cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Diane Cluff, and Maxine Shirts.
"Ben and Sarah and Ethan, we received your package. Matt was jumping up and down and really excited. I wished I would have had the camera on to catch the moment. Andrea and I love the picture of the three of you.
Before I write about mapping spread-sheets, I want to pass on a couple of stories that were sent. On the 7th of January, Audrey sent the following with the header: `I really liked this story and message about the power of love. I thought that you would like it, so here it is. It made me cry...'
Thanks Audrey. It made me cry too. And I sing a prayer for
those I love every night. Hopefully it will make it through the
smut and pollution of these `enlightened times.' Whatever the
case, I am comfortable with where I lay my head, similar to in
the following story, sent to me by my friend Steve Joseph:
Today's thoughtlet started on the streets of Ipswich, England
back in 1971. For what it is worth, many of those we baptized
came from tracting. In case some of you are not acquainted
with tracting, it was where we went from door to door to ask
people if we could tell them about the restoration of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ, modern day prophets, and new scriptures
supporting the bible. Most doors were quietly shut in our
faces. Some were slammed. Once, in Cantebury I had a man go
after me with a pitchfork, telling me to get off of his
property. Once in Norwich, I was physically thrown out of the
office when I asked permission to put up a street board in
front of his shop. Needless to say, tracting is not the
favorite activity of most missionaries.
I had two years of college behind me, and had spent the summer of 1970 working at Pan American (later Amoco and now BP). Since geophysicists had been the number two users of digital computing since the Geophysical Analysis Group at MIT (the U.S. Defence Department was number one) in the late 1940's, I was acquainted with computers and their capabilities. I had also spent summers at New Mexico State University with the J.E.S.S.I. Program (Junior Engineers And Scientists Summer Institute, see ../9703.html), and at Oregon State University (../9715.html). I had spent hours building tables of seismic interpretation picks (shotpoint location vs travel time to various horizons) and having them typed onto punch cards for mapping and digital display. Today, this would all be done with spreadsheets.
In Ipswitch, we lived in the apartment on Christchurch Street. Missionaries had been in the apartment for several years. There were many little books with notes about all of the tracting that had been done by various missionary companions. As I recall, I figured missionaries knocked on every door in Ipswitch every two years. They reminded me of the sheets of seismic interpretation picks I had filled out for the geophysicists I worked with at Pan American. So, starting back then I began to imagine what we now know as a portable computer, or a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). I could see this would be a way in which missionaries could make a couple of notes about the response of people at the door, simply to keep track of what was learned on each of the streets we tracted, so the next time we wouldn't come to each door cold. Of course, with all of the house selling and buying now, this is probably somewhat of an irrelevant idea. However, the technology is certainly available to keep track of who has sold and purchased which house on various streets, which could prove to be useful information for missionaries.
When Bill Bavinger (../9803.html) first taught me about Select Phone, I remember thinking about how it related directly to those days in Ipswich. The web pages we built for a test of mapping spread-sheets is still on my web site (see http://www.walden3d.com/SIC). Bill did a sort of all of the companies in the United States with SIC code 15. SIC stands for Standard Industrial Code, and is the basis for taxing by the U.S. Government. It is also how the yellow pages are organized. SIC code 15 defines businesses who do building construction - general contractors and operative builders. Select Phone sells a set of CD's, updated quarterly, which have all public phones in the United States listed. This includes three levels of SIC codes, and, of course, residential phones. For each phone, there is also a longitude, latitude, which is suppose to be plus or minus 5 meters from where the phone jack is located. In the maps referenced above, which have a time stamp of 29 August 1996 on them, red shows the number of businesses for IG5 (Infinite Grid(SM) level 5, 7.5 minutes longitude x 3.75 minutes latitude). Anything red highlights grid cells with between 400 and 1,400 businesses per grid cell. The input data was simply a large spread-sheet derived from the Select Phone CD's. Mapping spread-sheets was done using one of my Landmark licenses down at Interactive Interpretation & Training. I see tremendous use for this technology, say by a power company that wants to take advantage of decentralization of electricity providing in Texas.
As with most of my work, and specifically with regards to all of the effort done on the Infinite Grid(SM) over the last year (see ../0039.html, ../0042.html, ../0048.html, ../0101.html, ../0103.html, ../0106.html, ../0108.html, ../0113.html, ../0120.html, ../0126.html, ../0128.html, ../0136.html, ../0143.html, ../0144.html, ../0146.html, and ../0151.html), I have had in my mind it could be very useful for building up the Kingdom of God on Earth. This, of course, goes back to those days when walking the streets in Ipswich, Suffock, England. So yesterday, since I needed to get ready for ward council committee ths morning in my calling as Ward Activities Committee Chairman, I decided to do a demonstration. We have a new Katy Stake Directory for 2002. I typed the new list for Nottingham Country Ward members into a spread-sheet. Then I got out my Select Phone CD's and extracted the longitudes and latitudes for each member's house. It is interesting who has unlisted phone numbers in the ward. For those individuals, I simply got the longitude and latitude of neighbors and then interpolated or extrapolated to get the location of their house. Then I got out my 1993 DeLorme Street Atlas of the US and took a screen capture of the ward. It is really out of date, not even showing Kingsland Boulevard going through to Barker Cypress and missing many of the new subdivisions to the east. However, using SpotFire, I was able to build a map with the location of all members of the ward shown on it by mapping spread-sheet longitudes and latitudes.
