Bill Glass and I participate in a welcome ritual for tourist visitors to Kenya, 2013.
Hard to believe. A man who was larger than life in our circle of friends and coworkers is gone. He was regarded as a wizard in our particular cohort of engineers, enabling computers to perform powerful tasks beyond everyone’s expectations. He was among the pioneers of computer graphics, a key contributor to a technology that garnered an Academy Award for motion picture special effects. If, in our work, we encountered an insoluble problem, it was assigned to Bill. Which he then solved.
Fred and Fereshteh at the welcome and marriage reception (winter 1997-98)
After a long and productive career, my friend and colleague Fred Nourbakhsh is retiring.
I’ve known Fred a long time. I hired him at Management Graphics in 1991 at a time when this small company was growing because it had invented an unexpectedly popular device that was having a major impact in the computer graphics field, including how Hollywood made movies.
I was impressed when I interviewed him because it was clear that he had done his homework. He somehow knew a lot about the company—its size, its products, revenues, history. MGI was a privately held company, so how had Fred learned all this when corporate reports were only sent to shareholders? This was a time long before you could go to the “About” page on a company website; there was no website—there was no web. However he did it, this depth of research is a strong skill in Fred, and it has served him well.
The QSL postcard sent through the postal service is the mechanism used by ham radio operators to confirm their over-the-air radio contacts. This is my dad’s QSL card for his Idaho station.
As an electrical engineer I learned that “all digital devices comprise analog components”. This has remained true even as quantum effects are now being utilized in computational logic gates (they are defined by analog wave functions).
Radio waves, especially those used by amateur radio operators, are analog signals transmitted and received by oddly shaped and configured pieces of conducting metal parts known as “antennas”. And the techniques to couple a useful signal to them are part of the arcane art and science of amateur radio. The sharing of this knowledge is a big part of the ham radio community ethos.
So I should not have been surprised to receive an email asking for help with “s-meter calibration” of an antenna. It was addressed to my dad, who died in 2016, but whose email address has been set to forward everything to me. I get occasional messages from this account, but with diminishing frequency, and usually from some company or service he had subscribed to, but for which there was no “unsubscribe”. In this case however, it was from one of his fellow ham radio acquaintances looking for advice.
I recall visiting my grandmother and noticing a large coffee cup that stood apart from the rest. I learned that this was a cup that was reserved for use by her father (my great-grandfather) when he came by to visit each week. She would make coffee and they would update each other on family news.
My great-grandfather was an immigrant from Sweden with a strong work ethic and a clear set of moral principles. Among them was that one shouldn’t live to excess, so he allowed himself only a single cup of coffee. With this restriction, a normal cup of coffee wouldn’t last long enough to be done visiting his daughter. She solved this by obtaining a very large cup for him to use whenever he stopped by.
Evidently, this story was so good that Poldi remembered me telling it to her years ago when I inherited that heirloom. When she encountered a similarly sized cup with my sunflower “totem”, she acquired it and presented it to me as a birthday gift. Well, I don’t have the same restriction for coffee consumption, but I will now be able to say that I had only one cup of coffee in the morning.
Inside the Wirth Picnic Pavilion with friends and family
Six months ago I posted an item that described my transformation from being a marriage skeptic to being a proponent, while my partner had experienced the reverse conversion.
Regardless of any marriage decision, we made plans to host an anniversary party. Ten years had passed since our “(happily ever) After Party” and our commitment ceremony, and we thought it would be fun to have everyone back to celebrate life, love, and a decade of wonderful experiences, with our family and friends.
I was a teenager when asked to help stage this photo for my grandparent’s 1967 Christmas card.
I recently ran across some speaker notes that I used almost 30 years ago on the occasion of my grandfather’s 90th birthday (1994). I recall that a large white party tent had been set up on a backyard lawn and was filled with four generations of my grandparents’ descendants and their remaining lifelong friends. Here are my comments for that day.
I’ve been blessed by not only knowing, but sharing in my grandparents’ lives for many years (I am over 40!) Many of my friends and colleagues do not even remember their grandparents.
They told me I would be speaking at this gathering, but did not tell me what to talk about, so I just picked something that appealed to me. I’m going to tell you a little about an activity that my grandfather undertakes each and every year and we are all the beneficiaries of—their annual Christmas greeting card.
He’s been making photographic Christmas cards for over… well, I don’t know how many years. I was planning to make copies of some of the great ones over the years as a slide show, but then I found out that this party would be in the afternoon, outside!
So instead, I made some posters, and if my assistants will help hold them up I will describe them…
As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, I inherited a collection of 16mm movies made by my two grandfathers, each an enthusiastic amateur and early adopter of photo technology. I have been struggling with their fate, as they consume a not-inconsiderable amount of space in my archives. Space that could be used to store other useless artifacts.
They have now been (mostly) digitized. And one can find them summarized at this page.
I have great difficulty getting rid of things. As someone who respects the historical path that brought us to our current time, place, and relations, it is hard to discard mementos, especially (for me) photographs that captured moments along that path. As a scientist, I am loathe to delete “data”, that might someday be valuable.
