cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Diane Cluff, Maxine Shirts, and Sherri Nelson.
"Rats! I didn't finish the thoughtlet last night, and after I finished it this morning, while waiting for Andrea to get back from her walk and to proof what I wrote, I was writing another e-mail when the e-mail system crashed, and I lost the thoughtlet. I will try to recreate what I wrote yesterday, last night, and this morning, and it will probably be quite different, especially because of time constraints. Oh well!
This week was busy. I had known it would be busy for some time, and sometimes even knowing does not prepare one for what is coming. Monday morning I received a call from Mike Bahorich, now a vice- president at Apache Corporation where Allen Peterson works. He had a trip to Egypt come up over Thanksgiving and was only available to meet about the Analog Atlas on Monday. So I put him on hold and conferenced to Ward and Fern Abbott, who had spent Thanksgiving with their daughter in Euless by Ft. Worth, to see if they could leave a little early so we could meet on Monday afternoon. They said sure, and about 1:30 I got a call they were already in The Woodlands. We met in the lobby of Apache at 2:40. They had to wait for me because of heavy traffic on I-10 and because I parked in Woodside's parking instead of Apache's which is in the next building. The southeast side of the Woodside building is where Andrea, Sara, Peter, and I had watched the Thanksgiving evening Disney fireworks a few of days earlier.
Yesterday I wrote a lot about the history of what led to meeting Ward and Fern Abbott at Apache. I first met Ward and Fern in 1983 on my first trip to China. After a toast during a banquet Fern asked if I was LDS, and told me they were also. We became friends, and I spent the next decade attempting to pull Ward's outcrop photos into the Landmark workstation products. In about 1985 Elliott Boullion joined Landmark from Lafayette. He had been a student at The university of Southwestern Louisiana, now The University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL). Elliott had started a company named Phoenix Graphics, which John Mouton had evaluated as a source for a graphics controller for the Landkmark workstations. We ended up using a system that came from another start-up group out of RPI (Renseller Polytechnical Institute), and Phoenix ended up going bankrupt. Elliott introduced Terry Smith to some of his professors at ULL, and they did a prototype hypertext project in 1987 for consideration as a way to provide documentation on how to use Landmark workstations. The professor was Dr. Dennis Moreau, who was involved in the tour and demonstrations we did on the GSH tour of immersive environments a couple of years ago (../9913.html). A couple of notes of interest: Elliott was John Amason's nemesis, having received more stock options than John and being a very dictitorial manager whom John ended up reporting to; Elliott later married Judy Doran, who was my first secretary, employee #10, and whom all agreed was a perfect 10; Elliott and Judy had triplets, moved to Colorado Springs, and he now does work as a venture capital investment advisor.
Terry Smith showed me the hypertext prototype in about 1987, and I immediately saw the value of using this media to share the outcrop image library Ward and Fern Abbott and I had been talking about for several years. In addition, at this time I was in the middle of an extensive new product design for Landmark Graphics, for a new interpretation product we were calling `Sequence Stratigraphy.' This project was focused around the work of Dr. Peter Vail, who had retired from Exxon Production Research (EPR) and was teaching at Rice University. The key members of the design team were Pete, John Sangree, Tury Taner, and myself. We didn't have Andy Hildebrand nor other software engineers on the team, and this is surely one of the reasons the design was never reduced to a product. Others on the outside involved with the sequence stratigraphy design included Brad Macurda (Brad, Gary Jones, and I received the award for excellence of poster presentation by the SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology) at the 1994 annual meeting on 07 March 1995 for a paper entitled `The Stratigrpahy, Sedimentology and Chronostratigraphy of the Mobile Bay Fan, Northeastern Gulf of Mexico'; and Brad and I did dozens of other papers on sequence stratigraphy, including several about the stratigraphy of Offshore Mozambique and several about the Porcupine Basin offshore Ireland, including having Des help us name different anomalies based on Irish history), Bob Mitchum (also from EPR), Bob Sneider (formerly at Shell), Scott Bowman (Pete Vail's only PhD student before his stroke, and later my office mate for HyperMedia Corporation) and of course Ward Abbott. Internally there was Kevin Donihoo (who took the design and attempted to implement it at IES in Germany), Andrew Dove (who was the key technical guy at HyperMedia Corporation), Ced Snyder (who retired to his home on Lake Travis where we vacationed once), and Terry Smith (who I have worked with off and on for years (../9645.html, ../9837.html, ../9845.html, ../9847.html, ../9902.html, ../9903.html, ../9904.html, ../9930.html, ../9951.html, and 0119.html).
