The flight is about half over going from the San Francisco Airport to Salt
Lake City. I’ll meet Heather, Daryl, and Christopher just outside the
terminal. We’ll get a bit to eat somewhere, and then Christopher and I will
continue on to Denver and then to Colorado Springs. I understand that
Christopher is pretty excited to be making this trip. Hopefully we can make
it interesting enough for him!!

This airplane is about half full, but it doesn’t have Plus Seating. Many
United airplanes have extended legroom (called “pitch”) on the first 8-10
rows of coach class. The seating there is generally reserved first for
frequent fliers and then for anyone who is flying. This one doesn’t have the
extra room, so the seat is quite uncomfortable when using the computer. The
trip east from San Jose to Denver is usually about 2 hours and 10 minutes.
This flight is 1 hour and 40 minutes from San Francisco to Salt Lake. It
definitely must be an older airplane and they’re flying it pretty slow. I’ll
get into the gate about 3:30 p.m. MDT and am meeting Heather and the gang at
3:45 outside.

The week in California was pretty busy. Monday was our quarterly meeting
with Bryon Look, our CFO. The presentations went well and I think he’s
beginning to understand more about our business and what we do for the
company. Still not much relief in sight for our manpower shortages. Tuesday
I went to Symantec for a briefing about their security processes.

My notes from that meeting:
As you know I was invited to attend a small briefing at Symantec this
morning. It was done by their CIO and discussed how Symantec uses their own
products (they called it “eating their own cookies”) in their security
space. They only use released, generally available Symantec products. The
presentation turned out to be much better than I had hoped. While the
meeting was set up by their sales folks, it definitely wasn’t a sales pitch.
So, here’s the highlights from the presentation:

Symantec did about $1.1 billion last year, 4,000 employees, 500 contractors.
The IT department has just under 300 people and a budget of $70 million.
That compares to $1.8 billion, 5,300 employees, 255 IT people, and a budget
of $72 million. Reasonably about the same size as LSI Logic. No
manufacturing, very different engineering, and a whole bunch more offices.

They’re running Oracle ERP (just upgraded to 11.5.6, which was “enormously
difficult”), Siebel, PeopleSoft for HR, Lotus Notes for e-mail and
collaboration. No SMTP inside the company (made a big point of that, but I
don’t really understand why). They have 209 Unix servers, mostly Solaris,
and run NT or W2K everywhere else.

The Security Director reports to the CIO. He has a staff of 4 people, all
dispersed in different parts of the world (with the director, a total of 5
people). Their jobs scopes are:

• 1 person handles all PKI (located in Cupertino)
• 1 person handles all perimiter security and Unix security (located in
  England)
• 1 person handles all internal security and windows security (located in the
  eastern US)
• 1 person handles business apps security, database security, and security
  awareness (located in Germany)

The director oversees all of this and is responsible for writing polices and
enforcement

One person in internal audit rotates through a whole bunch of audits on IT
each year.

They use their own firewall products and have “far too many” firewalls in
place. Every location has an internet connection and a firewall of some
type. All have VPN concentrators as well.
Offices are categorized as

• Tier 1: Large offices, 250 people or so and larger (about 20 of these
  offices)
• Tier 2: Regional offices, more than 10-20 full time people (about 30 of
  these offices)
• Tier 3: Sales and support offices, fewer than 10 people (about 40 of these
  offices)

Tier 1 and Tier 2 offices are connected on the WAN. Tier 3 offices are
connected through VPN (their own products).

They use their NetRecon package to scan their networks inside and out on a
continual basis. The scans are run by operations (actually seem to be
started and run on a regular schedule by the data center command and control
people). Every subnet gets scanned every six weeks. The perimeter is scanned
once a month. The results of the scans are loaded into a database and
reports prepared from there so they can see what has happened over time.

They have a lot of wireless 802.11b deployed. They were using 3Com’s
products but are switching to Cisco since 3Com doesn’t do MAC Address
validation anymore. They have WEP turned on, but feel it could easily be
turned off. Anything connected to a wireless access point has to use VPN to
get into the network. They’ve had some issues with this and have stumbled
across a couple of “illegal” wireless setups. They don’t look for rogue
wireless setups, but want to start doing something.