I have to acknowledge the slim likelihood of such artifacts becoming valuable. I hold no conceit that some biographer will ever be looking for scraps and clues identifying the influences on my own childhood. I like to think that my contributions to society have been positive, but probably not worth much more than an oblique reference in an obituary (“he was a curious man”). But maybe there were things in those movies that would be of interest to someone else. I didn’t know how to find that audience.
So the movies, spooled on metal reels of various sizes, lay dormant for years. When I wondered about their ultimate fate, I realized that eventually, they would have NO meaning to anyone, even if it were possible to view them. If there was any value to be extracted, it would have to be now, by me.
I described that initial effort in the previous post on this topic. Here is what has happened since.
Ten years ago, after a year of renovation kicked off by a housewarming “Before Party”, we hosted an “After Party”, which became the “(Happily Ever) After Party”. We pledged our devotion to each other and were declared, by virtue of superpowers claimed by the MC, to be “well and truly united”.
In the ten years since, we have recognized how well-matched we truly are: emotionally, intellectually, physically. We have had marvelous adventures, and we have nurtured and watched our families grow while sharing in the losses of our elders. We recognize in each other the love of our life.
I once encountered a story about a 90-year-old man who filed for divorce from his life-long spouse. The clerk at the courthouse asked, “why after all these years would you file for divorce NOW?” His answer: “I don’t want to die married to that awful woman!”
And I suddenly realized that I did not want to die NOT married to this wonderful woman!
Cover art for “Vietnam 1970-71, Confronting Challenges” (click to enlarge)
I helped my uncle complete a memoir in his last weeks of fighting multiple myeloma. It is a collection of stories, told in his inimitable style, of the year he spent in Vietnam in 1970-71. My foreword for the book is below.
The book was self-published through my Blurb account for the benefit of close friends and family. There have been others that have expressed an interest in having a copy of the book. There are a few options. If you want a physical memento that you can hold and read and cherish, you can order one from its Blurb book page.
The listed price is the actual cost (there is no markup). Custom printed books are expensive, but you get a real hard-cover book! To reduce the expense slightly, Blurb makes promotions from time to time with discount coupons. You can Google “Blurb coupons” to find them. I once encountered and used a 40% coupon.
If you do not need the artifact of a physical book, the content is available here in a (50MB) PDF file for free. Download and enjoy it. Maybe you will decide you need it in a form not requiring a machine to read. If so, go ahead and order the book.
Here is my introduction to Bob’s memoir:
Foreword
The author of this volume is Dr. Robert Olson, whom I know as my Uncle Bob. Over the years I heard him tell stories of when, fresh out of medical school, he served as a Navy doctor in Vietnam. Now, over the last 12 years, he has worked at putting words to paper to capture the remarkable experiences of that life-changing year, and he has collected photographs of that time, taken by himself and others.
It has been my privilege and honor to assist Uncle Bob in assembling this book. While he is a master storyteller, he is not a master of the modern tools of writers. But as you will see as a recurring theme in so many of the stories that follow, he took on that challenge in his signature manner—head on, picking up what he needed, as he needed it, to accomplish the task. Microsoft Word, hardly an intuitive editing tool, was Bob’s choice to render his material and turn it into text.
Which he did.
The modern tools of writing allow for easy revisions. And he made many of them, carefully crafting each story for impact and detail, augmenting them with photographs to illustrate the locations, people and world context of the times.
When it became apparent that he would not be able to take on the final task of assembling the stories and photographs into a full book and actually publishing it, I offered to help. I obtained his large “working folder” of the many files he had created over the course of a decade. Despite failing strength and plummeting hemoglobin levels, he confirmed the titles of his stories, eventually to become chapters in the book, which I then used to locate their most recent versions.
As I performed my new role as copy editor and typesetter, I learned the backstories and more complete details of these events, many of which I had never heard before, and I was struck by a recurring theme. It is hard to express succinctly, but it has to do with how we respond to events that are not under our control, not what we expect, not what we want, outside our experience or skill, and sometimes even frightening.
This sort of event happens to all of us: life is unpredictable, and stuff happens. In these stories, we see a response that does not shy away, but rather, meets the challenge head-on. It is more than just “making lemonade from lemons”; it goes beyond “rolling with the punches”. It is a full embrace of these unexpected and undesired events; an acceptance and a firm resolve to do the best you can in a difficult situation.
And in the end, two results obtain: the outcomes are better, and you are better.
I am struck, but not surprised, that Bob considers these difficult, challenging moments to be among the highlights of his life. I hope that after reading this book, you will understand why.
Two pairs of brothers backpacking in 1987. I’m on the left next to my younger brother Eric. My dad, Tod, is on the right, next to his younger brother, my uncle Bob
Dr Robert Olson, 1940-2022
It is with great sadness that I report the passing of my uncle, Dr. Robert Olson. After a lengthy battle with multiple myeloma that included periods of remission, he succumbed on September 15, 2022. He was a remarkable man, and there will be many tributes that capture his many talents, his professional contributions, his passion for gardening, and his strong friendships and family relations. They will all be inadequate, as is any attempt to capture the essence of a person’s life.
But to the list of inadequate tributes, I would like to add mine, an anecdote that I wrote a few years ago following a Thanksgiving dinner, one of many large and boisterous holiday gatherings that he loved to host, with his daughters handling cooking and logistics. I was able to share it with Bob in a letter, at a time of better health. He was an important influence on me during a formative period of my life.
