Holiday cheer has come to my beloved Interactive Department here at work in the form of a $16 Christmas tree from Walmart. Mix with left-over lights and a bevy of plushie animals, and you have the makings of mirth in tree form.

In other news, I made beer yesterday evening. I have had this
Brewer’s Best Steam-Style beer kit since last fall, and just now got around to making it with a little help from Winemakers & Beermakers Supply on Westport Road. Nice, helpful folks they are!

On a side note, Thanksgiving was also very nice. We house-hopped between Indiana and Kentucky and had a good time all around. The holidays are starting off well this year.

I’ll tell you with considerable pride that I haven’t given more than the compulsory two minutes of my attention to the Laci Peterson case. It really wasn’t a conscious decision so much as that is how little I watch network news and read the local paper. If it were a conscious decision to avoid this stuff, it’d probably have been more like a couple hours of my life wasted on a murder (notice I didn’t say “alleged”) way across the country. As a side note to my lack of awareness on this case: NPR’s search engine shows that they have only TWO articles containing the term “Laci”, as compared to the some 30 articles dealing with the “Artic National Wildlife Refuge”. I think that explains it pretty well.

Further, Louisville has had a bona-fide rash of murders in it’s own right the last couple of weeks. At least seven within the last week, totalling some 60 for the year, a figure that far outweighs the 2 people killed by Scott Peterson both in number and personal relevance.

As I heard the father of the most recently slain boy (17-year-old Johnathan Watson) in Louisville say this morning (paraphrased): “I just want everyone with the guns to know that, yeah, you’re the big men today — but know this — you didn’t just kill a boy, you killed a whole family.” So, while the death of Laci Peterson and their unborn child is certainly tragic and reprehensible, we’ve got 60 families right here in town that could use a little more attention.

That’s right, the capital “A” Audiophile in me made me reconsider how I rip CDs into the digital MP3 format. At lunch today I did a little looking around at the current ripping/encoding systems available for the PC. After a little deliberation, I have found that there are two tools that are considering the audiophile standard for digital music. First is Exact Audio Copy (EAC), a ripper that I find better than they venerable CDex, due in part to EAC’s sophisticated error checking and error recovery methods.

Further, I found that the choice encoder is (as it has always been) LAME (LAME Isn’t an MP3 Encoder). However, earlier this year someone tweaked version 3.90.3 of LAME for ever finer audio reproduction. There are a couple of presets in LAME now called “Alt Presets”. The most popular of these presets is “Alt Preset Standard”. This makes a stereo, approximately 256kbps variable-bit-rate MP3 file of exquisite quality. The filesize is a little larger over that of my previous modus-encoderi of stereo 192kbps constant-bit-rate, but the quality of the music is much better (at least in headphones).

I did a little comparative testing with my brand-spanking-new copy of Interpol‘s newest album, Antics. The results were, to my ears, astounding. I’ve heard stereo 256kbps VBR and I ain’t going back!

On a side note, I should mention that Antics is a really awesome album — much like their previous hailed effort Turn on the Bright Lights, it might require a few listenings for it to sink in. However, after it has sunk in, you’ll be hard pressed to not hum their solid rhythms to yourself, while secretly wishing it was snowing outside. File under: Winter music.

Before the election, and before the overwhelming win for the Kentucky Gay Marriage Amendment, our local super-church, South East Christian helped to support this amendment with their “One Man, One Woman” campaign. This campaign involved numerous billboards and mobile advertising and through their weighty clout and coffers, I think they helped to steel conservative opinion around Louisville at least, where the measure passed 60% YES / 40% NO 20-point margin. The rest of the state voted 75/25 YES/NO. Certainly a win for SouthEast and their campaign, and it could be said for Christians state-wide.

Now, while SouthEast claims that “The same-sex marriage controversy is NOT ABOUT… homophobia, [or] whether homosexuals are nice people, good citizens, loving parents, loyal friends or helpful neighbors”, they forgot to mention that this amendment not only bars gays from “marriage”, but also from the lesser charge of “civil unions” which grants them the same rights as a “wedded couple” which includes any number of legal rights, including inheritance, life insurance, medical decisions, etc. Oddly enough, South East has left this out of their website, on any page dealing with “gay marriage”. However, on a funny ha-ha sidenote, they do reference a number of scientific studies in their defense of marriage. To quote:

The recognition that marriage is the union of male and female has never been seriously questioned in America until the past decade. During that time, activists were busy promoting their own private social revolution, and scientists were busy studying the institution of marriage and its affect on the participants and on society.

