Time to add another ‘back in the day’ post.

I was just reading a magazine article called “Aught to Be a Great Decade” in Fast Company.  I get Fast Company because I used to get Computer Shopper and that magazine went the way of the dodo so they send me Fast Company instead.  Anyway the article was opening a time capsule from 1999 – yes people we have come ten years since Y2K and all the hub bub that went with that “New Millennium” advent.

Reading about the things like Wonderful new car from Chrysler – the PT Cruiser was going to rescue the Big Three – oops that worked out different didn’t it!  Or how Al Gore was set to be the next President – well almost only counts in horseshoes. Remember the MP3 player that would hold two whole albums with a whopping 64megs of storage?  Well that is in the same place as floppy disks (and Zip disks for that matter.)

Looking at those things, going back to 1959 (I was eleven years old) might be fun just to see what fifty years have done.  Let’s see minimum wage was $1.00 by the time I started working in 1964 it was $1.25.  1959 was the year that Castro took over Cuba – he was like the energizer bunny – he kept going for almost 50 years – just stepping down February of last year, during that same time we have had 10 presidents come and go and the 11th is there in the White House now. Computers – well the closest thing to a “personal computer” would be the IBM Electronic Typewriter that was released in 1956 – this is the line from the press release – “The first electronic typewriter, an IBM electric typewriter which “reads” business forms and does all the tabulation setting for the typist electronically.” pretty neat!  In two years, IBM would get rid of the little striker keys and replace them with a Ball and typing would never be the same.

Cars in 1959 were much bigger than what we drive now but just one year later the Valiant, Falcon and Corvair (Ralph Nader’s favorite) would appear as the answer to the invasion of VW’s, Datsun’s and Toyota’s to our shores.  They were bigger than most of the off-shore competition but that was the american way.  Our cars today require computers to make them run, in 1959, the radios still had tubes in them and the battery was charged with a generator not an alternator.  Interestingly though, fuel injection was tried, in fact DeSoto had an electronic version in 1958 – that did not work out but a lot was learned.  Mechanical fuel injection was used on many sport cars including the Corvette.

Houses were simple then – but people still build the basic box house that was popular in 1959 – they called them “Ramblers” then – they have other names but they are still basic protection from the elements.

We ate a lot of animals and animal by-products – Lard was what most people fried things in.  If you asked someone what Tofu was they would not know what you were talking about.  The only decaf coffee we had was “Sanka” and that was an instant power that really did not taste a lot like coffee, more like dirty, gritty water.  My own family ate a lot of “hot dishes” made from hamburger and macaroni because it was easy and cheap. Diet beverages were still a way off so Sugar was king in everything. The only artificial sweetener was Saccharine which came in little pills that worked in Coffee and Tea.

Oh, we did not have the Sesame Street gang untill later in 1959, up to that time we had to make do with Howdy Doody and Captian Kangaroo.  Of course that was on a Black and White small screen TV without anything like Cable or Satellite.   Funny though the new digital antennas remind me of the old rabbit ears we used to have to get any TV and at times we had to attach tin foil to them to get better reception.  Cell phones were something Dick Tracy would use but not real life.  Telephones still used the round dial and went clickity clickity click when you turned them.  Oh and the Zip code was one digit then not the nine we use now.

Let’s see Computers, yes there were Computers in 1959 in fact our town of Duluth just had a new Computer installed in building near the Air Base – SAGE or Semi Automatic Ground Environment – this computer was a block building made of two foot thick concrete walls with a huge air conditioner along side the building.  It was about as powerful as a new Netbook but took enough power to run a small town.  It was floor after floor of tubes and relays all hard wired together to make what today we would call a large scale integrated processor chip – that was the building.  There may have been other computers around but that was the one we in Duluth knew about.  Check out SAGE – WIKI There were a few other computers around but the common theme was Huge, Power Hungry, Hand Wired monsters.  Personal and Computer was waaaaaaaayyyy off in the future.

Fifty years is not much time in the whole picture of our planet. But is is a better part of my life and I would not want to go back to 1959, I know better, been there done that!

