"Monday morning John Gillooley and I checked out of the Celebrity International Hotel. Quite possibly this will be the last time I stay at that hotel, specifically because of the Internet problems that plagued me the first week. We went to Ji Dong Oilfield for our presentation of the results of the processing and interpretation work we did. The meetings seemed to go well. Mr. Li of Geo gave the presentation, except for Scott Burns portion. Scott's work was very well received by the Chinese. We were definitely third fiddle. They had some kind of a Communist Party meeting in the main conference room and we were delegated to stuffing 25 folks in a room which comfortably seats 12. Oh well! We could tell when someone was falling asleep.
There were no banquets. I assume this is because we were so late in making the deliveries. They wanted the results about a month before we this trip. Oh well! After Mr. Xie gave us a lecture about how to go forward, I took the opportunity and gave him and his colleagues a lecture on how the world is flat, at least in information terms, based on the popular book by the same title, which I have only read reviews about. It took us 5 months to do processing which should have taken 3 months. The two hurricanes were part of our excuse. The fact that the key processor quit and left the job hanging was an important factor in the delay. I went through all of the reasons why we did not have good communication, both on GDC's part, and on the part of the Ji Dong Oilfield. My lecture certainly made points with John Gillooley, and I think Mr. Xie heard what I was attempting to say. We stayed at the Ji Dong Oilfield Hotel in Tanjun City Monday night.
One surprising thing was that in the Hotel elevator, Jialin looked at my yellow tie and said, `Do you want to know the translation of this?' I said I had asked several folks, and no one could give me the translation. He explained it is very old Chinese, and many can not read this script. Then he proceeded to translate my tie as saying:
No wonder I like that yellow tie so much. And I thought it was just because it was yellow, like the yellow tie Sara Ellyn got me at Stonehenge. It is interesting how much one can learn in an elevator in a little town, of several million people, near the Bohai Bay, in northeast China. And this is in one of the nicest elevators in town, an elevator where one was not sure if it would make it to the third floor or not. Scott Burns was so upset about the mold in the bathtub that he refused to shower or bathe. I guess there are advantages to having grown up on a farm with a meat packing byproducts plant in the center of the the farm. The biggest problem we faced, and to some degree still face (../0607.html), is where the location of the existing wells are. I understand the Chinese paranoia about U.S. folks working on their oil field, and the desire to keep everything secret. However, the coordinate transformation they did on the well locations has become a big stumbling block as we attempt to tell them where to drill new wells. Oh well! Life is full of trade-offs. And we can not tell the Chinese what to paranoid about, any more than they can tell us. For GDC, the bottom line is that the meetings seemed to go very good, despite our being so late on the delivery of the processed seismic data. So Tuesday, after spending all day trying to tie down the location of the wells in the 3-D seismic survey we have been working on, we made the 2 hour drive back to Beijing.
When we got back we went to the Hilton, as per Dave Johnson's instructions, so we could have a room where I could be in e-mail contact. There were no regular rooms available, and there were none of the business rooms I've stayed in before on floors 26 and above. However there was a Hilton luxury room available for each of us, on about the 9th and 10th floors. They were expensive, we were tired, and so John and I said OK. I was blown away by the room! The only time I remember staying in such a nice room was once when I stayed at the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake, before the church took it back over. And even that was mild compared to this room. I took 5 photos of the room, and they are posted at http://www.walden3d.com/photos/GDC/051130_Hilton. The first shows my reflection in the mirror above the bathtub, looking into the bathroom. The second shows the room through the hallway past the bathroom. The third shows the big couch, glass desk, and large plasma TV. The forth and fifth show the giant bed from a couple of angles. And the really bad news is that Andrea left for Houston on Saturday. Oh well!
I told them I wanted to be moved into a cheaper room as soon as it became available. I changed rooms on Thursday, so I was in the Hilton luxury room Tuesday and Wednesday. It was easy for me to mentally jump from this room to the 3-D housing Ray and I are talking about putting in at Red Cove. In fact, I went through the tutorials and down loaded the evaluation version of the software Sketch-Up, which John Winston told me about just before we left (0550.html) when I was staying in this room.
It was very enjoyable traveling with John Gillooley. John is a good man. He had a lot of good insights, and we played off of each other quite well. I remember one evening he mentioned how blessed he is to carry the name John Fullon Gillooley, Jr., and especially the Jr. He is very proud of his Dad and all the things his Dad has done in the military service. It was fun to learn about his brothers and some of the things they do to stay close. I can imagine you kids doing similar things, and I do hope one of you will become the leader that builds on the bonds Andrea and I attempted to forge as we were raising the 10 of you.
John and I played off of each other well in our discussions with Geo. I remember the big meeting we had on Friday, the day before John and I returned to the states. During the meeting, when the time was appropriate, I told Jialin a story, and had him translate it for his brother and for Mr. Li. John wasn't sure where I was going with this, and he acted like it was planned out, and at the punch line he got it, and took it from there to where we were trying to lead the Geo folks. The story was about the financial closing meeting for the initial funding of Landmark Graphics.
