leonard (whose mother gave me weekly allergy shots for years), Daniel Blake (who married Dale Hatch), Heidi Hanson (who moved to Amerillo and whom we stayed with on one of our trips to Colorado), Marnie Sorenson (from the Utah Junior Herford Association), Ellen Green (Paul Nelson's wife Sharon's younger sister), and Shirley Esplin (who was killed in a car accident between St. George and Salt Lake while I was on my mission). It is a long distance in both time and space from those years in Southern Utah and the work I have been doing Offshore Texas. (And when Andrea read this, she said, `Where did this come from?' Oh well! It is simply a trian of thought.)
Saturday morning I took Heather to the airport. Heather, I was afraid we would not be able to get your suitcases into the car when we left. I also found it interesting how careful you were to keep me from looking in your suitcase when you had to open it up at the airport. I hope the day will come when there will be complete trust between all of us. I'm glad you came and spent the summer, and I hope the positives outweigh the negatives as you look back on the summer. I went from Hobby Airport to II&T downtown and worked until early Sunday morning. This was kind of the the conclusion to this phase of the work offshore Texas, and the next phase is to find someone who will buy the work or similar work in some other area of the world.
As I read back over this, I realize I am not describing what we did Offshore Texas. Basically we took a data base of reservoir and field data from Richard Nehring and built maps of basic engineering data (depth to target horizions, distance from analog fields, water depth, etc.), basic physics data (temperature, pressure, barrels of oil equivalent already discovered, etc.), basic geology data (depositional systems, number of reservoir sands, formations, etc.), and then did a series of calculations to classify areas according to the kind of criteria specific oil companies are interested in. This is really a proof-of-concept project, which now we can repeat for any area on the surface of the planet, specifically anywhere in the continental United States except in the Appalacia Mountains where oil and gas records are really messed up. Being able to do this allows Dynamic to put any prospects we come up with in a good engineering, physics, and geologic context, decreasing the risk of drilling failure.
There will always be times when problems beyond our control create barriers, like Earthlink has done for me the last couple of weeks on the Internet. At the same time, there are always lots of basins like Offshore Texas to evaluate (opportunities you evaluate might be jobs, girls or boys when you are young and single, etc.). We can always spend time looking back and second guess our choices. However, in my mind the best thing to do is to set up a process, like our process for evaluating Offshore Texas, and then following the process until there is success. And I hope all of you find those opportunities in life which fill you will feelings of success, and that they are truly opportunities which are built on an eternal framework."