My sister put up a new profile picture on her blog the other day that immediately reminded me of another photograph. My sister’s photo was taken when she was about 9 years old, in 1974 1978 (she’s on the right in the photo at right). The picture I’m remembering was of me when I was 9 or ten (on the left in the photo at right). See the similarity? 
OK, yes, we are brother and sister so we should look alike, right? Now fast forward 25 years to the next photo. Hey what do you know? We still look alike and we’re still brother and sister!
personal
Those who know me understand my passion for taking things apart. I try to find excuses to do so any time I can. I especially like to take apart my car (the Audi TT). Thankfully I’ve developed a 95% success rate for being able to put everything back together without any parts left over.
Most recently, I have taken out the rear seat and seat backs, the spare tire, the trim around the rear hatch . . . well, everything from the front seats back. This in preparation for sound proofing with a special sound-absorbing product called
Damplifier from Second Skin Audio. I’m not doing this install because I’m looking to improve the audio quality in the cabin, I’m doing it mainly because there is a certain amount of road noise inherent with any car – and with my TT I have just completed installing a
3″ downpipe to finish off my custom exhaust system. It’s not too loud, I simply want to dampen the road and exhaust noise that does make it into the passenger compartment.
So I’m done with the fun, taking out all that stuff to get to the bare metal. Now it gets complicated which leads to why I’m procrastinating. It looks daunting from here! I have a box of 12″ x 18″ flat sheets of the Damplifier material looking at me every time I walk through the garage; it has adhesive backing to secure it to the metal. You have to cut it just so, place it and then roll it out with a small wooden or rubber roller in it’s final home. I suppose I’ll create paper templates based on the complex surfaces that I need to cover, then cut the material to size. That’ll test my patience for sure but the payoff is when I get to put everything back together and enjoy my sense of accomplishment.
Audi TT, personal
Yay! Just booked a trip to see my neices. This is what has become my yearly trek west in early December. I’m so glad it has become part of my year – these girls grow and change daily it seems! Naomi and Leah below.
family
My excuse for not posting more often to my blog was that I held close the thought of staying “on topic.” I had chosen technology and marketing and I was going to stick to it. Well, now – not so much. I’ll choose to write “on topic” every now and then but I want to write about other parts of “me” that include passion for the Audi TT, books, interesting people and places encountered – whatever comes to mind. Sure, when I find interesting technology and can weave it in to marketing, I’ll write about it.
Doug Karr helped me realize that my blog is about me, not about work or about someone else’s expectation.
Business blogs, on the other hand, carry some guidelines that should be adhered to. (This blog is not about winning a high search ranking or attracting readers.)
personal
Community Days this weekend, I took the tour Sunday. The new Indianapolis airport is due to open November 12, and the first day of the open house attracted 12,000 visitors. I was happy to read that the airport was built and will be run without taxpayer support. They did a good job marketing the event, with plenty of television and internet coverage. A large number of ambassadors were available to answer questions along the self-guided tour. I did find it very strange to have unfettered access to places within the terminal where normally one would be given the stink-eye under normal operating conditions. We were encouraged to explore freely, even around the security screening area and the tarmac to check out the equipment and chat with the personnel.
personal
Took the day to meander south through the color and visit with mom and dad in Loogootee. It was so nice out, mom and I decided to drive some more and ended up on the 70 or so acres of land that I called home from 1975 – 1982. The house / cabin has been in various forms of disrepair over the past few years, with tenants choosing to make upgrades or to do damage.
What was once a thriving garden is now overgrown with long, rough grasses and sticker-bushes that used to bear raspberries; the hours and hours spent collecting just the right rocks and building walls to berm the earth are barely visible though still intact; a family of Paw-Paw trees has taken residence just north of the house, standing in various angles shading the ground 20 feet below; and the remnants of outbuildings that housed tools or chickens or goats or pigs now house spiders and certaintly a variety of critters.
What once was home to a young family of six now only holds vastly divergent memories of that time. We can’t deny the significant impact of the experience, and recalling specific events today with mom only scratched at the vault in my mind.
personal
I like power, I like speed. That’s why I make my car go fast with fun modifications. So, when I started hearing about “readyboost” I thought this was another product or technique to make a turbo charged or super charged engine work more efficiently. Well, no. Microsoft quietly (to me anyway) released a feature for thier Windows Vista operating system that enables more efficient use of resources when you plug in a compatible flash memory device. (Like a USB thumb drive – you know, you’ve seen them I’m sure.)
I carry around a 4GB thumb drive for backing up my files at work, and when I insert the drive in a USB port a window pops up and one of the options is “speed up my computer with ReadyBoost.” I have been ignoring that for a few weeks now since I thought it was some type of program the thumb drive manufacturer placed on the drive that you had to install. Well, I don’t ignore it anymore! I clicked on it and it asks how much space you want to allocate on the thumb drive to this extra memory capacity. Nice.
personal, technology
So I’m reading this book (yay, me – I’m reading a book!) at the perfect time. Patriotic Grace is WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan’s observation on the current state of our country and it has me intrigued for several reasons.
One is the speed at which the book was brought in to the market. She wrote it as a quick sell, since after the election it won’t hold as much relevance as it does now. Next, Ms. Noonan writes of some unknown challenge that the country will have to face, seemingly foreshadowing this “economic crisis” we are in right now. (Though what she may be referring to is something much worse, like another attack on our soil.) The debacle of our economy is the outcome of many points she makes throughout the book, that something tragic will result because we have not been taking care of what’s been going on right under our noses.
She puts on paper some realities we have faced but don’t want to admit. Like the fact that we’ve just “lost it” and need to get back to basics and treat each other with respect, with grace.
The book also helps me to realize that some pressures of the world we live in can affect your own self-respect. We aren’t respecting one another, others don’t respect this nation, so no wonder we may have lost some of what we once had. One wonders why they feel down every now and then – just wake up and look around. Yuk.
Thankfully, the book ends with a prescription on how we can regain what we once had. I should read more often.
Daily Reads, personal