All laptops are required to have Symantec’s personal firewall on them.
They’ve had a number of issues with personal firewall and a lot of feedback
has been incorporated into the next version of the personal firewall (which
will be part of their next major release. We’ll deploy this as part of the
next release at LSI Logic. It’s kind of being tested now). I think the new
product is probably pretty good and we should require the same on all laptop
computers.

They have their own anti-virus deployed everywhere…. No surprise there!

Before any server can be put on the network, the builder must schedule a
scan, correct any issues, go through a rescan. Then it can be allowed to
stay on the network. Part of their internal scanning is to find systems that
haven’t been scanned, or that are vulnerable in some way. Operations does
this scanning and gives the reports to the builder and security. They had
almost no Code Red or Nimda issues because the vulnerability had already
been patched.

They use their intrusion detection capability only on the three subnets that
have their critical systems (Oracle, Sieble, Peoplesoft) on them. The
current IDS from Symantec apparently isn’t robust enough to handle a bigger
load (a New and Improved product is coming Real Soon Now).

They use secure-id type tokens (they weren’t from SecureID but I don’t
remember which vendor) for all remote access, including VPN.

They have a Security Emergency Action Plan which describes what kinds of
things constitute Security Emergencies, a classification system on severity
of a Security Emergency, who can declare such an emergency, and what general
kinds of things will be done during an emergency. There were three levels of
emergencies. During the highest two levels, specific additional monitoring
of key DMZ, mission critical, and internet facing systems is implemented.
People are reassigned from their regular jobs to doing this monitoring. They
had two of these emergencies in the past year, mostly because they are
specifically a target just due to the business they are in.

They have four internal networks. One is the normal business network. A
second one is set up for incoming customer viruses (when customers find
suspected viruses, this is the place they can be sent to at Symantec). A
third network is a dirty network — specifically for testing viruses and
their payloads. The fourth network is for testing virus signatures and virus
responses. Lots of internal rules about these networks.

There are also about 30 internal firewalls set up to keep things from
escaping into their business network at large. Since they develop products
such as intrusion detection, firewalls, and a bunch more besides their virus
scanning systems, they have a number of development labs. Every lab is
behind a VPN/Firewall model 200 (I have one of these at home and Really Like
It — I’ve ordered a couple of them which are on back order for y’all to
play with). That allows them to keep these guys separated but also allow
them the ability to do business on the business network.

All perimiter firewalls are managed by the guy responsible for perimiter
security. All internal firewalls are managed by the guy responsible for
internal security. No one outside of the security folks have access to these
firewalls.

They generally run 5 honeypots of various flavors out on the internet-facing
network. It takes about 30 minutes for them to get compromised. Operations
rebuilds one each day after it has been examined to see if anything new
happened. They also run a couple of honeypots internally as another look to
see if anything is amok in their business network. Occasionally one gets
compromised, which constitutes a low-level security emergency.

They scan all outgoing e-mail for viruses. It wouldn’t do to send a virus
from Symantec to someone….

They do some e-mail monitoring looking for gambling, hate mail, and porn.
They use their own products for that monitoring. Issues are handled by HR.
They aren’t yet filtering for spam but a recent 24-hour sample showed about
25% of the incoming e-mail was probably spam. They are looking at how to use
their own products to filter for spam (and weren’t sure they could do it
with the current product suite).

They have every possible variation of their name registered in every
possible domain and are currently managing more than 700 inactive domain
names and about 150 active names.

That’s about all I can remember.

————— end of notes —————-

That afternoon I went to Santa Cruz for some meetings with Caldera. I’ve
been talking with them about doing some things for us at LSI Logic. Primary
reason for interest is that my sister Eileen works there as their HR
Director and that gives me a bit of an entry into the company. However,
they’re always coming up just a bit short when compared to what we can get
from RedHat. More on that later. Anyhow, I had a good visit with the folks
down there and have a good understanding about how they provide support. The
price is $65,000 per year, and that’s too pricey for the amount of support
we actually need.