Are we having fun yet? Backdoor Trojan :-P

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon. I was at home working on some financial stuff on my home computer.  I was waiting for my daughter to call from Scotland (she lives there.)  The phone rang – oh good Alana is calling – - but wait – - the caller ID say it is the home phone of our operations manager at the County where I work.  This can’t be good, we are not social friends, I debate – should I answer it?  I figure I should so when he tells me we have about fifty computers infected with a virus and two of his employees are in operations trying to find out what they can do to stop it – beside the fifty desktop PC most of the 80 plus servers are infected.  While talking to him, the phone beeped – it was my daughter.

I got to talk to Alana for about fifteen minutes and then headed to the GSC where I work. When I got there Dan and Keith were working on cleaning the servers but it was not working too well.  We use Symantec Enterprise for all our protection and it was finding two of the listed bad guys but when they were removed they came right back. We tried some other products and found one that identified Qbot as the real culprit and even that tool removed it but it returned a while later.

Keith worked with engineers at Symantec and after about two hours I realized that I could not do much as until we had a fix from Symantec we were stalled in the water.  I discussed shutting off various links to networks we knew were infected but because our server farm had been infected – well it would not make much difference except that emergency services and other important things would be down.  The Trojan did not seem to do damage to the systems as it was more for gathering information not havoc.

I went home and tried not to think about Monday morning.  Keith had some success with the engineers – they isolated the biggest problem and sent rapid releases to fix it.  Like many things we should do and don’t, we had never upgraded all our computers to the newest version of Symantec – that was a big mistake I will take some blame for. Many of our older computers were not capable of running version 10 and we assumed that they would not be able to run version 11 (current version) – the fact is that 11 takes less resources than 10.  All the versions we had were pretty much able to stop the spread of the bad guy but it still took time.  As anyone can tell you that works around a large network in many locations with different speed connections – time is not on your side.  The Trojan moved faster than our up-dates to the software and because of that most of our 1900 computers had the Qbot on them.  By noon on Monday we had it pretty much contained and it was not spreading (well when all the machines have it that happens too!)

It is now Thursday and we are just able to tell people in finance that they should be safe to log into on-line accounts, we are 99% sure our out-bound protection kept the Trojan from “calling home” with data from users but we are recommending they change passwords and monitor anything they may have accessed from their desktop PC.

Almost all of the stuff we sent to the engineers at Symantec was new and the first time submitted – lucky us!!!

It looks like a few weeks of vigil to clean any little hot-spots that remain – by today all our computers (that we can access) should be up to date.

I was running Windows 7 (we get it early) and while the Trojan was delivered, it would not run, it did send the Trojan to Microsoft under WER (Windows Error Reporting) because all 14 of the exe files crashed when W7 tried to run them – I guess they were not certified by Microsoft – I hope they don’t fix them so they run!

How we celebrated our 38th wedding anniversary.

Believe it or not, our 38th wedding celebration began over 44 years ago, way back before my wife and I met. I can hear you saying “WHAT?”

Let me tell you the whole tale. It started when Chrysler selected my dad as the 160th user in the Chrysler turbine program in 1965. I was sixteen years old and was privileged to drive Chrysler turbine car #32 five thousand miles or more during the three months we had possession of the car. Okay, I hear you going “yeah we know that, how did that effect how you celebrate your anniversary?”

I will tell you. . .  A very well known car collector by the name of Jay Leno was fortunate enough to be able to somehow obtain for his stunning collection, one of the last remaining turbine cars (number 42).  He took delivery of the car in June of this year.  He had known of me and my web site (www.turbinecar.com) for some years as he too loves the idea of a turbine powered car and the only real production American turbine cars were the cars like the one we drove built by Ghia of Italy and powered by the Chrysler engine.

