I’m on an airplane somewhere over eastern Nevada headed towards Utah. In about ninety minutes I’ll be in
the Denver Airport waiting for a connecting flight to Colorado Springs. The flight is full — it is always full on
the flights between San Jose and Denver in both directions. I’ve got a window seat just over the wing on
the left side of the airplane. The flight has been smooth with no issues. We left the gate on time and will
arrive in Denver about fifteen minutes early. It’s amazing to me how much the on-time performance at
United changed when they took about thirty percent of their flights out of the schedule. But, they’re still
loosing money in a very big way, in bankruptcy, and there’s a lot of bleeding left to do. I have a hard
time understanding how it is they can’t make money! There’s something very wrong with this company.

The weather outside is lovely. Clear, not much haze, a few clouds on the horizon. Isabel, the first major
hurricane of this season to come ashore in the US should be up in Canada now and largely disapated.
We generally get a couple of days of fabulous weather across most of the country following a hurricane.
Perhaps all the weather energy has been wrapped up in that storm and gives the rest of the region a respite.

This was a very busy week in California. I flew in on Monday arriving around 2:30 p.m. The flight was
marginally eventful; the first officer’s seat wouldn’t adjust properly and the maintenance folks had to
disassemble part of the seat and replace a bolt. That delayed the flight by about 45 minutes. Meetings
filled most of the time during the week. This is my second trip out since February and I’ll make at least
three more yet this year to California along with one to Austin, Texas early next month. There’s also a
possibility of making a trip in mid-October to Atlanta, Georgia, Raleigh, North Carolina, Boston,
Massachusetts, and Minneapolis, Minnesota along with my boss Bruce and another director Michael
who has responsibility for the engineering systems. Coupled with the birth of a couple of grandchildren
and spending Christmas in Phoenix, the rest of the year will be very busy.

Monday night I stopped by Fry’s in San Jose. A trip to California isn’t much of a trip without a stop at
Fry’s toy shop. I didn’t buy much, but had a good time looking at all the electronic stuff there. I didn’t
have much time, either. I wanted to get back later in the week but there was no time. Tuesday night
I went up to the Oakland Temple for a session. I got there for the 6:30 session which was held in a
smaller session room (only seats 70 people instead of 220). There were five sisters and three brothers.
Since there were no couples there, I was asked to be part of the witness couple with another sister.
Haven’t had that opportunity for a long time, either. The fellow officiating was doing it for the first time.
He sure was nervous! It was kind of fun watching him.

Wednesday night I had dinner with one of my managers and his fiance. We went to a Japanese
restaurant in Sunnyvale run by a Japanese woman I knew in Japan. It was fun to see her and the food was
very good (but expensive). I will definitely eat there again. (An Aside: just to the left and above my airplane,
another jet just came zooming by going the other direction. The combined speed must have been about
700 mph. Quite spectacular!) Thursday night (last night) I had dinner at the home of a fellow who works
for me in California. He and his wife are from Turkey and she had worked most of the day to prepare a
fairly traditional Turkish meal for their home region. The both grew up in Istanbul and both majored in
mathematics at a university in Istanbul. They met while at college. I had a delightful time, the food was
delicious, and I’m sure I overstayed my welcome by not leaving until 11 p.m.!

Meetings generally define my life at work. I’ve remarked to people that meetings are how I get my work
done. Sometimes they’re big meetings, sometimes a one-on-one meeting, mostly they’re scheduled
meetings but occasionally they’re ad-hoc meetings. (It’s now very cloudy outside.) Monday after I arrived
I was in a meeting at disaster recovery followed by a one-on-one meeting with one of my managers.
Tuesday I was in an all-morning e-business working council meeting which was one of the most useless
meetings I’ve attended in a very long time. That afternoon was a meeting on the hardware architecture
being planned for the Channel Management project. Wednesday morning was a meeting on the new
Microsoft vulnerability and the patch that needs to be applied to all the personal computers in the company.
I also had my boss’s staff meeting which lasts about two and a half hours, followed by a meeting in
another building on spam e-mail and how to do a better job of helping our employees manage the amount
of spam that they get. Thursday started with an 8 a.m. meeting on monitoring in the data center, a
meeting with SGI on their new Linux servers, a meeting with Neoteris on their proxied secure sockets
product, a disaster recovery meeting for our Oracle ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, and a
ninety-minute meeting with IBM to review thier product families certified for Linux. Today I only had one
meeting — a two hour IT Working Council meeting where we discussed in detail our going-forward
strategy for our collaboration sites, managing consultants and such who need to connect their own
computers to our network. Right after that meeting I packed up and headed for the airport. Sometimes
I wonder where the time went until I go back and review the week to see what meetings I suffered through!

With the new church calling comes lots of other church things I have to be at. Tonight I was supposed to
be at the Black Forest Ward building for a BBQ social for the Stake and Ward Young Men Presidencies
and their spouses. I arrive in the Colorado Springs airport well after the social starts, so I won’t be there.
Tomorrow night is a regional youth dance at the Broadmoor building and I’ll have to go as a chaperone.
That’s after a full day at the Denver Temple. I think I’m tired already!

In my boss’s staff meeting we discussed what things we might need to do to better manage outsourced
development. We’ve gone through a couple of projects where the programming work was being done in
India and they haven’t gone very well. Some other companies are putting one of the senior IT executives
in India to manage these relationships. I volunteered to go. That would be an outstanding assignment.
It’ll never happen, but I can dream a bit, I think. I can hear our daughter Jaelene’s passionate comments
now should that ever happen….

The clouds are gone, it’s gotten a bit bumpy, and we’re over Utah southeast of Salt Lake City. We’ll be
on the ground in Denver in about 40 minutes. The trip to California is coming to a close!