It’s inconceivable to me that we could lose a server! But, for some reason on Friday morning a crucial business-continuity server had disappeared. Further, it had been offline for some thirty hours and that fact was also just being discovered. Then followed a most frustrating day that I was very glad to have come to an end. The server was eventually found. It hadn’t been shipped to Gresham, Oregon, as reported by some people but was, in fact, exactly where it was supposed to be. The network connection had failed and needed to be restarted. The workday ended with a “come-to-Jesus” meeting with my boss. That’s not the kind of meeting one likes to have at the time of year when he’s writing my annual review.

So, I got home in a fairly foul mood in time to head to the Church for the annual Christmas Creche festivities. Again, a bunch of little things that should have happened didn’t and I ended up spending the entire evening there serving punch and cookies. The event was a brilliant success which helped to diminish my mood. By the end of the evening, the only issue was my very sore feet from being on them too long during the evening.

It’s now a Monday morning and I’m back in the office. The day was supposed to start with a dentist appointment that didn’t happen. I showed up at the supposedly appointed time of 7:30 a.m. to find that they thought the appointment was tomorrow at 7:30 a.m. I’ve got my own “come-to-Jesus” meeting that’ll happen in about 45 minutes. I’ll be meeting with the staff here in a one-way-communication meeting to see if we can’t break this cycle of haphazard work accompanied by a “so what?” attitude. I’d like to think that things can only get better, but there’s plenty of room for things to get worse.

Yesterday I started the last business trip of the year. I flew out of Colorado Springs through Denver into San Jose, California. I got out of the houst about 15 minutes later than I wanted to leave for a 7:40 a.m. flight and then missed the exit off the freeway to the airport. Due to construction in that area, the exit configuration had changed rather dramatically and I went flying by the exit. That added about five minutes to the trip to the airport. However, none of that mattered since the flight was delayed and perhaps cancelled.

This flight was operated by Air Wisconsin and equipment problems grounded the planned airplane. A replacement airplane was being ferried to Colorado Springs but probably wouldn’t be available in sufficient time for me to catch the flight from Denver to San Jose. So, I rebooked to take an 8:40 a.m. United flight to Denver and an 11:20 flight out of Denver to San Jose.

While I was sitting in the airport in Colorado Springs waiting for the rescheduled airplane, United filed for bankruptcy. That shouldn’t make much difference for me in the short term, but probably means a huge difference for United in the long term. No airline has ever emerged from bankruptcy and survived.

Sunday’s newspaper had an announcement that security at the airports will change “just in time for the holidays.” Not a day too soon, in my opinion. One of the changes implemented after 9/11/2001 attack was to implement supposedly random inspection of passengers at the boarding gate. Amongst the frequent traveling public, this has become known as the “old lady search.” Because it is imperative that the random inspection of passengers at the boarding gate not delay flight departure, the inspectors pull the first person in line for inspection. When they are finished inspecting that person, if there are sufficient people still in line to board, they will inspect someone else. So, all the seasoned travelers hang back from boarding until someone is being inspected. That usually turns out to be an elderly person, usually a lady, who approaches the boarding gate hoping to get early boarding so she can get situated. She’s usually walking with the aid of a cane and carrying a lot of stuff. She becomes the sacrificial lamb and as soon as she’s snagged, the boarding gate is mobbed. It’s definitely time for this absurd practice to end.

Of course, when I arrived in San Jose, I was more than two hours late for my rental car reservation. That necessitated a stop at the rental car counter to get the reservation reset and get a car rented. The net was rather than arriving at my San Jose office about 11:00 a.m., I didn’t get there until about 2:30 p.m.

The purpose of the trip is to attend two all-day meetings. In times past, these would have been so-called “offsite” meetings. However, in the current economic situation, we’re meeting on-site in one of our conference rooms — an on-site offsite meeting! The first of them is an e-commerce working council meeting followed by an all-day IT management meeting on Wednesday. I’ll fly back on Thursday afternoon. Perhaps travel will be less of a travail on Thursday?

It’s a little past 9 p.m. on the first day of December, which is also a Sunday and is further the first Sunday of the month. Nina is watching one of the made-for-TV Christmas Movies in the other room. I’m, as usual, fussing with computers. The first Sunday of each month is generally a Fast Sunday — a day when we abstain from food and drink for two meals in a 24-hour period. The money we would have spent on food is donated to the Church for charitable purposes. We then gather together in our worship service where we take the sacrament and bear testimony. This is the last Fast Sunday for this year and in this time slot. Starting in January we switch meeting times with the other Ward in our building. They will have their block of meetings from 9:00 a.m. to noon and we will have our block of meetings from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. All in all, I prefer the afternoon meeting schedule.

This Sunday is also the First Presidency Christmas Devotional. Now that we have satellite TV, we get KBYU on the satellite and can watch these things from the comfort of our living room. We invited Duane and Bobby Slocum to come up and watch the devotional with us. The music by the Orchestra at Temple Square and the Tabernacle Choir was outstanding. It was a lovely meeting and we enjoyed the time together.

It’s also a tired day — I took a nap this afternoon and am still right ready to head for bed. I got a call about 10:30 last night that a woman in the ward, a single mother, had gone into the emergency room and needed a blessing. I rousted out one of my assistant group leaders and we drove over to the hospital to give the blessing. We were gone about an hour and a half. Then it was up a 6 a.m. to get ready for church and meetings starting at 7:00. Taking a nap is rather unusual for me these days, but it was welcomed this afternoon!

In addition to having the ability to post on-line to this journal, I also want to be able to send e-mail to the journal and have that post as well. This is the first step in that process, making sure that by doing a straight insert into the database is handled correctly by the system.

