Blog

Started the day by visiting the nearby Harley Davidson factory in Kansas City. I’m not a bike person, but I appreciate craftsmanship and HD’s ability to gardner customer loyalty. all workers who drive HDs park in the very front of the building, there is a lot of pride in showing off their personal machines HD managers and factor workers and undistinguishable, they all wear identical clothing (mostly HD gear but it is not required) the only tie I saw was worn by a visitor managers and workers use the same dining area and parking managers and union leaders share the same office space plant workers in different cells are responsible for self-organizing and prioritizing duties all workers in each cell are required to switch off every job, every worker knows every duty of the job robots are cool, lots of precision robot work is performed, but hand-checked by humans After the trip to HD, we hunted down a local bookstore (Prospero’s) where Jen found a couple of treasures and then walked around downtown KC. We found the library, which has a really impressive display of large books that decorate the outside of the library’s parking structure. ...

Got up early and spent the day doing mostly touristy stuff. We started at the Arch early enough to beat the crowd. I’ve been surprised at how few people we’ve seen on vacation, short lines everywhere. The view was great and the trip up/down was cramped but not awful. We headed out to the Botanical Gardens for a few hours and walked around. It was a pretty decent day weather-wise, but after a few hours it warmed up and my blood sugar crashed. We headed back to the Loop District to get lunch at Blueberry Hill. Got a pretty tasty burger there and the place had a nice group of displays, everything from Beatles dolls to Cardinals memorabilia. ...

Back on the road with a four-hour trip to St. Louis. The drive was beautiful and went through the Hoosier National Forrest. We headed directly to the Loop District since we couldn’t check in for a couple of hours. We had a good lunch at Fitz’s (mighty solid root-beer and creme soda on tap) and stopped at a Subterranean Books (nice bookstore with a small but decent selection). We walked around most of the Loop District as well as finding a branch of Left-Bank Books which was also small but hosted an appropriate collection of books. ...

Got up fairly early and made the trip to Louisville. It was an easy 90 minutes on the road and we made it in time for breakfast at the North End Cafe. We hit the local Half-Price bookstores and after loading up on McAllister’s sweet tea, we headed out a bit south of the city to the Zappo’s outlet store. The store portion is tiny compared to the massive warehouse. It looked the length of two football fields. It’s not the fancy space out in Las Vegas where you can take the tour, but Jen and Paul found a few decent deals. ...

Had a pretty awful night of sleep. I rarely sleep well for the first couple nights of vacation. It’s a big mental adjustment trying to get my brain to relax. We slept in pretty late and then headed out to walk around the area. We headed west towards the canal walk and the state park. We caught a nice film about Alaska at the Omnimax theatre. I can watch nearly anything in Omni format. It was a good way to get out of the heat for an hour or so. ...

Father’s Day 2009 I really like this photo of my grandparents at the Indiana Dunes. I think it was from when they were both in high school or just out. Also from high school, my grandfather and a friend of his skipped school one day and made a road trip to Vassar College. They’re wearing their Roosevelt High School sweaters. I like to remember my grandfather like this. He had a habit of working outside until tired and then taking a nap. He makes good use of a wheelbarrow. ...

Heading out of Skokie around 6:00 am and made it through the city with no issues. It was a smooth trip until reaching Merrillville when we saw a notice about an accident on I65. The interstate was closed several miles south so we took a detour through Crown Point down state road 55 and picked up I65 again in Roselawn. Just a bit south of Lafayette we stopped at Jen’s friends house who was home working at her parents farm. I really miss the space in Indiana. I like being able to look out for miles in the distance over farmland. ...

Made the trip from KC to Des Moines, IA with a fueling up stop at Cracker Barrel. DM was .. a less than thrilling stop. We hit the only bookstore we could find and grabbed some lunch at a really lousy mexican place in the capital district. We stopped at the busiest place we could find, but the food had almost no taste at all. I had a minor panic attack while walking around the area. The town felt miserable and lifeless. We were planning on catching the Iowa Cubs game that night, but the 90%+ change of rain plus the onset of my full-on panic and depression and the thought of trying to occupy another 4.5 hrs in DM before the game (that was likely to be rained out) we bailed on the town and headed home. ...

Finished ‘Made to Stick’ the other day. Solid read, like Gladwell without the arrogance but with some practicality. I like the way that the authors emphasis the use of ’the story’ and how much more effective and ‘sticky’ concepts are when they are built into a story. They break ‘stickiness’ into five concepts: simple, unexpected, concrete, emotional and stories. There are definitive examples within each concept that effectively help ideas adhere become easier to recall. I’ve suffered through a fair number of ‘biz’ book but this one was pretty great. ...

Finished a track last night, ‘Passing’, three left to go. Hopefully I’ll finish them this weekend and take the next week to mix and hopefully master next weekend. I’m listening to some of the tracks that I finished months ago and I’m reasonably happy with them. I’m trying some new ideas and they have a different sound than the last project. I like getting up early to get work done but sometimes at night when I’m on a roll I start to get some anxiety about getting enough sleep to hit the gym in the morning. The workouts are the priority, they keep me sane and I guess health benefits are worthwhile. ...