Family Reunion

We were up to the Park Valley area for a family reunion on the weekend. Elaine's father comes from a family of 8 and with their children and grandchildren there were about 100 at the reunion. There were a lot of Elaine's cousins there who had not seen each other for many years. The weather was perfect for an outdoor event as you can see in the picture and the area there is beautiful. Elaine's uncle's farmyard is landscaped like a park.

This is the start of a busy summer. We have 3 weddings to attend. One wedding this Saturday (Derek and Ariann), before we go to NB Camp for a week, and another wedding (Angela and Errol) the weekend after Camp. The third wedding (Matt and Christine) is in September.

And we have visitors in transit. Mary and Chris will arrive in Regina later this afternoon. And Steve, Darlene, and Lisa are on their way to arrive by Tuesday night. So we will have plenty to do with people to see and places to go.

My First Computer

My first computer was a Radio Shack MC10 Micro Color Computer that I bought in 1984. I believe I got it on sale for about $100. It had 4k of memory and for about another $30 I got the 16k memory expansion (seen plugged in the back.) It connected to a TV as a monitor. Programs were loaded from standard audio cassettes.

It was certainly not what would be termed "user friendly." The MC10 was rated by PC World as one of the 10 worst computer keyboards of all time.

I had a Texas Instruments 300 baud acoustic coupled modem (as seen in the picture above) which was connected by placing the telephone handset over the two "earpieces." I wrote a program to allow me to use this to connect by phone to computers at work to check the progress of large programs running overnight. This was painfully slow by today's standards with each screen of text taking several minutes to load.

Then in 1986 I got a Radio Shack Color Computer 3 which had 128k of memory and also used a TV as a monitor. I got it out and hooked it to our TV to try it out again as seen in the picture above. In the late 1980s Elaine actually used this computer for some word processing including our Christmas letters. It took some patience to use the simple program, and printing took about 5 minutes per page.

Our family played several games on this computer loaded from cartridges or audio cassette. One of the favourites was a classic arcade game called Pooyan that our kids still mention.

These computers had minimal capabilities compared to today's machines. But they did give our family their first introduction to computers.

House Progress

Elaine and I have been driving up to where Mike and Nicole's house is being built. There has been a lot of progress this week with the walls going up and the roof started. It as amazing each time to see how many more houses are being built. And the same record construction is happening on every side of the city.

Another Trach Examination

Today I had another examination by the Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) specialist including having my trach tube changed. My last trach change was 6 weeks ago in early May. When the ENT specialist examined me at the end of March (which I referred to as having a Microscope up my Nose) I had been having a lot of pain in my neck area around the trach. I am thankful that pain is completely gone. The ENT specialist says that area looks quite good now. The surgery that was scheduled has been cancelled.

The ENT specialist was also going to schedule me for a Cat Scan to examine the source of the pain in my neck area. So I studied up on the Cat Scan technology as shown in the diagram below. Since the pain is now gone it is probably just as well that examination is now cancelled.

Father's Day

Today is Father's Day and I am remembering my Father who passed away in 2003 at the age of 85. I have many great memories of my Father. He was as unique as unique can be.

My Mom always liked the pictures of my Dad in uniforms. The pictures here show him in the US Army in about 1939 and as a milkman in the 1960s. My Dad was a milk delivery man when I was a child. He was the last one to use a horse and wagon for milk delivery until they switched to using trucks. The picture was taken in July 1963 on the last day that the horse was used for milk delivery.

My Father worked very hard long hours with the milk delivery getting up before 5 AM and not getting home until after 6 PM. When I was under 2 years old I was very sick with polio. My Mom told me how he would be up in the night holding me because I was so ill. My Mom was concerned because he had to go to work in the morning but he said "Who wants to sleep when you have a little boy?" All my life I had no question my Father loved me as this exemplified.

He took delight in trying to make people laugh to cheer them up. He had a very strong faith in God and a passion for sharing it with others. I was blessed to have him as my Father.

World's Fastest Supercomputer

IBM has produced the world's fastest supercomputer, doubling the previous computer speed record.



This computer does over 1 quadrillion (1000 trillion) calculations per second, which can calculate circles around any other computer on the planet. But do not expect to have a computer of this speed on your desktop any time soon. This super computer occupies 6000 square feet, weighs 250 tons, and is shipped in 21 tractor-trailer trucks. Its electrical usage is 3.9 Megawatts. It was built for the US Department of Energy and only they could afford it $133 million price tag.

Post-Polio Organization

This year Elaine and I joined a local organization of polio survivors called Polio Regina. At the end of May we attended a picnic at the home of a member and she sent us some of the pictures.

Poliomyelitis is a vaccine-preventable disease with a vaccine first introduced in 1955. I had polio in 1955 before the age of 2, just before the vaccine came out. There were many polio epidemics in Canada and world-wide. The man standing behind Elaine and I in the lower picture had polio during an epidemic in 1936. The last epidemic in Canada was in 1959, but there were isolated cases up to 1996 among sects who did not have their children vaccinated, and with contact from other countries.

There are major initiatives to eradicate polio world-wide. The World Health Organization had a target to eradicate polio by vaccinating children around the world by 2000. This target moved to 2005 and now to 2008. The Rotary Club International has raised $billions for this initiative with people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet donating $100s of millions. The difficulty has been reaching the children in some areas of south Asia and west-central Africa due to war and uncooperative governments. But there is optimism with coordinated effort that polio will be completely eradicated.

Convocation Pictures

Janny took pictures during and after convocation. Here are pictures of Mike with the family (sans Mary) and Mike with Nicole. There are more pictures on Janny's Flickr.

Mike's Convocation

Today is Mike's convocation from the University of Regina. He officially receives his degree Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Geography. He has come a long way since he first went off to school and his first graduation. (He always looked good in that red bow tie.)

For his honours program he majored in urban planning. I was very impressed with his thesis entitled "Past, Present and Future Influences of Railways in Regina: A Critical Analysis of Regina's Rail Relocation Program". It is well written and he obviously put a lot of work into it. It is over 60 pages long, based on research with over 100 references, and someone at the archives said there is enough there for a master's thesis. And he got an excellent mark for it.

Congratulations Mike. We are proud of your accomplishments!