Tim Mann
				707 Leahy St. #127-C
				Redwood City, CA  94061
				650-367-8019  tim.mann@compaq.com
				December 9, 1999


Dear Friends and Family,

Things are a bit strange as I write this.  I have a business trip
coming up next week, to a conference near Charleston, so I'm at the
office trying to get last minute things done before I go.  It's
especially important because after the conference I'm flying right
from Charleston to Milwaukee to visit my Mom and family for two weeks,
so I'll be gone three weeks in all.  But our network just went down
here at work, so my computer is useless except for writing documents
and saving them on the local disk until the net comes back up.

I could try to work this all into some labored point about modern
life, technology, and how it impinges on the Christmas spirit, but
such thoughts are done to death these days, so I'll leave it to your
imagination.  I know it will be great to be on the plane in two days,
with whatever I do or don't get done first, ready to enjoy the
conference, time with my family, and Christmas worship at Mom's church.

I hope to see those of you who are based in the Milwaukee area while
I'm there.  The triangle trip gives me a bit more time than usual;
I'll be in town from 12/17 to 1/2.  My Mom's phone number is 414 466
3082 if you want to call me before I get around to calling you!

It's been a pretty normal year for me.  At work I spent some time on a
new project (as well as continuing the old ones), helping the Itsy
handheld group get a filesystem that uses flash memory in place of a
disk.  Not really research, but useful work, and fairly interesting.
I got promoted to "Senior Member of Technical Staff."

One of my hobby projects unexpectedly made me some money this year.  I
maintain a chessboard program (called xboard) that's included in most
Linux distributions, and as a result Red Hat included me on their list
of contributors when they had their initial public stock offering.
This gave me a chance to purchase some shares at the IPO price of
$14/share.  The stock is up to $286/share today!  Amazing.

I traveled in May to attend Jeff Nelson's wedding in Aberdeen, SD.  It
was a nice, small wedding, and I enjoyed the visit to the South Dakota
flatlands and getting to see a few friends I hadn't seen in a while.
In October I went off to Boulder, CO, for a conference.  I got to do
some hiking in the mountains before the conference started.  Boulder
is right on the edge of the Great Plains, with the Rockies rising up
suddenly just outside of town.  Very beautiful country.

As usual I was privileged to use my modest guitar-playing skills by
serving as songleader at the weeklong northern California WELS summer
Bible camp.  This year I had another enthusiastic guitarist and
another singer up front helping me.  As a new thing this year, I also
helped do music at a WELS men's retreat in February, again with
another guitarist and another singer, and also a pianist.  That was
fun, and we hope to do it again in 2000.

				Christmas blessings to all,