Every once in a while, if you are lucky, you stumble upon a job that is a real joy. OldCranks is a project of three friends Cranky John, Cranky Doug and Cranky Tom. When the old Square Building Supply business slipped into history, these fellows stepped in and preserved  an aspect of our history, our very being, the motorcar. Cranky Tom brought me a CD with a gorgeous collections of photographs. I reached into my toolbox and came up with Drupal and tossed together a website with little else. There is still much to do but just browsing the Image Galleries is a joy.

That joy pales when compared to discovering the "back room'.  The cars there are dirty and dusty and rusty. The sort of stuff Oscar the Grouch immortalized. Not old enough to be antiques, but there were four cars like ones I used to own and drive. Two early 60s Mercedes Benz 300d, fuel injected gas that didn't come into their own until you wrapped them up to 80 miles per hour in third gear and dropped the accelerator to the floor. Definitely more at home on the Autobahn than the back roads of Grayson County; one mid sixties Lincoln Continental with a sunroof and suicide doors much like the one in which John Kennedy was assassinated. Much gratification when you could leave the Eurotrash in the dust; a 70s Mark that I drove until I started worrying about losing passengers through the floor from the encrouching rust after losing tool boxes through the trunk floor.

These guys put the finishing touches on their campground just as people started arriving for the Galax Fiddler's Convention. Woody and I spent two days on the roof re-engineering a wireless relay to serve both the campers in the back and several old and new friends attending the Convention. Another object lesson in NIH, we built the relay from a basket full of parts from our lab. We were plagued by a common little RF connection with the appropriate designation U.fl (simply oofull). The damn little thing is designed for 30 insertions but starts coming apart after five or six. We scrounged a "bulkhead" adapter, drilled out a new hole in the case, connected the "pigtail" and held it in place with hot glue. Then we found there was already a wireless system operating in the park and it was "listening" on the entire IP address space we had planned to use a part of. "They" were handing out routing information that connected everybody to their "hotspot". A few hours of reprogramming and we moved to a distinct IP space. At last, people were connecting to our router. Why would anybody spend $500 on a shiny new system when you can build it yourself and get it working in only 100 hours or so? Answer. Not Invented Here.

The joy of invention, the existential pleasure of engineering, working with your buddy on a project for your friends. Priceless.

Did I mention the black cherry ice cream cones?