"This was the annual trek to the SEG Convention. It was the third year I have been with GDC, and the third and last year in their 25 years of existence GDC has had a booth at the SEG. The reason is that on Monday they announced to the world that the name GDC (Geophysical Development Corporation) is being retired, and the new name of the company is Geokinetics Processing and Interpretation.
Sunday morning I got up and drove to Vidor. I arrived at the Wright's at about 10:40 AM, and Music and the Spoken Word was on. Jared, Colby, and Taylor arrived at about 10:55 AM to watch conference on Grandpa and Grandma Wright's satellite television. It was a good session of conference. I have notes if anyone is interested and doesn't have access to an Ensign or the Internet. After conference I took off for the four and a half hour drive to New Orleans. Of course, I missed the afternoon session of conference, and have not taken a chance to watch it yet. Andrea said it was the best session this year. All four of the sessions I went to were wonderful, and so I'm not sure how this session could be better. Hopefully I will find time to find out this next week.
I arrived in New Orleans at 5:30 PM, checked into my room at the Doubletree Hotel, changed into my suit, and walked over to the convention center. The Ice Breaker was on the exhibition floor, and this was quite a ways down the convention center. This was my first year to pre-register and to have my badge mailed to me. So I just walked right past all of the lines and made my way over to the GDC booth. It is always good to see friends at the SEG. A lot of these folks are people I see each year at the convention, and some of them are folks I haven't seen for many years. I ate a little bit at some of the food stands. I went to the other side of the Exhibition Floor to see the Grant turned Geokinetics, Trace, Quantum, and Grant booth. I was very impressed with the layout of the booth, and the acquisition message being presented. The fact each of these companies had to give up their name and became part of Geokinetics was the reason GDC was renamed Geokinetics Processing and Interpretation. After the floor was closed, I caught the bus back to the hotel, went up to my room and worked on catching up Thoughtlets.
Each morning I got up about 6:45, and after getting ready worked on stuff until it was time to go to the Convention Center. Monday started at 9:00 in La Nouvelle Orleans Ballroom, where there was a discussion on the future of the oil and gas industry with representatives from Chevron-Texaco, Shell, and BP. It was an interesting turn of discussion. These are all big picture people, and they are obviously thinking about alternative sources of energy and all of the ramifications. The lady from BP is in charge of alternative energy, so I asked if BP is doing anything with Solar Chimneys. Her response was she has read an article about them. I did not follow-up this on this question, especially since they were anonymously submitted on 3"x5" cards. I went by the GDC booth, and Mike asked me to go back to the hotel and to get my PC to use for demonstrations. I caught the bus back, and ended up walking back to the Convention Center carrying the computer. There was a University of Utah luncheon at the Marriott, which I was invited to and attended on the way back. It was Jerry Schuester's consortium report. They did a very good job, and it makes sense to me for Geokinetics Processing and Interpretation to sponsor their research. I reported the same to Mike Dunn and Lee Bell, and it will be interesting to see if they follow up. Peter Duncan was at the luncheon, and sat by me. It was nice to catch up with Peter, as it always is.
I had booth duty from 1:30-6:30 PM. There were not very many people on the floor, and it was a very quiet convention. The three of us, Cheryl, Luis, and myself, spent most of the time talking to each other. Oh well! Cheryl and Luis took off about 4:00 to take clients to the Geokinetics party. I waited until Mike Dunn came and said to shut down the booth and go to the party. I took my computer back to the hotel, and then walked down St. Peters to Lafayette, where the party was. It was on the second floor of a bar called Ernst Cafe. Needless to say, spending Family Home Evening in a bar is not one of my favorite activities. I talked to several people. The husband of the assistant to the President of Geokinetics North America works for Landmark Graphics. We talked quite a while. Dave Johnson found me, pulled me aside, and we talked for a while. He was walking past the BGP (Chinese Bureau of Geophysical Prospecting) booth, and Mr. Guo saw Dave and said hello. He said, you are the President of that little processing company in Houston called GDC. Dave said, 'Geokinetics is the now the third largest land seismic acquisition company in the world after BGP and Western Geophysical. The little processing company is now called Geokinetics Processing and Interpretation. Is BGP for sale?' Dave said they went off and chatted among themselves. I told Dave things I had heard. First, that Geokinetics as a name doesn't mean anything. Second, that Geokinetics is hard to find among all of the other Geo-companies. Third, I felt the accountants at Grant are a little aggressive. Dave asked what I meant by this. I said, well, they gave us cards with phone numbers for everyone attending the show, and the acquisition companies were in black while Geokinetics Processing and Interpretation was in red. Dave laughed with me, even though this is about the first month since I've worked for GDC that they have made a profit. I stayed for an hour, then excused myself and went back to my hotel room to work on Thoughtlets and to start the interactive course on "Science and Religion" out of John Hopkin's University. It is really good, and it is obvious this is something I want to do much more of in the coming years.
