"The following article was in Friday's (08Sep06) Outlook section of the Chronicle:
I still remember the excitement when President John F. Kennedy gave his speech at Rice University (I didn't know until years later it was at Rice), where he challenged the nation to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. I consider this article in the Houston Chronicle the same class of announcement, only without the power of the same type of charismatic President behind it. However, the impact will have the same type of impact on my Grandkids, which President Kennedy's announcement had on me, if they choose to pursue science in school. The article gave some dates, plus the first trip to Mars from other sources is scheduled for 2030. To put the dates in context, I've built the following table with ages of six grandkids when these events happen.
Name | 2006 | 2012 | 2014 | 2030 | |
Ethan Evans | 6 | 12 | 14 | 30 | |
Grant Matthew | 4 | 10 | 12 | 28 | |
Colby Cade | 4 | 10 | 12 | 28 | |
Taylor Robbyn | 2 | 8 | 10 | 26 | |
Ella Dawn | 2 | 8 | 10 | 26 | |
Halle Nalise | 0 | 6 | 8 | 24 |
It is not straightforward to "cite your minds forward" (Alma 13:1) and to remember the future. However, sometimes the future is so blatantly set in front of us it is just obvious. I can imagine any one of my Grandkids being one of the astronauts making these trips. Probably it is just my ego to have this type of imaginations. Oh well! Too bad I haven't been able to keep up my part of preparing the kids for this type of roll through my planned Grandkidlets. As I write this Thoughtlet, I'm 23 weeks behind and obviously having a hard time keeping up with the Thoughtlets, let alone the Grandkidlets, of which I haven't written one since the 7th of March 2004 ( http://www.walden3d.com/grandkidlets/2004/0410.html). Oh well!
As far the rest of the week went, it was pretty quiet. Just getting back from a 10 day trip to China, there was a lot of catch-up to do at the office. Probably the most important thing I did for GDC this week was to put together a couple of marketing brochures. Dave was very preoccupied with the purchase of Grant Geophysical, which was announced in an e-mail from Maureen at about 7:00 PM Friday evening.
I did get in the middle of a bunch of company politics this week. John Gillooley and Sonny Landrum are under a tremendous amount of pressure to make GDC profitable. One of the issues is whether the interpretation group will make their projected numbers. They day not realize the power of Fred's new Zhou Transform for quantifiably defining the difference between producible and unproducible fizz gas. So I set up a Lunch 'N Learn for Fred to present to the software, sales, and interpretation teams. The title was "What Units Are the Seismic Amplitudes on Your Screen." Fred is really good. He gave me a bad time about never drinking coffee in front of everyone. Then he talked about the SpaceGraphTM and some of the work we did. He was mixed up and thought it came from Utah, not from BBN. Oh well!
I worked with Marc Roulston a couple of evenings. By getting a bid from AT&T for $54/month for 1.0 Mbit DSL connection, I was able to get Earthlink to give me the same speed, and to cut the cost from $140/month to $70/month for 12 months, and then $80/month. This will provide 3 mega-bits/second uplink, and 768 kilobits/second downlink, instead of 193 kilobits/second. Marc has set things up so I can sit anyplace in the house and access the Internet.
Monday was the Labor Day. I spent the day working in the home office. I would have liked to go to the Hafen Reunion, and there isn't money in the bank for this kind of activity yet. Andrea was very busy getting her seminary and Japanese class material together. So we did not see each other over our holiday. She was upstairs, and I was in the office. In fact, I think Marc came over for a few hours on Monday. Oh well!
Tuesday I drove because I knew George and Becky Schultz are temple workers on Tuesdays. I listened to the last of the AudioTech cassette tapes I was behind on. I wrote down two interesting and pretty obvious concepts from these tapes:
And
Tuesday night Elder Green and Elder Munro, the two new missionaries in our ward, came over for dinner. I enjoy having the missionaries over to the house. Elder Munro was enthralled by the books. Elder Green said, "I've seen more neat things in this house that in all the other houses I've been in on my mission." It was a nice evening. They even liked 'Froggie Learns The Gospel.'
The other evenings I just worked on getting things moved over to the new Linux system, working on a proposal to Henry Ho, and generally keeping myself buried in the office. On Friday Fred gave a 'Lunch and Learn' lecture tiltled "What Units Are Your Seismic Amplitudes On Your Workstation." I had set it up after discussions with John Gilloley and Sonny Landrum.
Saturday it rained, and so I did not mow the lawn. There were e-mails with Ed Rogers and Merril Littlewood, and there were Thoughtlets to catch up on. Andrea and I went to see an afternoon showing of The Illusionist. Andrea wanted to see it because it was set in Austria, and we had spent a week there a few weeks ago during the EAGE (0625.html). In the evening I watched the CNN special, "In the Footsteps of Ben Ladin." Sunday was special, because I gave each of the 10 kids who were all in attendance at my Primary Class for the second week in a row (there is only one who doesn't come, Nathanial Wilson), a nice leather Chinese box with a divider and two labels: TITHING; and SAVINGS AND SPENDING. In the evening Brent Peterson and I visited some of the families we are responsible for helping if there is an emergency. And through all of the activities and mundane things of this week, there was an overcasting shadow of the future, and the future is named Orion."