Email from Jon (April '07)

Per Grandma's request, I have pasted an email that I sent to my mom a week back.

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I was thinking about Dad as a trigger when I heard the song "Just the Way You Are" by Billy Joel (Jefra hit that song dead on in a video a while back as a good fit for Dad and I could not agree more . . I feel like he is around when I hear it). Anyway, I started looking through old emails to see when the last email correspondence from Dad was via email and it just happened to be a year ago from this last Monday. I will insert the email here and comment after:

From: jonstarr@aol.com
To: jonstarr@aol.com

Sent: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:30 PM
Subject: Re: Any luck with BYU

Shane I guess Mom told you about the bone cancer on my back and in the brain. Bummer. Well, I will continue to pray and trust in God. If it goes the other way,I will have had the best wife, children,sons and daughters in law and grandkids one could have. We some how believe we are entitled to 85 years plus on this earth. Not so. It's what the lord gives us as the time for us.

Did you resolve the BYU inspection?

Ashton will need to know not to freez the pipes in winter at vivian or Provo over christmas break. where all the tools and supplies are in the basement and back of the garage

Mom just said you got a washing machine.

Did you tape up the Provo business license visable from the street?

Did you go through the keys for Provo, Vivian (the boys have 3 sets could you arrange to check them out -with Ashton) as well as Park City? We need to have exact knowledge where the keys are ALWAYS. Also the leases.

We should try and lease to the 7 students next fall now should we not? Anyone coming back for another year and do they have the BYU 07-08 leases yet?

Anything I forgot? No seniors?

sorry for the cancer relaps when there are so many important things to see it your s and LULUS life.

love

Dad

This was after he had the serious blow of information that he was not progressing but digressing rapidly. Who apologizes that their deathly cancer has relapsed!!!! This was a hard email for me to reread (as well as read the first time). I thought it was very timely to look up this email seeing that it was just one year ago that he really started to dive and to think how much has happened since then. It was this time last year that was the turning point for near inevitability. I thought it a tender mercy to hear the song and almost feel his presence and reread this message almost as if it were being read to me for the first time. What a sweet spirit he became!

I also realize that I can never really understand the gravity of Mom's situation. I am TRULY sorry for your loss, Mom. I think if Lydia (and the others to come) were out of the house and all the sudden Lauren is taken form me!

We love you Mom/Mockie!

Shane, Lauren, lil lyddie lu
Bryn, Joel, Abby, JJ, Lukey-baby
Jefra, David, Evey, Bootchie and newskie (???)

My Lucky Day!!!

We are taking a trip to Newport tomorrow and a needed to find a book for the airplane.  So I went to my favorite bookstore, DI. Yes, it was my lucky day because sitting right there on the shelf of books that needed to be put out was a very nice addition of the Charles Harper Biology book!   The one I told you all to be looking for. There is one listed on ebay for over $1,100.00 at a "buy in now" price.  I will be surprised if it sells for that but I am feeling like my $1.00 was well spent today.  Dad would be proud.

Why Isn't Fashion Fun Anymore??

Start them Young

If you want your kids to be really good at Dummy Rummy you have to start them out at around one month!!!

What is it you do exactly??

The name of this blog is "Everson Doings" and it looks like the only thing we do is youtube (sorry Trey) and make babies. Jordan and I are going to a Yankees game tonight; box seats courtesy of the Children's Health Fund via J.Lo and Marc. We'll be sure to have a great time and post about it later.

Trey wins Addy Award

Trey's colleged entered two of his compositions in the 'alternate media category' for a Student Addy Award. Both of his entries won first place landing him a double gold and two trophies.

He made them using a video effects program called After Effects. The two entries plug his freelance design work business name, Über Studio. The first two are the winners. I like the 3rd one best You can watch them here:

Addy Award Winner #1
Addy Award Winner # 2
#3 Heidi's fav (completed after the award deadline)

Trey's website Prankdialer.com hits the front page of Digg

Trey's too busy to tell you about it, so I'm giving this a stab . . . According to Wikipedia:

"Rickroll is an Internet meme involving Rick Astley's music video for his song "Never Gonna Give You Up". In a rickroll, a person provides a link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand which actually takes the user to the Astley video. By May 2007, the practice had become widespread, and it eventually began to receive some coverage in the mainstream media."

About 2 weeks ago, using the original technology from his site, www.wheresmycellphone.com Trey spun off the Rickroll phenomena and built a new site called www.prankdialer.com. A user enters a phone number of a friend (or foe) on his site, and they receive a 30 second call that plays the Rickroll tune. The recipient then exclaims loudly, "Dang, I just got Rickrolled, ha, ha, ha!"

Trey was paying .03 per call but making more than that with GoogleAds on his site when the hits began to skyrocket. He was averaging an income of about $50 - $100 per day. A reporter interviewed him yesterday for an article for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus paper. She said that his Rickroll prank has taken over the campus.

Trey realized that he had to figure out a way to reduce the call costs so he spent the last 48 hours (with about 3 hrs of sleep) setting up a server to process the calls - thousands of them every hour - so now instead of paying 3 cents per call he's paying just .0008 or something. The amazing thing to me is that he figured out how to do all this. He had to learn PBX and VoiceOver IP, and computer coding, and setting up a computer to act as a server with multiple trunks so that if one avenue is busy the calls get made by the next trunk, and international calls and a do not call list so we don't all end up in jail. Lots of technology that is outside his normal "visual communications" skill set. But he got it all done just in time for -

April Fools! To add to the craziness, if you click on ANY video on YouTube today, you see the Rickroll video. It's YouTube's little April Fools joke, but as you know, if YouTube is doing it, it ain't so little. Also, people are adding Trey's site as a favorite on Digg.com If your number of Diggs exceeds 1,200 and your website appears on the home page of Digg, you've made it in the internet world. As I write this, at 3pm on April Fools, his server is now maxed out and making about 20 calls a second. So the man is making bank on google ads - right now he's at $560 income for the day and we're hoping he tops $1,000 by midnight. Of course April Fools will be higher than most, but you do the math to figure out the potential income rolling in 7 days a week, it's pretty exciting! And when Rickroll dies, there will undoubtedly be some other stupid song or saying around the corner. Go Trey, go!

PS - if you want to try it out, please wait until it's not April Fools day. The traffic and call volume is overwhelming the site today so some calls don't go through.