Dec 03 2009

Day Two of RVIA

We must be getting the hang of it after five years of visiting RVIA, because we had a rather less complicated second day, with less rushing around. Just by hanging out at the Airstream booth in the morning we were able to find several people we wanted to speak to. I felt like a spider in a web, just waiting for people to blunder into my snare. This knocked quite a lot of business off our “to-do” list and gave us the afternoon to browse some of the more startling RV’s on the show floor.

With the downturn in the industry, the overall show is quite a bit smaller (in square footage) than previously. Predictably, the giant Class A’s in the $500k and up range are fewer, but they are still popular offerings. When the heavy business is done, I like to take a walk through some of the really over-the-top rigs just for entertainment value. Winnebago was trying hard with scaled down A’s, but Tiffen and Fleetwood (among others) still are supplying the people who really need a Class A motorhome with granite countertops, five large TVs, two bathrooms, marble floors, power window shades, and four huge slideouts. I can’t say I wouldn’t like to live in some of them, but it would feel weird to me to drive around a luxury condominium that costs more than any house I’ve ever owned.

The big joy of the day was meeting Sean and Kristy Michael of The Long Long Honeymoon. They were camped outside the convention center and had dropped in for a couple of days to see what RVIA was all about. (If you are thinking about going, keep in mind that it is industry-only, so you must be qualified, and camping on the asphalt is $50 per night.) We were happy to find that the Michaels are just as friendly and fun to talk to as their many online videos demonstrate. I would not be surprised at all to find a video collaboration in our mutual futures. We spent the afternoon talking about ideas and making plans to get together again. They are also now planning to come to Alumapalooza next June, to give a talk and show some of their camping videos.

Airstream made some announcements at the show to the gaggle of financial analysts who always show up at these things. The big news from Bob Wheeler is that production of trailers doubled recently, to 24 trailers per week. That’s still below historic highs but a huge jump and an indicator of the revival of the industry. The whole of Thor Inc. (Airstream’s parent company) is feeling rather bullish about the coming year, and so am I. There are still a lot of companies trying to kill themselves by cutting their way to “survival”, which is like slicing off your arms and legs so you need less food to eat. But more of the companies we saw are making investments and strategic plays for their future, and they came to us with strong requests for new media solutions to help them along. It will be a VERY interesting 2010 for the Airstream Life worldwide media conglomerate…

I know I’ve griped about convention center food and road food many times, so it is my distinct pleasure to tell you about a really good place to eat near the Kentucky Expo Center. Just a couple of miles away is the Windy City Pizzeria, where you can get a Chicago-style pizza, several varieties of microbrews, and a cozy family atmosphere. We found it by chance, in the pouring cold Louisville rain last night. Nobody recommended it, which made finding it kind of fun. We had just hoped to find something local and not too expensive, and this place exceeded our expectations by adding friendly service and great pizza.

I can see it becoming an annual stop for us on RVIA trips in the future. If we can just find one or two more good spots like this, we’ll have the whole trip covered. Then we can stop going to (a) ridiculously expensive business-class restaurants; (b) el-cheap-o and boring chain restaurants.

RVIA runs another day but it is time for us to go. Brett is flying home and I’ve got a 6 hour drive to Grand Rapids to do today, under the threat of lake-effect snow near Lake Michigan. Phase III of my trip begins today, so the blogging will continue.

Nov 01 2009

My week in tweets

From time to time in the course of a friendly conversation I’ll be asked why I don’t have a Facebook page, or why I don’t “tweet” on Twitter. A lot of my friends do, and I certainly am happy that they are having a good time doing it. Generally I give the quick and easy explanation that I have this blog, the Airstream Life web store, a photo/video site, and considerable email correspondence to keep me glued to the computer. I don’t really want any more. Besides, if there’s something you wanted to know about me that isn’t already revealed somewhere in the past five years of blogging (Vintage Thunder, Tour of America, Man In The Maze) then you are probably getting a little too close and personal.

Now that I think of it, that does seem to be exactly what people want. I mean, how many Twitter feeds are out there where people are talking about what they are eating right at that very moment? Twitter celebrates the mundane moments of our lives and encourages narcissism for even the most boring people. If you can convince friends and family to “follow me on Twitter!” you’ve created an audience for any sort of blather you might generate. You can tweet away in 160-character bursts, secure in the knowledge that all of those subscribers are forced to receive the latest news about your manicure or even your bowel movements.

Well, that’s true at least until people wise up. It’s as easy to tune out the noise as it is to sign up in the first place. For that reason, and because of a little business intuition, I will predict that the popular tweet-fest will subside rather rapidly soon, and the media will move on shortly, as they did with MySpace (remember them?) and dozens of others.

