Editor’s Note

Every year, the "lumenati" (the enlightened members of the lighting industry) come to the Big Trade Show (the BTS), hungering for a taste of the latest technology, thirsting for a long drink from the well of new products, and they go home with aching heads and sore feet. Next year, we all promise, we'll all sing the praises of the BTS, but this year we've had our fill. Then we all beat a hasty retreat to the comfort of our stacks of virtual paper and our grand To-Do lists.

"I have six locks on my door, all in a row," George Carlin said. "When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three of them."

Once, in a moment of apparent weakness, the dean of the college of engineering invited me and some other students to his house for dinner. We were all sitting in the study talking about school when I said something that, in retrospect, seemed to be the dumbest comment ever.

"Learning is painful," I said.

The good news is that no one was seriously injured…as far as we know…and we don't know much. The bad news is that it happened again.

What is the secret to success and why is it such a big secret? It's been thousands of years since it was first tasted; you would think that it's in the public domain by now. Volumes have been written about it, you can buy DVDs, attend seminars, and find a variety of materials purporting to reveal it, yet the true formula can't be bought, sold, or traded. You have a better chance of stealing Mr. Krab's secret formula for the Krabby Patty than getting your fins on the secret formula for success.

All my life I've been waiting for someone to build a flying car. It's kind of like waiting for Donald Trump to lose the rest of his hair; we're pretty sure it's going to happen, we just don't know when. Whether we're talking about the Donald's hair falling out or cars flying in, when it does happen it will be a big improvement but far too expected not to be anti-climactic.

Do you remember the first concert you ever attended? Of course you do. I remember mine like it was yesterday. It was a band called Krackerjack at the Corpus Christi Exhibition Center. They had a bass player named Tommy Shannon (currently touring with Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, Jonny Lang, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd on the Experience Hendrix Tour) and a young guy on the guitar they called "Skeeter." Later on they stopped calling him Skeeter and started calling him Stevie Ray Vaughn.

There was once a lighting supplier who bought a case of 12 PAR lamps from the manufacturer for $200 and sold them for $15 each. Business was brisk. At the end of the month, the owner counted his money and found that he was a little short on cash. So he called a meeting of the entire company and explained the problem. "What are we going to do?" an employee asked. "Isn't it obvious?" the owner answered. "We're going to get a bigger warehouse."

Every January, Tour Tech East in Halifax, Nova Scotia hosts a mini trade show and maxi charity event and party benefiting AIDS research. If you've never been then you owe it to yourself to make a point of going. It's a great way to get some quality time with different people in the industry and to help support a worthy cause at the same time.

Every January, we all step up to the home plate of the New Year and get ready to take our swings at the wild pitches of life. Some of us dream of pointing to the center field fence like Babe Ruth and swatting one over. Me? I'm happy just to not strike out. I still remember the words of my little league coach, who used to tell me, "Just meet the ball. Just get on base."

In the 1950s, George Izenour designed an electronically-controlled line shaft system for the theatre at Hofstra University. It was a very flexible system in which the sheaves and blocks could be moved around using a matrix of bolt holes on a series of beams in the fly loft.

My wife bought me the book, John Adams by David McCullough shortly after it came out in 2001. It’s a 700+ page book about the second president of the United States. (You thought it was about the guy who works at Vari-Lite and who used to work for High End Systems, didn’t you?) Although the book very much intrigued me, it sat on the shelf for almost eight years before I finally got the time to read it.