There are lots of interesting gadgets available. I kind of think we’re just on the cusp of a whole bunch of new special-purpose gadgets that’ll be coming out. One of the attractions of the personal computer back in the 1980’s was that it was a general purpose machine capable of being programmed for a whole variety of capabilities. Computers were expensive enough that having dedicated, single-purpose machines was not practical.

In the mid-1800’s when electricity was becoming generally available, the electric motor was particularly expensive. General Electric planned to build a “house motor” to which a variety of attachments would be available, each taking advantage of the one motor. The concept was brought to market, but by that time the electric motor technology began making great strides and the single motor idea was abandoned. The same idea made it’s way into farming where the tractor became the “big engine” to which a variety of attachments were available, each drawing on the tractor’s universal power system to operate.

The computer has followed the same route. Initially, the thrust was to build bigger and faster computers with more and more memory. In the past few years, however, that has changed into building more and more special-purpose machines. My favorite at the moment is my iPhone!

I love my iPhone. I really like iTunes and the application store. The entire eco-system works wonderfully well. In the next year or so I’m sure that Apple will loose the tight control they exercise over the entire iPhone system. Other companies will finally figure out that ease of use trumps geekiness! Meantime, the iPhone is quite delightful.

The device that I’m looking forward to is something like the Amazon Kindle, except capable of doing vibrant color (the current Kindle is gray-scale only). I think that kind of a device that will prove to be the resurrection of magazines and newspapers … given that Amazon puts together an eco-system similar to what Apple has done for the iPhone. Ease of use will again trump everything else.

Ta ta for now!

The Rotary Club that I belong to was able to reach the first important milestone this year … enough members to be chartered. The chartering ceremony was fun and it’s quite exciting to be part of this organization.

Rotary is a service organization involved in doing things for the community as well as around the world.

My role in our Pocatello Portneuf Rotary Club is to arrange for our weekly programs. Over the past year we’ve been able to have a number of very interesting programs and through that, I’ve been able to meet a lot of important people in the community. The day after the election in November (when the incumbent mayor was defeated) I was able to sign up the mayor elect to be on our program in December, which proved to be one of the most popular programs of the year.

Ta ta for now!

These are some of my favorite pictures from the past year.

Click on the pictures for additional information!

Ta ta for now!

If there is food involved, I’m generally there. If it’s good food, I want to be all over it. When we go to potluck kinds of events, I like to know who prepared what just to check out their creative cooking skills.

On the other hand,  it’s pretty clear that I’ve not missed many meals in my lifetime. I often use a favorite joke:

I’m in shape! Round IS a shape, ya know…

Or, another favorite:

I have the shape of a god: Buddha!

I also put food into a few generic categories:

• Food that’s good for you (and generally has that “taste” to it)
• Breakfast foods
• Foods eaten at mealtimes
• Desserts and snacks

I haven’t found much that I would put into the “favorite” category that also fits in the “good for you” category. Usually, if something is good for you, they’ve taken out the stuff that makes it satisfying, such as fat and sugar. There’s a Roland Smith Minimum Daily Requirement that the “good for you” foods seldom meet.

I really like breakfast foods and quite often when Nina and I are fending for ourselves for dinner, I’ll make something requiring syrup or something requiring milk and sugar.

I’m not so fond of lunch foods. Most sandwiches aren’t interesting to me at all.

I enjoy eating out for either breakfast or dinner (and will occasionally have breakfast for dinner if the restaurant offers that option). Usually I’ll have either a steak or will have pasta of some sort.

Two of my daughters make absolutely fabulous caramels and those rank very high on my favorite list. Nina is also an excellent cook and my favorite restaurant is at our dining table. I’m pretty much a meat and potatoes person, but my favorite Nina-prepared food includes salmon, chicken casserole, and spaghetti. Nina likes to have a wide variety of foods. I’m quite content to eat pretty much the same things over and over again.

But, in the end, I will have to confess that Nina’s chocolate chip cookies are by far my favorite. They must be food … they have all the important food groups represented: flour, eggs, milk, chocolate…. And my favorite batch of cookies will be the next batch that comes out of the oven. Umm, good!

Ta ta for now!

This is one of those wide open topics. For instance, one could argue that my favorite place is in our computer room in front of the computer, and that would be correct. I certainly spend a lot of time there!

As far as destinations go, Yellowstone National Park is certainly a favorite. We’re less than four hours from the center of the park and we go over there a couple of times a year. Our trip this past September was particularly fun and relaxing.

We’ve had the good fortune to have traveled pretty far and wide throughout the world, but haven’t been outside of North America since 2007 when we were on a cruise in Scandinavia. I have a number of favorite places that we’ve visited overseas and many, many more that I’d like to visit.

For the past several months Nina and I have been working each Friday morning at the Idaho Falls Temple. We get up at 3 a.m., leave the house at 3:45 a.m., and arrive at the Temple about 4:45 to begin our shift at 5 a.m. We’re usually finished around 11 to 11:30 a.m. We both thoroughly enjoy or service at the Temple and definitely arrange our lives around Friday morning so that we can always be there for our assignment.

We generally don’t talk a lot about what goes on inside the Temple, not that it’s particularly secret, but that the ordinances performed there are sacred and only become meaningful to members of the Church who have put themselves in a position to be qualified to be in the Temple. What I will say, however, is that the time we spend there on Friday mornings is some of the most satisfying  and rewarding time of the week.

