Fall is officially here, and Kelly couldn’t be happier. She’s bona-fide nutty for fall, and specifically Halloween. We’ve done all the requisite fall things — we went to Huber’s, we enjoyed Jackson and Medina’s wedding, Kelly made a gingerbread house, carved pumpkins, and we visited Louisville most-decorated-for-Halloween street, Hillcrest Avenue.

Kelly also ran the Chicago Marathon, and beat last year’s time with a 4:28:00!

We also picked up another el-cheapo bike ($15) from Goodwill, a snappy old cruiser – a Columbia Sports III. It’s a 3-speed cruiser from the late 70′s, red with fenders and curved handlebars. Kelly and I spent Saturday fetching new tires and tubes for it, and getting it into shape for riding.

The clocks rolled back last night, and so that small window of time when it’s cold, but we’re still in daylight until 7:30 has closed. Fall might hang around until November 22nd, but for all intents it might as well be winter. We had a good fall, though!

You know I really don’t have enough soaring-related content on this blog. If it were in relation to how often I think about it or how much it consumes my free time, we might look into creating a more exciting (to soaring nerds) side-blog. But that is not why we are gathered here to-day, oh no!

I went to the first-ever World Soaring Masters held in Muncie, IN at the end of September. Being as excited as I might be at a world-class R/C soaring event, I decided that I’d keep my soaring chums on the RC Soaring Exchange (RCSE), a soaring mailing list, up-to-date for the course of the 4-day contest. I posted day-by-day accounts of the action, and thanks to the free Wifi coverage over the whole flying site, I was even able to give blow-by-blow, round-by-round accounts of the finals! I went into complete journo-mode with a pad of paper and pencil in teeth and the whole thing. It was a blast, and I received a lot of praise from my soaring brethren over my coverage.

While the emails of encouragement were nice, I was really “awe-shucked” when my coverage got picked up by the RC Soaring Digest (not affiliated with the RCSE), which is a classy monthly magazine for RC Soaring Enthusiasts. They’ve got 20 years of publishing experience behind them, so it was pretty neat to have my work accepted by something that I read religiously cover-to-cover.

Should you wish to read my report, which will be ungodly nerdy to the vast majority of you, you can – the RCSD is only published on the Internet anymore, and you can download the full-color November 2006 issue of the RCSD and read it at your leisure.

Listening to a song just now from the great compilation I am the Resurrection – A Tribute to John Fahey, I was thinking that I’d really, really like to hear more music like what I heard in that song. But where do I start? How do I describe that music? How would I search teh intarwebs to find such things? If I put “acoustic jangly music” into Google, I doubt I’d get what I’m looking for. Further, I wondered what it’d be like to search for images with only basic cues, like “cat fuzzy” and be presented with images specifically of fuzzy cats and nothing more.

What I’m looking for is a more abstract search – which I think is something that humans do every day in their minds. The equivalent of asking the video-store clerk “You know that movie with that guy with that shiny thing on his head,” or like what Kelly refers to as “fall music” – music that somehow evokes the feelings of the season that is “fall”. Obviously this isn’t something that you can easily divine from a filename, and even the search terms like “fall music” mean different things to different people, so it’s a tough challenge.

As you might imagine, Google’s already pushing things in this direction. In a small step to make their image search better (it’s already fairly awesome), they introduced the Google Image Labeler a while back. It puts you head-to-head with someone else to help “tag” the images with words of what you see in the photo. If you see a cat in the image, you can put in the word “cat”. Your description doesn’t get accepted unless the anonymous person on the other end puts in the same word, thereby ensuring some level of quality.

The problem is that humans are intelligent, but not quite intelligent enough to transfer equivalent intelligence into machines. This is a whole branch of science, as you might imagine, and we are certainly pushing things forward every day. It’s only a matter of plumbing the depths of our own minds and learning just how we learn.

The mind, it boggles.

It started off so innocently, a conversation between Yukon Charnelius and I:

So i thought for all these years that [so-and-so] was a man. Had no idea otherwise! But dang yeah there are some people I never seen around this place (work).

