Henry's Web Log

Thursday was an ACI covered dish lunch, Friday the President's Council hosted what may have been the first gathering of all 3 groups for a sendoff lunch. Both days were interspersed with "final" client and employee meetings, since there's always just a few more things we need to take care of. Kevin Litten's article about this deployment and its effect on our business appeared in today's Virginia section of the Roanoke Times. The online edition put it under business. It was a great ink, got everything right, and captured our sentiment: this is a challange, but we're up for it and all of us (family and employees) see this as a patriotic responsibility.

Saturday's swan song was at the Virginia Tech tailgate: not a celebration tailgate, but our golden opportunity to sell Cub Scout popcorn! We piloted a popcorn sale last year, visiting our well-to-do tailgaters and found them very supportive. It helps that our Cub Scouts are enthusiastic, pull a red wagon full of carmel corn tins, and tell the fans about the great activities we do in our Pack. Plus the cuteness factor. We managed to sell over 28 cases, 12 cans/case. As over-priced as Cub Scout popcorn is, many fans supported our boys with tips and donations.

Sunday we made waffles at home, a delicious family tradition, and I zipped through a quick IASO course (information assurance/computer security), some reading I had been doing over the last 2 weeks. The boys and I enjoyed some horseplay, helped me put on my uniform and we headed out. While traveling in uniform wasn't required, Lisa suggested it would help the boys understand that this is no ordinary business trip. Message received! We stopped at the new R/C flying field on the way to the airport: the Radio Controlled airplane club was hosting a fun-fly and cook out. The weather was great. We enjoyed a few flights for me, Eric and Ethan, then had a burger before continuing to the airport.

Good-bye was certainly tough. Eric was stoic, Ethan was emotional, and Lisa was wonderful, supporting both boys and me.

With Lisa, I visited her grandmother Ilse today, in the Blacksburg Kroontjie care facility. She's wonderful, a German immagrant who gave birth to Lisa's mother in the middle of WWII. In a German brewery during a bombing raid, according to Lisa's mother. Wow.

Ilse has her good and bad days, and she was sharp today- she knew from the early morning that there were plans in the works, and she wanted to know what was up. So we sat with her and told her about the Army call-up, and how we'd like to stay in touch. The staff at Kroontji said we should tell Ilse about a week out, because we didn't want her to worry too long or be confused about when I was leaving.

The photo is me and Lisa visiting her on her birthday, last May, while she was recovering from a hip injury. Kroontjie is nicer than the room shown...but it helped that Lisa filled the room up with colorful balloons to celebrate the day!

For almost two years, we've been developing, testing and improving a fantastic innovation for the supermarket refrigeration controls industry. ACI, working under Zero3 Controls, has developed what I refer to as the BabelFish for refrigeration control. Not only does it translate nearly all commercial controllers to a universal XML format, but also puts refrigeration energy and usage data on the web. The protocol is clean, efficient and very much revolutionizes the industry at a time when energy management is big on everyone's radar.

We had some units in an Ohio store and Pennsylvania store, but not since April. Prompted by my immenant deployment, and motivated by our advisory board, we arranged a meeting with Greg Wade, the manager of a popular, independent group of 3 supermarkets in our own New River Valley. We learned that all 3 of his stores had electronic controls. 2 will make excellent demonstration candidates immediately, and the third will be refit soon.

Zero3 will perform an "eCommissioning" where Mr. Wade's stores are tuned for optimum energy performance, without sacrificing food quality. Supermarket electricity bills are the single largest expense on any store's balance sheet, after payroll. Even a 15% decrease in energy can save $2000 per MONTH in a store's expenses, plus the reduction in carbon emissions and improvement of our energy grid. One popular quote I've heard, but not been able to verify, is that supermarkets consume 10% of all generated power in the United States. So reducing every store's energy usage makes a huge improvement in our nation's energy posture.

We look forward to serving the Wade's Foods chain well, and to the subsequent stores that have been waiting for a real demonstration of this technology.

Once a summer we've always thrown an employee picnic, and our favorite venue has become Claytor Lake. With my deployment, our celebration took on an additional significance. We did have a great time, and I think it's important to celebrate with friends.

One remarkable accomplishment: everyone on the MatWeb team got up on water skis. Not simultaneously, but over the course of the day. The weather was already a little chilly, but the water was ok and it beats working!

Matt Gentry of the Roanoke Times joined us mid-afternoon and shot plenty of photos, which will likely wind up in the business section around the time I deploy.

I found out that the National Guard provides an infrastructure of regional family support advocates. Last Friday evening, I fired off an email to an address in Abington, and actually got a response within minutes, loaded with useful resources...including a reference to Elaine Dumler's "flat daddy" photo. The idea is that a life-size cutout of your soldier can be photographed with your family and shared with others, creating a virtual presence, and generally make life apart a little more bearable.
Well, what a good idea! So I shot several photos and fired off emails to several local graphics companies. Tech Express refered me to Radford's Sign Systems and a DC firm. The DC firm responded the next day with a decent quote, and agreed to go a little extra: we made a flat Henry with a big smile on one side, but precisely fit the back with an angry flat Henry! This one is for use at work: the flat Henry sits in my office, smiling his normal self, until some month in the future, I get a note that profits are down. I'd email Angela, our CFO, and say, "Turn the Henry around!" and out comes flat angry Henry. Angela was good enough to even practice: she held it in front of her and went office-to-office and in her best angry voice (well, there was quite a bit of laughter mixed in) said, "Get to work! Earn more money!"
Well, a few days later, the fine folks at Sign Systems in Radford generously provided my family with all three flat-henry versions: the "happy henry", "concerned henry", and "angry henry." They printed each and mounted them very professionally (of course), and got it done quickly.