My favorite place to be right now, above all others, is at the Idaho Falls Temple on a Friday morning.

Ta ta for now!

We here in Pocatello, Idaho are blessed with a world-class venue for the performing arts, the L.E. and Thelma E. Stephens Performing Arts Center. Every group that comes through Pocatello and performs there comments on how magnificent the facility is. As a result, we’ve gotten some great performances during this past year.

The facility has two performance areas (with a third planned when enough money is raised), a theater and a grand performance hall. There are two subscription series, The Season of Note and The Idaho State Civic Symphony. We buy tickets to both of them and are particularly impressed with the Symphony. This fall we’ve been to see the 5 Browns and Rockapella along with two Symphony performances. The last event we attended there was the 25th Annual Messiah Sing. This event was previously held in the Highland Stake Center but had pretty much outgrown the facility. This time there were more than 700 people singing in the chorus plus another 900 there to listen. We had a fabulous time.

The best performance (the link is to my blog post about this performance), however, was last April with the Symphony along with the Camarata Singers. That was one fabulous concert. It just gets better and better here in Pocatello!

Ta ta for now!

Social Networks has taken on a new dimension in the past couple of years with the advent of several sites on the Internet. I’ve dabbled in several of them and still have accounts on a few of these sites, some of which I use and most of which I don’t use. I think Friendster was the first of these sites that I created an account on a couple of years ago, primarily because it was very popular in the Philippines and several of the people I worked with over there encouraged me to sign up. After “leaving” my job at AMI Semiconductor, and because the Friendster website really sucked, I pretty much stopped using it and haven’t logged in for probably a year. Perhaps my account is now dead?

Facebook, Seesmic, and Twitter next captured my attention. Seesmic was oriented around video. I recorded a few, but even though handling the video was easy and straightforward, I found I much preferred to write rather than be a talking head. With the written word I can think about it, work on it, revise it, and eventually either delete or publish. Video editing is incredibly time consuming and until someone builds some software to dramatically reduce the complexity, I’ll just leave video alone for the most part.

In January of this year, however, Facebook almost overnight became really useful. I had reached some kind of a critical mass of people on my friends list, and more importantly, a critical mass of people on my friends list that I actually was interested in what they were saying and doing. I have currently 148 friends on Facebook, but only about half of them everupdate their status. A couple only play games (and I have those games hidden, so I don’t see much from them either). I check Facebook often. I have the iPhone Facebook app loaded and use it when I’m away from my computer. Facebook is definitely the 2009 Social Network application.

Twitter continues to be my other major social network site. I have it open all the time on my computer and when I’m away from home I check it rather often. I currently follow 310 people and 460 people are following me on Twitter. I’m thinking it’s about time to trim the Twitter follow list down a bit as it sometimes takes up a lot of time.

Facebook has become the primary means for keeping up on what’s happening with a lot of my extended family. Twitter is the place to keep up with what’s happening with friends and colleagues, but more importantly Twitter is how I get my news. When anything happens, it seems to show up on Twitter almost immediately.

I suspect we’re just at the leading edge of online social networking. This year has proven that it works and is useful. I’m really looking forward to what will come in the next year or two.

Ta ta for now!

The holidays in 2009 have been enjoyable and rather quiet.

New Years: We spent this holiday at home. The Pocatello Stake had a family New Years party on New Years Eve. We stayed there until about 10 p.m. and then made our way home and to bed. New Years Day itself was spent watching football games and just being lazy around the house. We both remembered to say “Rabbit, rabbit,” making a very good start to the year.

Memorial Day: Nina and I went down to Heather’s in North Salt Lake for Memorial Day. Her pool was open and we had a fun time swimming, although the weather was a bit cool. We also spent some time at Wasatch Lawn Cemetery, cleaning Trevor’s headstone and leaving some flowers. It was a good start to the summer and we left a couple of weeks later on our Big Trip East.

July 4th: We arrived home from our Big Trip East mid-day on the 4th of July. We unpacked the motor home and put everything away. Nina made some potato salad and baked beans, we grilled some chicken on the grill, and went to bed before the fireworks started. We were very happy to be home!

Labor Day: The week before Labor Day we went to Yellowstone National Park for a week and had a delightful time there. We spent Labor Day at home catching up on things around the house and the yard. It was essentially a completely uneventful holiday.

Thanksgiving: We drove down to Heather’s on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and stayed until Thanksgiving afternoon. We needed to get home and to bed as we had to get up at 3:00 a.m. on Friday for our normal shift at the Idaho Falls Temple. We always enjoy the time we spend with Heather and her family.

Christmas: At the moment I can only say what we plan to do for Christmas, as it hasn’t arrived yet. We’ll leave Pocatello on Sunday afternoon, December 20th for another Big Trip East and hope to arrive at Dawnmarie’s place in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania on Tuesday afternoon. We’ll spend Christmas with Dawnmarie and her family. We’ve not been there for Christmas and it’ll be fun to be with the grandkids on Christmas Day. We’ll probably spend New Years Day with Nina’s sister Pam before heading back home to Pocatello. All of this planning depends on the weather! If mother nature cooperates, that’s what we’ll be doing.

Ta ta for now!