Last week I took a quick trip back from Seattle to Provo. The occasion was to present a paper at the 7th International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Natural Computing (CINC) about some of the work I did last summer while at Sandia National Laboratories. Not a large or well known conference, but I’m published. CINC was part of JCIS, the 8th Joint Conference on Information Sciences. It was cool to attend presentations on such a wide variety of topics, including fuzzy logic, agent based modeling in financial markets, and game theory. I stayed five nights in Provo, and had the opportunity to hang out with many of the best people I know. Being without a car or a place in Provo to stay, I was dependent on the generosity of others. I tried not to impose, but there were many people more than willing to help me out. Brady picked me up from the airport. Julie let me stay at her place. McKay let me hang out at his apartment and use his Internet. Genevieve gave me a ride back up to the airport. Having nothing with me other than what fit in my backpack, I was very grateful for the kindness shown to me by my friends. Solely thanks to their generosity, the trip was a most enjoyable success.