One of the things that came out of this product design was the need for an interactive analog atlas to guide interpreters understanding of stratigraphic patterns on seismic data, and well log cross-sections. I immediately wanted to bring Ward Abbott into the project, because of his extensive outcrop photo library. One of the highlights of my professional career was when I took Ward Abbot (representing tectonic control of sequence boundaries), Pete Vail (representing eustatic control of sequence boundaries), Dennis Moreau, Andy Hildebrand, and others to the Guadalupe Mountains to look at the same rocks they had been using to tell different stories of sedimentary creation. We took a lot of photos of outcrops, as well as videos of different explanations. Most of this stuff is in the boxes currently in our garage and formerly in Mom and Dad's basement.
The insights Pete Vail provided the world about how gravity has been the same from pre-cambrian times to today, and how the stratigraphic rock record records predictable responses to sea level raising and falling are truly revolutionary. He pointed out that during ice ages the water stacks up at the poles and sea level will drop some 200 feet. During warm times, the ice caps melt and sea leve raises, flooding the coastal planes like where Houston is built. This is what is referred to as eustatic or sea level controlled stratigraphy. There are those who considered most of these patterns to actually be due to plate movements and to large faulting episodes. The truth appears to involve both. I distinctly recall that during the time we were doing all of this work, I was reading the Book of Mormon as part of one of Ron Burgerner's annual challenges, and came across the following passage in 2 Nephi 1:9-10 (CAPS for emphasis):
The spirit bore witness to me, in a tangible fashion that I can never deny, that Pete Vail, Ward Abbott, and the other men I was working with truly have unravelled a knowledge of the creation of the earth. It is very probable that this experience was one of the reasons I was willing to put so much time and money and effort into attempting to get the Online Analog Atlas to market. When Landmark would not provide $200,000. to productize the software design, and yet was willing to spend $7,000,000. to purchase a piece of dirt upon which to build a monument to themselves, I knew it was time to leave Landmark. A year later, they fired Andrew Dove and the rest of the team who had worked on the hypertext Atlas project, and I was able to negotiate release of the intellectual property to me. Thus on 04 January 1991, the day the U.S. bombed Iraq and started Desert Storm, we incorporated Hypermedia eXchange Corporation, which later became HyperMedia Corporation to pursue the ideas initially discovered with Ward and Fern Abbott in China years before.
For reference, the World-Wide-Web (WWW) was first initiated later that same year, and by 1992 there were 50 web pages. In 1993 Marc Anderson created Mosaic as a graduate student at The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbania. It was several years after this when he reworked Mosaic as NetScape and started the WWW revolution. HyperMedia's HyperEdge software was built on UNIX, and thus did not have the opportunity to become the standard WWW browser NetScape and now Explorer have become. However, from a geoscientists standpoint, it is still more useful than any of the browsers out there as far as keeping track of geotechical data, building overlays to show different interpretations, and indexing all of this data. Oh well!
One last reminiscence is that right after my first trip to Saudi Arabia, which was following the EAEG (European Association of Exploration Geophysisicsts) annual meeting held in Florence, Italy, in the spring of 1992, that I went to Amoco Research in Tulsa to introduce HyperEdge to a team of hotshots, including Mike Bahorich. If Hypermedia would have closed this sales call, it would not have been the failure it turned into. The Amoco team fell in love with the concept and the technology, and they decided to rebuild what we had done using a technology called Frame. Oh well!
