Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Catching up I find I'm spending up to 6 hours a day on correspondence. Something's got to give. There may be times you don't get the usual rapid response. We had about 3 inches of rain last week. But Friday was pretty good and the Mayfest Soccer Tournament ground crew worked all day getting the fields ready. Then it started raining at about 6 pm and rained most of the night. We played in the mud in sunny 70 degree weather Saturday. But it rained again Saturday night, then again from 7 to 8 on Sunday. After much heated argument (over my objection) the tournament committee decided to play at 8. At 9:30 the thunderstorm that our two resident experts said would not hit Sidney did hit Sidney. The rest of the tournament was canceled. Glad that's over. It's a lot of work on my part (and a bunch of others), but about 3,000 kids had fun playing soccer in the mud. We had two parents ejected first thing Saturday. One complained to the tournament director that the referees should be more tolerant of their bad behavior. Had a coach who should have been ejected who still complained to the tournament director. I told the referee in the future to go ahead and eject a coach and I'd back her up. We also ejected a coach for physically fighting with a parent of the other team. For the first time in 13 years I did not have to mediate any disputes. In a previous post, I complained about the battery life in my Treo 755p. Got a recommendation to try a Seidio extended power battery. I got one. Using it about three weeks now. It's great. Recommended. I've been reading more and more about the manufacturing delays at Boeing and Airbus. Some of the comments coming about Boeing is the lack of skilled aerospace workers at its far flung suppliers' sites. Hmm, I bet there are about 20,000 skilled aerospace workers in the Seattle area. Maybe Boeing could try using them and getting back on track. I bet they never try a strange experiment like this again. (At least, if any of my funds have Boeing stock, I personally hope they don't.) In that vein, politicians are bemoaning the loss of manufacturing in the US. Wrong. Manufacturing is growing in the US. Manufacturing jobs are declining because of improved productivity. What we need is more entrepreneurial vision that leads to even more manufacturing plants here. That's how to increase jobs. I'm writing an article for the July issue of Automation World on the tools manufacturers have available to help them implement manufacturing strategies such as Lean. If you have any cool stories I could share with the readers about this topic, please send a note to gmintchell@automationworld.com. We received a big rush of registrations for our Automation Forum next week in the Chicago area. There are still a few open spots. The speakers are excellent--plus the OMAC demonstration and seminar on Monday. If you can get free for a trip to Chicago, it'll be well worth it. If you can't get there but are close to Cleveland, I'll be moderating a panel on Wednesday at the ISA Manufacturing/IT summit. 4:52:58 PM    comment []