Uncle Bill's Helicopter All of us keep things working pretty good, every day. It's not always an anonymous spacecraft that we crash, and we rarely have a Y2k success story to tell.

But I know the mistakes that we make are still worth it. My uncle Bill killed several friends, while testing his helicopter. I don't think he ever really got over it... But he got up, somehow, pulled himself out of that crater, and tried again.

His Super Stallion keeps on flying, well, 12 got shot down in Vietnam. In 1990, one saved everyone in an entire embassy. In 1995, one pulled a pilot out of somalia. In 50 years, when that bird's retired, it's still gonna be flying in at least one place, my mind. There are thousands of these wonderful machines, doing that kind of stuff, every day. If you look carefully you'll find helicopters like that everywhere.

Last week I cratered one of my projects, and while driving home, I sat at a traffic light.

There's a 4 bit microprocessor in that, an intel 4004, one of the first embedded computers. This chip has been around for 30 years!

The light turned from red to green. And from green to red. And from red to green. And from green to red. I thought about how many lives that little traffic light had saved, of the engineer who made it work that good, and of the people that had worked so hard to keep it working... the light turned from red to green, and I said thanks, and drove on.