Subject: It's the Borenstein family message!

Hello!  This is the Borenstein family annual letter.  Yes, we used to call it 
a "holiday letter" like our more conventional friends and acquaintences, but 
as most of you know it has been many years since we allowed ourselves to be so 
tied down by the tyranny of the calendar.  (OK, so the truth is we're very 
slow to get our act together.  But really, don't you already get way too many 
letters at Christmas time anyway?)

This year, we got off to a good start; the parts of the letters that the girls 
wrote were actually written in early December, as will probably be fairly 
obvious.  Trina and I were the big procrastinators.  (Actually there's a sense 
in which I spent the whole year, and even more, working on this letter, but 
I'll mention that in another section.)

This year's annual letter is also a bit of a technological experiment, too.  
We're making it available in several different formats, for four different 
categories of technological capabilities.  (We're equal-opportunity friends, 
and we'll cheerfully correspond with those unfortunate enough to be 
computing-impaired, but the high-tech version is the most fun.)  Specifically, 
although we really only wrote one annual letter, we produced and distributed 
it to be read in four different ways.  You are currently using one of the 
following technologies:

1.  Paper.  If you're reading this on paper, that means that you don't, as far 
as I know, have ANY access to electronic mail.  That's a real shame.  (If I'm 
wrong, PLEASE tell me by sending mail to [email-masked].)  You'll see all of 
the textual parts of this letter, but you'll have to settle for a grainy 
black-and-white rendition of all the color pictures, and you're missing out on 
the audio parts completely.  (NOTE ALSO that if you're reading this by emaail 
but you want a paper copy for your family at home, the end of this message 
includes a technical section that tells you how to get the Postscript to 
print out your own copy.)

2.  Text email.  If you're reading this with an old-fashioned mail system (one 
that has remained completely unaffected by all my best efforts in the last ten 
years), you'll see all the textual portions of this letter, followed by a very 
large bunch of apparent gibberish, which you should ignore.  No pictures, no 
sounds.  Tell your system staff that you're unhappy with the state of your 
email system!  (You can also hang onto the message in the hopes that you'll 
some day be able to read it properly!)

3.  Multimedia email.  If you're reading this with most MIME-capable mail 
readers, you'll get text, audio, and images, in sequence.  There will be one 
more MIME object at the end that your mail reader probably won't 
recognize -- you can ignore its error message.  Note also that, in order to 
avoid problems with mail systems that can't handle a four-megabyte mail 
message, I have included all the audio clips as MIME "external references".  
This means the audio isn't directly included, but what's included instead is 
directions that will allow a MIME-smart mail reader to automatically 
download the audio (via ftp) when you read the message.  If for some reason 
you would prefer to have a copy of the mail that includes all the audio parts 
"in-line", you can ftp a copy from thumper -- the MIME data to let you 
automatically download that version of the message (which is over four 
megabytes!!!) is included later in this message.

4.  Interactive multimedia email.  If you're reading this with a mail reader 
that has been augmented with the latest in the state of the email art (Safe-
Tcl), you are seeing it not in sequence, but as an interactive window on your 
screen, with buttons that you can click on for different parts of the 
message.  This is the preferred way to read the message, because you can 
ignore all the boring stuff, which as we all know is most of the letter.
(Actually, category #4 is technically further subdivided into two categories, 
depending on whether or not your Safe-Tcl interpreter supports the "Tk" 
interface style & you're running X11, but that's a detail. If by some chance 
you aren't, this message isn't nearly as spiffy.)

Anyway, what follows is our one annual attempt to keep in touch with all our 
friends and family to whom we should be writing more frequently and 
individually, but never do.  Please know that we love to hear from you, even 
though we aren't always courteous enough to make the time to reply 
individually.  We hope you all had a wonderful year, and that 1994 is, for all 
of us, a year of peace, prosperity, growth, and happiness.

And now, on with the show!  

Once again last year we were privileged to spend nearly our whole summer at 
our place in Michigan.  You've no doubt heard about all the rains in the 
American midwest last summer.  In Michigan, things never reached flood stage, 
but our little pond (Guppy Lake) was higher than we've ever seen it -- so 
high, in fact, that it covered both ends of the bridge Nathaniel built a few 
years ago to connect the area with the log cabin more directly to the rest of 
the property.  (Pictures are attached.)

In the middle of the summer, we took a vacation from the arduous work of 
living in civilized Greenbush.   We visited my parents in Rock Island, visited 
Trina's brother Daniel in Madison, and toured the Wisconsin Dells.  (In both 
Rock Island and Wisconsin, we saw some of the incredible mess left behind in 
the flood's wake.  It's very sobering to see a piece of downtown Davenport 
that is, for all intents and purposes, fifty feet on the wrong side of the 
shoreline of a river!)  But the most exciting part by far was our backpacking 
trip.  All five of us went off into the deep woods of the Pictured Rocks 
National Lakeshore, in Michigan's Upper Penninsula, where we hiked (up to ten 
miles in a day, with full packs -- a real milestone for the girls!) and camped 
for several nights in splendid isolation, with no other human beings around us 
for miles.  Our girls are now all certified outdoorswomen, just call on them 
if you need to have any serious exploring done for you!

Hi, this is Miriam!  School is fine over here.  I'm taking piano lessons 
with Pam Moyer.  She's a really nice person.  How are you doing?  
This is Miiram and I want to wish you a Happy Hanukah or a Merry Christmas.  
Bye!

Hi everybody, it's Rachel!  I just hope that all of you are OK.  I'm OK.  I 
take piano lessons, violin lessons, and karate lessons.  I think I'm pretty 
close to becoming a yellow belt in karate.  I'm doing very well in school.  
I'm in the top reading & math classes.  I miss every one of you, whoever 
gets this letter!  Bye!