Wednesday was a bit closer to the office with several other meetings. We’ve
implemented a new search engine in LSI Logic for our intranet and had a
status meeting about that product and what the next phases for it should be.
(Looks like we’re getting close to the Salt Lake area. We’ve started the
descent and are moving around to dodge some thunderstorms.) That was
followed up by some meetings on Microsoft’s System Mangement Software and
how we’re going to handle Spam filtering going forward.

After work on Wednesday I went over to Fry’s and looked through the entire
store. Had a lot of fun and enjoyed looking around. I’d like a new home
computer and may just put one together for me to use. I can get a lot more
computer for the money by assembling components. I could make it a dual-boot
system as well and begin the migration process to Linux entirely at home. I
did buy a clock for Nina similar to the one I have. It syncs up daily with
the National Time Clock meaning that it stays very accurate. Has a couple of
alarms and doesn’t ring very loudly. I also bought a Sony MiniDisk player
that has been built for handling MP3’s and other stuff. I really like how it
works and the small format of the disks. I can get a couple of hours of
music on one minidisk and can carry with me all the music I want on a flight
in a package a fourth the size of the CD player and CD’s that I’ve been
carrying. Further, I can make up my own sequence and mix of music. That’ll
be good as there’s a lot of CD’s that I have where I’m only interested in
one or two cuts. Right now I’m listening to Richard Wagner’s music from the
Ring Cycle. I’ve made up one minidisk with both the Ring and Tannhauser.

Thursday was meetings in the morning and then a meeting with Dell / Intel /
RedHat in the afternoon. In the morning we spent a couple of hours going
through all of the IT survey responses. The responses were very interesting
and hopefully we can do some things to address some of the concerns people
expressed.

The meeting with Dell / Intel / RedHat in the afternoon was very
interesting. RedHat certainly has their act much better together than
Caldera has. They are putting together products that work for business and
their partnering with Dell is very well done. Dell has a lovely ordering
process (they are completely geared towards on-line ordering systems) and
we’ll be using a lot of Dell servers with RedHat Advanced Server on them for
our Engineering Design Application tools. They’ve built something that is
very easy for us to use. Unfortunately, Caldera has missed most of these
boats. I’d like for Eileen to continue to be gainfully employed for a very
long time, but I’m worried about how RedHat seems to eat Caldera’s lunch at
every turn. Caldera’s purchase of SCO Unix seems to be more and more dumb as
time goes on. The company is almost schizophrenic!

I spent the time on Thursday evening learning how to use the new Sony
minidisk system and making up three music disks to take with me on the
airplane today. I also watched The Fellowship of the Ring from the Lord of
the Rings trilogy. It was one of the in-room movies available. The
three-hour movie continues to be very enjoyable. I’m looking forward to
receiving my own copy of it in the mail when it’s released in a couple of
weeks.

Today I went into the office for a few minutes and then left for the SFO
Airport about 9:30. Traffic was absolutely no issue and by 10:45 I was
through security and in the Red Carpet Lounge downloading e-mail and such. I
like security when it happens like that. We’ll see what it’ll be like in
Salt Lake!

We’ve got about 10 returning missioniaries on this flight, most of them
wearing badges from Japan. I’m sure there’ll be a number of families meeting
this flight and being right happy to have their son or daughter home once
again.

That’s all from here….

This entry was copied from an older journaling system on 29 November 2002.

I’m on my way out to California for another trip. This one will pick up 5
flight segments since I’ll be coming back through Salt Lake City.
Christopher is flying back with me to spend a week with Nina and me. THe
segments are important as that is primarily how I maintain my flight status
with United. Don’t quite come up with enough miles to, but usually get
plenty of segments.

