Lordsburg, NM

A couple of weeks ago I had to make a trip to Lordsburg, New Mexico to do a PM on their Kodak LS-75 film digitizer. If you are not aware, Lordsburg is 20 miles from the Arizona border in southern NM.



In the past I have always flown my own airplane out there but as some of you may know, I had a heart attack in January '09 so I am grounded for a minimum of six months until I can get my flight physical back.

I looked into flying commercial but it wasn't all that practical. I would have to fly to Dallas, then connect to either El Paso, Albuquerque, or Tuscon, and then STILL drive something like 5 hours to get there. Total trip time would be in the neighborhood of 8-10 hours depending on connecting flights, how long I would have to wait for a rental, etc. My normal flight time in my Maule would be 3.5 hours. Not to mention I need to take tools with me, so I would have to check luggage.

So, instead I decided to drive. I had some free time and worked it in over a weekend. But instead of driving my Toyota FJ Cruiser, I decided to take my new Honda Goldwing! I love riding my bike and the big Wing is extremely comfortable on long trips. I could load my tools, laptop and clothes in the spacious bags and have room to spare. It was a really fun, yet fast trip. I was able to cruise through the Rockies east of Alamogardo, which was a lot of fun.


Arriving in Lordsburg early afternoon, I met with George Craig, whom I have known for years. They have a small facility but they are looking to expand to include CR soon. Talked to him about CR and spent a few hours going through their LS-75 and recalibrating it. They were extremely pleased with the image quality once I got done. Digitizer tend to drift out of calibration over time so if you see the images every day, it is hard to notice until someone recalibrates them - then it is very noticable.


On the return trip I stopped in Lamesa to visit a customer there. They are building a new hospital and we are designing the network infrastructure and installing switches and firewalls. Everything was looking good there and we will be going live in another couple of weeks. They will have a very nice gigabit speed network, along with dual high end Sonicwall firewalls with failover protection, a secure wireless network for both the hospital staff and the patients, intrusion detection and prevention, content filtering, the works. It will be very nice. I am working with Brad Snell their IT manager to implement the system and will help him manage the installation until he becomes comfortable with the system.

Hopefully I will be back in the air in July and ready to fly, but in the meantime you might see me on my Goldwing when I come out. In my opinion, a bad day on a motorycle is better than a good day in a car!