It appears that the web log is back in business! Cable One got their problem fixed and I’ve gotten my problem fixed. With luck the system will stay up and operational from now forward, except (of course) when the system comes down to be moved into the new house at the end of July. There have been too many little problems and it’s time for the system to settle down for a while.

I’m at lunch at the office on a pretty busy day. Because of the time differences, 7 a.m. in Pocatello is 3 p.m. in Oudenaarde, Belgium. That means many meetings are scheduled between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pocatello time. Two or three times a week I’ll have meetings at 7 a.m. and every day I’ll have meetings at 8 and 9 a.m. with people in Belgium. The rest of the day us usually fairly open. Every other Thursday, however, is a day packed with meetings. On those Thursdays all the local management meetings are scheduled and any HR training needed is scheduled as well. Since I get most of my work done in meetings (I’m not paid to be an individual contributor), that’s where I spend most of my day. Today is just busier than most.

Last Sunday was the 4th of July. We gathered in Soda Springs, Idaho, at mom and dad’s house. At one point there were twenty-six people there. Dawnmarie, Kirk, and their five children were the first to arrive. Saturday afternoon Heather, Ty, and their four children arrived. Sunday afternoon my sister Eileen and two of her children (Alison and Suzie) came up for the remainder of the holiday. We got a surprise visit from Daryl who stayed through late Monday afternoon. On Monday my niece Amy, her husband, and three children came over for a few hours. Most of the folks visited, played, and ate. But, Ty, Kirk, Dad, and I worked on putting up a roof.

Dad is building a large workshop behind his house in the back yard. He had finished putting up the framing and was putting on the plastic protective sheets on the roof when he fell off the ladder (see the July 2nd post) and injured himself. He’s still in a lot of pain and having lots of gastrointestinal problems. So, the roof needed to be put on. I thought it would be six or seven hours of work. Not so. We worked all day Saturday and all day Monday until Kirk and Ty had to leave in the late afternoon. By that time, the roof was about two-thirds finished. My brother Perry drove over yesterday from Green River, Wyoming, to help finish up the roof. So, I took off early yesterday afternoon and we went back to Soda Springs. Perry and I were able to finish the roof. Now there’s no need for dad to climb up on the ladder until he’s in much better health. It’ll be a lovely shop when he’s finished.

Because sleeping arrangments were scarce at mom and dad’s house, Nina and I (along with Bradica the dog) drove back and forth from Pocatello every day. That meant that Nina had driven back and forth to Soda Springs eight times in nine days. That translates to about 900 miles of driving! So what does she do today? Drives down to Orem to visit Heather and drop off Bradica, the dog. She left about seven this morning and will be back about eight this evening.

The travelling isn’t finished with that, however. Tomorrow morning we’ll drive back to Salt Lake City to catch an airplane to Kentucky for the twin’s baptism on Saturday. We’ll fly back Sunday morning. It’ll be a rapid trip, but we do want to attend every baptism we can of our grandchildren.

Only problem with all this is, while the holiday season has arrived, who’s had time for any holiday-ing? Not much time in this household, for sure. Happy 4th of July!

Monday night late I noticed that my web log was no longer accessible from the Internet.
The problem didn’t seem to be any of the problems I was having earlier with getting
the right setup. So, this afternoon for lunch I spent a fair amount of time on the
phone with Cable One trying to get the problem fixed. It turned out that the problem
was that my Internet Protocol address (IP address) was supposed to be permanently
assigned, but the Cable One tech didn’t do the order correctly to get everything
set up.

So, sometime in the next 24 hours they will finally get me back online. In the meantime,
I’ve been working on figuring out why e-mail postings haven’t been working. That
problem turned out to be a rookie programming mistake. When I took my first programming
class at Purdue University in 1968, the instructor told us that by the end of the
class if we learned nothing else, we would learn that we didn’t know how to count.
Counting in a computer program turns out to be quite complex. Do you count before
or after the event? Do you test the count before counting or after counting? How
does the programming language count — from 0 or from 1 (that is, is the first
instance 0 or is the first instance 1?). This weblog is written in a language
that counts from zero. So, the first e-mail message found on an iteration is the
zeroth message, the next one (if there is one) is the oneth record, and so on. I was
counting from zero but testing against a count from one. A good rookie mistake that
I’ve made several times (and will likely make again!).

So, if you’re reading this, Cable One has fixed their mistake and I’ve fixed mine.
Aren’t computers wonderful?

It’s mid-afternoon on the Friday before a three-day weekend. I’m in the office and it is very quiet. The parking lot is more than half empty. It is holiday time! Since this year offers three opportunities for a long summer weekend, many folks are taking advantage. I’ve got a couple of more meetings right after lunch and then I’ll be on my way to Soda Springs.

We’ll spend the days in Soda Springs over the weekend and nights back at our apartment. Dawnmarie, Kirk, and clan are arriving in Soda this afternoon. Heather, Ty, and family will come up Saturday late morning. We’ll enjoy the time visiting with them and playing with the grandchildren.