It’s been a fairly hectic (or rather loud) week. Dawnmarie and her four kids
came back from Idaho with us and have been here for the week. Kirk arrives
on Wednesday night with his parents. They whole crew will leave on Thursday
to drive out to Pennsylvania. It’s amazing to me how much noise kids can
generate! It like a constant bedlam. Yesterday when I got home from my
church meetings, Dawnmarie had taken the kids to visit some friends of
theirs. The house was so quiet it was kind of eerie. When it’s just Nina and
me at home things are often very quiet, particularly on a Sunday when we
usually don’t turn on the TV either.

Saturday night we packed everyone up to go to the Concert in the Park.
According to the schedule in the paper, the Colorado Springs Symphonie was
presenting a concert in a park on the south-east side of town. A few weeks
ago they were planning to do the same thing in a park near our house, but
the weather prevented them from doing much more than playing a few Sousa
marches. Occasional thunderstorms and lots of wind were the culprits. So,
off we went to the park. When we finally found the place, the concert was
supposed to start in less than 5 minutes, but there was no symphony there!!
Several other folks were there planning to find the concert as well, so we
definitely weren’t the only ones. However, there were very few folks looking
for the concert meaning that everyone else had gotten the word.

We’ve just changed altitude down a couple thousand feet. The ride was a bit
bumpy where we were before and seems to be much smoother here. We’re just
south of Salt Lake City and it’s pretty overcast so there isn’t much to see.
I’m in a window seat, exit row, meaning that there’s plenty of room around
me and the folks in front of me can’t put their seat back. As close together
as the rows are on most of these flights, this is a real bonus.

Tuesday night I had missionary splits. I brought some names that we needed
to call on, so we did have something to do that night. That very often is
not the case. Wednesday night was home with the grandkids. Thursday night
was our monthly Linux User’s Group meeting and I made a presentation on how
I have my home network set up to name resolution. The Internet uses as
series of numbers as addresses for computers on the network. The network
depends on routers to forward packets of data from the source computer to
the destination computer. However, numbers are difficult to remember, so
computers are usually referred to by a name, which when fully qualified must
be a unique name not found anywhere else on the network. My computers all
belong to the rnsmith.com domain (named for Roland and Nina Smith). They
also all sit behind a firewall to protect them from the big bad things going
on out on the internet. So, I need the ability to address the computers
inside the firewall by name as well as computers outside my firewall. While
it isn’t a difficult thing to do, it also isn’t a trivial task. Hence the
presentation at the meeting. By the time that anyone else reads this (if
ever), the addressing processes on the internet will certainly be vastly
different. They are in the process of changing now as we’re running out of
numbers in the present scheme. Further, the present scheme requires all
computers to be named using ASCII characters (meaning pretty much that
English is lingua franca of the Internet). People who speak Chinese are
certainly going to want to be able to name their computers using Chinese
characters and people outside of China are going to want to be able to
access these computers.

Friday was another night spent pretty much at home. Saturday, however, was
the first Saturday in several months that we were home. We generally work at
the Temple on Saturdays, but the Denver Temple is closed for summer break,
reopening on Tuesday (tomorrow). That meant we had the whole day home! It’s
been fairly hot recently, but there was a nice breeze all day on Saturday.
Since Dawnmarie and Kirk have agreed to take the buffet out east to James
(and keep it if James doesn’t want it), I needed to get it out where it
could be loaded on Kirk’s truck. I also wanted to finally get rid of
Trevor’s motorcycle. So, I arranged for a U-Haul rental trailer and found a
junk yard that would take the bike. I picked up the trailer and brought it
back to the house. Pulled the old motorcycle out of the garage, and started
to hose it down so that the worst of the dirt would come off in the
driveway. Our next door neighbor came over and wanted to know what I was
doing with the bike…. Turns out he wanted to have it, so the motorcycle
now sits in his garage. He’s got a lot of work to do to make it back into a
nice machine, but he’ll probably spend less that he would have spent buying
one new. I was quite happy to have the bike in another home. It was kind of
sad to think we were just going to park it in a junk yard. The neighbors
have been there for a little more than a month and seem to be very nice
folks. They’ve one son twelve years old. They’re in their late 40’s. They
were out working in their yard as well. The wife seems to be an avid
gardener.

