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.