It’s now about 23 hours since we left the Jensen Performing Arts Center after being thrilled (and chilled) by the Golden Dragon Chinese Acrobats. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe their show last night. Tonight I’ve got very sore hands from clapping. I think that Nina is going to post some pictures so that’s the place to go. At one point near the end of the program as one of the stars stacked chairs higher and higher to the ceiling and then did all kinds of hand stands and other tricks at each level, I noticed that I had been holding my breath for quite some time — afraid to exhale in case that blew down the stack, I guess.

A couple of new weblogs have been set up. My sister Eileen and my neice Lexie have joined the ranks of bloggers. The links are on the right sidebar as well. I was talking with a group of folks the other day about the value of weblogs in a family setting. We had been discussing corporate weblogs and whether or not they add any value (the jury is still out on that one) and had gone on to discuss political and so-called news blogs. I pointed out that the overwhelming majority of web logs are read by fewer than thirty people on any regular basis, but for those thirty people, the blogs were an important part of communication. For example, my mother really enjoys being able to read what is happening in our family. She and her siblings more than fifty years ago started what might be classified as a private, paper blog — called The Family Letter. Each sibling wrote a letter, added it to the envelope, and sent the batch of letters along to the next sibling, who removed their previous letter, added a new letter, and sent the collection along. This letter has been making the rounds for a Very Long Time. I would love to have copies of those early letters today, even though at the time they were about very every-day mundane things. Today the letter still circulates and the number of recipients has increased. It comes around to me about every three months. I make a copy of all the letters, take my last letter out, add a new letter, and send the envelope along to the next person. Perhaps someday these copies will be interesting to someone … in fact, I’m sure they’ll be interesting to some people.

Well, these blogs are the new Family Letter. We don’t have to wait for the envelope to come around — people add to the collective Family Letter at their own pace and in their own time. I like it. However, since these blogs are really nothing more than little magnetic pulses on a computer hard drive (and I do make a backup of all the blogs on my server every day at 1:00 a.m.), I need to do something to preserve them into the next generation or two of computer technology. Nina has some movie film that her great-grandfather took in the 1920’s. The film has the sprockets running down the middle of the film. We’ve not found a projecter anywhere that can show the pictures. Consequently, unless some miracle happens, this bit of family history will be lost. I’ve found over the years that paper seems to be the only medium that lasts and crosses many generations of technology. So, it’s about time to do some more programming and build an application that can take the weblog postings and the associated images and print them on paper. That way they can be put into a book or a binder and be a good backup to the computer. I’d sure hate to loose all this good stuff!