It has been a fairly eventful week, however. Dad is building a workshop behind his house. The frame is up and the roof trusses are in place. He was nailing up the firring strips for the metal roof when he lost balance and fell off the ladder last Friday. He landed on his back and bit his tongue pretty badly. When we saw him on Sunday, he was feeling pretty rotten. He had a very upset stomach and was in a lot of pain.

He visited the chiropractor on Monday and got some pain relief, but he still had a lot of gastronomic distress. Finally on Tuesday he went to the doctor who put him in the hospital. He spent the night there undergoing tests and observation. There isn’t any significant apparent damage, but he had become quite constipated. He came home on Wednesday. Nina went to Soda on both Tuesday and Wednesday to stay with mom and do what she could to help. We both went up last night (Thursday) to help clean things up on the deck for the grandkids. He’s feeling better, but still is a long way from getting back to normal.

The shop, however, is still a high priority! He and mom drove to Pocatello yesterday to pick up the roofing and siding material for the shop. Since it’s not a good idea for him to get up on a ladder until he’s feeling much better, I think that Kirk, Ty, and I will spend Saturday putting the roof on the shop. Haven’t done that before, so it should be a good learning experience. Perhaps even a great way to spend a Holiday!

The past few days have been a series of difficult technical problems with my home network. This evening, Daryl came riding to my rescue!! Hurrah Daryl!!

I moved the network pretty much intact from Colorado Springs to Pocatello. The only real difference was the internet service provider. Once the high-speed connection was installed and all the outside technical stuff like domain naming services was set up, my network came up and worked like a charm — except for being able to connect to my employer’s network. That just wouldn’t work. The technical guy at work told me that unless I changed the internal addressing on my home network, I would never be able to connect. So, I began the process of changing all of the internal addresses.

That process seemed to go pretty well, except that nothing would work on the inbound side! The weblog was not reachable and email bound for rnsmith.com wasn’t being delivered, either. Even internal mail could not be retrieved from the web server. One problem for me was that all of the documentation for this network is on the moving van! I had set up the email system more than a year ago and the details had long since fled my grey matter. I spent several days poking here and there in the system to see if I could figure out what the problem was. I wasn’t finding much that seemed to make any difference. So, finally I called Daryl.

We connected this evening and within ten minutes he had found the problem. I would never have found these configuration files until the moving van arrived and I found my documentation.

Our son Daryl is one of the most knowledgeable and capable systems administrators I’ve ever worked with — bar none. You’ve come through once again, Daryl. Many, many thanks!

The web log is back on line in Pocatello, Idaho! The system came up this afternoon when Cable One finished the DNS implementation. It should be a bit faster, particularly on the initial page load. We’ll see how service is over the next few months.

This also means we’re in our apartment in Pocatello, and have moved out of our home in Colorado Springs. Here’s some dates:

• We got back from the cruise on Saturday evening, June 12th, too tired to do much other than unload some suitcases.
• On Sunday, June 13th, all the computer equipment was turned off and packaged up so it could come with us in the motorhome to Pocatello.
• Monday morning, promptly at 8 a.m., the packers arrived. Three people started packing up the house and Nina and I started consolidating the stuff we needed to have with us in Pocatello into the motorhome. We were successful in getting most things we needed out before they got packed. In one case, the packer put our telephone system into a box just before lunch on Tuesday. We were able to retrieve it before he closed up the box.
• Monday evening we had dinner with our good friends Bobbie and Duane at the Outback Steakhouse. Good food and very good company.
• Tuesday the packers continued their work, finishing up about 3 p.m. that afternoon having packed about 280 boxes of "really important stuff".
• Wednesday morning the moving truck showed up about 9:30 a.m. to begin loading the truck. The driver and a crew of four other people arrived. They began tearing down beds and putting boxes on the truck. The original estimate was that they’d be done around 5 p.m. It was about that time when they figured out they didn’t have a large enough truck and called for another truck. In the end, they finished loading everything onto the trucks about 7 p.m. that night.
• Continuing on Wednesday, we finished loading the motorhome and cleaning the house. Duane came up and loaded all the remaining trash in his pickup truck to give to the trash collectors on Friday. It was a full load! We finally drove away about 8:30 p.m. headed north on I-25. We drove up north of Denver and stayed the night in a TraveLodge because they allowed a dog to stay in the room. We both collapsed into bed. The dog, however, spent most of the night sniffing all of the strange smells in the room!
• Thursday morning, June 17th, we drove through Ft. Collins, over to Rawlins, and across I-80 to Green River. From there we took US 30 through Soda Springs for a quick visit with mom and dad, and ended up in Pocatello about 6 p.m. that evening. We picked up the apartment keys and directions from security at my new employer and went to the apartment. It’s quite serviceable for our needs right now.
• Hallelujah! Our Pocatello realtor called as we were driving across Wyoming to tell us that we would close on our new home in Pocatello on July 22nd. We will be in our new home by the end of July! That’s a whole month earlier than expected!!