The gist of Twitter is that you can bore people, er, I mean “communicate with people,” in succinct 160-character notes. Because you can Twitter right from your mobile phone, you can do this all day long as you go through the motions of any day in the developed world. But I figure we can do one better than Twitter. With blog technology, I can give you all the tweets you’ve been dying for, all at once. In other words, why sit by your computer awaiting the next tidbit of my fascinating life, when you can sign in right now and get the week’s worth of news in one easy session?

So without delaying you even one more second (because we’re operating on “Internet time” and even ten seconds is too long to expect anyone to wait), here’s my week in tweets:

Back from Copperstate Fly-In. 3 tries to get Airstream in carport. Embarrassing.

Found more mouse droppings in kitchen. Can you say “hantavirus?” LOL

Looking for yellow tape at Lowe’s to mark carport. Maybe now E can back me in straight.

Eleanor back from grocery store. $200, and she used coupons! But got apple cider so I’m happy.

@bnsf Yes, she bought mouse traps too.

Can’t sleep waiting for SNAP sound all night. Why don’t they just leave voluntarily?

Why did the diesel pump at Fry’s shut off when my tank was just 5/8s full?

Remembered cider gives me gas. ROTFL. Actually, not exactly laughing.

Cold snap in Tucson: http://www.c4womenblog.com/2008/12/cold-snap-in-tucson.html

8 presenters signed up so far for next year’s trailer event. Woo-hoo!

Emma’s bat costume is nearly ready. I’m squirreling away Butterfingers & Snickers for myself.

Planning solo trip to Louisville starting Nov 28. Anyone need a trailer hauled from the southwest?

Cleaning Weber grill with heavy tools. Last night’s salmon stuck to it. Not LOL.

@lrko No sauce, just Deep South Tangerine Pepper dry rub. Sprayed the grill but it stuck anyway.

Winter 2009 issue of Airstream Life printed today. Should be in mail in a week or so. YMMV

Car show in Tucson: Cops and Rodders. Shot 100+ pics. http://www.copsandrodderstucson.org/

Eleanor’s new MacBook arrived. Logic board and hard drive dead on old iBook G4. (4sale)

About 40 kids for Halloween. Nice warm night. Then I watched The Big Lebowski.

And there you have it. Fascinating, eh? An utter failure to inform in a meaningful way, and a nearly-complete failure to entertain, in easily-digested bursts of 160 characters or less.

There’s a lot of credence given to the theory that “today’s generation” doesn’t read, doesn’t have an attention span, respects only what they read online, etc. People point to the failure of daily newspapers all over the country as evidence that someday, everything will be online. Maybe it will be. But that day will be a long time coming. There’s still value in old media.

Perhaps I’m biased as a publisher of a print magazine, but I don’t think so. After all, I’ve introduced an online version of Airstream Life. I believe in the value of online as a new medium. My suspicion starts when people assume that semi-literate yakking about trivia will replace deliberate thought. No, Twitter won’t replace the beauty of good composition, exchange of intellect, a well-researched report, or meaningful debate. (Daily newspapers could have remained relevant in an online-oriented world, if they had less arrogance about their exalted position in society, and more willingness to re-invent themselves to suit the modern competitive environment.)

For many people, tweeting is a way to have their own little reality show. Like “reality TV,” the only compelling stories are faked, exaggerated, staged, or incited. Some people are happy to fight with their spouses (or someone else’s spouse, a la Wife Swap) on TV for money. Most of us would prefer to keep that sort of thing private. It’s the same with Twitter: those who have something to promote or gain will contribute, and many of them will lie or tell only the truth that suits them; the rest will be boring. Very few people have the ability to say anything interesting and true in 160 characters.

But now everyone, regardless of talent or motivation, can have their own communications channel to the world. It’s like blogging, except that the signal-to-noise ratio is much worse. There’s not much chance of meaningful value being conveyed with a tweet.

So now you know the real reason I don’t use Twitter. I could break down my day into 160-character blips, but the nuance and richness of life, the exploration of ideas, the ability to invoke emotion and sway opinion, and much more would be lost. As a writer, I can’t find satisfaction in writing only shallow phrases, while foregoing sentences and paragraphs. As an editor, it’s hard for me to respect the content that comes through the Twitter stream. The pen is still mightier than the sword, but only for those who know how to use it.

PS: If you comment on this blog entry, please restrict your thoughts to 160 characters or less!