I guess I rewrote a lot about the history today too. Anyway I met Ward and Fern Abbott in the lobby at Apache, and Ward and I went upstairs leaving Fern with her Tom Clancy novel. We ended up waiting for Mike Bahorich for 30 minutes, and this gave us time to organize our presentation and talk about next steps. Although we have been talking specifically about the Atlas for over 12 years, we had not put together a specific presentation. However, it came together very well, and Mike was definitely impressed with what we showed. He is very quick, very intense, and very much to the point; e.g. Question: `What is non-sponsor image royalties?' Answer: `Ward's recompense for making his life's work available as a basis for this project.' Mike was careful to point out Apache seldom sponsors consortium projects and research projects. We are asking 5 companies to prepurchase the atlas for $50,000. each in order to build the viewing tools, scan and index the images, set up a server, etc. He was equally definite that he wanted to see this funded. His number one choice of funding is someone named Renee from Schlumberger Research in Ridgelake, Connecticut. They are also doing an outcrop atlas, with dip meter results for the outcrops, and virtual reality models. However, they do not have a critical mass of images, and Ward's library of 800+ photos would provide that critical mass. Second, as SEG President next year, he believes he will have an influence on the AAPG Foundation, and he sees this as an ideal project for the AAPG Foundation to fund. Both Ward and I left this meeting very positive and looking forward to the rest of the week.
I gave Ward and Fern a map showing how to get to the house, as they stayed with us in the newly redecorated guest room, and I took off on 290 to Telge Road, where Sara's gymnastics gym was, to pick up a SpotFire computer form GeoMark to use the rest of the week in presentations. I got home in time for a nice dinner of turkey soup, corn bread biscuits, jello, and green salad. After Ward and Fern went to bed, I spent the evening working on Wednesday's Obsolesence paper. After Ward and Fern went to bed I ended up at Dick Coons reading data from a zip drive and writing it on a CD so I could load it on the SpotFire PC. It is nice to have friends who are willing to help.
Tuesday morning we were at Conoco at 7:45 to meet Dr. John F. Casey, Chariman of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Houston. Ed Reynolds of Conoco was waiting for us, and escorted us to a meeting room in the very back of the Conoco complex. We met with Bill Clopine, group leader for predictive stratigraphy and the integrated interpretation center, and Bill Morgan, a senior explorationist in the same group. The presentation went well, and half way through we were joined by Dr. Don Van Nieuwenhuise, a stratigraphic researcher at UH whom Dr. Casey invited. UH is considering hosting the Analog Atlas and also putting a lot of their data into the Atlas. Later in the week Ed Reynolds sent me an e-mail saying they were not going to prepurchase the atlas at this time. This was disappointing and not unexpected. With Conoco's purchase of Gulf Canada (0120.html), and last week's announcement of a merger of equals with Phillips Petroleum, I anticipate Conoco management has reached beyond it's level of incompetence. Oh well!
From Eldridge and I-10, Don, Ward, and I, in two cars, went to Shell's Bellaire Research Lab inside the 610 loop on the south side of Bellaire Boulevard. It was raining off and on and we still made good time. The meeting was with Gary Scott Steffens, Denise Butler, Brent Couzens- Schultz, and Scott Sumner. Typically bright and insightful Shell geoscientists. The meeting went very well, and I was suprised by the reverence shown to Ward. Shouldn't have been, but I was. It came out that when Mike Forrest (../9821.html, ../9840.html, ../9850.html, ../9916.html, and ../0033.html) first noticed amplitude anomalies in the Gulf of Mexico, Ward told him they were where the sands were; i.e. Ward was involved in the discovery of bright spot technology at Shell, which was independently discovered at Mobil about the same time. As we were leaving Gary introduced Ward to someone who was passing by, with glowing comments about his contributions to Shell, and then off handedly introduced me. It felt good to have someone I like so much be in the limelight. I did make sure to mention my friendship with Paul Sullivan, who is now the Director of Shell's Research worldwide, based out of The Hague. I look forward to hearing what their response to our request will be.
