As I create my Interactive Resume, I remember stories of working with some of these amazing people.  Dr. Burkardt is one of those people.  He is a living treasure for his mathematical and computational knowledge.  Even the content of his webpage leads people to suspect this fact.

And here is what is surprising about it.  Sometimes I get curious and ask search engine a question.  It’s easier that way and often times faster than finding a human to ask.  Could be how to spell a word, or looking up a numerical algorithm.

Dr. Burkardt is notable in that twice his web site has come up in a list of google results that I clicked on, only then to discover I was on the page of a person whom I previously had worked for.  And yes, his pages have a 100% rate of having the answer I seek.  So far, the rate is about once in every 5 years this happens.

Check out his site below.  It looks small, but it is in fact quite huge; it only looks small due to it’s tight organization.  This site represents a lifetime of publicly accessible work this brilliant mind has worked on.

http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/

At my father’s house today and I heard the heat pump chirping occasionally. To me, that is the sound of lubrication failure and an early state of electric motor failure. As compressors are hermetically sealed and lubricated, I was almost certain the culprit was the blower motor.

I opened up the unit and saw the blade still spun freely, a good sign. After shutting the breaker, I disconnected the compressor and powered the heat pump back up. The fan ran for about 30 seconds and started chirping again.

I proceeded to remove the motor. It is a 48Y frame 1/4 horsepower single phase motor made in 1989 by General Electric. Looking up the cost of this motor to be $160-180 in the 60C ambient temperature spec (the 40C was $60 cheaper, but would fail soon). Given the expense, I decided to experiment with servicing it.

53,000,000 e-mails.  Amounts to about 1/6 the population the United States.  Now I can’t imagine every one of those being valid.  I will confess that on occasions where I was pressed for an e-mail address, I simply made one up for the sake of moving right along without arguing with the cashier.

There are occasions where I simply can’t get away with posting bogus data.  Let’s say with Amazon, Google, Facebook, the e-mail address is an important part of your identity, and in many cases, my actual login ID.  What if one of the big guys gets hacked, or an unscrupulous employee collects and sells the data and retires in southern Snoozebeckistan?  The is a preventative measure.

I own my own domain.  Your sitting here and reading it.  No one knows of any specific e-mail address for me. One of the perks of owning my own domain is a have total control over the email addresses on my server.  I have an e-mail for each service I subscribe too, such as f@timothylegg.com for Facebook or g@timothylegg.com for all things Google.  These addresses simply alias and to a common local address that I receive mail from directly.

So yeah, some place that verifies over e-mail before creating an account, I create a special address just for them and have it delivered to my inbox.  Sometimes you find out who got hacked or sells out when I start getting Canadian Pharmacy or Russian Singles emails and that’s a bonus.  To fix it,  just rename the e-mail address and let them try to get it again.

Going wide with your e-mail addresses is the best spam filter.  They have to find it, and then after that, send me enough junk mail to where it’s worth changing my address.  I typically change my address every three or four years and have been quite fortunate.  In all of 2014, I have only gotten about 15 spam messages.

You want to send me a message on e-mail, just go to my website and look it up.  It’s current and fresh.  You know where to find me.

Every now and then, you find something on youtube that is so fascinating that you can’t help share it with everybody you know.  You play the video, pause it, and ask yourself, “How is this going to turn out?”

A few years back, the IIHS celebrated their 50th anniversary by crash testing two cars for a direct comparison of the technologies of restraint systems and energy-absorbing crumple zones.  The subjects of this test were both Chevrolet makes: a 2009 Malibu and a 1959 Bel Air.

The outcome of the test will surprise many people, excluding a few trained engineers whom daydream about types of destructive evaluation experiments.  If you haven’t searched it out already, hit up the youtube link that I selected as being the most comprehensive.

A number of social changes occurred during this time to make safety  profitable for automakers.  The deaths of Jayne Mansfield and James Dean were catalysts and culminated with the best selling book Unsafe At Any Speed by Ralph Nader.