Last Updated: May 06, 2009
(Updated personal/Zach info, Privacy Policy)

You wanna see me and my friends?

Howdy. This is me, sitting on the deck, reading. My bio resides here. Deanie and I have separated (soon to be legal) as of the beginning of the year (at least emotionally). I'm not going to remove every reference to her from my web pages or my life - we were together for 25 years. So when you see her name here, that's the person to whom I'm referring. So far, still friendly, but we'll see how that goes.

Here's my son, Zachary. In the distant past, he held the position of honorary Aircraft Manufacturing Assistant although I've got to say, patience in building is not exactly his forte'. This particular picture shows him in a eating a bowl of cereal on the deck over the Christmas school break. He came out for a visit with his cousin during their vacation. He'll be graduating Syracuse University in May, 2009 from the Whitman School of Management and is a member of the SAE fraternity. He did an internship at Fidelity, marketing 401K programs for the summer of 2007 and worked in a pizza shop for the summer of 2008. He's currently trying to find a job after school in this miserable excuse for an economy. I am extremely proud of him. Especially considering the hell he put us through in high school, and the distance he's come since then.

MY FATHER'S FUNERAL:

My father died on January 6^th, 2007. I've put the funeral service on line for those who were not able to attend.

MOVE TO CALIFORNIA:

In April, 2005 Scaled Composites offered me a job in Mojave, CA and I accepted. On August 24^th we began our journey west. I've got an account of the trip on my other web site (the COZY one), since I flew the plane from MA to CA over the course of a week.

I've begun keeping a intermittent record of our experiences in CA.

Building a House in Tehachapi, CA - As of February, 2007, we started building, and as of 4/10/2008, we moved in. I've created a photo gallery to peruse the unbelievably painful and stressful build process (at least for a class A control freak such as myself).

VACATIONS:

• Deanie, Zach and I took the month of May, 1996 and traveled around the states of Colorado, Arizona and Utah. You may view our itinerary and some pictures and comments.

• Deanie, Zach and I took the last two weeks of August, 2000 and traveled around the southern half of Alaska - the part you can drive around.  Geez, it's big. You may view our itinerary and some pictures and comments.

• We splurged and took the Christmas/New Year's 2000 week down in the Cinnamon Bay Campground on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Not much in the way of an itinerary (hang out on the beach, snorkel, swim, eat), but we bought a disposable underwater camera and have some cool pictures and commentary.

• Since Zachary was in Madrid and Deanie's relatives were in Switzerland, we decided to take a two week vacation and visit them. We stopped in New York/New Jersey on the way to Madrid from Los Angeles to visit parents and break up the trip, and we stopped in Boston on the way home to visit friends. Here you'll find our itinerary and commentary.

DAY TRIPS:

• Not a "vacation", per se, but we did go down to Martha's Vineyard for 1/2 a day (one nice thing about having a plane, and a fast one) in May, 2004 just to get lunch and hang out by the wharf. We took some photos with my new digital camera.
   
• We FINALLY got a chance to get the balloon ride that I'd been waiting for for two years.

WORK RELATED:

• What I do for Scaled Composites

• What it's like to work at Scaled Composites

• Fight the Powers that Be (My Struggle Against the Mass. Dept. of Unemployment Assistance)

• My Foray into Self-Employment - Burnside Aerospace

• What I used to do for Philips

• What I did for Bose

• What I used to do for HP/Agilent

• I wrote this paper (technical, sort of) on "Curviness and Squigglyness - New Paradigms in Automotive/Road Theory" (with much help in the theoretical stage) while on the plane coming back from a business trip in Germany.

• I've presented these papers at Hewlett Packard's MICON 94 and EuroMICON 95 (MICON stands for Mechanical Integration CONference):

1. Minimal Documentation - Abstract
2. Designing Plastic Parts with SolidDesigner - Workshop Abstract

• I've given the following presentation (in various incarnations) to customers of the Workstation Division(s), as well as to customers of the Mechanical Design Division (then the CoCreate Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of HP, now an independent company).

Engineering the Vision at Hewlett Packard (No Longer Available)

AIRPLANE RELATED:

I built this airplane (a Cozy-MKIV) in my spare time (besides all the house, car and motorcycle work).

If you have an interest in reading about my progress in building and flying this plane see:

• Zeitlin's Cozy

I've maintained a running commentary (with illustrations) of what I do.

If you'd like to know about COZY aircraft in general, or about the COZY mailing list I administer, or about other links to aviation related (especially homebuilt aviation), visit:

• The Unofficial COZY Builders Web Page

LETTERS I'VE WRITTEN:

• VerizonWireless has the worst customer service department on the face of the earth (excepting possibly Burma's dictatorship), so when I finally found someone there who exhibited extreme competence, I felt compelled to write this letter to her supervisor, supporting her efforts.
   
• I hate flying commercially (the COZY is MUCH better), but in January, 2006 America West Airways REALLY screwed up big time. Again, I was compelled to bill them in this letter for time wasted.



• So my family and I needed to fly east in June, 2006 for a vacation on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Three letters evolved from this fiasco. I'd recommend reading them in order of their criticality:
   
  • Paradise Bakery and Cafe - mostly good feedback letter, with one real issue
  • Dunkin Donuts - all bad, but not all that important letter
  • America West Airways - almost completely all bad letter, and extremely important (but is this really a surprise?)
     
• I found it necessary to write a letter to the CEO of Clearwire Communications regarding some extremely nefarious behavior on the part of their sales and billing departments, not to mention the utter uselessness of their customer service department.

OTHER:

• My Biography
   
• I wrote this magnetic poem while in the midst of a discussion with a previous boss one day.
   
• My mother bought these icemaker trays - they apparently come from outer space, judging from the english translations.   Enjoy.

What I like:

• I like Volleyball and racquetball. I like my family. I like flying. I like E-prime. Not in that order.

What I DON'T like:

• I don't like idiots. I don't like people whose mouths have no connection to their thinking apparatus. I don't like the HP/Agilent Drug testing policy (since cancelled for lack of efficacy - YAY!). I don't like Nixon (the man, not the movie) - dead or not. I never thought that anyone could supplant Nixon in my list of "people to detest", but GW Bush managed to accomplish that - props to him.

Copyright © 1995 - 2009, All Rights Reserved, Marc J. Zeitlin
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