Don, Ward, and I went to Main Street and ate at Captain Benny's, where Bill Bavinger and I used to eat after thinking and planning sessions. Ward and I had catfish and shrimp and chips. Really good. Don is very positive about how this project will help UH, and so I remain optimistic that after all of this time and effort this project is going to all come together. From south Main we went to Chroma, where I introduced Ward to Don Volte and described my vision of how the Analog Atlas will be helpful to Chroma. Then we went to Sam LeRoy's shop, so Ward and Sam know who each other is. As Ward was showing his work to Sam we got a call from Jim DiSiena at Unocal asking where we are. I had written 2:30 so badly, I translated it as 3:30, and so we were late for a very important date. Oh well! We got there at 3:15, and the rescheduled meeting started at 3:45. We had about 8 folks in attendance, and they liked what they saw. Most of their discussion was about political positioning in order to sell the concept to their management. It will be interesting to see what if anything develops here. When we got back to the house, Ward and Fern took Andrea and I out to dinner at Landry's. Andrea and I shared redfish and I had a cup of gumbo. It was a very nice evening.
Wednesday morning I was busy working on the Tectonica Energy business plan (revised with no password yet at http://www.walden3d.com/TectonicaEnergy), when it was time to leave. Ward and Fern Abbott and I left at 8:30, took the transit lane, and were at UH by 9:05. We had a good meeting with a half a dozen professors. It was different than I expected. We ended up selling the project to them, where as Ward and I thought they were going to be selling the department to us. They have a couple of thousand slides they scanned this year, which could be indexed against the Atlas. All in all it was another positive meeting. Fern was particularly positive about the response she saw.
We left the University at 10:45 and missing an exit, made our way downtown to the Exxon Building on Bell Street by about 11:00. I gave the latest revision of my talk `The Impending Obsolesence of Maps' to the Houston Geological Society (../0024.html, ../0031.html, ../0034.html, ../0044.html, ../0049.html, 0114.html, and 0121.html). There were about 50 people present, several good questions at the end, and all in all a good experience. I got a half a dozen cards to follow-up on this week, and it was good to visit with friends. Of interest at the luncheon was the dessert. It appears they took a 3 inch balloon and put both white and dark chocolate stripes on it around the sphere, with like with a cake decorating tool, and when it dried popped or deflated the balloon and put pushed it into a chocholate pie filling. It was really pretty and tasted very good. After we left the luncheon, Ward and Fern Abbott and I took the transit lane back to Katy. Think this is the first time I have used the transit lane both ways in a single day. I obviously don't help the Houston traffic problems.
Ward and I spent the afternoon building an IDEF-0 model of how we are actually going to turn his 800 images and the associated overlays into the On-Line Analalog Atlas. Neat results. While I was building the model, Ward took about 80 photos with the ditigal camera so I can build more complete examples of what the Analog Atlas will look like. I was going to do that this morning and it looks like I consider it more important to rewrite the Thoughtlet. Oh well!
Thursday morning started at BP at 7:45 AM. We met Kurt Marfurt director of the UH AGL, and formerly at Amoco Research for 20 years. He has a lot of friends at Amoco. Our host was Dr. Art D. Donovan, who studied under Pete Vail at EPR, and he had 3 of his associates at the meeting. It was a good meeting, with good discussion, and several different opportunities for funding the Analog Atlas project. It was especially interesting to Ward, because it has only been a few weeks since we were told BP has no interest in funding this project (0121.html). I'm convinced the Atlas project will happen and that all of the major oil companies will purchase a corporate license. I just don't know when.
