September 19, 1996
Dear Everyone:
Well, I’m back from
my trip to beautiful downtown “Boise”.
Heck of a business trip.
Free food all day.
Free drinks nearly every night.
How can they expect people to work under those conditions?
I spent the week
(when we weren’t eating and drinking, which is called “networking”)
learning about two new software products.
These will be the Windows versions of
Versatile and
Retention!.
They are, to put it mildly, completely different species from the
DOS versions we’re using now.
The first isn’t due to ship for about a month and we won’t be
converting before the end of the year, so nuff said for now.
Speaking of
“networking”, there are quite few
Versatile Users out there in the great state of
Texas.
Texans have to be the friendliest people in the world.
They’ll be your friend whether you want them to or not.
I also met people from
Wisconsin,
Long Island, the
American Heart
Association and the
General Conference of Seventh Day Adventists.
Just goes to show,
Versatile can be very “versatile”.
In other news...
“Jeannie” bought a
new desk for her office last weekend.
I should say, “Jeannie”
finally bought a new desk, since the old one was never a desk to
begin with and is hopelessly warped now.
“Jeannie” brought me along, in a reversal of our usual roles of
Shopper and Personal Shopping Advisor, to pick out a desk the “we” could
assemble. In other words,
she wasn’t going to buy it unless I was sure I could put it together.
Usually, when “we”
assemble something, “Jeannie” holds the cat in her lap while I do the
more complex work. This time
the cats can wait outside while we
both do the assembly.
This desk has a U-shaped arrangement, with three desktop areas,
multiple drawers, a keyboard shelf and a hutch.
It comes in two boxes. “Jeannie’s”
terrific with a screwdriver, as long as someone else is there to
interpret the instructions.
Movies...
Before we went
desk-shopping, we went to see
Fly
Away Home. In a word,
utterly charming and completely miss-able.
13-year-old Amy has just lost her mother in an accident and now
has to live in the wilds of eastern
Canada with a father she hasn’t seen
in 10 years. Dad is an
eccentric artist who likes living in the back of beyond because he can
try out his various gliders.
He can fly OK (sort of), but he can’t land to save his life, or his
knees. Think, “Jeff Daniels,
human Gooney Bird”.
Not much bonding
goes on until Amy rescues a nest full of goose eggs, orphaned by an
environmentally incorrect developer.
When the goslings hatch, the first thing they see is Amy, so
naturally they think she’s, well,
Mother Goose.
Lots of cute scenes of goslings in the bathtub, goslings
following Amy, goslings growing up.
Trouble is, when they reach adulthood, instinct tells them to
migrate and they don’t know the way south.
That’s when Dad
hatches* an idea to have Amy lead the geese in an
Ultra-Light Flier to
show them the right route.
Do you have any idea what one of those things
cost?
Nevertheless, Amy is soon teaching her birds to follow the flier.
Of course, there are a few quasi-villains along the way, like a
local bureaucrat who insists that the geese have their wings clipped,
thus necessitating a daring daylight goose getaway.
Soon, Amy is braving
the elements, the Air Force, “sport” hunters, and every television
camera crew from Ontario to the
Carolinas.
Lots of terrific aerial photography.
The ending is a foregone conclusion.
Love, as always,
Pete
* Like the pun?
Worked all week on it.
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