Ol' Vienna

Years ago, I worked with a fellow by the name of Greg Grimes.  I'm sure I've told you about him before.

Greg and his wife financed the childhood racing careers of their two sons.

You might have seen the boys in their sprint cars, crashing as much as winning (maybe more so, but who's counting), creating metal "sculptures" tossed into the family pond.

Well, Greg and I worked for a spinoff from Rockwell, originally the division called Rockwell Semiconductor, that turned into Conexant Systems.

At Conexant, Greg and I did our part to make sure customers got the high-speed Internet experience they expected from ADSL equipment, including "modems" and gateways.

He and I worked for the Huntsville Design Center, which included about 30 folks, including engineers from all over the world who continued to travel the world during interoperability tests and whatever else was required to design, test and deploy the equipment.

Like I said, this is a blog about local folks ...

... And so it is.

Greg's a great guy.  He's the kind of fellow you want when a tornado or cyclone goes ripping through your neighbourhood.  He's the one who'll be first to drop what he's doing to take care of a community.

While we were getting our ADSL design perfected (if such is possible), we needed real-world testing to ensure both the CO (Central Office - think "local telephone exchange location") and business/residential sides of the ADSL engineering prototypes worked both as designed and according to international standards.

Who else but Greg to find the perfect place to perfect our design?

Greg turned to his friends at NEHP (the New Hope Telephone Cooperative) to help us out.

Some of you are too young to remember but high-speed data connections used to be expensive.  You think your Internet connection is expensive now?  Well, in days gone by, a T1 connection to your home or business would run into the thousands of dollars for setup/installation, monthly service and maintenance.

Greg will have to correct me on this if I'm wrong but I seem to remember he paid for NEHP to run a T1 out to his place.

Thus, NEHP and Greg had a good bit of business history, along with Greg's persuasive personality, to let us test our ADSL equipment.  Not to mention the possibility that NEHP could be a potential customer for Conexant.

Like I said, that was years ago.  Neither Greg nor I work for Conexant anymore.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that Conexant is out of the ADSL business altogether.

But NEHP is still around.  Drive down Main Drive in New Hope and you'll see the old and new offices of NEHP.

Stop by.  They're friendly folks and if you're friendly enough, they might offer you a tour.  Maybe Tom Wing is still there.  Maybe he'll remember Greg Grimes if you remember to ask.

But don't tell them I sent you - they won't remember me - I'm as anonymous now as I was then, making connections that people don't even know they're making; making sure our local ways are just as important as our global ones.

Time to head off to my new job and gather up a few more stories about us and our local ways of living.  Along the way, I'm gonna stop at a local bakery and pick up a few freshly-prepared scones and doughnuts that'll make those prepackaged/frozen pastries at your local grocer's a little lonely today.

See y'all real soon.  If you have a story worth telling or a tall tale not too far-fetched, I'm listening.