From BP in Westlake Park at I-10 and Highway 6 we went to Greenway Plaza and Occidental Oil & Gas Corporation. Ward worked at Oxy for 12 years after retiring form Shell, and wanted them to see what we are doing because much of the data comes from Oxy. When we first called up, we were told all of the managers we wanted to see were at meetings offsite for the week. Then we got a call back from Michael Fenton and he said he would round up some people to look at what Ward Abbott and Roice Nelson were doing together. When we got there he had 9 folks in the room, including Steve Binger, Patricia Hagar, Judy Russell, and James Phillips. Ward had taught most of them, and there was real reverence for Ward in the meeting. It went better than any of the meetings, and I was given the names of people in Oxy who will be interested in looking at the CLPs (new exploration Concepts, Leads, and Prospects) Dynamic has and is putting together. They had lunch catered in, paid for our parking, and treated us like visiting royalty. I would like to work with these people.
From Oxy we went across Richmond to Exxon-Mobil Upstream Research and visited with Randy Ewasko, Christopher Tenney, and two of their colleagues. Good meeting. They are interested. They will get back to us. From here we went back to Katy. Within 15 minutes of getting to the house, Ward and Fern Abbott were on their way to Austin to visit with his brother Arnold, a retired UT Professor who never married. It was a wonderful visit, and I sure hope we turn this project into a funded real project. I believe it will demonstrate how to use extended hypertext (XML) to index all data in a particular scientific field, and to allow this to be shared by others all across the world. In the bigger picture, having experts who coordinate indexing of all of the data in their areas of professional expertise will allow the creation of a new type of scientific advisory board to nations, and quite possibly the establishment of what I call the `Council of 50' to provide rational scientific based government to the world.
Thursday afternoon was spent reworking the Tectonica Energy funding proposal yet again. Hopefully it is close to being sellable. I also started a book called `The Message' by Lance Richardson, which I finished on Saturday. I was pretty skeptical about his story at the beginning, and the ending definitely resonated with me. Rachel and Andrea also read it and think it is very good.
Friday morning was spent getting images and files together for the FW presentation (the preliminary meeting with the Chroma FW team was described in 0146.html). I took the data via zip down to Sam and he put it on a CD so I could load it on the SpotFire PC. Sam and Dick Coons were with me for the presentation. It was exceptional. We met with Christopher Latkiewicz, Bill Rieniets, and Cliff Creasy. They liked what they saw, and hopefully we will be able to sell them some or all of the study we did Offshore Texas. They have a Board of Director's meeting this week, and so I should have a pretty good feel for the lay of the land by the end of this week. Dick gave Sam a ride back to his office and I took the computer back to Telge Road and GeoMark. I spent an hour with Kevin Ferworn and Stephen Brown. They have very interesting geochemical databases and reports which we will be able to merge into Dynamic. I got home exhausted and feeling like it had been a very good week.
After a nap and some more reading, Matt, Andrea, and I went to eat at Taylor High School's Choir's `Ye Olde Renaissance Christmas Feaste.' It was like last year, only more polished. Matt loved it, and we all had a lot of fun. We sat with the Senior Principal, and a couple that is on the Project Graduation Commmittee with Andrea. I won't describe the whole program, rather will refer you to last year's comments (../0049.html).
Saturday morning I slept in. Andrea and I went to Ward Choir at 8:00, then Stake Choir from 9-11:00. We will miss the last practice for the Epiphany Concert next Saturday because it is Melanie's graduation. I spent the rest of the day fixing the christmas tree with duct tape so it will stand up, and fluffing out all of the branches. I finished the book, worked on a song I have been writing about the pig in the Mirage(R) (see page 189 of New Technologies in Exploration Geophysics, if you have a copy).
