Happy Saturday!

I received a blog from my son Marc that says he is coming up here from Texas with his family. It interesting this blog technology: First it was email, then Instant Messengers and now blogs. OK, OK I have to admit it saves a telephone call and spending that money, which it seems in not in great supply these days, but is life becomming to impersonal? Well, I liked the movie Tron and then Matrix so I know what my desired path will be. However, life does not always deal the expected so who knows!

The doughnut shop was cool today – literally & figuratively – but the talk centered around shallow thinking of Steuben County business people. I seems like confrontational approaches work best here: a point to prove the point. Tri-State University essentially closed the Aero Department and made it part of the Mechanical Engineering circula. However, do they really try to grow the Aero program? I do not think so because several avenues were not even explored. For example, we have a great airport in this county, we have a good engineering college and we have a great community in the heart of “the lakes district”. Could we attract students – for sure and here is how:
1. Have a booth at EAA Oshkosh convention and tout NE Indiana and Tri-State.
2. Throw in a private pilot certificate (this costs about $3K-4K) with admission to Aero Department.
3. Partner with EAA on some good scholarships ( EAA already has some for general aeronautical programs).
Everyone benefits in the community this way. But no we have to close the Aeronautical Engineering program for lack of students. Yep, it is the confrontational approach – do not co-operate on anything, tough it alone and ,above all things, if it did not work in the past certainly NEVER, NEVER try it again.

Work, work

The past few days have been busy ones – consumed with install work. Wireless LAN’s and internet are great, especially when you get to put them in, because of the more or less instant gratification: Bang, you are talking to each other. I love this kind of thing.

Today, I helped a flying associate with his controller power supply on a CNC Machine. Alas, to no avail since he absolutely needed it running this week to fulfil an order. We did find the +300 & 14 VDC were OK. I am sure we could have found the problem given sufficient time. I think it would have helped to have an oscilliscope too.

It has been a while!

Hi everyone out there! I have missed writing to you. My time has been consumed with designing and developing www.moorewireless.com and it is in its beta stage with a few tweaks needed. I wrote the profile tonight. I have had a long day – getting up at 0500 to go to the MS TS2 & TechNet presentations in Fort Wayne. Sitting down all day is hard on ones posterior but the data was informative so it was worth the effort “so to speak”. If you want the links slip over to Moore Wireless and check out the News.

Man, I missed two (and probably more) important calls today related to work – and work means money and I need money. I do not know what it means but I just cannot sit around waiting for the phone to ring. Nope, it is necessary to pound the ground. I have my cell and they tried to call it but I missed because it was “silent” at the request of the MS presenter. Ok, I’ll tell you – I have no vibrator because the phones are an older model of Nokia – so I get NO warm fuzzy when the aural tones are turned off and vibes on. Well, I am paying for my cost effective approach now – being a fiscal conservative has its rewards – and someday I will tell you. Right now I am dead tired so I am going to hit the sack. Luego.

An overcast, rainy graduation day

Doughnut shops are where half the small town business gets formulated and sometimes implemented. Poor Bill was lamenting today that his “grader box” was stolen. For those who do not know what a grader box is, it is a rather heavy 5 foot box that may or may not have tines that mounts via a hitch to a tractor. It is used for smoothing clods of dirt for subsequent planting. Anyway, someone made the statement that given the state of the economy it is not surprising things will come up missing: Bear in mind that the box was visible from the road but was 300 ft off the road and the unit weighs more than 500 pounds. There are lots of theories as to why crime is increasing in our area – some blame the economy, a few blame the influx of “bad” people filling our $7/hr jobs and some blame the permissive court systems but most blame our collective selves for the lack of due diligence by our generation. It is hard to say, but I can say, I give people the benefit of the doubt and I do have a big problem with injustice so maybe the due diligence thing could be correct. Also correct must be the saying that “if you give people enough rope they will hang themselves”. Should I believe we are in the process of the latter at this time? It was a one large doughnut day.

Graduation Party Day!

Today was graduation party day (and tomorrow too for that matter). My niece Miranda graduates from AHS and her party was today. Actually it was a co-party with a friend of hers – these are usually pretty good as the food has more variety and more of it. After I sampled most everything I went back at 1700 and helped them tear down. Roger called and wanted to fly a bit so I met him at the airport.

We flew the Comanche and Decathlon. I wanted to check out the glideslope in the radio that was worked on and Roger wanted to do some aerobatics. The radio worked OK so I feel more secure about IFR flights in bad weather. Well, it is now dark so it is a no walking day. I think a shift to the mornings is in order for a variety of reasons but the most compelling is the work schedule: SAM has a new work routine.

The Dead Horse

Traditional business wisdom, passed on from one generation of management to the next, says that when you discover you’re riding dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.

But in modern business (and education and government) because heavy investment factors are taken into consideration, other strategies are often tried with dead horses, including the following:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Threatening the horse with termination.
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
7. Reclassifying the dead horse as “living-impaired.”
8. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance.
11. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
12. Declaring that the dead horse carries lower overhead andtherefore contributes more to the bottom line then some other horses.
13. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Microsoft & the Linux tale

Do you think Microsoft is worried about open-source Linux? If you have an opinion then read this article and if you do not have an opinion you really must read this article.

Honda

Just received this via email. Now this is the obscure thing I like. The email goes on to tell how many takes it took to get this to work but it looks like a electronic hoax to me. Anyway, it is interesting if a little far feched contraption or event.

Lockergnome

For years I have been receiving the daily and weekly reports from Lockergnome. For some reason I never stumbled across the webmasters weekly report. Man, I like it as it has some great ideas that may be simple to implement but I just never thought of it – for example, the copyright that now graces my main page at the bottom. It took me all of 5 minutes to add it. I wish my site had a hundredith the amount of traffic Lockergnome does – it is nice to be appreciated.

Yesterday, Yesterday

Charlie traveled eastward yesterday to do a site survey. It was fun to be out of the state again and doing something important for the big guys. It took more time to drive than it did to do the survey and the resultant paperwork. Finding your way to an unknown site, interfacing with unknown people who do not know you are coming and entering the bowels of a structure puts a bit of spice in the life and re-kindels the explorer in you. Studs Terkel has it right – have you read any of Studs books? If not you might want to pick one you think you would like and start reading.