Hi everybody!  This is Shana and I've been taking karate lessons and I'm 
much better than Rachel and Miriam who I take karate lessons with.
(Rachel's voice:  That's not nice!)  I don't take piano.  I take cello lessons 
and I played two concerts recently and just today I sang in the school chorus  
I'm doing OK in school but not great, and I'm going to a party tomorrow, 
and I play the recorder.  Bye!

From Trina:
Many of you may have noticed the preponderance of blue moons, brought on by 
the freezing over of Hell.  Yes, I have taken the GED and enrolled in our 
local county college.  I've chosen Graphic Design as my major, and started 
classes on a part-time basis (9 credits) in January.  (Luckily, the semester 
ends just about the time I'm hoping to jet off to Europe for a couple of weeks 
in May.)  It is my plan, at this point, to take two years worth of courses at 
the county college, then switch to a regular four-year institution to finish 
up.  I'm hoping to get a dual degree in Art and Geology.  Luckily, one of the 
few undergraduate programs (in Geology) in New Jersey is at a college three 
miles from our house.  I've also taken a part-time job as an administrative 
assistant for the Association for Computational Linguistics.  It`s similar in 
some ways  to the job I enjoyed so much in Pittsburgh (for the Journal of 
Polymer Chemistry), but the tasks are more varied and the need for my  
abilities much greater.  

So, my life is, as always, in a state of flux.  The decision to go to school 
has pretty much put my cookbook on a high, dusty shelf.  If I don't find 
working part time and attending school part time challenging enough, I may 
pull it out again.  

I've cut back somewhat on the volunteer work that I do for the school, and 
intend to use my terribly demanding schedule as an excuse for doing much less 
next year.  (Now the REAL reason for my life changes becomes apparent!)

From Nathaniel:
My life in 1994 was more of the same, basically.   Actually, I suppose I could 
say that my whole year at work, and indeed most of my last decade at work, was 
spent on this letter you're reading now!  That's because this year's annual 
letter, available as multimedia interactive email, represents something of a 
culmination of a decade's research and development.  I also wrote the usual 
articles, gave a bunch of talks, and finished up a lot of loose ends and 
peripheral work related to my research over the last decade.  By the end of 
the year, work was actually taking a back burner for the first time in a 
long while, as I reassessed my life and career and looked for a new focus to 
replace multimedia mail, a productive obsession that has now mostly served 
its purpose in keeping me off the streets.  In recent months, I've been doing 
a lot of reading, thinking, meditating, and particularly singing and playing 
guitar.  It's been a refreshing period, but lately I've found myself very 
naturally focusing on new directions for my work and career, about which 
you'll be hearing more later. 

    !!!! LATE-BREAKING NEWS !!!! LATE-BREAKING NEWS !!!!

Well, I'm finally able to tell you (this is why our annual letter has been 
delayed so long this year) that I am leaving Bellcore, having accepted a 
position as Chief Scientist for First Virtual Holdings, Incorporated.  This is 
a big move for me, a major change of direction and focus in my career, and 
it promises to be extremely exciting and challenging.

If you've never heard of First Virtual, that's no surprise -- it is a brand 
new company -- but I'm hoping this won't be the last time you hear of us.  All 
I can tell you for now is that we're going to be doing some very exciting and 
innovative things, NONE of which have much in common with my career up 
to now.  However, I'm not leaving anything in the lurch -- I've pretty much 
tied up all my loose ends at Bellcore, and First Virtual has encouraged me to 
continue to participate in all my ongoing professional committments 
(standardization efforts, conferences, journals, and the like).  In addition, 
I will continue to work on getting my multimedia magazine, the Electric 
Eclectic, off the ground.  

I don't know my new email address yet.  I hope that my Bellcore email will 
forward to me for some time, but if you lose touch with me you should always 
be able to reach me by sending mail to "[email-masked]" or, in a real 
pinch, by calling me on the telephone.  (The telephone, for those of you who 
have forgotten, was a commonly used communications technology in the days 
before electronic mail.  They're still easy to find in most large cities.)

[BEGINNING OF TECHNICAL-INTEREST SECTION]
What follows is relatively technical, of interest only to those who are 
sufficiently internet-savvy to know about things like ftp.  if you aren't such 
a person, please skip this section.

As you have probably noticed, I have distributed the email version of this 
letter in MIME format, but with the audio parts available only by "external 
reference".  If for some reason you prefer to have a more self-contained 
version of this letter, you can ftp a version that contains the audio in-
line.  Be warned that this version is over four megabytes!

If you're interested in how the metamail tools (release 2.7) were used in a 
Makefile to construct this message, you can ftp the Makefile.  

If you've read this message in your office, but would like to bring a paper 
copy home for your family, you can ftp the PostScript version of the paper 
copy of the message, which includes images but, of course, no audio.  If you 
have a color printer, the pictures should print extremely nicely, but most 
monochrome PostScript printers will also do a reasonable job rendering the 
pictures in grayscale.

A MIME-smart mail system will offer you the chance to retreive any or all of 
these things automatically, below.  If you are reading this with a non-MIME 
mail system, you can ftp all of these things by hand from thumper.bellcore.com 
in the directory pub/nsb/famlet.  

[END OF TECHNICAL-INTEREST SECTION]

Well, that's the end of our annual letter!  In addition to all the things we normally say when signing off, such as that we'd love to see you, talk to you, or read mail from you whenever possible, this year I'd like to add one final note, which is to apologize for any "bugs" or "glitches" you might have encountered in this year's annual letter.  I guess that's the price you pay for having a state-of-the-art friendship!

				With love & best wishes for the coming year,

				Nathaniel, Trina, Shana, Rachel, and Miriam