It’s about 6:30 p.m. Central Time and I’m on a flight from Austin, Texas, to Denver and eventually home. We’re climbing through some clouds with a fair amount of turbulence making typing this pretty interesting. We’ll be above the clouds Real Soon Now as it’s gotten quite bright outside the window. That should end the turblence (perhaps!). This is a small Regional Jet. There are two (narrow) seats on each side of the aisle. It looks like there are seats for about fifty people and all but two seats are occupied. Fortunately, one of those seats is right next to me. On this airplane I want to either sit in the first row or in the exit row. That way no one in front of me can recline their seatback. There isn’t much room between the seats (this distance is called "pitch" in airplane speak) so if the person in front reclines their
seat, there’s no room at all available. The seats just before the exit row can’t be reclined and of course there are now seats in front of the first row. There was a fellow sitting next to me (I’m in the window seat on the left side of the airplane in row 8), but since the two seats in the last row of the airplane were empty, he moved there. He’s at least six feet tall and was quite uncomfortable sitting next to me and scrunched up against the seat in front of us. Even though an exit row has about four inches of pitch than the other rows,
he was not fitting well into the seat. He was quite unhappy with his travel department for having booked him on this type of airplane ("They know better!" he fumed). That gives him an empty seat next to him and I’ve got an extra seat next to me. There are a couple of ladies sitting behind me that met at a conference in Austin for the first time. Yack, yack, yack, yada, yada, yada. I’ve got some noise cancelling headsets and am glad of it. At least this way they’re fairly faint background noise. We’re through the clouds, the sun is
out, and the skies above us are clear blue. It’s finally a fairly smooth light.

Three of my managers and I flew over to Austin, Texas, yesterday for meetings with Dell Computer. We got in about 2 p.m. and went on a plant tour followed by dinner at a pretty exclusive restaurant. There were four of us and five of them at dinner. I’m sure it was a healthy bill at the end. I’m spending about a million dollars a year on Dell products and the rest of the company is spending another milion dollars. For that price they should spring for dinner every once in a while. The factory tour was very interesting. The Dell plants are well automated and the automation looks to be working incredibly well. Our guide worked as a supervisor and then a line manager in the plant before moving into Information Technology (IT) managing the factory support systems. That’s an interesting transition. She certainly knew the plant very well. As we walked through the plant she would step right into a work area and literally take it over. I was very impressed and would like to have several folks like her on my staff.

After dinner we stopped at a sports bar (a glass of Sprite was $4.50!) to watch the last couple of innings of the Chicago Cubs vs the Florida Marlins playoff baseball game. The Cubs finally lost the game in the eleventh inning by a score of 9-8. It was a great game and a worthy baseball playoff game. This is the first post-season appearance for the Cubs in more than fifty years. The last time they were in the World Series was in 1918! Is this finally the year? The Cub fans certainly hope so. But, they’ve got to do better than they did last night to make that dream come true.

Today was spent in the Dell Briefing Center with a flurry of presentations by different groups within Dell. We talked about support services, the server roadmap, the Linux roadmap, the support software tools available, took a tour of the customer support center, and had a great lunch. The Briefing Center is very well equipped and is a showcase of Dell products. The trip was well worth the time. It’s been several years since I’ve been to see Dell in Austin but I think we need to do it much more often — at least once a year. It was also good to have the three managers most invoved with Dell products be there as well. It was a great interaction and more than sufficiently informative.

Tomorrow at 7:30 I’ll be sitting in the dentist’s chair. The bridge in the front left of my mouth has become "mobile," to use a word from the dental industry vocabulary. That means the bridge is moving like it isn’t quite tied down. That’s not anything near what I’d really want to be doing tomorrow morning. Hopefully this is easily fixed with little discomfort. Not very likely!

The new (to us) RV is still in the driveway. It’s been cleaned and drained of all fluids likely to freeze. Some of the stuff from the trailer has been loaded into the RV. There’s quite a bit of stuff that doesn’t have a home in the RV which has significantly less storage space than the trailer. We’re having to decide what we really need to have in the RV! We usually take lots and lots of stuff with us, most of which doesn’t get used while we’re travelling. We’ve decided to drive it to Utah the last week of the month. I’ll then fly to
California on business and back on the following Friday. We’ll stay for Danielle’s baptism on Saturday, November 1st, and then drive back home on Sunday. It should give us a good chance to use the vehicle and work out the best way for us to use it. When we get back, it’ll probably go into storage. The storage bill is paid through the end of December. In the meantime I want to find a place much closer to the house even though it’ll cost a bit more. I think we’d be much more likely to use it if we had better access to it. Where
we’re storing it now takes about an hour to get there and back.

If all goes well, we’ll be on the ground in about a half-hour. It’s been another uneventful flight. It still astounds me that United is losing so much money. Every flight is full!! There’s got to be some major overhaul required in management ranks. It is also interesting that with their reduced flight schedule (about 30% of their flights were taken out of service over the past couple of years), the airline has become on-time. It’s now rare that a flight is late or leaves late. In spite of the dentist, it’ll be good to get back home
once again.