We had our traditional Christmas services this morning in Church. The choir sang four numbers along with two speakers. I enjoy singing in the choir and we performed reasonably well for a volunteer pick-up type of a choir. We sang an arrangement of Silent Night followed by a speaker reading the Christmas story from Luke. We then sang Angels We Have Heard on High from the hymnbook followed by a congregational hymn Far, Far Away on Judea’s Plain. We then sang Were You There followed by the main speaker. The choir then sang an arrangement of Hosannah. The congregation sang O Come, All Ye Faithful and that ended the service. Our normal organist was out of town, so I was substituting on the organ. All went well except for the introduction into O Come, All Ye Faithful! My feet wanted to play the hymn in it’s normal three flats, hands were playing it in one sharp as it is now written in the hymnbook. We survived, however. Our organ has a nice 32′ diapason stop which got cranked in on the last verse…!

This Christmas looks to be very quiet around the house. We’ve been invited over to our Bobby and Duane’s house for Christmas dinner. We’ll have a quiet dinner here with Nina and me on Christmas Eve. This is the first time that I can remember where we’ve not yet found anyone to come over for Christmas Eve!

Bradica has been scarfing up on candy, however. She’s torn open a couple of packages that had candy in them. The one last night had fudge in it and she’s been a pretty sick dog. She just started to perk up a little while ago. Only problem is, she never learns a lesson from that.

Looking ahead at the new year is a bit difficult. Business conditions are improving, but very slowly. Bonuses and merits increases will continue to be on hold for at least the first six months of the year. Hiring is frozen; even if someone quits they likely won’t be replaced. Spending will be tightly constrained. I think that’s even the optomistic outlook. We’re looking right down the barrel at war with Iraq and if that happens, the economy will likely go south in a real hurry. That war will likely be very messy with a lot of casualties and the American people won’t tolerate that very well. We’ve got plenty of political problems as well. Reason and moderation have completely departed Washington and have been replaced by radical fanaticism. Only the far right and far left remain as they’ve literally made everyone that even smells moderate inconsequential. Makes one a bit depressed, me thinks.

The Two Towers was a marvelous movie. I was ready to turn around and go right back into the theater! Nina and I will definitely go next week, perhaps on Monday afternoon after we’ve finished with the will. That’s a task that’s been put off too long, so Monday morning we’ll review the wills thoroughly with our lawyer and get them finalized.

We left the office about 10 a.m. to go to the 11:30 a.m. movie. When we got to the theater, the line of people with advance purchase tickets was fairly long. We waited in line until almost 11:20 before the doors into the theater complex opened. They were showing the film on two screens, both of which were filled to capacity. It was a thoroughly engrossing movie and the almost three hours were over quite quickly.

I did find it very strange that the building was closed up for so long with only a few minutes to get into the right theater and seated before the movie started. As it was, I found a seat, left my jacket there, took a couple of food orders, and went back out to the popcorn counter to get some popcorn and drinks. Those lines were pretty long as well and I didn’t get back into the theater until about 11:50. I got to my seat as the last preview finished and the main feature started. Thank goodness for previews!

We’ve had a little snow this afternoon — perhaps an inch or so. Probably don’t have much more snow coming, even this small amount wasn’t forecast. We’d sure like to get a lot of snow and make some more progress towards breaking the drought in this area.

The second installment in the three-movie Lord of the Rings series debuts today. The first movie, The Fellowship of the Ring was an outstanding movie, so attending the movie today is quite important. To that end, I’ve declared the middle part of the day a “mental health” day and given everyone on my staff permission to take the time to attend the movie. Some thirty people here in Colorado Springs will be going together. This is quite exciting, actually!

We’re headed to the Church in a few minutes for our annual Tithing Settlement meeting with the Bishop. After that, it’s off to Walmart to finish up some shopping. We may even find some treasures there! Nina seems to be right ready for Christmas to be here. She’s been wrapping and packaging non-stop it seems for a couple of days. Tomorrow should see most everything in the mail.

We’ll have no family here for Christmas and have been invited over to Duane and Bobby Slocum’s for Christmas dinner. I think Nina’s got a few folks coming over on Christmas eve as well. Meanwhile, tomorrow is a very big day!

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.