Preventive and predictive maintenance practices are proven methods for keeping machinery running and avoiding costly unplanned downtime. That's why maintenance is so important, right?

After it was announced that Sullair was being purchased by private equity firms BC Partners (www.bcpartners.com) and The Carlyle Group (www.carlyle.com) from Hamilton Sundstrand (www.hamiltonsundstrand.com), the party had begun.

My feet still hurt. After two days at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) in Chicago's McCormick Place, I'm pretty sure I'd walked more miles than Harold Fry.

Make no mistake. Manufacturing in the United States and abroad is alive and well, and so is the technology to automate it. The last count I'd heard had the event flirting with 100,000 registrants for the trade show and conferences. It was indeed a sea of attendees flooding the venue's 470,000 square ft.

Nothing says, "Autumn," like Florida. Huh?

Maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but this October, we'll all most certainly find ourselves in Orlando for the 20th annual SMRP conference. I'll be there. Stanton McGroarty will be there. David Crosby will be there.

Well, David claims to be a reliability coordinator from a U.S. energy company, but I see him there every year, and this time I'm going to get him to sing the harmony on "Teach Your Children" with Stanton, just to prove I'm right.

You'll see. You'll all see.

Maintenance machismo comes in many flavors. Plant Services Senior Technical Editor Stanton McGroarty introduced us to the concept a week ago (http://community.plantservices.com/content/maintenance-machismo-today) and made a strong case for changing the face of what it is.

Some people make a difference. These are the folks who leave legacies that are bigger than themselves. The world is better because of them.

Pat Ostrenga is one of those people. He retired from the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA), where he'd served for 34 years and received countless internal awards and commendations, and he earned the Safety Lifetime Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Safety Council in his home state. He'd conducted training for the American Society of Safety Engineers and the National Safety Council.

Earlier this week, smart people around the world became millionaires. Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, physics professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, respectively, were two of nine physicists who received $3 million each from the Russia-based Milner Foundation. All kids looking for a reason to focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education just had 27 million of them drop in their collective lap.

Who owns maintenance?

I don't just mean in your facility or throughout your organization. I'm talking full-on ownership. Who holds a live registered trademark on it?

Every day, more than a dozen workers die on the job in the United States.

That bit of information comes from the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics' "Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries Summary" (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm).

China's State Administration of Work Safety reports more than 200 work-related deaths per day, while other countries fall somewhere in between the two.

News of a recent IMS Research (www.imsresearch.com) study, which estimates the revenues for global discrete machine safety components grew by more than 17% and exceeded $2 billion in 2011, reminds us of the need to design machines to the dominant global safety standard, which is EN ISO 13849-1, now that EN 954-1 is dead. Updates to international and European machine safety standards were among the main growth drivers of the machine safety component market.