The results of hundreds of scientific studies and years of sociological research is undisputable. There is a mountain of evidence demonstrating the rewards to society as well as to individual families of marriage.

This is not an indictment of single-parent families; it is a scientific understanding of the dynamics of family structure.

Wow, hey! While you’re thumbing through scientific reports, why not read up on evolution as well! It’s just a letter away from “faggotry”.

I respect SouthEast’s opinion and the opinion of the lawmakers who support this tripe, but did the lawmakers have to go and completely ban even civil unions? I guess they figured that if they hooped and hollered about marriage enough that they could squeak in some verbiage about civil unions and just really kill the whole thing once and for all. That is some pork-barrel baby and the bath water sort of shenanigans that I really hate to see. To bar marriage from homosexuals is one thing, to categorically and systematically bar them from the rights regarded to any other wedded — or joined — couple is just ridiculous. This is a major setback for a very large and very real segment of our society that is not going to “go away”. Well, I take that back — if you wanted to rid the state of gays, well, you’ve made a step in the right direction, Kentucky!

That, of course, brings me to my final point — Kentucky is attempting a branding initiative that will create a singular, unified logo for the state. You, citizen, can even vote for your favorite logo. (On a side note: the agency that got the state’s business is New West, and according to a little bird New West is shipping a great deal of the some $14 million state ad budget down South to Atlanta in the form of contract work! Thanks Gov. Fletcher! Keep it in the state, man!) Anyway, I figure that at least this time the state is giving the public some choice in what logo will represent the state, rather than foisting some candy-assed design on us. Hey! Kentucky — It’s That Friendly (except to gays). Well, in that spirit of public consideration and contribution, I submit my own Kentucky logo:

jine: antiquated and poetic version of “to join”, or perhaps “to agree with”. Note usage here in this old Civil War bar shanty.

This is the text of an email from a friend of mine (who is gay) in reaction to the Kentucky Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment which passed this last Tuesday…

Friends:

As most of you are probably aware, the majority of voters in Kentucky, along with 10 other states across our fine nation, just placed a ban on same sex marriage into the state constitution, effectively endorsing discrimination as a model practice. I am sitting here very nearly in tears right now because what this means is that the state that I was born in, and spent the first 24 years of my life in, has decided that I am not entitled to the same respect or the same sense of basic human dignity that 90% of the country’s population is automatically accorded. What this means is that my monogamous relationship with my boyfriend of three years is worth less than my father’s less lengthy relationship with a woman from another country; it is worth less than the second marriage of my mother; it is even worth less than a 55 hour practical joke perpetrated by Britney
Spears. It is, in fact, worth nothing in Kentucky.

What this means is that I cannot, and will not, ever be a resident of Kentucky again.

Maybe this seems a bit extreme to some of you, but I’d ask you to try to see this from my perspective. The state I have spent the vast majority of my life in, the one that educated me and collected my tax dollars, has now decided it knows better than I do when it comes to my relationship. All I can think is “What right do you have to tell me who I can marry? What right do you have to determine that my relationship is worth less than your own? What right do you have to presume to speak for God?”

Many people, maybe some of you, think this fight was about giving special rights to gay people. This could not be further from the truth. It was, and is, about affording equal rights to every tax-paying citizen of this country. In fact, the only people with “special rights” in this respect are heterosexuals: straight people have the right to marry, gay people do not. Straight people have the right to inherit property from their significant other, make medical decisions for their significant other, take care of the person they love most in the world; gay people do not. I do not. I am not equal.

So, it’s time I drew a line for my basic sense of self-respect, and sadly for me, that line must be abandoning the state I once considered my home.

I’ve been hearing a bit about the country “healing” after this election — which is as of right now (Kerry is giving his concession speech), officially over. “Re-uniting” is another term I’ve heard today. “Healing” and “re-uniting” is a big bunch of hokum if you ask me — this election only shows that the country is terribly split, and either side is going to have a tough battle. This will be Bush’s last term, and with a pro-Republican shift in Congress, he’ll be pushing even more of his conservative legislation through. The Democrats, long-suffering from the stings of two very, very close defeats will certainly redouble their efforts to curtail those pieces of legislation. Bush’s “standing on principle” and his black-and-white values did well to retain his base, despite polls claiming that a majority of Americans think the US is on the wrong track and that the economy is failing. The gay marriage amendments in 11 states passed by overwhelming margins. These amendments are “protection” amendments — amendments of exclusion the likes of which we have never seen in this country. How do people vote for a politician that they feel is putting the country on the wrong track, both economically and politically? Is the other half of the country so scared that they have to compromise on their economic and national beliefs that they’ll elect the guy who will protect them from the gays and the terrorist by standing on prinicpal? How do you go up against religious faith in a politician? How do you argue against that sort of bull-headed devotion? When you’re against a foe that only knows how to attack and protect, it’s going to be a hard fight.

