Listened to the original Leonard Cohen version of “Hallelujah” earlier. I respect the man’s songwriting skills, but it sounded for all the world like a bad Johnny Cash cover band crossed with an airport hotel lounge act… Pretty bad. I much, much prefer the late Mr. Buckley’s rendition of the song.<\/p>\n
The trip last week to Albuquerque was good and bad. It was good in the sense that my presentation went extremely well, praise God, and that the seat design effort is looking to become a more-or-less long-term association. That’ll help with the rent a little bit, I think. The real praise was how well I hit it off with the two men I’m directly responsible to. See, the aircraft is made by a company called Eclipse. The folks at Eclipse subcontracted the seat design out to another company, called Seamech (no idea where the name comes from). I’m technically a contract worker for Seamech, and responsible to Blaine (the owner of the company) and Todd (the project director in charge of the seat design). It so happens that Blaine is an avid Audi enthusiast (he owns a late-model A8), and not only is my current automotive project getting my Audi running, the seat designs I presented all bore striking resemblances to Audi seats–clean, comfortable, supportive-looking, but not overbearing. When we talked on the phone last week in preparation for the meeting, we spent more than half the time discussing Audi lore, homebrew fixes and the like. So we have an amazing common ground in that respect. As for Todd and me, we have close to the same sense of humor (a boon) and after meeting him at the airport, we talked about anything from baseball to the progress of powerplant technology immediately following the second World War, and everything in between, with an amazing easyness. Not only that, but he’s one of the few engineers I’ve met who doesn’t immediately wince when a designer walks in the room, thinking that he’s not going to present anything even remotely realistic from an engineering standpoint. He respects industrial design and is fully conscious of the fact that the seat has to look attractive, and is willing to revise his design to suit aesthetic and ergonomic needs. This attitude from an engineer was a revelation to me after my experiences at Luhrs in early ’02, and all I could do after the meeting and on the way home was to praise God for the way He’s worked everything out. Amazing, really. I couldn’t be more pleased with the nature of my association with the men at this company.<\/p>\n
The bad part was that my flight back to RDU was canceled Thursday afternoon. In retrospect, I might have exhibited a bit of hubris in thinking that I could fly out to New Mexico on Thursday morning, attend the meeting, and fly back that night, but the prospect of losing two days of work at my day job wasn’t appealing. Turns out I almost did, thanks to (reportedly) golf-ball sized hail at DFW, my connection through to RDU. From the terminal at the airport, the pilot appeared at the mike and delayed the flight two and a half hours before finally cancelling it. Wasn’t too bad, though. I got to witness a New Mexico sky at dusk from the hotel environs, ate at JB’s (not-so-glorified Denny’s next to the hotel–no car), watched a couple episodes of ATHF<\/a> and caught up a bit more on my reading.<\/p>\n Apparently they don’t serve meals anymore on airplane flights. Used to be whenever you were up in the air for more than an hour or so they’d feed you, but all I got on my two and a half hour lunchtime flight from DFW to RDU were two bags of pretzels, and the second one only because the lady next to me didn’t want hers. Ah well. Cost-cutting rears its ugly head.<\/p>\n Donald and I planned a tentative Europe itinerary last night. Without detailed knowledge of the friends we have there, and whether we’ll be able to stay with them and when, I bought a road map of Europe and we hashed things out. There was a bit of a shift in the nature of the trip, too–instead of making our way from London down to Nice as quickly as possible and branching out from there, the progress down to Nice IS going to be the event. So it’s turning out to be a 12-day European road trip. w00t. Tentative dotted line runs as follows, with overnight stops at the cities\/towns indicated: Arrival in London. London to Paris by train. A few days in Paris. From there by car to Frankfurt\/Heidelburg\/Stuttgart. From Germany south into Switzerland (Bern, probably), then to northern Italy (lake country–Como). After that, down the Italian peninsula a bit to Florence, then doubling back to Nice, where we’ll be for a few days, relaxing, before we fly one-way to London and then back here to the states. Doesn’t look likely that it’ll be a very soothing, relaxing vacation, but we’re mobile and energetic, and we’ll make it fine. I want to get everything settled by the end of the month, but who knows whether that’ll happen. We’ll see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Listened to the original Leonard Cohen version of “Hallelujah” earlier. I respect the man’s songwriting skills, but it sounded for all the world like a bad Johnny Cash cover band crossed with an airport hotel lounge act… Pretty bad. I much, much prefer the late Mr. Buckley’s rendition of the song. The trip last week […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}