They always say “it’s as easy as riding a bike.” This proves otherwise. At least for electric bikes.

Coleco Telstar Combat

My parents set the stage early. We had two Mustangs, a ‘65 and a ‘66, one hardtop, one convertible.

A mechanic friend of mine refers to his planes (three ultralights, an LSA, and a Tri Pacer) as flying lawnmowers. There’s some truth to that. The engine uses basically the same technology as a lawn mower. The airframes for many general aviation aircraft have changed little since their original design back in the ‘50s…

Well... sort of. If you can get an A&P to oversee your work, you can overhaul an engine yourself. A friend of mine is a truck mechanic and has rebuilt several engines for his personal aircraft with an A&P reviewing his work. He even took a course on how to install fabric so he could re-skin his vintage Tri-Pacer.

In my area, the local airport has a long waiting list for hangar space and the construction of new hangar space has been delayed by weather issues. (Frankly, I think the airport managers are buffoons and have no business managing construction projects.) The nearest airport with hangar space is over an hour away. That…

That sensor is measuring how fast you pedal the bike, not how fast you sell stuff.

That goes for most of our physical infrastructure too. We’ve spent a great deal of time and money trying to digitize it before most of the old guys retire. The map shows the gas main over here... “Nope. That’s just that way on the map so you can see it. The actual location is ten feet to the right.”

Some of the companies go a step further. It is possible to order custom textbooks with chapters pulled from any of the other textbooks in their catalog, arrange them to your liking, and print them up with custom covers. E-publishing tools automatically take care of the TOC and index.

It’s even common for one company to buy product from another company and relabel it as their own. When I worked at a petrochemical plant, we would occasionally put our product in someone else’s packaging. The joke was on them - we were required to put adhesive labels with our quality results on each and every bag, so…

For starters, my name isn’t Jesus. I don’t need help chewing my food, thank you very much.

I wish they had thought to rotate the “print” 90 degrees so it would be clear what was being printed. It took me a minute to figure out that it was Mario.

You might get a kick out of truck-towing hang gliders.

My company has used it to survey sign locations and accessibility ramps to sidewalks. We even used it to get a case thrown out of court. We were blamed for a pothole which injured someone after we had a road permit to conduct a road inspection. The hole had been there for years and our inspections had nothing to do…

Our company has a sub-contract with another firm which, instead of establishing a longer-term lease, set up a short-term lease in a wework space. It’s crowded. It’s noisy. They shut off the a/c at 6:00 sharp, so it’s uncomfortably warm if you have to work long hours. Most of the walls are glass, so there’s no…

No.

There’s one station where I have to leave my car at the pump nearly every time I fill up there. The problem? The pump doesn’t deliver a receipt. While it’s generally good practice to get a receipt, it’s an absolute necessity when the receipt is required to get reimbursement from your company. While I would be…

No need to hone them.  A friend of mine reached over the prop to adjust the carb on a nitro-powered R/C plane and the prop sliced through his forearm. It was so sharp that he didn’t even notice the cut until the fuel can sitting near the plane went from clear to red.

That’s what our Explorer had. The pad on the truck is the same technology, different implementation.

“With PIN to Drive, you have to enter a four-digit code before you can drive, which makes it sort of like all those old Fords and Lincolns with numeric keypads I’ve never seen anyone use, and all of this seems like a much bigger ass-pain than putting a damn key into a hole and twisting.”