| December 8, 1998 | Issue 16 | Orem, Utah |
What daddy does at work
In mid-September, some people at work met with Bookcraft to show them the product that we’ve been working on. “LivePublish” is a web publishing system for putting huge amounts of data on the internet.
Bookcraft had already started on a project to get all the titles from their CD-ROM product (which was built with our software) onto the internet. To do this, they were hiring consulting and products from a few different vendors. But when Bookcraft saw our stuff, they saw immediately that we had a superior offering.
The only problem was that they wanted their site to go live for October General Conference, and we weren’t planning on shipping LivePublish until the end of the year. We were, however, planning a pre-release version (a beta version) at the end of September, so they asked if they could go live with that.
We warned them of all the risks and said they wanted to go ahead anyway, so they paid us a bunch of money and we built their site for them.
It was a very tough two weeks, with many of our team members working well past midnight and on weekends. I helped with the HTML coding and graphic design.
So after a huge, burnout threatening effort, their site went live Thursday before conference. We had very little time to test it, but the server seemed pretty robust, so hopefully it will keep cranking away.
As a thanks for our efforts, Brad Pelo, former Folio president and current Bookcraft executive, invited us to Alan Ashton’s Sundance cabin for lunch. Alan Ashton, who got very rich by founding WordPerfect, is now a partial owner of Bookcraft, so he had lunch with us too, and expressed how excited he is about what we’ve done. Brad was also pleased.
The cabin itself is probably a multi-million dollar affair, and with the fall colors in the mountains it was a gorgeous setting. I was thinking that most of my house would fit within the front room. The ceilings were all highly vaulted with a rustic barrage of wooden cross-beams. There was a cloak room off the main entrance with room for probably 100 winter coats, and cubby holes filled with wool lined slippers for guests to trade their winter shoes for. The dining room easily seated the 20 of us from Folio/Open Market and the 15 or so people from Bookcraft. There was even the children’s table left over that was at a good kid height and surrounded by little leather armchairs.
Food was catered by Thanksgiving Point, and it was really good except for being sandwich-like. There was a wonderful fruit dip though, and some great cheesecake for dessert.
After Brad and Alan told us how wonderful we are, Henry Heilesen (from Folio) told them that they are wonderful for giving us the chance to be wonderful.
Pat McGowan, our VP of development commented that this was the best thanks he’s ever gotten from a customer.
Terriffic(?) two
Ethan turned two on October 19th. It was a mostly happy day for him, until we had his birthday party. We had just a few of the neighbors over with their kids that are about Ethan’s age, and he just couldn’t bear having any of those other kids touch something that could, in anyway, be considered his. Added to that was the frustration of learning to ride his new tricycle. He has a little car that he rides on, but it doesn’t have a steering mechanism, so he just kind of picks it up in order to turn. That strategy was much less effective with the tricycle, so he ended up on floor tangled in the handlebars a lot.
Pedals? Handlebars? What are those?
Things got better for him when we went out to Chuck E. Cheese’s for dinner. That place has got to have the worst pizza anywhere, but Ethan never eats there anyway. He gets too excited, playing in the ball pit, climbing on the coin-op rides, and generally running around. There is a little basketball shooting game there that he likes pretty well, and he amazed me at how well he could shoot sometimes. In one game, he probably shot something like 85%. In all, he earned enough tickets to get some little plastic cars from the prize counter.
Ethan goes for two
OK, what daddy really does at work
We had a couple of sports tournaments at work during October. One was a 3 on 3 basketball tournament, and the other was a 4 on 4 volleyball tournament. I recruited some guys to play in both tournaments, which were held in the sports court behind our building.
I felt confident enough in our volleyball team to name us “Domination”. We play volleyball, weather permitting, every Thursday afternoon at work. So after six and a half years of weekly volleyball, I’ve become a fairly decent player. I also knew who to get on my team. Kerry was on my team, as well as a couple of other engineers — Russ Barnett and Mike Wolfgramm. We went undefeated through the double-elimination bracket to become the volleyball champions.
My basketball team was a much humbler “Team A”. I might play basketball as well as volleyball, but there are a lot more really good basketball players than really good volleyball players. So in a relative sense, I’m just a mediocre basketball player. But my recruiting was again excellent. Mike Wolfgramm’s good genes helped a lot in volleyball, but his skills are more in basketball, so he was a good choice. Jeff Brown was our third man, who brought some height and great athleticism and jumping ability.
There were only four teams in the basketball tournament, which was also double-elimination. The games were scored by ones and twos up to 22.
In our first game, we won something like 22 to 6. That was owing largely to Jeff playing beyond his normal abilities. He was making three point shots (worth only 2 points in this situation) from way beyond the line, and throwing in these sky hooks from 15 feet out on the baseline. It was the kind of situation where we started to get ahead, so Jeff started taking some wild shots, and they just happened to all go in.
Our second game was against a team that had a lot of height, and some very physical play. At first they played man defense against us, but they switched to a zone after I drove around my defender for lay-ups three times in a row. I’m not usually such an offensive threat, but my defender was the tallest and slowest man on the court.
The game ended up being pretty close, but we managed to win by a few points.
At some point during the tournament, we started hearing a little grumbling from a couple of people. The tournament had been organized pretty quickly, so one guy that was on vacation, Wade, didn’t get on a team. Another guy who did get in the tournament, Wes, was a little disappointed that he didn’t have Wade on his team. Those two are the Stockton and Malone of the lunchtime games at work. I think they were figuring that they would clean up the tournament with a good third man. But more on that in a moment.
The second team we played made it out of the loser’s bracket to challenge us for the championship. But we had the advantage that they would have to beat us twice since we were still undefeated.
The game against them was very tough. Their captain, Russ Young, was having an amazing shooting game. He has this running hook shot that tends to be kind of inconsistent, but he was throwing everything through the hoop. Fortunately Mike’s jump-shot was on, and the game stayed close all the way down to the end. Jeff managed to block a shot and fast-break with the deflected ball for the winning basket, and we won 22 to 20. So my team took the basketball tournament, too.
After that tough game, Wade and Wes were waiting to challenge us, along with Rob Rene, who used to be on the BYU track team. Since we were pretty tired, we agreed on a game to only 11. But we were motivated, and legitimized our championship by winning that game too.
So, in spite of being a short, skinny, and aging guy, I felt like a jock for a while.
Love,
Copyright � Eric Smith, 1998, All rights reserved.