Kelly shot me a text message today that said it all:

i has a blog

She’s been kicking around the idea of doing an Ironman Triathlon for a while now – and she was a volunteer for the Louisville Ironman that was held last weekend. She’s been really struggling with whether she should do it or not, especially after working the medical tent and seeing what people look like after some 16 hours of physical exertion. It’s pretty intense! But, oddly at the same time the Ironman is very, very seductive.

I wandered down to the finish line on Sunday and it was extremely exciting and worse still – inspiring! Families cheering on their athletes, people breaking down into tears upon finishing, people collapsing into the arms of the legion of volunteers. I’ve been to marathons before and have completed a half-marathon, but I’ve never, ever seen anything on this level of commitment before. And now, it would seem, Kelly is leaning towards doing it… and that scares me a little.

Kelly and I have done “sprint” triathlons- .5 mile swim, 14 mile bike, 3 mile run – and those are OK. We both finish in under 2 hours. But an Ironman is something completely different. 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike and a full marathon – 26 miles! The time cutoff is about 17 hours. That’s longer than most people are awake on any given day.

Kelly’s other option is to do a half-Ironman distance, which I personally think is a better choice, given her relatively short experience with triathlons – but you know you can’t keep Kelly down when it comes to being healthy. It’s a special kind of crazy, I think.

Whatever her decision, you can track Kelly’s progress here: Wanna Tri Some?

And as loath as I am to say it – chalk one up for the cable company. I received in the mail a printed piece from my broadband provider saying that they were upping the download speeds 250%, now allowing me to download a 650 megabyte CD image in a little over 10 minutes. (They also quadrupled the outgoing speed, which is nice for when I pull my music from my house to work).

Kudos, Insight. Now can we work on the ala-carte cable television lineup? Please?

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.

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

Man, have I been busy as of late! Let me roll it down to you blog style!

First up, since about January, I’ve been helping out my buddy Denny over at Polecat Aeroplane Works to build the prototype of his new sailplane, the EZ Bubble Dancer. You may remember that I built something similar last winter, called the Allegro-Lite. The EZ Bubble Dancer is the “big brother” to what I built, with a 117″ wingspan. Denny saw my Allegro-Lite Building Gallery and offered to let me build the first EZ Bubble Dancer. I was elated! It took me a little longer than I had expected, but it was the first kit to be built, so I guess that is expected. I also volunteered to write the instruction manual, which ended up as a 59-page tome with full color photos. A lot of work, but well worth it! Oh, and I also help maintain the Polecat Aero website and have been helping out with Denny’s ginormous handlaunch contest as well.

Even deeper into hobby news, I’ve been helping to organize and plan the 2006 MidSouth Soaring Championships which will be held here in Louisville in late June/early July. I wrote the flyer for the contest, and am pretty close to finalizing a t-shirt design.

At work we’ve been pretty busy! The Interactive Department where I work has seen some changes over the past few months – and for the good! Last fall we added Matt Rasnake, a friend of mine and a fellow ex-Corvus Digital Systems employee. In the interim between the fall of Corvus and Power, he worked for GE on web stuff. He’s done right well at Power, and we’ve certainly had enough to keep him busy. This spring, we added Jackson Cooper, another friend of mine and chum from my University of Louisville College of Business / Computer Information System days who actually interviewed at Corvus a few times. He’s had better luck here at Power and like Matt, is doing very well and staying busy.

Me? Well, apparently last summer I was promoted, and didn’t know it! Now, I’m heading up a team of folks in the Interactive Department and moving into more of a Analyst role while still “keeping my hands dirty” in development of websites and such. I also got to pick my title, which I finally decided was “Senior Interactive Analyst / Developer”. We had a bit of a “Programmer” vs. “Developer” debate up here, and I’ve never been a big fan of title “Programmer”. That insinuates that all I do is write line after line of code all day long, which I’ll tell you is so remote from the truth that it boggles the mind. (Insert your witty puns here, friends).

On the fun and fitness end of things, I ran two miles in a row last night and did not collapse. It actually felt pretty good! Now, I probably won’t be trail-running or doing miniMarathons with Kelly any time soon, but it was nice to know that I could run from thugs or bears for a while and at least give them a decent go for it.

