Back in about 1990, when Dan was about a year old, I was talking with my sister-in-law Denise about how difficult it was to load the car with all of the stuff we had to carry, such as the car seats, diaper bags, extra clothes, and not to mention the 20 lbs. 1.5 year old, who was dead weight when he fell asleep! We thought, wouldn't it be great if we did not have to lug the car seat and could just put the child in a seat built into the car? Lo and behold, in '92, Chrysler introduced the built-in child seat for toddlers with other manufacturers following suit.
As an early teen, I was always inquisitive and curious. Wanting to know more about how things worked. I had a chemistry set and tried to make lava spew out of a volcano only to have it just go up in smoke. Literally, with a strong smell of sulfur requiring the windows to be opened for a long while.
As an early teen, I was always inquisitive and curious. Wanting to know more about how things worked. I had a chemistry set and tried to make lava spew out of a volcano only to have it just go up in smoke. Literally, with a strong smell of sulfur requiring the windows to be opened for a long while.
Later in my years, not knowing the difference between AC and DC, I took an old car stereo and wired up an AC plug to it and plugged it into my outlet in my parent's apartment. Needless to say, I blew a fuse and my dad's gasket at the same time when the spark burned the wall.
As a junior in high school, I got my first computer, a Commodore 64, with the cassette tape drive (I could not afford the slow floppy disk, until at least a year later) and would spend hours typing in by hand the hex codes of a game from the Compute magazine I bought so I can learn to program and play a game at the same time. Oh how frustrating it was to transpose the digits in the magazine during the hours, if not days input, only to get an error and then having to go back and re-enter the thing again.
To think that I actually contemplated going to a music college to pursue a degree in music when all along, my calling was to become an engineer. Had I done so, I don't think I would have woken up so many times at night, to scribble something on a notepad that I was dreaming about, so I can remember that thought the next morning. Even today, I wake up in the morning, mind racing, about a problem I worked on the day before, only to get a good night's rest and the inspiration to solve that which puzzled me for hours the day before.
Thomas Edison once said, "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
Today I came across a news article about a new mailbox alert sensor that Amazon is releasing a week from today. The sensor, which is something they are adding to support their sidewalk wireless service that has been in deployment for the past several years, will tie to the Ring and Echo platforms and notify users when a person opens the mailbox.
It immediately brought back memories of a project Dan and I worked on when he was in elementary school which we called "You've Got Mail", pun intended.
Dan, I guess Edison was right. We should have never given up. We were sooo close! What should we do next?
