What better place to cement relationships than Portland, Oregon, so let’s all be off to the City of Roses. In the days before jet aircraft, when flying across the country was a real adventure what with thunderstorms over the plains and airplanes with no radar that couldn’t get above the larger cumulo-nimbus so they could avoid the worst of the weather, there was a passenger train called the Portland Rose. It left Chicago in the late afternoon and you had dinner on board in a dining car with china plates, silverware and a menu. Then you retired to your compartment where there was a real, even if somewhat small, bed. You awoke and returned to the dining car and had a lovely breakfast of maybe eggs Benedict, coffee and coffee cake. The view from the window was mountains, pine forests and ranch land. It took about nine hours while you were awake and you didn’t miss the eight hours you slept through. You got off at lunch time rested and ready to race a whole pack of rats in Portland.

Now, of course, things are much better. You get up at zero-dark-thirty so you can get through the security line in Chicago in time to have a breakfast burrito before you get on a plane to Denver. After a gala three hours in the Denver airport and a tasteless club sandwich, you board the plane for Portland where you find out they lost your bag. It is four o’clock in the afternoon but your brain thinks it’s seven in the evening. None of the factories you need to visit are open all night and you’re in a motel which doesn’t serve dinner so you go to Applebees. Next morning you have a continental breakfast (the Antarctic continent – you have to thaw the frozen Danish in a microwave). And except that you feel like you’ve been run over by a truck you are ready for the rat race. But you saved hours over the train travel time. Now that’s progress.

I always enjoy meeting old friends at the IEEE EMC farrago. And, of course, it’s a place to meet new friends with similar interests and problems. Many a thorny RFI problem solution has been scribbled on a cocktail napkin as the combined talents of ten or so EMC engineers lubricated by several quarts of adult beverage are brought to bear on the paradox.

You can have a look at the latest and greatest louden-boomers at the booths where Shep and company from Amplifier Reseach (I mean ARWW) hang out. Or perhaps you’d rather check out the shocking equipment for which KeyTek (now Thermo Electron) is famous. Then there are all the booths bristling with antennas: Electro-Metrics, Electro-Mechanics (excuse me, ETS Lindgren). Speaking of Lindgren you might have a look at a real live screen room (do they still make those?). And there are more gasket people than you can shake a current probe at.

No doubt there will be a get aquainted bash at which 20% of the underpaid engineers will be trying to scrounge their dinner. You will recognize them by the two plates they are carrying with conical piles of horse-doovers eight inches high, with a bottle of beer in each pocket and the silverware between their teeeth. Then comes the gala night out on the town where we all get into buses and go where the worst possible incarnation of the local food is available to anyone who wants to stand in lines of 200 people. Then we all get to sit at lunch (chicken, of course, with nameless pulp that probably was once potatoes) and listen to the grand-poo-bah and the assistant poo-bahs praise each other and pass out plaques for their respective me-walls.

You also can spend most of your time listening to the papers. We now have what is called a “mature technology.” Look around – that means we’re all geriatric. It also means that most of what can be discovered has been discovered so the papers are mostly written by some dude who measured 60 washing machine motors, all the same model, and finds that their magnetic field interference differs by plus or minus 4dB. Ho hum. It’s no wonder everything of interest happens in the bar.