The Big Dog and his Big Dog Bike

Now Jay is a true “car nut” and “gear-head” if there ever was one.  Jay called me to tell me personally that he was getting the Chrysler car the day before he got it.  That was June 15th and the first time I had ever had the pleasure of talking to Jay. During the course of that first conversation, Jay asked, “do you ever get out to California?”  I answered, “why would I want to do that?”  He said,  “so you can drive the turbine car and see my Jay Leno’s Big Dog garage.”  Sold!  I am going to California!   When should we go?  I would have packed up the next day but we were already packed, in fact, we were on vacation in Michigan when Jay called. It actually was the first full day of the two weeks we had planned and the second week was grand kids time in St. Louis with our son and his family so the immediate future was out for a trip to California.

Sometime during one of the driving days over the next two weeks Lynette and I decided that we would go (if Jay said it was okay) over the August 7th – 9th weekend. That was our wedding anniversary and we always do something like maybe stay in the Twin Cities or whatever.  This time it was flying to California to see Jay! For those of you reading this who might have been born under a rock, Jay is also the former host of the Tonight Show and has a new show “The Jay Leno Show” on NBC at 9:00 coming this fall.  No, Jay did not make me say that, I figure a plug for his new show here is the least I can do for such a great guy!

I called Jay the week we got back from our vacation and asked if the 7th of August would work as it was our 38th wedding anniversary and we had time off for that already.  Jay called back the next day and said he could work us in but he had a show in Las Vegas on the 7th and 8th and would we like to go with him?

Hello!  Did I just hear you right?  You want us to go to Vegas with you? I would think that over half the population of the US would like to go to a show as your guest and the other half are the people you interview for “Jay Walking”!

So the date was set and we purchased airplane tickets for Burbank.  We were arriving on the 6th and leaving on the 10th of August.  I called Jay again just before I made the reservations (non-refundable) to make sure we were good.  At some point during that discussion, Jay said he would arrange a hotel for us, so we did not have to do that. He had a deal with the Holiday Inn Media Center in Burbank.  About that time was the first time I had to pinch myself to see, am I really talking to one of the most known individuals in the world who just offered me, someone he has never met, a chance to drive his turbine car, fly to Vegas and see his show and now he is offering to spring for our lodging!  I was very surprised to say the least.

So the date was set!  By then it was still over a month away but we were counting the days.  I sent some copies of information I had on the turbine car to Jay and was working on getting anything else he might be interested in.  I have a large collection of material I have used on my website which I am more than willing to share with anyone who has a need for it.  I believe that history is the most important thing we can share. Without history, we keep making the same mistakes and re-inventing things that were already done once and that is just plain stupid!

Lynette and I arrived in Burbank about 6:00 pm on Thursday the 6th of August. The flight(s) out were pretty good except I will NEVER accept a ticket with a half hour between flights again at any terminal and I want even longer if possible at Salt Lake City.  We talked to Jay that evening and he said he would meet us around 2:00 pm at the garage on Friday.

Friday morning we ate breakfast at the hotel and wandered around downtown Burbank for a while. We caught a cab around 1:00 pm and learned that cab drivers don’t have a clue where Jay’s garage is.  It took a little longer than it should have to get there (about 6 miles from the hotel) but the guy was nice so I didn’t feel bad about tipping him a little extra.  Jay’s Big Dog complex is kind of hidden in plain sight.

We called Jay’s shop manager on my cell phone and he opened the gate to let us in.  Jay was not around and he had left no specific instructions to his staff about Lynette and me so we could not take any photos till Jay said it was okay.  No problem, we went with Bob and started touring the Big Dog Garage.

Jay showed up around 2:15 pm and greeted me with Hi, Mark!  Then Jay kidded me about the car not running. I was fully ready for that to happen because over the past ten years I have tried multiple times to get a ride/drive a turbine car again and every time success was close, fate intervened and kept it from happening.  I did get to hear one run in St. Louis this past June along with my son, his family and Lynette. It was the first time any of them had seen a turbine car actually running.

Jay behind the wheel of the Chrysler Turbine car.