But then it (d)evovled into what has been termed by others as “an elaborate daymare”:

…Oh, he’s from the Poughkeepsie office. I hear once he fully dressed a buck deer in an airplane bathroom…

…The least of all questions is just how he got the deer on the plane! He choked it to death in the wild after a three year stint of burrowing into it’s community and lifestyle. A deer blind? Hell no – this was a LIFE BLIND. The deer assumed he was another buck…

…He never lost focus, though. He waited for a breech in deer etiquette, which is so assumed by all deer that it reaches the level of a virtual certainly – it is after all their nature, so perhaps they do not even know it as etiquette…

…But he knew and he waited for the chance to choke that deer to death that would be legal and right in his eyes, even if the deer weren’t conscious of such legalities…

…The circumstances of the faux pas have been lost to time, but as the light faded from that buck’s eyes, the larger world opened up to him. He realized then and there what our co-worker from Poughkeepsie knew. And then, croaked from deer’s gullet was one final word: “mother”. Much respect was learned that day…

The ol’ gallery has been a little silent in the past few months, but I have been busy:

2006.08.18 – My 28th Birthday

2006.08.25 – Kentucky State Fair

2006.09.04 – Mayor Jerry’s Hike & Bike

2006.10.14 – Huber’s and Holly’s Birthday

The title says it all. While I normally keep work-life out of the blog-life, I’ll make an exception now, on account of the many, many lurkers that frequent this site, many of whom are either former co-workers of mine, or are of the nerdly persuasion.

Power Creative needs web developers, and in a good way. We’ve got plenty of work and we need people (like me) who can walk, talk, chew gum and code in a number of languages. Communication, problem-solving and learning skills might even be more important, and I’ll tell you why: Power Creative is an advertising agency, and the “Interactive” (it’s ad agency speak) department where you’d work is not like the dinosaur-pen or cube-farm to which you might be familiar.

It’s not for everyone, it’s true. You’ll be doing some serious warrior-poet sorta stuff here – a little analysis, a little design, and a good bit of development. You won’t just be “the developer”, but rather someone who works as part of a larger team inside the agency. You want project ownership? You’ll have it. Power’s “Interactive” department is small, but growing and more often than not you’ll be the point-wo(man) on the job at hand.

What is for everyone, however, is the stability of the job, the varied experience and the culture of the place. Power (which has been around since the late 1960′s) is a ridiculously diversified compared to the strictly Interactive agencies. We’ve got photo studios, copywriters, creative designers, set builders, ad buyers, media planners, etc, etc. We service any number of high-profile clients, like GE and Lennox to hometown favorites like Hillerich & Bradsby and Louisville Stoneware. We develop in many languages on many environments (PHP, ASP/VBscript, .NET, Windows, *nix, Mac), and you’ll be sure to expand your skill set. Finally, the culture of the place is excellent. I can’t imagine anywhere else I’d rather work.

Are you interested? Are you up for the challenge? Can you hit a softball while batting switch-handed? Let me know. Drop me a line here: ben{aye-tee}thelocust{deeohtee}org. Full position description after the jump.

{more}

INTERACTIVE ANALYST/DEVELOPER

Power Creative is seeking a versatile and personable interactive analyst/developer with strong technical knowledge and good client-relation skills. Candidate must be completely comfortable working in both Linux and Windows environments, must have extensive experience with XHTML, CSS, XML and Web Standards, must be familiar with installation, configuration and usage of Apache, IIS, MySQL, PostgreSQL and MS SQL Server, and must be able to switch easily between several scripting languages, especially PHP, VBScript and JavaScript (.NET/C#, Java, Ruby, Python, and Perl a plus).
Candidate must also be able to communicate well with clients.

