Not only is it already March, the month seems to be almost half over! I wasn’t even ready for 2004 to start let alone be almost a fourth finished. Someone remarked the other day that "The older I get, the faster I’m getting older!" I can certainly sympathize with that sentiment.

I spent last week in California. This is the time of year when California is quite pretty. All the hills are green and lush, the trees are blooming, flowers are growing, and it just looks to be wonderful. Too bad it can’t last. By late May everything will be brown unless it’s getting lots of irrigation in some fashion. Nevertheless, this is a good time to visit the Bay Area in California. There were several reasons for being in California: meetings with some key vendors, my boss’s staff meeting, and annual reviews. The company I work does an annual performance review process. While I was in California, I met with my boss so he could review with me my performance over the past year. That was a good review meeting (perhaps one of the better meetings with him on this subject). I also met with my two managers in California to deliver to them their annual reviews. I’ve got three more to do here in Colorado Springs, which I’ll get finished this week.

We have also rolled out a new process for managing spam at LSI Logic. After struggling with this scourge for about eighteen months I finally decided to contract with someone to provide the service for us. After doing a quick evaluation of several service providers, we elected to contract with Postini Corporation. I’ve now had my work e-mail filtered through Postini for two weeks and am very pleased with the result. They have a good product and it captures and quarantines some 50-70 spam messages per day that now no longer get to my inbox. I get a daily spam summary from them which I can quickly review to decide whether any of these messages were falsely quarantined (if so, a couple of mouse clicks causes the e-mail to be delivered to my inbox). I’d sure like to have the same capability for my home e-mail! Earthlink — take notice!!

For some time I’ve been trying to get my computer to write DVD’s. It’s been a very frustrating process, but I’ve finally been able to get the right combination of jumpers, drivers, and hardware. I was finally able to write a primitive DVD movie just before heading to California. Now I’m reading through the software manual as I’d like to begin reducing some of the video tape we’ve taken over the years into DVD’s. I’ve also got a couple of reels of Super 8 movie film that it’d be good to get it onto DVD as well. I never paid to get that film onto VHS tape, so I’ll now pay to have the film transferred to a DVD as that’ll give me digital images to work with. Some of these technical things take a very long time to get working and are pretty complicated. I’m having similar complications with setting up an e-mail server that both Nina and I can access from anywhere. In this process, I’m thinking I might also be able to send our home e-mail through a service like Postini and get rid of all the spam. That’d be very interesting to me and I know that Nina would like to get rid of most of this crap. But, setting up the e-mail server is turning out to be quite the saga. Daryl would be able to whip right through this stuff with ease! It’s taken me a month and I’m only part way through the process. I’d like to think I’m learning something as this all is happening. I just know that documentation in the Linux / Unix open source arena is just horrible.

We’re having a magnificent 50-degree afternoon in Colorado Springs. Thursday night and Friday morning saw several inches of new snow on the ground. It’s all gone now (except for some shady areas). We seem to have some massive temperature differentials in this area. Yesterday was incredibly windy. It’s calm today with no weather anywhere in the intermountain west. It’ll be in the upper 50’s and lower 60’s until Thursday when the next weather system is forecast. In the early 90’s I was at a meeting in Boston with a computer manufacturer (no longer existent) that was rolling out a new, superfast computer (which also didn’t gain much market acceptance). The company president was extolling the virtues of the computer by talking about weather forecasting. He told us that the National Weather Service had some very good computer models of the weather, capable of telling us precisely what the weather would be on any given day in the next 4-5 days. Only problem was, the models would take about 15 days to run. Of course, with his new computer that would be cut in half — we could know tomorrows weather in 5 days. We’ve now got desktop computers with that much horsepower and more, and we still don’t know for sure what tomorrow’s weather will be. On Friday morning the ABC affiliate in San Francisco was doing their morning show. Their weatherman was apologizing for a fast-moving cold front that blew through the San Francisco Bay area late the previous afternoon accompanied by some rain showers. The front was completely unexpected, he said as he made his apology. Unpredictability is good for the soul as it brings on confession…. Meanwhile, March has arrived pretty much like a lion here in Colorado Springs. We’ll see if the pithy saying holds true as March exits all to soon from now.