The incoming e-mail would have the category, author, posting date and time, and the content of the post in the body of the e-mail. A php program set up as a cron job would read the incoming e-mail, parse out the various components, and insert the post into the journal database.

The purpose is to provide a way to write a journal entry while I’m not connected to the internet, such as when I’m on an airplane, and be able to deliver the post when I am next able to connect to the internet.

The day after thanksgiving is coming to an end. Star Trek II ‘The Wrath of Kahn’ is on TV and just finishing. The hot tub is warm and my next destination. It’s been an interesting day.

We made a great breakfast since both Daryl and Jared are here to enjoy it. We then went to the movies to see ‘The Emperor Club’. That was a very good movie about a dedicated teacher. We followed that up with a trip to a new Super Target store near the theater. It was crowded and people seemed to be buying lots of stuff. I’m not yet ready to start buying. Nina and I have agreed to hold to a limit of $50 on each other. Shouldn’t be hard to do that this year for sure.

After we got home and let Bradica out, we left again and had dinner out at new Japanese restaurant not far from the house. The food was very good. This is the third time I’ve eaten there, but the first time in the evening. It’ll definitely make our list of the best restaurants around.

The end result is that I’ve eaten far too much food in the past couple of days. I’ll never get rid of this weight at this rate! Time to start really counting calories.

I think I’ve gotten the date fixed for these posts. Only problem is, the computer keeps reporting that the time is Eastern Standard Time. Does the computer know the difference? I’m going to have to ask the question about how to get the time zone reset. My other Linux computer is reporting the correct time zone. This is pretty strange.

I think I need to create another category — one for regular journal posts and another for technical posts about this journaling system.

I’ve also got other electronic journal entries that I need to put into this system as well. Finally, I need to get the e-mail process working. This system doesn’t come with a method for e-mailing in entries, but I have one pretty well written so I can modify that to put posts into this same database from e-mails.

This is the first post to the new web journal. I’m still getting this software to work correctly. I think enough is working to start putting posts out on the web page for all the world to see.

Today is Thanksgiving. It’s been a good day. Our two youngest sons Daryl and Jared arrived last night and will stay through tomorrow. Daryl being here was a surprise that the boys did a good job of keeping. Fortunately there is more than enough food!! It’s now close to 11 p.m. and time to head for bed!! I’m noticing that the server time isn’t set correct, either. So I’ve got to get that fixed — maybe tomorrow. I think the server thinks it’s set up for EST and I’m in MST.

We’ve just finished breakfast. Nina is out taking pictures of the ship and
we’ll meet in the library in about 15 minutes for the daily trivia quiz. She
would have won yesterday had she turned in her paper. I won two days ago. The
prize isn’t much of interest, but it’s kind of fun to have won. Each day the
trivia questions are different, having to do with the area where we are
sailing. I took the one related to glaciers.

Today is the last day aboard the ship. We dock tomorrow morning around 7 a.m.
and will disembark when our number is called. Oh my goodness, there is a huge
bunch of dolphins or something jumping and swimming just off the port side of
the ship. No way to get a good picture without going topside and even then, I
don’t have the right camera. But that was quite interesting!!

Anyhow, we’ll dock and wait upstairs in the library or something until the
motorcoach is ready that we’re scheduled to take to go to the airport. Our
flight is at 1:30 p.m. and we’ll get into Colorado Springs about 7:00 p.m.
tomorrow night.

The cruise has been a lot of fun. I think Nina has had a very good time. I
would have liked the weather to have been warmer, so next time we’ll make this
trip in July or not later than mid August. The best weather day was yesterday
late afernoon. That was the first time that one could have been out on the
verandah in shirtsleeves.

The cruise left Vancouver, B.C., on Saturday afternoon, September 14th. We
sailed all day Sunday and arrived in Juneau on Monday mid-day. Cruising on
Sunday worked out pretty well. We had a short Sacrament Meeting at 9:00 a.m.
and a couple other people from Idaho joined us for that meeting. It was a very
relaxing day followed by formal night in the restaurant.

Juneau was quite interesting. We spent only a short time in town before
boarding a bus for the whale-watching trip. I’ve already written about that,
so more detail isn’t necessary. We left Juneau around 10 p.m. and sailed to
Skagway, arriving about 7:00 a.m. We got off the boat there about 9:30 or so
to do some shopping. We spent a little money, took a lot of pictures, and
enjoyed the town. We “discovered” an old steam locomotive back in the woods
and expended a lot of film around that engine. Now I wished I had climbed up
into the engineer’s compartment to take some pictures, but I didn’t think of
it at the time.

Wednesday was spent cruising up into Glacier Bay National Park and then on
south towards Ketchikan. The glaciers are quite magnificent. The weather
wasn’t very cooperative…. Lots of blowing rain and cold temperatures. We
didn’t stay very long around the glaciers, which was surprising to me. I
thought we would have been there for several hours.

We got into Ketchikan yesterday about 9:00 a.m. Nina and I disembarked shortly
after we arrived and did a little picture taking before taking a tour to the
Tlingit Indian village — called Saxman Village.

More dolphines off the side of the boat!

The village was quite interesting. A number of totem poles along with
explanations of what the pole represented. We visited with a carver working on
a pole to be sent to a customer in Saratoga, Florida. We also saw some native
songs and dances performed. So, with a 2-hour glimpse into this village, we
are now experts on the Tlingit Indians!

So, we’re now on the last day. Lots of small stuff to do and some picture to
take around the ship. It has been a very relaxing time. I’m ready to pack and
go again … which is happening in just under a month when we take a cruise to
the western Caribbean!

Transferred from an older journaling system on 29 November 2002. Pictures from the cruise are available here.