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This is the blog of a one Ben Wilson, a Louisville, Kentucky native who enjoys baseball, beer, music, bikes, things that fly and good food. By day he pushes pixels and makes the Internet happen for a local advertising agency. His wife, Kelly is an Ironman, and his baby Amelia is the cutest thing ever. |
To Conquer the Air -
Skyward – Autobiography of Bird
Tesla – Man out of Time
Wings of Madness
Executioner’s Current
Into The Wild
Into Thin Air
Hell’s Angels
Moneyball
Three Nights in August
Ball Four
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Living Dolls
It’s just model planes, it’s just model planes… That refrain is constantly bouncing around my head a lot of the time. Isn’t there something bigger and better I should be doing? I’m no doctor, so that’s out. I’m not equipped to be a philanthropist, so that’s a scratch. Failing medicine and philanthropy, I’ve got a drive to help people it would seem. It’s not something I necessarily decided upon, but it’s certainly there. What is truly strange is that I can really, really stress myself out after I’ve committed to something – but it’s like a hardening process. I end up a better person for it in the end, but there are times when that refrain of “it’s just insert inconsequential thing here” comes in.
That, in a nutshell is what the run-up to the Soaring NATS (for which I covered the Soaring events in the NATSNews publication (July 22-30)) was like. Why put myself under such pressure to write about the events and compete at the same time!? You might not consider it a tough job, but the NATS is serious business. 130 pilots from around the country and I did it for-pay for the largest aeromodelling organization in the world. Not to mention that the Soaring crowd (like an hobby) is filled to the brim with opinionated (you could say cranky) dudes who are as passionate about the multi-faceted hobby as I am. I’ve got to take all that into account.
After I got the first article out, it relieved a fair bit of the pressure I was under. I had most of it pre-written and by that time I was already encamped in Muncie, IN (where the AMA HQ is and where the NATS are held), which is absolutely gorgeous and completely stuns me with silence at night. I got up every morning at 6:30 and went to sleep every night at midnight. I never have more energy, I never eat less and I never more focused than I am at the NATS. It’s like being fired out of a cannon through a week of soaring, and it never fails to inspire me to delve deeper into this hobby.
Despite my focus being elsewhere, I actually managed to do pretty well in the competition at the NATS. I got 5th out of 19 in the handlaunch soaring event, and I placed 6th out of 58(!) in the Rudder/Elevator/Spoiler contest with my EZ Bubble Dancer. RES is one of my favorite events (aside from handlaunch). I got middle-of-the-pack in the Unlimited contest as well, thanks largely in part to a pop-off launch (in which you don’t stay on the towline for very long, leaving you with maybe 75 feet of altitude, as compared to 600-800′, and you don’t get a re-launch!) in the fourth round.
Those successes were good for me, but I count as my greatest success the NATSNews coverage, for which I received universal acclaim. Never was heard a discouraging word from any of the some two dozen guys that came up to me over the week. That’s awesome.
I tried to take a bit of a different tack on the coverage for the NATS, so it was encouraging to hear that so many guys enjoyed my coverage. Soaring has a very committed following, but thanks in large part to the crazy advances in technology, it has become a bit elitist in it’s design. Competition has always been in soaring’s blood, even from the very first years – but now when a competition-level sailplane and gear can set you back $2000-$3000, that raises the barriers to entry considerably for most guys. The NATS is larger than just competition, though, so I thought it crucially important to focus on the “new guys” and let those staying at home for the NATS know that it’s not all about the competition. Doug Pike, a Canadian soaring enthusiast, likened it to “summer camp for sailplanes,” which I think hits the nail right on the head. You’ll never learn more, have more fun or meet more soaring pilots than the NATS. NEVER. If my coverage gets just one more “new guy” to the NATS or interested in soaring, then I’ve done my part.
I finished up my newest sailplane last week and got a chance to fly it on Sunday. It’s an Onyx JW from SoaringUSA, which I purchased with the aid of the 2006 “Rookie of the Year” award from the Ohio Valley Soaring Series.
It’s my first “molded” ship coming, made in the Ukraine and imported here by SoaringUSA. It’s really a thing of beauty – beautiful, immaculate white wing with red tips and really strong to boot. The wing and fuselage are full of carbon fiber and kevlar for strength… It’s so strong and so quiet when it flies! I’m really excited about it.