John Bayless had come down from Dallas for this meeting in Ed Roger's office. Just before the meeting Bob Limbaugh, Andy Hildebrand, and John Mouton had informed me that they had decided I was not going to be on the Board of Directors of Landmark Graphics. I was angry, since I had been working on this for six years, had hired Bob, and had been the driving force on getting Control Data Corporation's investment company, Elf Aquiaitine's investment company, the DLJ Sprout Group, and Sevin-Rosen-Bayless to commit to invest. A lot of my idealism melted in these few minutes, i.e. form a corporation where everyone has one vote, etc. Bayless had brought one of his investors down with him, an old man, probably about 85 years old. He asked to talk to the four of us. He told us that he had been involved in starting companies his entire life, and the one thing that was common with all of the companies was that the founders ended up not liking each other. He told us he thought it was because of the emotions involved in starting up a company, and the intensity of effort that went into this process. He advised us to look past the emotions of the moment, and to get on with the process of building a company. It calmed me down, a little, and it was always a thorn in my side that my "partners" all turned against me and kicked me off of the Board of Directors of Landmark Graphics right at the beginning, and made sure I never had the opportunity to demonstrate how I could contribute. As a side note to what I told the Geo folks, this was when I realized that Landmark Graphics was not the economic and demographic basis of a social experiment, the formation of a new community, a prototype of what communities would be like in the 21st century. Anyway, I closed off my story with the Chinese, explaining how strong the emotions had been during the previous two weeks, and how it was my fear that as founders of AVO seismic processing in China, this was process was going to repeat itself.
Yan Jiafeng understood exactly what I was saying. I think his younger brother Jialin was too busy translating to catch how it related to some of the interactions which had happened earlier during the week. Jiafeng turned to me and said in broken English, `Roice, you will always be a founder of the work GDC and GEO do together in China, and we will always like you and be your friend.' John picked up the ball and continued covering the things we need to fix if we are going to work closely together.
On Thursday morning I had taken John to meet Jim Higbee, GDC's lawyer in Beijing, and a member of the church I met at the Beijing Branch. He took us to lunch, and suggested we give a talk at the local SPE Luncheon Group. When I told Jialin, he got very angry and told me I was just like Frank, and was going behind his back. Thursday afternoon, I went with Jiafeng, Jialin, and Madam Guo, the Geo accountant and office manager, to meet with the government officials who were responsible for transferring the money from Geo to GDC. They had Madam Guo in tears the day before. However, they treated me with kindness, answered all of my questions, and I felt like we were tieing down some of the loose ends we had been working on. As we left Jiafeng told me I was probably the first "big nose" to ever be in that government building. I took a photo of us, which I include below to prove I was in this building.
I just did a search, and looked over the Thoughtlet that summarized when I took Ben and Brian to China with me (../0303.html), and it looks like I have not told one Mr. Yan's best stories. He very carefully explained to Ben and Brian why Westerner's have big noses. The Chinese recognize Westerners do not dress warm enough, and we wear open coats with only a thin tie around our neck. So we are always getting sick. And when we get sick we always blow our nose with a handkerchief, and as as we do this we pull on our nose, and it gets bigger and bigger. So instead of round-eyes, Chinese actually call us big noses.
There are probably a dozen other things that happened this week, which make sense to write about. But like the story above, from when Ben and Brian went to China with me, I will remember and write them down in some future thoughtlet, when and if I remember. After all, for the few who do read these regularly, I don't want to force you to read to 2 million words too soon.
I did send a couple of e-mails to Rick Zimmerman. He told me about his new blackberry, and wanted me to send him updates on how the trip went. The one I have a copy of said:
I have not heard anything from Rick since I got back China, several weeks ago now. I do not understand, and am very disappointed. Oh well! Like Ajay Kalsey and John Benard and Jude Amaefule, I guess my role is to be a friend, even when they simply take and never give back nor follow-up on what they say or promise they will do, and not to take it personally. Frustrating, and it is probably a function of how they treat other folks they know and are involved with. It certainly drives Andrea crazy that these folks make grand promises, or imply grand opportunities, as an optimist I paint a picture of what will happen, and nothing ever happens. Oh well! Oh well! Oh well!
One thing that happened this week in China was that each night after dinner I worked with Sketch-Up for hours and hours. On Friday night, I stayed up all night finishing a topographic model for Red Cove (../0604.html). One of the things I clearly remember about that night was the total garbage there is on late night TV. After one reasonable movie, another came on, which I was not really paying attention to. I don't know the name of the movie, and I do know that within the first five minutes a popular high school football star had a Bill Clinton experience, got mad at the girl, broke her neck, had the police come, pulled one policeman's gun and killed the other policeman, and was told by the first to go home and get ready for the next football game. Wow! If kids fill their mind full of this kind of stuff, there will be no room for spiritual things. So I changed channels to something called `Angels in America.' They were talking about the angel Moroni and the angel Mormon, and so I watched the whole hour. It was about a return missionary who got married in the temple, realized he was gay, stripped naked and threw his garments into the sea to prove to his boyfriend he was seriously "in love," and then went through all of the emotions of the wife left, his coming back, people getting AIDS, etc. Somebody was doing a lot of self-justification in that show. I fear we are just going to see more and more of this kind of stuff, and especially as more folks stay in a Hilton luxury room. I find this prospect extremely scary relative to the spiritual safety of you kids, and of your kids, my Grandkids. And the only thing I know to do about it is to warn you in these Thoughtlets.
John and I left on Saturday morning, and got back Saturday evening. Andrea and I went to see "Walk the Line," a movie about Johnny Cash that evening. The next morning I taught Primary, and it was good to be back with my kids after missing them for one Sunday. It was Audrey's 25th birthday, and I called and sang `Happy Birthday' to her answering machine. When we talked later, I think she did like it. A highlight on my return was the fact there was egg nog in the refrigerator. In some ways it made me feel like I was back in the Hilton luxury room."