Given this basis, I can now quickly create maps of the ward
for all kinds of uses. For instance, say the Elders Quorum
President wants a map of his Home Teachers homes, and where
the families they home teach live, then I simply put another
column in the spread-sheet, put a 1 for home teaching companions
and a 2 for the families they home teach. And them by mapping
spread-sheets, there is a map that shows up. As an introduction
to the idea, I used the process to show where the Dinner Group
Hosts lived, and then to select those families who live nearest
to them to attend the pot-luck dinner at their house. Then I
made copies of the maps and gave them to the hosts today. It
will be interesting to me to see if it takes another 30 years
for this to go the the next stage of usability (I was walking
the streets of Ipswich over 30 years ago).
In regards to this week, it was too quiet. I did more updating on my resume. It is amazing to me, looking back at the last time I touched this, to realize the deep impact and total loss of self accompanying the divorce. Oh well! We get back up and do as good as we know how to. I spent some time putting together a proposal for funding Dynamic to go to NAPE (the North American Prospect Exposition) the 31st of January and the 1st of February (see http://www.walden3d.com/dynamic/nape). I have been unsuccessful as of yet to raise any money. I went to the GSH lunch on Tuesday and talked to Ron Abshire, a Landmark salesman now at Alliant Technologies, about helping me raise the money. I called and went by several others folks offices to talk about it. Wednesday morning I gave an hour presentation across the web to Steve Rutherford at Anadarko. At 1:00 I met Chuck Edwards at Hobby Airport, and he took me to Dallas to meet with his client Lawrence Technologies. I was back at the house about 8:30 Wednesday night. Ben and Sarah, I considered dropping in on you guys to listen to Ethan. I didn't because of my insecurities and because I had an important lunch with Bob Peebler, now at Energy Virtual Partners (EVP) on Thursday. Both the meeting in Dallas and the lunch went well. I hope to close a retainer with the Dallas folks this week. And there will not be an opportunity to do any work with EVP until at least February.
Friday morning Andrea and I went to the temple. It was nice to be in the safety and security and peace of the temple. The afternoon was spent cleaning up a 3 foot pile of papers in my office. In the evening Andrea and I went to Dave and Rachele William's for the annual High Priest's White Elephant gift exchange. It was as fun as usual. Quiet, reserved, seminary teacher Becky Schultz sat next to me. She described this lovely gift she got last year at the same party, which she was so pleased with because it has her initials on the bottom. It has these sticks that move in and out as you rotate another stick around. My Mom and sister will recall what it is, because on the bottom it says `B.S. Grinder,' and B.S. does not stand for Becky Schultz. What a wonderful High Priest Quorum we have. It will be hard to move from Houston and to leave this group.
Saturday morning I went out to Peckham Park in Katy with Matt to watch him fish with the scouts. It was cold, and I left for choir practice before he caught anything. I was working on the PC upstairs mapping spread-sheets when he came home with 3 8"-12" rainbow trout. His first fish. Needless to say, I ended up cleaning them. He did help. Andrea cooked them for lunch, and they were very good. Made me homesick. I worked on the maps and creating the ward calendar for the next two months until about midnight. Rachel stayed out late to watch a movie. Rachel, it is wonderful how you have the respect, or is it self- confidence, to call and tell us your plans and then to come in and tell us when you get home. Thanks.
Ward Council was at 8:15 this morning, choir practice at 10:30, and Matt was one of the youth speakers in Sacrament meeting at 11:00. Matt, you do a wonderful job in speaking at church. Gospel Doctrine was about the Abraham manuscripts. Marian Pickerd is the teacher and asked me to talk about the Book of Abraham. I've written too much again, and so I'll save this story for another time. Those of you who are Egyptologists will really enjoy this bit of history when I get around to writing it out. We had Lesson 2 from the writings of Harold B. Lee in Priesthood meeting. I was asked to teach next week about receiving the blessings of the temple (0204.html). This afternoon I watched the last part of `True Grit' with John Wayne and Glen Campbell. Brought to mind when the centennial of the joining of the transcontinental railroad was celebrated at Promontory Point. Uncle Bill Krueger was in charge of this for the U.S. Parks Service, and I was invited to come up and stay with them in Brigham City and to attend. John Wayne and Glen Campbell were two of the guests at this event. Then this evening after Family Home Evening we watched Enterprise, the new Star Trek show. Matt and I have had a couple of interesting discussions. He doesn't have a 3-D accelerator card for the PC upstairs, and so he can't play his new game except on the PC I have borrowed from SpotFire. It reminds me of the scene in the church movie `Man's Search For Happiness' where the couple is at the carnival, striving to win a prize, then it gets dropped and broken, and the narration points out true happiness is never found in worldy things. Maybe someday I will have enough data organized I can prove this to all of you. In the meantime, I hope you are successful in whatever you are pursuing, including mapping spread-sheets."