No pictures today - spent most of it in the facilities of a private company, and they frown on stuff like that.

Bob works for Smiths Aerospace, so I went over and had lunch with him and a tour of the facility.

Smiths Aerospace makes a number of commercial and military aviation products, amongst them the "black box" flight recorders (which are actually bright orange). I also had a sort of interview with one of their managers, so this counts as a job-search contact for the unemployment people.

For you techies out there, the new flight data recorders store everything on flash memory. There are essentially no moving parts and are tested to an impact force of 622 G's. For those of you who are not techies, this means they are just really, really tough.

They also do stuff with missiles. A few guys had Stinger missile launch rails (the helicopter mounted type, not the shoulder launchers) set up in their work space, looking out over the cubicle tops. Bob said they were testing some of the ranging systems across the building to the far wall.

Q - "Gee honey, what did you do at work today?"

A- "Oh, not much, just aimed missiles at my boss's office."

Ah, we can only dream.