My next contest is the 2007 AMA/LSF Nationals (aka the NATS) in beautiful Muncie, IN. I’ll be flying handlaunch, RES (rudder/elevator/spoiler) and unlimited class (which the Onyx JW falls into). I’ll also be towing for F3J (link is YouTube), and writing the soaring coverage for the NATSNews. I’m sure I’ll have my hands full…
…It’s me you see with the funk in my walk.
Kelly and I ran the Northeast YMCA Thanksgiving Day Fun Run on Thursday. It’s a 10K (6.2 miles), but they have you guess at the distance at the end, so it’s never exactly 6.2 miles. It was the longest I’ve ever run in my entire life, and I was not being chased by a bear.
You gotta keep movin’ and you can’t say nothing
I’m a keep bouncin’ and bumpin’ and stuffin’
So, what then is the reason for the lyrics to the Beastie Boys’ The Maestro sprinkled about here? That was the song that came over the iPod strapped to my arm exactly halfway through the race. Never let the power of music to compel be a mystery to you. I’ve got this thing, you see, wherein I defeat myself the first half of the run, wondering just what the hell I am doing out there in the cold, nose all running and snotty. I beat myself down and consider stopping many times.
But then the yelling starts. In my brain. I am yelling at myself that I am weak and it is evident I will never finish. I think this is some sort of reverse-psychology play being acted out (or perhaps just directed or produced) by my hypothalamus as a survival instinct. In any case, this rarely works to much satisfaction. So then the only thing can save me is a good song with a beat to which I can pound pavement. Enter The Maestro.
Yeeeeaaaaaaaah you mother fuckers I am all that.
I see you looking at me saying “How can he be so skinny but live so phat?”
You know why?
…cause I’m The Maestro.
For those of you who know the song, that first line in all it’s filthy glory is the call-out in an album filled with awesome call-outs. It’s a rallying cry heard the world round. The Beastie Boys are back and are not to be meddled with. In short: damn. I then proceed to sprint (or at least what constitutes a sprint) the next mile or so, buoyed with that sort of hell yeah spirit so embodied in the song.
The problem, however, is that The Maestro is only three minute long. At this point in the race, I’m at something like 28 minutes in, with another 28 to go. Luckily, the iPod knows this all too well and kicks in another excellent brainpan-shattering song, the all-to-undervalued and under-played Black Sabbath tune Supernaut. All alone on the course, between the masses that seem to form during a race, it’s all too fitting:
Got no religion, dont need no friends
Got all I want and I dont need to pretend
Dont try to reach me, cause I’d tear up your mind
I’ve seen the future and Ive left it behind
Couple that with a certifiably fierce hook and the acoustic bad-assery that occurs near the end of the song and you’ve got metal brilliance. When my ashes are fired into space, this song will be played. (Followed shortly by The Wizard).
In the end, I managed to keep my time under an hour (56 minutes and change) and I felt good. Kelly was proud of me, and I was proud of me as well. All thanks to The Maestro.
Election day (November 7th) is five days away, and the House race for the 3rd District (Louisville) of Kentucky is still in contention, though it is leaning more to the left than it was even 2 weeks ago.
On Sunday, the Louisville Courier-Journal reversed their endorsement from two years ago (when they went for Northup) and endorsed John Yarmuth.
Today, SurveyUSA has released the results of a poll showing Yarmuth ahead of Northup by 8 points. Compared to the neck-and-neck poll results from 2 weeks ago, you’ve got to assume that Yarmuth is pulling ahead.
Why? Hard to say. Northup is still leading in the media-saturation column. Kelly and I have received at least one printed piece of mail from or supporting Northup every day for the last two weeks (sometimes more!) and her commercials are running at every blink. Could it be that her sour tone and base-thumping ways have turned away voters? Maybe. Yarmuth has been getting support late in the race in the way of money for ads, too.
I won’t be happy until there is at least a 10 point lead over Northup. Knowing how the Democrat base stays away from the polls and how reliable the right is in the same regard, we need a good head of steam to win it on Tuesday.
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.
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.
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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.
Power Creative
11701 Commonwealth Dr
Louisville, KY 40299
www.powercreative.com
email: opportunities{AT}powercreative{DOT}com