Jul 18 2009

What we’ll do for summer “vacation”

Most people go off for summer vacation, but for me it’s the busiest time of the year. In the winter there’s not a lot of Airstream activity going on, except on the west coast and in Florida, and we usually have large periods of time during which neither business or social obligation intrudes. That’s when we stretch out and have time to ourselves, but in the summer it’s usually go-go-go with rallies and travel.

Not only that, but we have persisted in the habit of getting some of the routine annual jobs done here in Vermont. Our cars are registered here, since we aren’t actually legal residents of any other state yet, and so that means state inspections must be obtained every summer. Our dentist is here, a guy that is so likable and reasonable that we can’t seem to fathom the thought of finding someone in Arizona to replace him. Emma takes two weeks of swim classes here every summer. We still have a PO Box here, which still fills with mail despite two years of attempts to get people to stop using it. My table saw and some parts of our Caravel are here, so there are projects to be completed as well.

This all makes summer in Vermont a little less idyllic than it would seem. “We spend our summers in Vermont” suggests a scene from On Golden Pond (filmed in New Hampshire, but most people don’t know the difference) with a rustic camp and boathouse on a still water lake. We would rise at 6 a.m. to watch the fog burn off the shallow water and listen to the early morning birds, while cupping a hot chocolate or coffee and wearing camp clothes. Then we’d retrieve the water melon from its icy cold spot in the fresh water spring, pack a picnic basket, and tromp off into the woods to spot deer, or perhaps putter around the lake in our 1930s wood boat.

Reality is quite different. We are near a lake, yes, but parked in a 2005 Airstream in the gravel driveway. I do often rise early, but yesterday it was to get some work done before I went to the dentist to get an old crown replaced. My picnic for the day was a protein shake in the car on the way to do errands, carefully slurped to avoid drooling while the novocaine wore off. Our antique motor vehicle is not a romantic 1930s boat but rather the 1983 Honda Accord that we keep up here as our cheap runabout. My brother does have a Glastron GT150 painted in gold glitter, which qualifies as an antique boat, but somehow I can’t picture it puttering around anywhere without a vision of Roger Moore driving it (in Live and Let Die). I suppose “summer in Vermont” has changed in the 21st century.

The other reason I am not relaxing much is because we have the Vintage Trailer Jam coming up in just a few weeks. We were finally able to post the preliminary schedule online today, and it looks good, but many details remain to be nailed down. If you are considering coming, better book your spot soon. We’re almost out of electric spaces. In about a week we’ll need to estimate the final headcount for the caterer and registration will probably close by Aug 7 (after that you can come as a walk-in but you’ll get a non-electric site).

Perhaps later in August things will quiet down, but by then it will be time to start thinking about our departure. I am planning to head out in September. It remains to be seen if the rest of my crew is onboard with that plan. After a summer full of rallies, classes, appointments, errands, and county fairs, I hope they will be sated and ready for a change of scene. Maybe we’ll go somewhere where we have absolutely nothing to do. That sounds pretty good to me.

Apr 13 2009

Photo lessons from the Tucson Tattoo Expo

Our friends Alex and Charon flew in from their frosty home up in the northeast, to spend a week in Tucson enjoying our fine spring weather, and not incidentally attending the Tucson Tattoo Expo. Our friends are best known as sword swallowers, fire breathers, and practitioners of other carnival sideshow specialties, but it just so happens that in their off-hours they pursue relatively typical activities as well. Alex embalms dead people and Charon tattoos live ones. (What? Not normal enough for you?)

Being fellow Airstreamers, they were happy to spend the week in our Airstream in the carport. I put only one condition on their use of the Airstream: I had to go to the Tattoo Expo. You just can’t pass up a photographic opportunity like that, and besides, I’m always interested in alternative cultures. Charon spent three days basically working non-stop on tattoos while Alex and I roamed around the booths of 30 or so artists who were also there.

I discovered that tattooing is part of a larger culture of “body modification,” which includes piercing, hair dyeing, and breast augmention. People seem to regard the body as a canvas to be tweaked and altered to suit fashion or personal taste, which really isn’t as odd as it sounds. After all, don’t you know plenty of people who dye their hair, wear makeup, or have had some sort of cosmetic surgery? This culture just takes it a step further. Sometimes two steps further. There certainly was a lot of cleavage about.

Naturally, this was photographically a rich subject area (more photos on my Flickr album), but there were some complications. I had to carefully ask permission before taking photos of anyone or any art. Also, the lighting in the hotel ballroom was a mixture of the worst that I encounter at indoor trade shows and conventions: fluorescent lights alternating in rows with tungsten lights. That means it was impossible to come up with a reasonable white balance, because the white balance would change with every step across the floor.