Tuesday morning I had booth duty. Again it was very slow. There was an interesting guy who came by who spent his career working for Exxon using electrical measurements onshore to identify gas chimney halos. I think this is quite exciting stuff. Time will tell if there is ever time to do something like this. Mike bought me a hamburger for lunch. It tasted good, since I didn't eat any breakfast except to drink some water. In the afternoon I went to listen to three talks. The first was by a student of Rob Stewart at the University of Calgary. She talked about using music to listen to and for auditory interpretation. It was very close to the sound patent we applied for at Continuum Resources, and which was never completed. There was some work at NASA referenced (http://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/research/sonification/sonification.html), which is interesting. Two papers later, Les Denham gave a paper with himself and Dave Johnson listed as the authors. It was good, and GDC got some feedback from it right after we got back to the office. There were other papers, and I spent more time at the booth. There was an Englishman named Robert Winsloe that came by the booth from a company named "digital e@rth." They are building the web interface for the oil industry I have talked about for years. He was asking for data in Northern Alaska, and I introduced him to Alf Klaviness via my cell phone. Robert later brought by his colleague, John Redfern, and we discussed how my indexing work (the Knowledge BackboneSM, the Infinite GridSM, the TimedexSM, and the Data Type) could be of benefit to their company. It will be interesting to see if anything comes of this. I also visited several booths on Tuesday afternoon.
One of the reasons I drove to New Orleans was to take my guitar. Peter Duncan said he would call if they got together to play. He didn't call. Oh well! I never did play the guitar on this trip. Just after I finished one of the Science and Religion lectures Matt called. It was good to hear from him. I miss calling the kids, and I still think it is a good idea to let those who want a relationship to make some effort, so it is not just Dad calling every week. Matt called to tell me he was using a book Mom donated to the SUU library about Marcus Arilius for a history assignment he needed to do. He confirmed that he is thinking about volunteering to go to Iraq for 18 months starting in January. We had a good and frank discussion about this. Matt, I feel comfortable you will make a good choice for him in this area. I hope you will also make good choices relative to preparation for and serving a mission.
Wednesday morning I went to Hector and Jennifer's papers. Fred was there, supporting his students. The papers were not well attended, and they were very good presentations. Especially regarding Geokinetics Processing and Interpretation TILESTM. Turns out the Zhou transform needs empirical or measured data to quantitatively predict fizz or commercial gas. Now I just need to figure out how to best get this message out to the industry, since there were not very many people at the paper. I went from these two talks to a talk by one of Peter Duncan's colleagues, who was talking about using passive and emissive tomography to monitor a frac job in the Barnett Shale. The results are very low frequency, and because the energy is so low, there is not very much dynamic range to the answers. However, the results compare with theory, and this is obviously something with a potential future. No wonder Peter was able to raise $7 million in his second round of funding.
As the questions were being asked, there was a phone call from Carolina Cruez-Niera. She was at the front desk with her fiancee, Dirk, and they wanted $300 for a one-day pass to the show. She wanted some help. I went by the booth and picked up John Gillooley. John, Carolina, and Dirk went to sit down and talk about it, and I was able to get an exhibitor's $80 pass for each of them. I would have put it on my expenses, and they went ahead and paid the $80 each plus the cost of the Friday workshops. I spent the next couple of hours with Dirk and Carolina showing them around the floor and introducing them to key people at dGB (Open d-Tect, the open source seismic interpretation system), Transform (a new seismic interpretation system start-up out of Denver Colorado headed by Rhett Bridges), and S2S (Stewart Jackson of Continuum Resources who is working with Tom Lassiter on an on-line rental seismic interpretation system). They were genuinely impressed with the show and with the contacts I helped them make.
I had booth duty in the afternoon. Again, it was very slow. We finally got ready to shutdown at 5:00. Sonny Landrum, the Geokinetics Processing and Interpretation sales manager, encouraged me to go over to the Western booth and to get some nerf footballs for the grandkids. I did, and I left them on the table at the booth while I went to look for a bag to put them in. Just as I got back a Pemex employee picked up one of the footballs and walked off with it. Sonny just shrugged his shoulders. Then Lee Bell came by and we were laughing about it. I told them the story about God offering commandments to Mexicans, Blacks, French, and Jews. Lee proceeded to tell the story about the Cardinal that went into the Pope with great news and bad news: i.e. Jesus returned, but it was to Salt Lake City.