JOB REQUIREMENTS

• Analysis, functional design specification, design, code development, testing, documentation, implementation and maintenance of Web-based applications
• Design and implementation of SQL databases
• Work with clients to analyze, understand and document user requirements for Web-based applications, and suggest solutions to problems and needs
• Perform cost/benefit analysis to determine the feasibility of a requested feature and suggest alternative solutions
• Work with client’s IT staff to implement necessary server configuration for databases and Web applications
• Analyze and resolve coding and scripting errors
• Research new technologies, techniques, trends and best practices in Web-based application development and apply this expertise to client applications
• Supervise development progress of projects

QUALIFICATIONS

• BS in Computer Science (or equivalent experience) preferred
• Solid record of good client interaction
• Proven track record of business process analysis and software design experience
• Proven track record of Web-based software design and development, with a focus on seeing projects through from beginning to end.

OTHER SKILLS

• Excellent troubleshooting skills a must
• Willingness, ability and desire to learn new technologies and techniques a must
• Ability to work as a part of an organic, networked organization
• Ability to creatively apply skills and technologies to achieve client needs
• Gathering of system requirements, mapping of processes and time and effort estimation
• Documentation of preliminary and functional specifications, model analysis, database designs, etc.
• Understanding of print media, page layout, and artistic abilities a plus
• Must be able to hit a softball switch-handed.

Power Creative

11701 Commonwealth Dr

Louisville, KY 40299

www.powercreative.com

email: opportunities{AT}powercreative{DOT}com

Jackson, Medina, Kelly and I went to see Wilco last night at the gloriously re-vamped Iroquois Amphitheatre here in Louisville. I had never seen Wilco live, though I really fell in love with them on our honeymoon back in 2002, shortly after their now-classic Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was released. I was extremely excited to see them, as was Kelly. Together, we are big fans.

The Iroquois Amphitheatre is located in the South End of Louisville. In a classic display of just how little Louisville hipsters have reason to visit the South End, Jackson and Medina met Kelly and I at one of the few reasons to venture south – the incredible edible Vietnam Kitchen – and it was packed to the rafters with hipsters! You’d be hard-pressed for a ‘Ville indie dude to give you the name of another restaurant in the ZIP code, so I guess it was only natural for the Wilco crowd to flashmob the joint.

We finished up there and headed down to the venue, which is just inside of Iroquois Park, the “Yellowstone of Louisville”. The amphitheatre was recently renovated, and I had never been inside of it before or after the renovation. It is just absolutely magnificent, and judging by the oohs-and-ahhs heard from the crowd as they entered, I’d assume that the local rock crowd will be clamoring for more shows to be held here. Call in your Vietnam Kitchen reservations now, scenesters!

The Early Day Miners opened for Wilco with no less than 5 guitarists and two drum kits and proceeded to blast out some AYWKUBTTOD / Explosions in the Sky-esque instrumental jams that came to an absolutely crushing end. Must be something about that Texas/Louisiana area that makes people want to elevate their rock to orchestral heights!

Wilco was excellent, and Jeff Tweedy was a jubilant and engaging frontman. At one point during “Hummingbird” he had panties thrown at him while he was hamming it up at the lip of the stage. Later, he would claim to wish that he was David Lee Roth, which was immediately followed by a qualification of “David Lee Roth from, like, 30 years ago”. Wilco’s music and lineup over the years has evolved in any number of different ways, but at the very core of it has always been Tweedy with his lyrical and rhythmic ventures, which have never strayed too far into the bizarre. Undoubtedly catchy hooks in his songs linger on my mind for days at a time, like a pop song, but with a lyrical depth that somehow strikes deeper.

The crowd was intense, with Wilco coming back for 2 encores. I overheard a photographer (whom I assume to be travelling with the band) remark that “these last two crowds were really great” (the other being a show at Michigan State) and I can’t argue with that. Wilco is one of few bands with a decade’s worth of work that is equally adored by fans – and judging by the wide, wide age range in the audience, they are at once retaining old fans and making new ones as they continue.

After the show wrapped, we walked back to the cars and I saw a sign that said “HONG KONG FAST FOOD”. Thanks to the curvature of the window on Jackson’s car, I managed to read that as “HONK HONK FAST POODLE” instead. That, Kelly decided, would be the name of her production company. Mine? Well, it would clearly be “Ferret with a Hat“.