I mowed the grass, cleaned out much of the garage, and ran the trimmer
around the yard. Spent some time on the computer, and that pretty much made
for the day until we went to the non-existent concert.

We’re over mid-Nevada. Sure is dry and barren down there.

It was a pretty normal Church day. I had Priesthood Executive Committee
Meeting at 7:30 a.m. followed by the normal block of meetings starting at
9. I have a One-on-One with the Bishop on the 2nd Sunday of the month, so I
went to Choir Practice until time for my meeting. That started late and
didn’t last very long as the Bishop had another interview that he needed to
conduct. Then it was home for lunch and a meeting with Br. Richard Sandberg
who was recently called as as Assistant Group Leader. That completed his
orientation and he’s now got his set of work to do. Hopefully we’ll get
another assistant called later this week and I can finish the
reorganization.

Since I had to get up at 3:30 a.m. this morning to leave for the airport at
4:30, I went to bed about 8:30 last night. It was a fairly fitfull night’s
sleep, so I’m pretty tired today. After I get to Milpitas, I’m right into
meetings. We’re having our quarterly review with Bryon Look, the Chief
Financial Officer, and Bruce Decock’s boss. This is a pretty important
meeting, so Bruce has scheduled a dry-run to happen this morning ahead of
the meeting. I’ll get there about half-way through the dry run. The rest of
the week is quite busy with meetings as well. I think I’ll bring Nina with
me in August and we’ll add some vacation to the trip. I’ve also been
thinking about renting a place for the camper in California for the winter.
That’d make it a lot easier to find a hotel room and it’s better than
leaving the camper sit in a storage lot all winter long. So, I’ll spend some
time this week looking to see if such a place can be found.

Transferred from an older journaling system on 29 November 2002.

I’ve just come up from the cafeteria with my soup and soda. I’ll use this
time to try and catch up a bit on the past week. I am REALLY tired, even
after a fairly good night’s sleep. The past week has certainly worn both
Nina and me out!!

The drive between Colorado Springs and Soda Springs is a very long day no
matter how it’s sliced. It’s right close to eleven hours of driving plus
whatever stopping time is required for food and gasoline. From Laramie to
Soda Springs last Tuesday took a full eight hours and driving back here on
Saturday was ten minutes less than twelve hours.

We arrived in Soda Springs on Tuesday about 4 p.m. and put the trailer up in
the driveway. Dawnmarie was driving down from Spokane, Washington, and she
arrived about 9 p.m. that evening, several hours longer than she had
anticipated. Her kids were pretty worn out when they arrived. During the day
on Wednesday Heather and her kids arrived, LeeAnn and her kids drove up from
Logan, and Daryl and Jared (along with Daryl’s roomate Jason) came up from
Salt Lake City. That meant we had 18 people there from our family including
11 grandchildren. In addition to our folks, my sister Eileen came up on
Wednesday and my brother Perry and his wife Chris drove over from Green
River. In total we had 23 people needing places to sleep on Wednesday night.

Daryl, Jared, and Jason pitched a tent in the back yard. They were
originally going to go camping somewhere, but waited until it was too dark
to decide what to do. So they ended up in the back yard!! We had our trailer
and my sister Terry had brought over her pop-up camper. LeeAnn and her crew
slept downstairs in the basement. So, we did manage to get everyone into a
reasonable bed.

During the day on Thursday, July 4th, all of Terry’s crew began arriving as
well. They didn’t need beds, but include a number of folks. Terry and Allan,
Amy and her husband Jeff, and Jenifer and her husband Josh plus kids. As the
day progressed, people began to leave for home. However, not before we had a
very enjoyable time!

