I just came back from the Engineering Educators' conference in Indianapolis. Rather than flying, I decided to drive to the conference since Indianapolis is only 4 hours away. With all the summer road construction, it turned out to be closer to 5 hours, but that's still faster than flying. Indianapolis is a very pretty town, but somewhat small. As I was driving in, I kept looking for the downtown skyline, but they don't really have one. I think the Marriott is the tallest building in town. Indianapolis has a really nice bike path that runs right through the middle of the downtown area. They had places you could rent bikes out on the sidewalks, but I didn't have enough time to try it out.
Every morning I walked over to Monument Circle to have breakfast. This is a Civil War monument that is ringed by several chain restaurants with outdoor seating areas, including Einsteins, Starbucks, and Au Bon Pain - lots of choices for breakfast. I don't think many people sat outside for lunch or dinner, because the heat and humidity were suffocating.
My Enerflex demo worked like a charm. Bruce built me a little model of an attic ceiling and I put the Enerflex radiant barrier on one half and left the other half open. I put a halogen light behind it and used an IR sensor to measure the temperature differences. The side without the Enerflex got up to 150
º, while the side with the Enerflex never got past 72
º - pretty impressive. I'm going to put more of this stuff in my attic this fall.
The most popular booth at the conference was the US Didactic booth. They had big screen TVs so they could show the World Cup soccer games. My partner is a big soccer fan, so he kept running over to check the score. US Didactic is a European company. All the women in this picture are hired models who wear short skirts, tight shirts, and high heels. Their sole purpose (besides attracting all the men at the conference) is to hand out Lindor truffles or ask if you want a latte. They had a latte station set up in the middle of their booth and this man spent his day serving people. I guess that's one way to attract customers.
