Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I was out and about today and had some very deep pithy thoughts:

1.  Scooters.  I'm against them.  Some folks go flying by me by inches and if I happened to turn a bit there would be an incident.  Plus, they leave them strewn about everywhere, sometimes in nice flower beds.  These folks should walk.

2.  Yoga pants.  I am generally for them.  A lot of the ladies around are young and fit, some are not.  The fit ones often are out running etc.  

3.  Dogs.  I've never been anywhere with nearly this high a dog population.  I like dogs.  I rarely see dog poop on the sidewalks.  I saw one dude with a great dane today, I figure he lives in a 1200 sf apartment somewhere.

4.  Libraries.  One of my trips was to the local.  I checked out a book entitled "Salt".  So far it is really briney.  The Chinese invented a lot of stuff.



Salt of course is the product of an acid and a base (often as not).  He says our bodies have no craving for salt even if we are salt deficient (which in the US is nearly impossible.)  The French are quasi-manic about their salt.  They not only want sea salt, but from this area and not that.  One can see salt flats all around the coastal areas in France.  It all tastes the same to me on food.  I try and use as little as possible anyway.  Libraries are amazing, and the books are "free".

5.  It's quite mild today and cloudy after a hot spell.  I should get out more, but at least I'm walking a lot now.  The wife has been hit with sciatica, first time for her, and not fun, but she says she's recovering.  She flew up to Boston for four days, so I'm batching.

6.  The food truck thing is popular around here.  I had a free Chick-Fil-A sammich I was going to use, the local place just reopened, so I figured I'd use it, at noon.  The line was REALLY long.  I know they serve customers at a fast pace, but I ended up at a Mexican place instead.  They just opened a small park outside the CFA under some large oaks called "The Grove", not to be confused with the thing in Oxford of course, but it's nice, and popular.  Cities should have preserved more park space, we're lucky to have what we have I think.

7.  My favorite BBQ guy has not come to the Saturday market this year.  He was getting old, but his Q was as good as any I've ever had.  He just had the trailer off his truck, no stand alone place, I asked.  I'm pretty unhappy, but hope he's doing well.  The other food places at the market are millennial,. crepes and whatnot.  HIs name was Fitzgerald.  

8.  Uber or Lyft?  We have one car now and walk nearly everywhere we need to walk.  I was calculating how much the one car costs me per month and wondering if I can't just Uber everywhere, or rent a car for a trip if needed.

I've found that my technical background as a practicing engineer has helped me quite a bit when moving over to the product and marketing sides.

In new product development, for example, when I set up some new feature requirements based on my expectations for the market or actual customer requests, and the engineering team pushes back (which they ALWAYS do), I'm able to challenge them in an informed way.  Sometimes they have good reasons, other times they're simply being lazy.  I've done their job and I know the differences, because sometimes I was just lazy too.

Not really lazy, to be fair.  It tends to be a result of an engineering mindset that you know better than the customer, and so taking on new work is pointless.  When in reality, the customer wants what the customer wants.  It may or may not be deliverable in a timely or profitable manner for my own company, but pushing back simply for the sake of pushing back occurs pretty regularly.  And it's MY job to determine the profitability, not the engineers', because honestly they have no idea.

My technical background has given me the skills to understand when that's happening, and it's also given me the credibility with the engineering teams that they know I'm not just busting their balls for no reason.  Then we can work collaboratively to find a solution.  Works out pretty well, ultimately.

Yeah, my law firm, and my practice specifically is heavily involved in the energy industry, and all of the top level partners are petroleum engineers who went back to law school.  For the reasons you said, the energy companies we work with like to talk to people who speak their language, and aren't sleazy lawyers who just learned a little technical jargon.  Certainly helps when you are bidding on work too, that those guys want to work with people who know the process.

I went to a technical round table a couple months ago, and I've never felt so over my head in my entire professional career.

There is no shortage of engineering jobs.

Badge, I wonder how much of your experience is colored by exposure to civil engineering / land surveying / etc.

I think those engineering disciplines are currently a lot less "sexy" than electrical engineering or computer science. I think with today's youth, working on something that affects a "screen" is more accessible to them than, say, performing structural analysis on a bridge design.

But maybe that's just the fact that I'm in the electrical world so perhaps I see a lot more interest in it than objectively exists...

As a kid, I loved building stuff.  I always intended to be either a civil engineer or architect and go to GaTech, which would have made me a black sheep in my family.

Until my senior year in HS, something changed, including getting a smallish scholarship to UGA.  I didn't even apply to Tech.

https://historycollection.co/20-myths-from-american-history-were-here-to-debunk/6/

I didn't read all of these, but they seemed pretty minor to me.

I agree.
Some of those aren't even myths at all, because they are not widely believed.  (Who thinks that Thomas Jefferson personally negotiated the Louisiana Purchase?)  And there are bigger myths about the Great Depression than the supposed mass suicides on Wall Street.
We are big on debunking these days.  "Tell the good parts" became "Tell the whole story, warts and all," which has become "Tell nothing but the warts."
In every debunking book (Don't Know Much About History, Lies My Teacher Told Me, and their ilk) or article I've seen, including this one, new inaccuracies--myths, if you will--are produced to replace the old ones.
Every society develops myths about itself, especially about its founding.  If they aren't lies covering up terrible wrongs, like genocide or slavery, they seem relatively harmless to me.  Should we stop to remember, every 4th of July, that the Continental Congress actually voted for independence on 2 July, and go around correcting everyone who thinks the "wrong" way?  Does it matter greatly that George Washington did not chop down that cherry tree?

Uber and Lyft around here cost nearly the same.  Many drivers do both at the same time.  I could live here without ever driving quite comfortably.  The wife drives to pilates and church routinely, and we like to take some short trips around the area, like to the history center, which is not walkable.

We generally take the subway to the airport unless we have a lot of luggage.    It's about $22 prime time before tip.  The subway is $2.50 and drops you right in the terminal.