WTF-J

While funding my two daughters college educations at Northwestern & Cornell, I came to the realization that we were effectively spending enough money each year to buy a Porsche Boxster and drive it off a cliff.  (Except for the year when my two daughters overlapped their college experience, and then it could have been a 911.)  Now, don’t get me wrong, their educations were well worth it and they are both successfully on their own, but somewhere during the journey, I decided to pay myself one additional year of tuition to build a car. 

This blog is the record of the build, and even though the car is well along toward completion, my closure rate on the finish suggests that there is enough time for the blog to catch up.

Dumb idea you say?  The title to this page reflects the typical reaction of people who know me, so you may be onto something; but the good news is that even though I didn’t exactly know what I was getting into, it appears to be working out OK. 

Working as a technology consultant you learn a few coping strategies that turn out to be very helpful in the garage:

• Transform "Big Problems" into a collection of (solvable) "Small Problems"
• "The truth is out there" – Somebody, somewhere has confronted this same problem, has solved it, and has posted it on the Web
  • Nobody is born knowing this stuff, they had to learn it somewhere, somehow, and you can too
• Don’t let best get in the way of better
  • You have to learn to accept that guys who have been doing this for many years are better at it than you are
• If you get the basics right, you can wing it for the rest
  • Conversely, if you guessed wrong on the basic building blocks, any additional effort/investment will only produce more expensive scrap (i.e. Admit failure and move on.)
• Sometimes you just gotta say "What the …"