So, healing isn’t something that is going to happen — re-uniting certainly won’t either. The gloves are off, if they weren’t off before. Get ready.

Well, today is the day. A quick look at the Electoral College Projections tells me that the race, as of late yesterday, is quite possibly the tightest it has been all year. The L.A. Times’ projection shows that there are many states with less than 10% separating the challengers, and if one were to cede the states based on percentage majority, it would come down to a dead heat between Bush and Kerry, with Hawaii as the deciding state (it is completely even according to their polls). The other three projections in that post also reflect the airtight status of this race.

Last night we received a call from Danny Glover, Ret. General Wesley Clark and Mitch McConnell (we were eating dinner, of course). In the last week we have received no less than 30 pieces of political mail, a couple of doorknob hangers, and at least a dozen messages on the answering machine. But after today, I’ll miss Danny’s calls. Yeah, I called him Danny. When dude calls my house 4 times, I think I reserve the right to call him by his first name, you know.

Tonight we are having some election day festivities (read: watching Fox News and cackling) and I’ll be making some White Turkey Chili. We have also prepared living arrangements in Canada, just in case :)

No, not really. In many ways, I’ll be sad to see “the Quadrennial Classic” go. I’m excited about this race — not so much because I’m hyped about Kerry, but I’m hyped that the rest of the U-S-of-A has been whipped into giving a flying foo about the state of the government. I think we might have a electorate-turnout pot tonight. I’m betting on 70%!

Anyway, if you haven’t voted, get out now. If you choose not to vote, well then the hell with ya.

First up, the photos from our annual Huber’s trip have been posted into the 2004.10.16 Hubers! gallery. Some great duck photography there, if I do say so myself.

Secondly, before the 2004 DESS Handlaunch competition, Bruce, Brian and I went to see Richard Harker‘s giant home aquarium. He built an addition onto his Raleigh, NC home for a 2,000 gallon saltwater reef tank. It is truly a sight to behold. You can behold it in the 2004.10.22 – Giant Home Aquarium gallery.

and now ladies and gentleman,
the oddest image of Pat Buchanan I could find.

bOINGbOING has a story about Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative magazine has endorsed Kerry. Though, not for the reasons you might imagine. Their claim, at least in the article entitled “Kerry’s the One” is that this election isn’t about Kerry, but is about the presidency of Bush and how horribly un-conservative Bush has been. We’ve got a huge deficit, the economy has worsened, and the government has grown greatly. Leave it to Buchanan to play the crazy card, huh? I don’t know how this will affect the whole race — chances are it will be imperceptible, but the article is certainly worth reading for liberals and conservatives and all those in between.

This past weekend, I joined a couple other of my RC soaring friends from LASS, and headed down to Wilson, North Carolina for the 2004 East Coast HLG Festival. Recently I picked up well-used discus-launched glider from a club mate, and by gum I was going to compete this year! Below is a recounted of this weekend wherein I managed to win my first trophy for soaring, a third place in the “sportsman” class competition. Click on “read more” to see the full story…

note: Yeah, I know I didn’t take any photos. I managed to mess up and delete a bunch, but luckily Peter Jensen should be posting a big bunch very soon.

{more}

David Gruneisen wrote:
> How did it go?

It went very well!

We stopped off in Raleigh on Friday to see Bruce’s buddy who has a 10,000 gallon saltwater aquarium in his house in the suburbs — AMAZING! He apparently had some calamity a couple months back involving his aquarium maintainer dumping a shitload of tap water into his tank while he was on vacation, so there was algae all over the place. Not that a layperson like I would really even notice such things, but it was clear he was professionally ashamed. His “pump room” was quite impressive. We later went to a local ale-house/sports bar thing for dinner. He spoke of dive trips to the Great Barrier Reef, Indonesia and the Phillipines.

We drove on down to Wilson, N.C. to the hotel, checked in and made some last-minute repairs.

Saturday morning we arrive bright and early at the field, which was bordered by a harvested cotton field on the left and rear, and soybeans on the right, with a treeline off in the distance if you stood facing forward. It was around 50 degrees, but the air was pretty still. I put my plane together to trim it out in this nice air, grab my frequency pin off the board, and after a couple of launches, I began getting radio interference! From about 10-15 feet she takes an inverted nose-dive into the ground. The boom has cracked near the fuselage! Oh no! I turn around to find that he who shot me down was none other than Phil Barnes — the maker of the wings that Bruce and I (and many others) fly on. Phil (as he would show later) is a terribly helpful guy, and immediately starts helping me repair with some carbon. Luckily, the cracks are just longitudinal cracks, and the repair goes smoothly.

