My friend Emily E-mailed this to me and I figured I’d share it here.
The car pictured in this note is a Mercedes Maybach. Notice the ‘recliner’ rear seats and the ‘electrostatic’ sunroof. The sunroof turns from opaque to crystal clear depending on the passengers preference.
NOW, STOP DREAMING AND GET BACK TO WORK! (BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU’VE GOT)!
I recently ran across an idea from MIT students for Carbon-Free Stackable Cars. The idea is to simply extend the range of public transportation. Public transportation typically only allows travel to the most common places. Often your real destination is off the beaten track. If that’s the case and the distance is too great people will often choose private transportation instead. This idea attempts to close that gap.
This reminds me of ZipCar in Boston. They leave cars in residential neighborhoods and allow you to reserve them online. You simply walk to it and pick it up to make use of it by the hour or the day. There’s no attendant and no complications. It’s simply a service you use at your convenience.
The fact that the cars are Carbon-Free is a huge bonus. Since the idea is to travel just small distances it seems like the plugin electric idea is a great fit. I can’t wait to see something like this put into place.
So my dad finally decided to retire and it’s a good thing too. He’s been bugging all of us with his proclamations of retirement to hunt with his brethren for months now. He got a pretty good early retirement package from EDS and figured he should take it.
I’m happy for him. Retirement is an event that we all plan for (hopefully) and work for our whole life. Unfortunately because of the way our society works very few can actually enjoy it once it arrives. I’m very proud to say that he won’t be one of them. He’s plenty more active than I am and has so many projects going at any point in time that I cant picture him being done with everything he has planned already until into his 90s. Not to mention the zany adventures and crock pot ideas he’ll cook up between now and then.
For those of you who don’t know him, he’s a hunter, from ducks to bears and everything in between (I just recently saw the light in his eye when he told us about the recent spike in the Moose population of New York). He likes the outdoors and has spent probably more than 50% of his life outside. This is at least partly due to being born and raised on his parents homestead in Canton NY. That’s right he’s a good old fashion country boy.
He also likes his toys, and for what I assume is his retirement gift to himself he bought himself a nice big red truck. Not just any truck, a Brand New Chevy Silverado extended cab Z71 4×4 fully loaded. He’s earned it though. Over 30 years dedicated to the same company and same wife. Both are pretty rare these days.
My Dad is a great guy, an excellent father and a patient teacher and has the best years ahead of him.
Congratulations Dad, you deserve it!
I wish I could drive like this.
About a year ago I started a major project. The digital archiving of all my parents old photo albums. It’s a slow and painful process but often times very rewarding. I have been rather busy lately but for some reason today I decided to scan an album or two. I happened across 2 pictures of some importance. One of my uncle Jerry and another of my Aunt Pauline. Both of which I think may be their Senior pictures. The reason I think this is because they both look very nice and on the back of my Aunt Pauline’s picture it says her age at the time is 18. It’s amazing how much they still look the same even after more than 40 years.
With all the recent talk of alternative transportation and some of the photographs I found, it made me think about how things have changed so much already, but not as far as they said they would. In the 50’s people were claiming we’d be driving Nuclear powered cars. The 60’s gave us The Jetsons. What happened to all of the promises? Well as far as the Nuclear car goes, experiments soon led us to understand that even if it were possible it wouldn’t be safe. As far as the Flying car goes, I’ll let Dante and Randal explain:
Watching the video again made me think about what did happen to the flying car so I did some googling and came up with Urban Aeronautics. Seems crazy and a bit far fetched doesn’t it? I thought so to so I did some digging and their X-Hawk seems legit. Check it out. There actually seems to be quite a few examples so the flying car may not be as far off as it seems.
I’ve been wanting to find out who uses my site and how. Ryan alerted me to Ultimate GA. It’s a plug-in for WordPress (the Blog engine I’m using) that allows me to track all incoming and outgoing traffic using Google Analytics . I’ve implemented it and now The Man (aka me) is watching you!
We’ve added a new ‘Page’ to our site for trips we’d like to take so we can keep them on our radar. If you are interested take a look: Trips
In other news I took a snowmobiling trip up north with my Father last weekend to visit some family and go Snowmobiling. I ended up putting around 200 miles on my sled. The scenery and the trails were absolutely amazing. We hit some rough riding the first day but on Sunday it seemed like every trail we rode on was freshly groomed. It was also good to see my family. I learned that my Uncle Jerry has been snowmobiling with a friend of his quit often. To me this is awesome. Selling his farm has to be the best thing he’s ever done. I just wish he had done it 10 years ago.
There’s been a lot of discussion at work lately about alternative automobiles. We’ve discussed hybrids, pure electric, hydrogen fuel cell and today the discussion went to air-powered. Before you’re too skeptical you should watch the video. It’s pretty interesting. If I were looking for a strictly commuting vehicle I would definitely be interested. The hybrid they talk about in the video is even more interesting. I’d be willing to use it as my primary means of transportation certainly. Across the country in a single tank of gas? Simply Amazing! Makes me wonder how fast the people Who Killed the electric car will kill this?
Randy Aldrich 