First thing we did with Jay was to take the long awaited ride and have a chance to drive a turbine car again after 44 years.  Jay took the car about five or six miles towards downtown Burbank and pulled onto a side street where he turned the car around.  Then it was my turn!  I got behind the wheel of an operating turbine car that I could drive again.  I was a little more nervous than the first time in May of 1965 when, with my father at my side, I took the first spin in a turbine car.  Now I had one of the most famous people sitting next to me and my loving wife of 38 years in the back seat.  I was also in Burbank California, which was still kind of new to me.  (I remembered how to get the selector into drive, as it is a little different than almost any other car.  You have to pull up on the outside lifters and the whole thing pops up to where you can move it to drive.)  It was a good thing that traffic was not too heavy.

I slipped out into traffic cruising down N. San Fernando Blvd. I felt like it was all a dream that I had dreamed before.  I kept having deja-vu all day as various events were happening; I had two of Jay’s employees ask if I had met them before too – that added to it.

When we got back to Jay’s garage, he let me drive it into the building and asked, “are you any good at backing up?”  I feel I am, so I said “pretty good” so he let me back the turbine car back between his Eco-Jet and a Ferrari 308 – I realized that wow, I could have done some major damage there if I screwed up.

Where I parked the turbine car.

We went over to the shop and gave Jay some more stuff we brought with us, photos, etc. He showed us around the shop a bit and then let me go back across the way to the big building where I could take some photos while he got the 1907 White steam car ready for a ride.

After Lynette and I wandered around the big garage for about twenty minutes the shop foreman came over and told us it was about ready to go.  Well, that was not quite true.  It was now about 4:00 in the afternoon and first the burner refused to stay lit on the White and then the throttle valve was frozen solid.  This was odd since Jay had just used the car the Saturday before to give  another turbine car guy, Steve Lehto, a ride.

It took about forty five minutes for Jay and two of his crew to remove, disassemble and lubricate the throttle mechanism.  Once back on the White we took off into rush hour traffic on the streets of Burbank.  I felt they were a little surprised when Lynette climbed into the back seat of the White, but hey, that is the woman I married, if I get a neat ride, she is going too.  After about a half a block, I began to wonder if it would be my last ride.  Jay is very comfortable with steam powered antique autos but for me this was a first!  The first time I ever rode in a brass era car and the first steamer I had ever ridden in.  To be honest, it is really an uncomfortable feeling to have nothing to hang onto, sit in a real “bucket” seat without any seat-belt or other safety appliance and realize that the driver can’t see much of anything on the left side of his charge.  More that once Jay asked me to check the traffic to see if he could move over into the left lane.  I asked Jay what he does without a “shotgun” ,he said he just moves over and the people get out of the way.

Jay working on 1907 White Steamer

Jay took me to Autobooks-Aerobooks in downtown Burbank because it is one of his favorite hang-outs.  I bought a very good book on the Maxwell Auto company.  We said goodbye to the crowd that formed around the White while we were in the store and headed back to the garage.  I told Jay not to even think about asking me to drive, I think that was never the plan anyway.

Back at the garage, we had about fifteen minutes alone in his library (very cool stuff there) while he had some work related stuff to do.  He came in dragging his big old leather briefcase stuffed with mostly auto related stuff from what I could see.  I saw something I had given him in his briefcase and felt honored.

Jay then got one of his favorite cars ready (1972 Mercedes 300 6.3) and we left for the short trip down the street to Million Air’s terminal at Burbank. We walked straight to the waiting Lear 35 and climbed in after Jay. The staff offered beverages and snacks and we settled in with Lynette sitting next to Jay on the back double wide seat and me across from her in a rear facing seat.

Before we left, Jay asked what we were going to do in Vegas, as he really did not expect us to catch his show, I guess.  We both said, “we want to see your show”, so he called the hotel and had tickets reserved for us. That was going to be one of our big highlights of the trip but I guess  Jay just wanted to be a good host  and not assume we wanted to see him perform.