Matt left at about 5:00 to ride his bike to the church and to be a traveller in the live nativity. I was holding the ladder for Andrea, who was hanging christmas lights from the roof gutters. Rachel left for Ye Old Renaissance Christmas Feaste at 5:30, and Andrea and I went over to the church to see the nativity sets, Matt's performance, and some choral numbers before going out to dinner with Dick Coons and some of his friends. It was my first time to go to the Barcelona Fine European Dinning in Katy. Very nice meal, and again I ate too much. We had nice conversations, and it was an nice evening. Was reminded the name Katy comes from the KAnsas Texas railroad companY. We went to Dick Coons' for cheesecake afterwards. One of the guests was a jack-mormon, and when he got talking about alcholic drinks in China, I pointed out how I never drank any of that stuff and simply told them it was against my religion. There was some jabbing back and forth, and all in all it was a fun evening.
Yesterday was a good Sunday. Because of the Stake Nativity we only had Fast & Testimony Meeting. Rachel bore a sweet, sincere testimony. Rachel taught a Family Home Evening lesson when we got home. We went back down to the church for tithing settlement at 12:45. Andrea had everything all cross-checked, and it was a plesent experience. We dropped Matt of at Brother Gillett's house (he is the Varsity Scout Leader and likes to play computer games with Matt). When we got to the house Rachel, Andrea, and I had a good discussion about the Thanksgiving Day blowup. It looked like it was going to go south for the first half hour, and it ended up with me holding Rachel in my lap for a couple of hours, with tears, hugs, and the right kind of words to work though stuff. As we sat there, I could not help but think of my other girls.
Melanie and Sara, I'm sorry I wan't there to hold you more, to tell you how beautiful you each are, and how proud I am of your accomplishments. Looking back, there are all kinds of excuses, including the fact emotional displays of affection were not part of my family of origin, the fact I was being accused of abuse when you were little girls, and did not want to ever have sexual abuse thrown at me (on reflection, I've concluded this was largely based around Emmit Sharp's dirty jokes and possibly more and a fear this behavior would be repeated by me). It wasn't, and I'm sorry the sins of the fathers pass on to the children. We did the best we could with the scripting and with the psychological tools available to us. And I am here now, and I am available to hold you on my lap and tell you how much I love you, how beautiful you each are, and how proud I am of your individual accomplishments any time you are available and want me to.
Heather and Audrey, I'm sorry your Dad left you in your youth. I wish he hadn't. I wish I could have been there to help you. He did and I wasn't. Oh well! Life isn't fair. Fairness isn't a principle. And we all need to get on with our lives. I look forward to the day you can forgive your Mom, stop ganging up on her, get rid of your anger, and realize she also did the best she could with the scripting and psychological tools available to her. And for what it is worth, I am here now, and I am available to hold you on my lap and tell you how much I love you, how beautiful you each are, and how proud I am of your individual accomplishments any time you are available and want me to.
After Matt got back we had a nice roast beef dinner, and then we went over to the Nicol's house to watch the First Presidency fireside. They have a digital TV and satellite, and the reception is beautiful. They also had cream puffs, roast beef sandwiches, pecan pie, and a variety of other things. Harold and Joyce Burnham, Dan and Linda Jones, and another of the Nicol's friends were also there. It was a very nice evening, and yet it reminded me of how we all struggle. Harold and Joyce with their son Bob's drug habits. Dan and Linda with being happy, after all her father left her mother (and her and her younger sister) when she was 18, and she has never worked through it. Martin Nicol, who described how his parents started to split up when he was in college, and he talked them out of it, and then they did split up when he was 40.
And then there are the perfect folks like Ward and Fern Abbott. Respected professionally. Wonderful to be with socially. Planning on serving a 4 day a week mission at Temple Square starting this next spring. And one of their daughters was killed in an automobile accident when she was between Rachel and Heather's age. I don't know the details, and I know that it still hurts deeply. And I know life goes on and we all do the best we can. It is sort of like whether it is worth it to spend six hours recreating a Thoughtlet, which had eight hours of thinking time into it and was lost with a computer glitch. We do what we can, and we do what is important to us. And hopefully others see though our weaknesses and see what we are striving for."