The other competitors have begun to arrive for the 9AM pilots meeting, and shortly the contest gets underway. They make the announcement that they will be giving away 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places trophies for “sportsman” class entrants as well! Cool. There turned out to be 10 sportsman entrants, most of which hadn’t flown an HLG contest yet. There are 26 pilots, and there are going to be 12 rounds (8 Saturday, 4 on Sunday) with 3 heats of about 9 pilots a piece. Each round is a different “task”. The first round task was “Total time – 2 minute flights max”, and scoring is always how many seconds you were “in flight”. So there is a possible 600 points per round. However, with the 2 minute max flight time, a little time will be wasted in the transition from landing to re-launch (or “relight” as it is known). Bruce claims the the good people can do it in around 2 seconds, so optimally you could see something like 594 seconds being scored. Each heat is scored individually (called “man-on-man” style, so the person (or people) with the top score(s) in each heat get 1000 points, and everyone else is prorated from that score. This is helpful because the lift comes and goes quite often in a contest, so it wouldn’t be fair to the folks in later/earlier heats. So anyway, I managed to score 964 points out of 1000, meaning I did 96.4% as well as the top scorers in my heat.

The next round was 5 longest flights, 2 minutes max. You could launch as many times as you wanted, and the top 5 counted towards your total. You could fly OVER 2 minutes, but you’d only get 2 minutes worth of points. Towards the end of the round, with about 1:30 to go, and lift in the air, I managed to cartwheel my plane a little, and the boom re-broke in the same area we had fixed! Bummer!

Now it’s got a small radial crack in it, so I go and get MORE uni-directional carbon from Phil, re-wrap that area, apply it with thin CA and kicker to harden, then I put some .75oz fiberglass cloth on it and CA/kicker it, and then wrap that area with some kevlar fishing line, and more CA/kicker! By god, if it breaks now, it won’t be from lack of trying. Unfortunately, I had to stay out of round 3 (five 3-minute flights), and drew a zero for that round. Lunch was up next, and I finished up my repairs and had the tastiest of NC BBQ for lunch. I finished up lunch and tested out my repairs. I throw easy at first, and then as hard as I can. Looks GREAT! WTF! One of my wing servos has decided to start messing up! What the hell? Ah well, I had been flying my beater wing anyway. I had fixed up another wing (one of Bruce’s cast offs), and it had two good servos in it, thankfully. It was nice and clean (compared to the beater), and I was getting better hang times and launches out of it. The fourth round (Three 3-minute flights and 1 one-minute flight in any order) comes, and I roar out of the gate with 966.9 points! I was one of only 8 of the pilots to score above 900 in that round. Woo-hoo. I’m back, baby! The repair manages to stick together for the rest of the day, and I’m pretty happy.

Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, Brian Kopke has been flying and timing along with me, and his Art Hobby Hyper DL is just getting punished! First he breaks the throwing peg out of the wing, which we quickly repaired with CA and carbon fiber, and then another break in the rudder, and another, etc, etc. He manages to patch it all back together, and flies in every round, battling through adversity! For a plane he had never flown before Saturday (his first soaring contest), he’s doing just fine, and really making the effort.

Oh, Phil later tells me that if send Denny (who assembles the XP4 DLGs, like I fly) my address, he’ll send me a new wing. Denny also tells me he has some leftover pods as well, so I’m going to end up with some loot out of the whole deal. My whole rig really isn’t worth a new wing anyway, so that goes to show you how supportive these guys are.

The first day comes to an end, some Negro Modelos are passed around, and some guys throw together their Pocket Combat Wings (http://www.edgerc.com/pcw.htm) and start trying to limbo under the tents near the pits, flying no more than six feet away from me as I sit in a camp chair. Many crashes ensue, with much hilarity. Then someone whips out a Pocket Combat wing with a CD-ROM motor on it. HOLY SHIT. Pure unlimited vertical performance on this little wing. It was INSANE. BAT-SHIT INSANE. The motor winding kit is something like $20 but he can crank out 38,000 RPMs and pulls 10 amps out of an 850mah LiPo 3-cell pack. It was CRANKING. The Pocket Combat Wings were no slouches either, but they certainly didn’t have the vertical performance of that wing w/ the CD-ROM motor. Later hilarity ensued as Phil Barnes lowered the tent they were flying under, causing the pilot to lose the plane into a large (50 ft) holly tree. Phil, again feeling bad (“I break it, I fix it!”) bounds up this holly tree and shakes the wing down. He might be a plane-wrecker, but he’s a generous and nice one at that :)

