Again I started looking for a job and was lucky to find one in Encinitas. Now the drive from Escondido to Encinitas was not ay fun by anyone's standard's. We lived in East Escondido so I had to drive 5 miles to the 78 freeway and then another seven to Rancho Santa Fe Rd and then 10 miles down to the office in Encinitas. Worst commute of my life.

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The company created integrated circuits that were used by companies in China to create cell phone chips and then crate cell phones. CommQuest never produced hard products it just created the circuitry for cell phone chips. I wrote 14 hardware and software manuals for the CommQuest GSM single-band and tri-band chipsets.

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The owner said that he had a unique process that enabled CommQuest to easily create different cell phone circuitry for various types of cell phones. My job was to document this process. The owner's brother was my only source of information on this great process and he stopped giving me information after six months.

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The owner was able to convince IBM that his process was a winner and the Integrated Circuit Division of IBM bought the company. Now I was an IBMer again. It was like I had gone to work for an entirely different company from the one I left 12 years before. That fact was it was a totally different company. IBM had almost gone under and had clawed its way back to profitability with a totally different management style. The man who did this is another great CEO of modern times, Louis Gerstner, who saved IBM and brought it back as a world leader.

Well, it finally came out that CommQuest’s whole "unique process" was a hoax and IBM closed down the facility. The vice president of the Integrated Circuit Division lost his job over the deal. His people had not done their due diligence. They had taken the word of the company people rather than checking out the source material.

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San Marcos

While I worked for IBM I drove this horrendous commute everyday. Coming and going at about half way I would go by this very nice senior citizens mobilehome park and one day it stuck me that if we lived in that park I would be home. I told Ruth about my thought and we decided to go see if there were any homes available that we could afford. We did and there were.

We went to the park and we found a fixer upper that we could afford and we sold our home in Escondido and bought the home that we plan to live in for the rest of our lives. We fixed it up, which was quite a group of tasks but we now have the home of our dreams.

The park is called Palomar Estates East and its one of three parks that set next to each other and are owed by Millennium Housing. It's a great owner. They have signed a 30 year rent control agreement with the city of San Marcos and we have a guarantee that our rent will not go up more than .75 of inflation per year.

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