Most everything is put away in the apartment and we’re getting used to living in a small space. Life is pretty good. Last Sunday we went to Church. As we drove towards the building on the freeway, the parking lot was completely empty at about ten minutes before meeting was to start. Our first thought? Stake Conference! So, I called our new bishop at home and we figured out where the Stake building was (funny thing was, I had talked with the Bishop at work on Friday and he totally forgot to tell me it was Stake Conference on Sunday). The conference was good and we enjoyed being there. This is the third time this has happened! We should just expect that first Sunday anywhere we move will be Stake Conference.

We spent Sunday afternoon in Soda Springs. It was a very pleasant time visiting and having dinner with my folks. We’ll do this fairly regularly. Also, they are no longer long distance! Nina calls mom a couple of times a day, "just because I can!" she says. Monday evening Cable One installed the high-speed internet and now today, the web site is now online and working. Hurrah!

As we came south along Vancouver Island, we came into range for this
Blackberry. As that happened, I started receiving work e-mail. 130 e-mails
later it stopped buzzing. A few of the e-mails are important. Most can be
handled next week. Reality is setting in.

We're at dinner. I didn't order a salad, so I've got a short break before
the next course.

We've docked at Victoria and can disembark after dinner. We've not been
there before, so we'll get off the boat and look around. There's probably
nothing there that we really need to buy. It's supposed to be a really
pretty (and very Brittish) town. We've a few more minutes of paradise
before the hectic starts tomorrow.

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Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

The cruise is almost over. We're close to docking in Victoria, Brittish
Columbia. Dinner is also in about 15 minutes. We've definitely had pleanty
of food on this trip! Every couple of hours, it seems, we're eating again.

The cruise has been a lot of fun and we're already talking about the next
cruise in the Carribean in a couple of years. Tomorrow it's all over and
back to reality. Dang!

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Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

The cruise is quickly coming to an end. We sailed away from Ketchikan at about 1 p.m. this afternoon headed for Victoria, Canada. Well arrive there about 8 p.m. tomorrow (Friday) night. There is a law (called the Jones Act) from the late 1800’s that prohibits ships of foreign registry from docking at two consecutive mainland US ports without going to a foreign port between them. I think the purpose was to prevent foreign shipping companies from going into competition with domestic shipping companies. Nevertheless, the affect on us is that we can’t dock in Seattle without first stopping at a foreign port. So, we’ll stop in Victoria, Canada (on the tip of Vancouver Island) for about 4 hours before sailing the rest of the way back into Seattle.

It’s been a good cruise and I think everyone has had a good, relaxing time. I’m sure that we’ve absolutely worn out mom and dad on this trip. They’ll be glad to get home and have some quiet time. However, meanwhile they’re having a good time and are very engaged with the cruising process.

This is our fourth cruise with Holland America and we’ve no experience with any other cruise line. Of the four, however, this one has had the most issues and would rank fourth in overall quality of the experience. That’s also partially our own fault but there’s quite a few issues that the cruise line could also address.

1. This is the first time we’ve cruised when school was out. There are a lot of kids on the boat and that’s a first for us. Most of the time that’s no issue except when it comes to the pools and hot tubs.
2. We booked four veranda rooms on the back of the boat. The result has been somewhat mixed.
• It’s been very nice to have the rooms next to each other and to have the doors between the verandas open. It has provided quick access between rooms.
• The verandas are large and the furniture is better than on previous cruises.
• However, we thought we’d get better views from the back of the boat. That didn’t turn out to be true. We can only see to the rear of the ship and it’s quite noisy back there! The decks are terraced so those folks above us see down into our veranda and we see down into the ones below us. Privacy is somewhat lacking.
• The smoke from the stacks goes right over the top of the boat and swirls back up along the back of the boat on occasion. Diesel smoke isn’t all that pleasant.
3. This is a fairly new ship — it’s been in service about 15 months at most. There are too many things not working on the boat! Lots of elevators are out of service and others are iffy whether or not the door will close correctly. The hot tubs on the rear of the Lido deck have been "down for maintenance" almost the entire cruise. Ceiling panels are coming loose and a couple of them have been pulled down to prevent them from falling down and injuring someone.
4. Speaking of hot tubs, while there are five of them on the boat (and two have been broken for most of the trip), they are all very small. Three or four people can be in them at the most. The hot tubs on the other three boats were large, spacious, and comfortably seated 8-9 people. These are small, quite uncomfortable, and not very deep.

I think we’ll stay with the older, smaller boats. We’ll definitely not cruise out of Seattle again to Alaska. It adds too much time to the cruise and we spend too much time out in the ocean away from the Inside Passage. Even then, because the boat is so big, we cruise a ways from the shore. The smaller boats sail closer to the shore with more interesting scenery.

Perhaps I’m being a little picky, however. We’ve had a wonderful time and have enjoyed being together on the boat. I’m sorry to see the vacation come to an end (although I’m plenty tired!). It seems strange that a week from today we’ll be homeless!! Our house sale in Colorado Springs closes next Thursday morning early and we’ll be on the road driving to Pocatello. The house there isn’t bought, yet, the company is looking for temporary housing for us, but so far no word on where or what that’ll be. We just might be living in the RV once again!