New Airport in Indianapolis

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. 

What I found most interesting was that everybody was happy to be there, nobody was in a hurry and most carried smiles of pride at this new facility. More pictures of the new airport facility here.

Visit to Shoals and Loogootee today . . .

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. 

Ready for ReadyBoost?

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.

I learned of all this through David Pogue's NY Times Circuits email . . . there was a link to an article How I Learned To Tolerate Vista by Stephen Williams. So now I'm cruising with extra speed and power with ReadyBoost. Funny how the message finally made it's way to me.

Peggy Noonan's Patriotic Grace

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.

Shout Out for Doug's Tuned In Calculator

I work with Doug Karr, who has so much enthusiasm and creativity, it spills out of his office and every now and then I'm fortunate enough to soak up a little. Admittedly, Doug likes to plan, model, ponder and create and has a great number of ideas 90% completed and he can't remember them all! In a flurry of genius, Doug recently created (and finished) the Tuned In Calculator which has garnered a bit of interest. To help him celebrate this achievement, I invite you to check it out. Here's the result on this blog:

Start up impressions - working for a young technology company

I'm going to try to keep more content coming in to this space on a more regular basis, some topics may just be about "me" while others may take on a more work - life - hobbies tone.

I've been with my new employer for three months now, well into my initiation period. I now see my contributions making a difference (in a small company most everything makes a difference in some way!). Our management team had a good conversation today about the future of the company (we get together every two weeks for financial and strategy sessions) and I truly appreciate the amount of involvement I have with these decisions. There are moments when I want things to happen much more quickly, though. That's my impatient side coming through and I tend to ignore the guy on my other shoulder whispering "you better watch what you ask for!"

Safe landing at Patronpath

So I did it! I'm now director of marketing for Patronpath, provider of marketing and e-commerce solutions for the restaurant industry. (Actually I stared about a month ago, I've just been late in posting about it!) I happen to be working with Douglas Karr, a great marketing and technology wizard who is active in the Indianapolis blogging scene. My days are spent developing and implementing marketing strategies to help this small, young company build a strong, sustainable and growing customer base.