Finally, on the games front, I’ve been playing in a poker tournament hosted by colleague and interactive marketing consultant Jay Lane for the past 6 months, one night a month. I’ve been fair-to-middling placing as high as 4th out of the 21 people that play each month. Chuck Pearsall, Hunter Dixon and Chris Gerstle have faired much better (in that order) with Chris being in first place at the moment! The final tourney is this weekend. While I don’t think I have a chance at the money, I hope to ruin someone’s day!

Softball season is also upon us! Power Softball is in a rebuilding year after a fun year of 1-and-13 ball last year. The same Jay Lane of poker fame is heading up the team this year after Coach Johnny Kitson has stepped aside to go and get married. Yes, I know it’s softball, but dammit I do love anything close to baseball. Also, I’m not 28 yet, so I can’t join up with the Louisville Men’s Senior Baseball League 28 and Over.

I wore my “Microsoft Freedom to Innovate” t-shirt today. I consider it the most ironic $10 I’ve ever spent, and I guess most folks get the joke. I did get my picture taken with someone with a “NO SOFTWARE PATENTS” shirt a lunch, so I consider that a small victory. His shirt was black, and mine was white. Nested ironies, I think. While I’m on the subject of attire, I’ll say that it’s been shorts and t-shirts for most everyone here, including the presenters. The “Schroedinger’s Cat is Dead” t-shirt I spied on a certain lass made me chuckle. The real “thinking outside the nerd attire box” award has got to go to Marcus Baker. I sat in on two of his sessions on two separate days, “Is Agile Development Right for You?” and “Breaking the OO Sound Barrier”. Both days he was wearing the same pair of pants. Big deal, right? I often wear the same pair of khakis a few days in a row at work. But Marcus doesn’t prefer the inconspicuousness of khaki – he prefers leather. Leather pants. Marcus, you have won the con. Congrats.

All kidding aside, I will say that Marcus’ sessions have been the most enlightening of all that I have attended. He is a natural and fluid speaker who doesn’t bombard the audience with a lot of code or pedantic knowledge. Granted, his topics haven’t been “Migrating from version X to version Y” or “The New Features of Some Code Gadget”, but instead have focused on analysis and design topics that lead to programming strategies. He does a very good job of it and and while their topics may differ, I think most of the folks I sat in with here at php|tek could take a cue from Marcus.

A certain level of knowledge about PHP is assumed if you are coming to this conference, yes, but I think that level should be fairly low. Many of the speakers here are actual developers *for* PHP. This obviously grants them wonderful insight on the depths of the language, but I would rather see more general and real-world applications of PHP. This is something that Rasmus Lerdorf did very well in his keynote. Oh – and before I forget the one session I sat in with Christian Wenz was also very good.

Dan and I took the free Zend Certification Exam this afternoon. I don’t know how well I did, and honestly I’m not that concerned having taken it. Many of the questions dealt with detailed specifics of the language and it’s constructs, which is something that I normally let the webserver worry about. I have bigger things to consider and remember when I use PHP. A certification is only a nice thing to put on your wall, I think. Programming’s name belies it’s complexity – a complexity that supercedes the language itself.

“PHP Pool Party” later tonight with an open bar! More later?

Technorati: phptek

For those of you who aren’t reading Achewood already or have previously attempted to grok that golden action and failed due to it’s sheer subtle gynormity, let me tell you that NOW NOW NOW is a perfectly opportune time to get yourself hooked. There are things happening on an epic scale with a story arc that is so brilliant and exciting that I am considering running to California to spy through Chris Onstad’s window to see just what will happen next.

Start here (January 11, 2006) with a seemingly innocuous tale about a squirrel and his new product, and read through the present day. And hang on, ’cause as far as black-and-white cats go, this story is epic. Fighting, family and a fake sacks on cellphones. Chris Onstad brings it to you for free.

Occassional readers of comics, like say Garfield, may not quite “get” Achewood. It’s a whole world created a panel at a time – and the punchlines are long and sometimes elusive. The characters come and go and even have their own blogs, and seem to use language like a man solving a Rubik’s cube in a wind-tunnel. I love it.

Man – been a busy time as of late with ol’ Ben! Let’s get down to business…

First off, I’ve been embroiled in a huge project here at work to launch 6 (count them one two three four five six) websites for a company called Heatcraft in less than a month. It couldn’t have been possible without the help of Yukon Charnelius and the venerable m@.

Secondly, yes, it’s true: I have been playing World of Warcraft, and yes, it is everything that they say it is. Deep, engulfing, wide, full of content and as addictive as crack. Me? I’m a 15th-level Dwarven Paladin name of Cramfist on server Akama.