We ate at the most bizarre restaurant in which I have ever eaten that night. It’s called “Griff’s Steak Barn”. It doesn’t actually look like a barn, in fact I think it may have been a bank at some point. The waiters are all dressed in black and white, and they have a wood-paneled coat-check and little butter mints on the counter and a nice marble foyer, but the rest of the restaurant reminds me of that bizarre “Friendly’s” place that used to be in Oxmoor mall. It’s all sort of this wild steamboat sort of decoration, with a room that appears to have been a vault at some point. It feels very old, but with many, many coats of paint. We were filed past many, many rooms and put into one in the rear. There was an Ale8One sign above the door with their old slogan “It Glorifies!”. It was strange. The steak was shitty and undercooked for medium-rare. It was just strange.

Sunday came, and we headed back out to the field to complete the remaining four rounds. It was cool and VERY calm, and some guys are taking advantage of the time to trim their planes in the deadest of dead air. Phil Barnes gets 2 minutes 5 seconds in dead air, and his launches are SUPER high. Bruce trims his plane and gets a little over 2 minutes after about 4 flights with successively more and more up elevator. Me, I was only managing 1:10s or 1:20s or so. Trimming is done, and the pilot meeting is held, and then the rain comes! I’ve never flown in the rain before, but safe to say this foam wings with the porous kevlar skins start taking on some water here and there, and my balsa tail surfaces are probably getting a little heavy. The first round is a real meat-grinder. It’s a “ladder” task of 1:10, 1:20, 1:30, 1:40, 1:50, and 2:00 minute flights you HAVE to make at least the first flight to move onto the second. So, if you have a 1:05 flight, SORRY! You had to make at least 70 seconds to move onto the 80 second task. I managed to eek out a 1:10 and 1:20, by the 1:30 flight, I was just too heavy, and there was so little lift. This is truly were the launch-height comes in REAL handy.

I finished out the other three rounds with respectable sportsman-class scores of a 717, 700 and a 698 (I’m consistently mediocre!)

At lunch they had a raffle for a JR-6102 radio, a Taboo DLG kit, and an XP-4 DLG kit, along with some servos and a couple of Allegro carbon tailbooms from tailbooms.com. The radio actually goes to contest director Dick Proseus, and the two kits go to two others whom I don’t remember. Both Bruce and Brian get some tailbooms, and I get two worthless raffle tickets :)

Then the top six out of the whole bunch fly in 3 fly-off rounds. Phil Barnes is in first place leading Bruce in second by about 100 points. The contest director, Dick Proseus makes it into the finals, but shortly before the fly-offs, he and Phil Barnes have a mid-air 6 feet off the ground, which knocks Dick’s elevator clean off! He quickly runs back to get another plane, and returns shortly. I time for Bruce, and to tell you the truth, I was a bit nervous! I mean, I’ve got to act like the eyes in the back of the head of the Nat’l champ here, and make sure I don’t mess up the timing. All of the fly-off tasks were limited-throw tasks, like 5 longest flights, 2 minute max, max five throws. Phil and Bruce duked it out for top honors, neither giving an inch. Adam “Red” Weston (past-maker of the Red Herring, and who now makes the Maple Leaf Encore DLG), who flew in from Seattle makes a good charge from fourth place into third with some daring flying.

In the end, Bruce only managed to make up 6 points on Phil, who ended up winning the contest. Red Weston managed to take in 3rd place by winning two of the 3 fly-off rounds, Dick Proseus made 4 places, reformed sloper Spencer Lisenby came in 5th, and Shane Spikler ended up in 6th.

So, as far as the “sportsman” class goes, Adam Propst gets first with 9526 points, Charles Frey had 8709 points and I have 8137 points for third. If only I hadn’t dropped that third round!It was a pretty high-scoring round for all involved, I think the average was around 900 points. So maybe I would have at 9037 points, who knows! In any case, I’m crazy happy about attending the contest, and am looking forward to many more in my future. I got a nice big glass mug etched with the LSF logo, and “DESS HLG 2004″ on it and a 3rd place ribbon.

We made a hasty retreat after the contest ended (about 3:30), and it took us about 9 1/2 hours to get back home. Whew. Lots of fun, lots of great people, and a big learning experience. Yee-haw!