[Al Skierkiewicz]

David,
How about some real people who just do interesting jobs. My son, for instance, works for Underwriter's Lab. He tests HVAC equipment so that devices can receive the UL label. In just a few short years, he has traveled the world to perform testing and monitor in house testing of products. My favorite story of his was monitoring rain testing of building HVAC units in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi engineers were very friendly and gracious people. They were a little incredulous on the rain testing though. Can you imagine hundreds of gallons of water being used for heavy rain tests in a country where the rainfall was less than two inches for the past two years? All of us do interesting things for our careers even if we aren't making big innovations every day.
One of my inspirations was old Doc Edgerton. You know him for all those high speed photos of shooting an apple or playing card or water dropping into a puddle. But you know his work better every time you take a flash picture. Yep, strobe flash was a big part of his work. He started taking flash photos during WWII when the allies needed photos of enemy held lands. To get high res pictures required flying low altitude so Doc helped take pictures at night with big flashes. This allowed the planes to fly low without getting shot down. Doc also developed time code (used in video editing) to help sync several cameras looking at the same event from different angles and distances.