Nextly, or perhaps thirdly, ol’ Cholly and I have regularly been playing chess. Currently, the record stands at 5-4-1 with me holding a tenuous lead. Ideas are underway to create a Web 2.0 site for chess. We’ll see if it takes off…

Lastly, on the soaring front… You may remember that last year I built a sailplane over the winter. This year is much the same, but improved! I’m building a bigger version of the one I did last year with help from a new friendship with Denny @ Polecat Aeroplane Works (I did his site for him, too).

So yesterday morning, in a fit of very rare TV-watching, made even rarer by the fact that I was watching MTV, I noticed something odd. Good ol’ Music Television had a profile of the very un-MTV Sufjan Stevens. I have also just announced to Good Ol’ Cholly Dillon that I cannot stop listening to Illinois, Sufjan’s latest creation.

More on this at The Confabulators.

I have never really considered myself an expert on much of anything save for “What does Ben think about when he lays down at night?”, but it’s becoming apparent to me that people at here at work consider me an expert in THE INTERNET. Obviously they hired me because I had a working knowledge thereof, but I figured there were people here that knew better than I. I apparently was wrong.

By saying “THE INTERNET”, I use the broadest of terms here because while the Internet is as wide as say, space – you don’t find many people with a Doctorate of Space studies. Perhaps you did when the idea of Space was new, perhaps even 10 years after we realized that we could poke holes in the sky. Now there are many, many specializations in Space Science, like astronomy, astropaleontology, astrophysics, temporal physics, etc. Again drawing from the Space/Internet parallel, there are many different aspects of the ‘web to be knowledgeable in. There are the programmers who create the application that you are using to view this web-page. There are people who do nothing but consider how best to bombard you with ads. There are people who consider how best to shield you from those ads. There are people who agonize over font-sizes, “site-flow”, metrics, returnability, content freshness and all sorts of media dynamics. There are grunts like me who help to create and publish the content created by the great hive-mind that is the marketing world. Somehow, I’ve managed through no real effort to be considered an expert in some of these areas. Lets consider that for a moment.

How did this come to be? Is it just that I had been trapped in the insular world of the I.T. world and didn’t bear to think about the other 99% of people who use the Internet like a toaster-oven? I guess that might be the case. I worked a co-op position for an in-house development staff, so there wasn’t a whole lot of “outside contact”, and then moved onto a job in an web-only agency which expanded and imploded in the Great Boom and Bust. For a period of about 4 years there, I was surrounded by either in-house IT complacency or being held aloft by the dot-com who-needs-the-rest-of-the-pie bubble. It was a little like the whole evolution of IT, condensed. Going from slaving away in a cave to being fired out of a cannon, exploding, then drifting lazily back to Earth. Now that I’m in a world and a time where this Internet technology is finally considered as just another tool in the handy-bag, I’m learning more about the rest of it all and at the same time spreading what knowledge I’ve gained on my albeit short journey. It’s nice to feel wanted.

It’s not to say that there aren’t people here at work who don’t get the Internet (I’m sure there are a few, but they don’t necessarily need to get it), but there are folks who just aren’t confident in their knowledge thereof. Like the toaster-oven analogy before, they know it makes toast, but don’t care and don’t need to know just how hot it gets or why it gets hot in the first place. They come to me and say “so can I cook a pizza in that?” and I respond (as per the usual) with “yes and no”. I am assuming that the next part is where I’ve gotten myself into that “trusted expert” role. I usually then attempt to explain to them why you can or cannot do that, or sometimes even why you shouldn’t do that, and then suggest something completely different, like a bagel. It’s all about understanding a communication.

Too many times, I’ve seen or heard thing that other IT-related folks do that simply make me cringe. I ask “Why do you want to do that?” but with a positively inquisitive tone. I’ve heard on a number of occassions a dismissive slant to that question – think of that character from Saturday Night Live – “Nick Burns – Your Company’s Computer Guy”, and you’ve got it about right. Dang. That just gives IT folks a bad name! The whole reclusive, mind-boggling, superiority-grappling nerd thing is so played it makes me sick. I know it’s hard for people in the IT departments of the world to realize that technology is just a tool and we are but mechanics. I’m talking humility here.

Maybe that is what I’ve been angling for my whole life. The whole mechanic/artist thing. Mixing technology with the intangible to create something more than both. I still don’t think I’m very good at it — that is to say I know folks who are certainly better than I am. But having people look to me for recommendations and information is both nice and bewildering.