Jeff Blogs

Growing up with the last name of “Summers”, this was always my favorite day of the year. I mean how many people can say that they have a day that commemorates them for the next 3 months? Not only that but even Mother Nature pays homage to you by making your special day the longest day of the year. According to scientists and the Farmer’s Almanac this is the day where the Northern Hemisphere is tilted more towards the sun than at any other time of the year hence there are more hours of daylight on this date than any other. The days from the first day of winter until today have gradually gotten longer while the days from today until the first day of winter will slowly get shorter. Given this information it is important to take full advantage of this day and live it up.

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As I arrived home from work I was greeted by a flashing light. That’s not to say that an LED was sitting at the door, it’s cord wagging waiting for me to arrive to play with it. It just means that as I walked through the living room I happened to glance over at the telephone answering machine and noticed the flashing light that indicates that there is a message waiting. The answering machine is an interesting device. I have now successfully lived through an era that began before this device was invented. I distinctly remember getting my first answering machine after we were married. I remembered the sense of freedom that I felt knowing that I no longer had to worry about being home or missing a call. Now if I was not at home someone would be able to leave me a message and I could return their call after I returned. It was an amazing feeling, quite liberating to say the least. I look at that now and think how pathetic my life once was that I would get excited about something as simple as a telephone answering machine. Now we take that kind of technology for granted. We have voice mail or a similar capability built into nearly all of our personal communications devices. Still, there is just something alluring about seeing a flashing “messaging waiting” button.

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There are certain days that are life changing: the birth of your child, the day you get your Arizona Diamondbacks Season Tickets, and the day you get married immediately come to mind. My kids are now reaching teen age years and the baseball season is now two and a half months old so that must mean that I am going to be talking about anniversaries. Today marks 27 years since my wedding to Trina. It seems so much longer than 27 years and I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way especially if Trina happens to be reading this. What I mean is that really we have known each other for much longer than the time we have been married. I met Trina during my sophomore year of high school at Skyline High School in Idaho Falls.

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I have been a big fan of Mozilla for as long as they have been in existence. Before that I was part of the Netscape crowd and worked with them on browser development even before Netscape Navigator 4. Early on I did some work on the Thunderbird project and Sunbird. During my time at Motorola I was a member of the Netscape Customer Council and worked closely with their server development teams integrating the Motorola PageWriter two-way pager into the Netscape environment. In fact I hold a patent for that work last I heard. So as Mozilla worked on the open source code that would become Firefox I was right there rolling up my sleeves. Firefox 2 has been my default browser since it was released. And while it has had its share of issues over time my loyalty has not wavered. That is not to say I wasn’t looking forward to its replacement. I was waiting rather impatiently to put it to the curbside and use something that was a little more memory friendly.

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Our middle daughter Tiffany begins college this coming January. She has just finished High School graduation and is now trying to earn money to afford to go to school this coming winter. Recently she was accepted into Brigham Young University – Idaho which is the campus in Rexburg Idaho as opposed to Provo Utah. There are pros and cons to going to BYU-Idaho. On the con side BYU-Idaho does not have the collegiate sports programs that the BYU-Utah campus has. This means that she will not be able to compete in NCAA track like she hoped. On the pro side the campus is slightly smaller than BYU-Utah and therefore has a closer student body. She will also be able to share an apartment with her sister Mallorie who will be a Senior during Tiffany’s Freshman year. This of course could be a pro and a con in itself depending on how much sister stuff they can deal with. When the kids graduate from high school my gift to each of them has been a laptop computer. It is nearly impossible for a kid to survive in college without their own computer and many colleges are now requiring a laptop for several classes.

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