Perry, Chris, Eileen and I went to the Lion’s Club breakfast on Thursday
morning. We saw a few schoolmates that we recognized. We then staked out a
place to watch the parade, and then I walked up to the Jr. High School to
find the float I was to be riding on. Each of the classes involved in the
All-Class-Reunion were invited to enter a float into the 4th of July Parade.
Several classes do so, including my class, the class of 1963. Essentially we
had a flat-bed trailer with some chairs. A few streamers and a couple of
flags later, and the float was complete. The parade started at the Jr. High
School, came down Highway 30 past Main Street, and then turned north on 1st
West. We went around the block to Main Street, and then past the city park.
The entire route took about 20 minutes at parade speed. It was fun to see
all the kids whooping and hollaring when the float went by. We didn’t have
anything to do on the float except wave! Some of the groups had candy to
toss to the crowd. Judging by how much candy all the kids brought home,
there was plenty of candy to go around.

We had hamburgers and hot dogs for lunch after the parade. Later that
afternoon Perry, Chris, Nina, Eileen, and me went out to Hooper Springs Park
for the next part of the reunion which was a dutch oven dinner. That didn’t
come off very well. It was very hot. The catering company was singularly
unprepared to handle 250 (and possibly more) people. The food was pretty
poor considering that we paid $10 a person for it. Nina and I stayed for
dinner and then left to go back to my folks’ house to be with the family.
There weren’t enough people that I knew who I wanted to stay around and
visit with.

After the kids were settled down, the same crew that went to the dinner went
out to watch the fireworks. There were a lot of people out for the
fireworks! The program included music and narration, but from where we were
sitting, we couldn’t hear the music and narration. The fireworks themselves
were very nice and the City of Soda Springs had done themselves a very nice
display.

We spent the day Friday doing some small errands and visiting in the
morning. In the afternoon Dawnmarie and her kids, LeeAnn and her kids, along
with Nina and I, drove out to Chesterfield to visit the old ghost town and
take some pictures. While it was very hot, we had a good time learning about
the history of that old town. One of the restored homes we toured was owned
by a fellow named Holbrook, who also ran a general store. He would be a
distant cousin to Nina.

Saturday was the long twelv-hour drive back to Colorado Springs. Dawnmarie
followed us in her car and we switched kids back and forth through most of
the day. When we got to Ft. Collins and onto I-25 Freeway, the traffic was
enormous! I don’t think Dawnmarie has seen that much traffic in many years.
We were plenty tired when we got home. We left Soda Springs at 8:00 a.m. and
arrived at 7:50 p.m. The route took us from Soda Springs through Montpelier,
Idaho. Then we went through Kemmerer and joined I-80 outside of Green River,
Wyoming. We followed I-80 across Wyoming to Laramie where we took Route 287
south to Ft. Collins. Then it was down I-25 through Denver and Castle Rock
into Colorado Springs.

Sunday was a hot and tired day. It started with a 7:30 Melchizedek
Priesthood Committee Meeting followed by the meeting block from 9-12. After
church we had the Temple Prep Class at our house and then the rest of the
day was free. I used the time to catch up on the 600 e-mails that had piled
up during the previous week. I think one more good night’s sleep will catch
my body back up and I won’t be so confounded tired!

Transferred from an older journaling system on 29 November 2002

We’ve just passed through Green River, Wyoming, on our way to Soda Springs.
We’ll be there in about 3 hours. It is a fairly hot day — 88 degrees — but
cooler than yesterday. Thank heavens for air conditioning! We’re quite
comfortable in our Chevy Suburban with this trailer stuck on our rear end.

The campground last night was more than adequate. Easy-in and easy-out
sites. The sites were long enough that we didn’t have to unhook from the car
which made getting underway this morning much easier. This afternoon we’ll
be in Soda Springs and will have to back the trailer into the driveway on
the pad that Dad built when they had their 5th wheel trailer.

My cold is making life somewhat miserable. Lots of hacking and coughing. We
stopped and replenished the cold medicine. That stops the hacking and
coughing, but with major dry mouth. But, the cold will go away one of these
days, I’m sure. My diaphram sure is sore from coughing. So, Nina is doing
all the driving today.