Lynette and Jay on Lear

The trip was pretty nice and I got a great photo (with Jay’s permission) of Lynette and him on the same seat.  I have a new respect for private jet travel for people in Jay’s position.  I asked if he ever traveled commercial and his reply was that if they were dependable and offered better schedules so he would not have to waste valuable time in airports and waiting for missed planes or connections, he would consider it.  He said these private trips are very expensive but people are depending on him being there for the shows and meetings or whatever and with a private jet, you get there on time.  We had just experienced commercial travel and had another day of travel ahead of us and I have to agree that it is not dependable or convenient.

We landed at Henderson Airport in Las Vegas and went right into a waiting limo.  The trip to the Mirage was very interesting as Jay has been coming to Vegas for many years and has seen new casinos built, used and torn down and replaced over the years.  He pointed out many sights that he thought we would find interesting.  You can’t help but feel how much of a waste most of Las Vegas is in both time and money. But then it is a booming industry that creates nothing and costs a lot to many people.

We arrived at the Mirage through the back entrance and were greeted by Roy, the manager of entertainment for the hotel.  Roy escorted us to Jay’s dressing room and after a brief conversation left to wait outside. We asked Jay if we could change clothes from our garage clothes to a little fancier attire for the evening so he let us change in his dressing area.  After getting changed and talking for a few minutes he had Roy take just Lynette and me to Kokomo’s Restaurant. Roy pointed out many of the things along the way mostly to help us find our way back to the theater.

We walked into Kokomo’s and Roy told the staff that we were Jay’s guests, we were seated and had a wonderful, relaxing, and delicious meal.  Kokomo’s is an American style restaurant with mostly beef and seafood items. Lynette and I enjoyed a very American meal and a very large serving of cheesecake with tart cherries on it for dessert. I can really say that Kokomo’s is a very fine place to eat.

We finished our meal close to 10:00 pm and headed back to the theater.  I depended on the signs to find my way as navigating around those casinos is difficult.  They don’t want you to find your way out, you might go to some other casino.

We were seated about four minutes before the lights dimmed.  While being seated, I asked how to get back to Jay’s dressing room after the show as he was our ride back to Burbank.

The Alley Cats were Jay’s opening number and they are great! I love A Capella singing and I love the songs from the 50’s and 60’s, so they were great combination.  Jay came on and did a longer version of his monologue, very much like his old Tonight show.  He is very well liked and the show was sold out from what I could see.  He can still make people of all ages laugh!

After the show, we found our way back-stage and were escorted back to his dressing room.  Jay was already back in his denims and relaxing on the couch.  We had some water and took care of necessary things before the forty five minute ride back to Burbank and left to meet Roy and company outside the door.  They escorted us to the back of the hotel where we boarded the limo for the airport.

Lynette, Me and Jay on the runway in Vegas.

Jay had the pilot take our picture on the runway and I am glad he did.  I was trying not to be a pest about taking his photo because I was just happy enjoying his company and the time we spent with him.

The flight back was pretty much like the flight over to Vegas and we arrived at Million Air about 1:30 in the morning Saturday.  On the plane Jay told us that he had arranged for tickets to Universal Studios for us and asked how we were getting there.  Lynette said probably the Metro bus.  Jay asked when we planned to go and said that he had to work on Saturday and he would call around that time and pick us up and take us to Universal Studios.  So we had the pleasure of saying to Jay “goodnight, see you in the morning!” in front of the people that were still around outside the hotel.

Saturday, about 10:00, Jay called the room and said he would be there in about twenty minutes; we got another call about fifteen minutes later saying he would be there in five.  We got down to the lobby just as he was pulling in.  He drove by NBC studios, where he works, and then on to Universal Studios. He gave us his cell number in case we had any trouble getting the tickets.

Universal Studios Hollywood

We had a great time with much better tickets than we probably would have purchased ourselves.  About 5:30 as we waited for the bus to take us back to the hotel, it was like Cinderella when the clock struck midnight and now we were back to just Mr. and Mrs. Olson waiting in L.A. for a bus back to the hotel.

We had a good flight back Sunday and we got a call from Jay Monday morning checking to see if we got home okay.  I don’t know what I could ever do that would equal the great time we had, so I probably will not try.  It was just a once in a lifetime anniversary!