The other day I tried to remember every single car I have ever owned in the past 40 years. From the first one, a ’69 Ford Galaxie 500 (with the Cleveland, not Windsor 351 cubic inch engine) to the vehicles that currently occupy my garage — a Ford Mustang and a Jeep. While I have driven more than 10 vehicles into the ground in the course of the last four decades, one driving issue has remained constant for me. I really, really, do not like the “idiot lights” that replaced gauges on many dashboards. While my Jeep has the typical lights that indicate problems only when they have reached certain thresholds known only to the Jeep’s computer, the ’94 Mustang has actual gauges for engine temperature, oil pressure, etc. These analog gauges allow an attentive driver to see a problem developing before it goes supernova, such as a pending engine overheat while I’m stuck on the Kennedy Expressway in downtown Chicago. (As a former service station professional and a loyal member of the Teamsters Local 705, let me pass along this tip: At the first sign of your engine overheating, turn on the interior cabin heat full bore. This will extract heat from the engine and maybe prevent a major meltdown.)

When a security dealer thinks about using some of the exciting new technologies that are coming into our industry, he or she is often suspicious; will this new stuff actually work? In the alarm industry, we have seen technologies come and prove themselves unworthy of being relied upon. For example, microwave-only motion detectors were installed by the thousands in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and we soon found out that while they did indeed detect motion, they also were very susceptible to false triggering from police radios and other RF and EMI sources. Therefore, microwave motion detection technology was married to passive infrared technology yielding “dual technology” motion detectors; microwave-only devices have been relegated to automatic door opener use.