Last Sunday afternon we attended the last dedicatory session of the Nauvoo
Temple which was broadcast into our Stake Center. Nina had previously gone
to the rebroadcast of the Thursday session, the first session, so she was
able to attend two sessions. It is so wonderful to have that temple rebuilt
and back into service. Quite a few people from our ward went to Nauvoo to
the open house, but we weren’t able to fit that into our schedule. We would
have had to take a Saturday off from the Denver Temple, and we’re so short
handed at the temple, we didn’t feel we could do that. But, we’ll soon go
over to Nauvoo and do a few sessions in the temple — that is, after it
cools down a bit! Here we have the high temperatures, but the air is
relatively dry. In Nauvoo the temperatures are high and the humidity is also
and that makes for a very sweltery day. We can easily wait for much nicer
weather.

I’m using my laptop computer plugged into the car’s power. It’s amazing how
far technology has progressed, and I’m certain that in another 20 years the
technology we’ve got available to us today will seem very quaint and quite
ancient. To be able to pull into a campground and be fully hooked up (water,
electricity, sewer) and to have cable TV available is very nice. As soon as
I buy a tripod we’ll have satellite TV available to us as we’ve enough
receivers to be able to take one with us when we’re travelling. Most
campgrounds have modem hookups in the office, and the one last night was no
exception. They had a nice facility set up for modem users and I was able to
log onto my e-mail account as well as log into work and take care of a
couple of issues there.

The economic climate is improving somewhat, but several companies have
turned up using fraudulent accounting practices. Enron was the first to
collapse last fall. Since then, Adelphia Cable, Xerox, Tyco, Global
Crossing, Quest, and MCI Worldcom have all been uncovered. These are major,
multi-billion dollar companies using illegal methods to inflate their
revenues or reduce their costs. In some cases, they had also made extremely
large loans to the CEO for other purposes. The net result is that the stock
market is very skittish and stock prices are around their lowest point in
ten years. There’s a lot of money on the sidelines because no one knows
where to invest. Money market rates are also at their lowest point in years,
so even the money on the sidelines isn’t doing much, either.

The work situation is heavily influenced by the overall economic situation.
We just finished our 2nd quarter which looks to be right on target at about
$500 million in revenue. I’d sure like for our stock price to pick up! We
need for it to gain about $18 a share over the next few years which would be
enough to retire. Retirement needs to happen in the next 5-7 years!

I made a trip to California last week. I need to make a couple of trips in a
couple of months to be certain that I retain the Premier Exec class at
United. It makes a real difference. If I make a couple of extra trips, I can
probably become a 1K flier which results in a much greater opportunity for
1st Class upgrades.

So, now I’m rambling. Time to queue this up and send it along to the computer
file.

Transferred from an older journaling system on 29 November 2002

We’re on our way to Soda Springs, Idaho. My class reunion is on the 4th of
July which gives us reason to spend some time visiting with mom and dad.
Much of the family will be there over the same time. My brother Perry and
his wife Chris are coming over, my sister Eileen and her husband are coming
up from Sandy, and my other sister Terry lives nearby in Grace. Our daughter
Heather is coming up with her kids for a couple of days. Dawnmarie and her
kids will be arriving from Spokane. Daryl and Jared are driving up as well.
So we should have a house full of people.

We’re towing the trailer to provide more beds (and in particular, beds for
Nina and me). So, we left about 3 p.m. this afternoon and drove as far as
Laramie. We’re camped in a KOA campground for the night and will drive the
rest of the way to Soda Springs tomorrow. This stop gives me a chance to
drain all the holding tanks before we get to Soda Springs. Dad does have a
sewage drain outside by the driveway, but it’s on the opposite side of the
drive from where the trailer will be parked.

It’s been quite a while since I last sent in a journal entry. Lots has
happened in the past few weeks. While we’re driving tomorrow I’ll probably
write a much longer entry that’ll get sent from Soda Springs when we arrive.

So for now, life is pretty good. I’ve caught a bit of a cold, but other than
that we’re having a great time.

Transferred from an older journaling system on 29 November 2002.