At 7:30 I met Dirk and Carolina at their hotel, the Monteleone, in the French Quarter and we went to dinner. They had a paper tablecloth, which was covered with notes by the time we left dinner. Dirk did not understand the seismic process, and so I went through an introduction to seismology lecture with him. We also talked more about how LITE (0640.html) could take advantage of the oil and gas market. Carolina asked me to be on the LITE Technical Board. I told her Dr. Gary Kingsland had recommended me for the position she holds, and that I could not have done what she has been able to do with the position. I had shrimp etouffee. Carolina insisted they pick up the tab. It was a nice evening, and definitely my highlight for the 2006 New Orleans SEG Convention.
Thursday morning I slept in until about 7:00. Got up and packed. Got my car, and drove to Vidor. Melanie did not answer when I called. So I just went out to the house. We had a nice visit, and I let Colby use my camera to take some videos. He got upset when I would not play computer games with him, and told him I do not like computer games. Oh well! We went for a walk, and Taylor and Colby had a race. It was a nice visit. I stopped at Wrights and got dinner for Andrea and I. She had cooked roast beef, potatoes, and carrots. We ended up saving this until Sunday.
Friday morning was catching up with stuff at the office, doing my expenses, etc. Jeremy Fu was at the office, following the SEG, and we had a meeting with Mike and Jeremy got set up in an office, where he will sit for the next week. There was a lunch party at Geokinetics West for everyone at Geokinetics Processing and Interpretation. It started at 12:30. I got there about 1:00. The Grant office is right in back, on the freeway side, of the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza at I-10 and Highway 6. I stayed there for about an hour, and did my best to be social. I introduced myself to Dick Miles, President of Geokinetics International and told him "I know who you are." He responded, "I know who you are, too." I took my car to the Saturn dealership to be serviced, and Andrea came and picked me up. We went to see the movie "Flyboys." I enjoyed it a lot. I especially got a kick out of the fact Larry Ellison's son was one of the stars. Larry Ellison is the founder of Oracle, the giant database company that grew up the same time as Landmark, and which is a key component of Landmark's OpenWorks. There are lots of Larry Ellison stories. One was how his neighbors complained about something. So he would buzz the house with his private airplane. Maybe this is why his son can claim to have been flying since he was 13. Another story was that he was driving too fast on the California coast highway and the police attempted to pull him over. He just kept going, drove to his office building, went to the top floor of the parking garage, locked the car doors, and refused to get out until his lawyer arrived. And these are the mild stories. Greg and Robyn Branning were at the movie. We had a nice chat with them after the movie. Then we went hope to watch the only debate by the four candidates for Governor of Texas. Kinky Friedman is a buffoon. I don't trust the current governor. The democratic candidate takes stands I do not agree with. And Carol Strayhorn does not come across as honest. Oh well. One of them will win the election.
Saturday morning I made some progress hacking at the leaves and trees in the back yard. Allergies were in full swing, and so I didn't stay outside very long. One of my primary class member, Cody McInroe, was baptized at 4:00. I thought it was 4:30, and so I got there after the baptism. Oh well! I was able to talk to his Mom and Dad and him. I love these kids. In the evening, Andrea and I went to the Greek Festival. She has wanted to do this for several years. We watched the dancing, and went to a lecture in the cathedral. One interesting comment was that Orthodox hymns do not have a sense of time. When singing hymns the participants are in heaven and outside of time. They also pointed out the earth is a square, heaven is a circle, and earth and heaven come together as a square with a half circle on top of the square, which is how Orthodox cathedrals are built. The gyros and shiskabobs, and deserts were very good. When we got home there was another upsetting e-mail. Oh well! These too will pass.
My Primary lesson for Sunday lesson was about the parable of the wise man who built his house on a rock and the foolish man man who built his house on the sand. I felt like it was a very appropriate lesson for stuff going on in the background. It was a quiet afternoon. Sara Ellyn called to say Josh is on Iron Chef tonight. It was nice to hear from her. We went to a Relief Society fireside about Soloman's Temple. It was quite interesting. We ended up leaving as the questions and answers started in order to make it back to the house to watch Iron Chef. I've never seen this program before, and doubt if I would watch it regularly. However, it was fun to see someone we have met and who Sara Ellyn cares for on national television. Josh was not shown that much, as he was one of three challenger cooks. The times he was shown, he was doing interesting things. Obviously has a talent and an interest in cooking. I wonder if he will ever feel trapped like I sometimes feel working for Geokinetics Processing and Interpretation?"