One solution in such situations is to overpower the ambient lighting with flash, so I mounted up the trusty Nikon SB-600 and bounced it off the ceiling. I was lucky that the ceiling was white and relatively low (about 12 feet). Still, it was a struggle to get usable photos with my Tamron 10-24mm superwide lens. It needs to be stopped down to at least f/6.3 to get sharp images and there were situations where that just wasn’t possible. After a few hours I gave up with it and switched to the Nikon 18-200mm lens, which takes sharp photos at lower F-stops. That helped during the fast action of the Saturday evening pinup contest. (Now I bet you want to see my Flickr album!)

Alex is a walking encyclopedia of obsolete photographic methods. His collection at home includes large-format 4×5 and 8×10 cameras. He was once a professional photographer, and even taught people how to make their own emulsion for glass-plate cameras. Digital, he knows little of, so we were happily exchanging knowledge all day. At one point he opened up a box of camera equipment and I was delighted to see an old Nikkor (Nikon) 50mm f/1.4 manual-focus lens in there.

Now, if you’ve gotten into SLRs only since the digital age, you may not have seen such a lens. Like a lot of people, I learned the basics on a film camera, when everyone carried an f/2.0 or faster “normal” lens, but these days such lenses are ignored by most people (you young whippersnappers!) in favor of big zooms. There’s good reason for that: today’s zooms can give you a lot of utility for not a lot of cost. Inexpensive zooms are rather poor at gathering light, but digital SLRs can easily be cranked up to high ISOs (meaning fast “film”) to compensate.

But hey, one day you’ll be in an dimly-lit room trying to capture people moving around, and you’ll find that it’s a tough slog to get images without blur or adverse flash. You’ll also find that the flash alerts everyone to your presence, and so it is harder to get good candids. That’s the situation I found myself in at the Tattoo Expo.

So I popped the old Nikon lens on and tried it out. Wow, what a difference! I could shoot a full three F-stops faster, which meant no-flash images. But the varying lighting, and dark shadows on faces, forced me back to bounce flash and the zoom Nikon for the balance of the day. Still, I was intrigued, and so I’ve borrowed the lens from Alex for a few months to see what I can do with it.

I have to admit that I had some trepidation at going back to this old-tech lens. It has no internal microchip, and pre-dates digital cameras by at least a decade, so all of the advanced features of the camera are defeated. No auto-focus, no light metering, no distance information, no automatic aperture, and no readout on the camera. All the camera can do is sort of electronically shrug and tell me “There’s a lens there and I don’t know what to do with it.” The rest is up to me. I wondered if I’d still remember how to manually focus and set aperture/shutter speed quickly enough to get photos before they got away.

I needn’t have worried. It’s like putting on a well-worn old pair of shoes. In fact, it’s darned fun. The lens takes beautiful pictures, and once again I can control depth of field indoors with precision. I’m having a blast running around the house and snapping away at everything, just marveling at the visual effects I can create with de-focused backgrounds and shallow fields. Having this much fun with an ancient lens worth perhaps $25 is like a kid playing with the box his toy came in. It just reminds me of how sometimes simpler is better.

The Tattoo Expo is over now, and we have two days in which to explore Tucson with Alex and Charon before they wing it back to the northeast. Our primary mission, however, is already accomplished: they will be coming back to spend the winter here. That’s the second couple we’ve converted from northeasterners to southwesterners (at least for the cold season). My plan for world domination is to convince as many good friends as possible to come down here in the winter, so we have lots of people to play with. It’s working … who will be our next victims?

Feb 10 2009

A healthy debate

Each quarter I receive half a dozen or more proposals from writers for feature articles they’d like to write for Airstream Life magazine. Usually, these proposals sit in my email Inbox for several weeks, while I do other things. As I’m conducting the day-to-day business of the magazine, there’s a little part of my brain that is considering the possible use of the article proposals: Do they fit in the magazine? How could they be better, or more complete? Can it be part of a theme?

After a few weeks, clarity usually arrives and I write back to the author to tell them whether the article is something we can use. Many apply; few are chosen. Mostly this is because I get repeats of the same article suggestions perennially (“my first Airstream experience,” “my Airstream of Consciousness,” “safety tips,” etc.) Those are easy to weed out, as are the occasional screwball suggestions. Those that make the cut will get a detailed and lengthy email from me, outlining specifically what I want, what the article needs to include, style & research tips, a word count guideline, and comments on photography.

But there are a few that really stump me, and I’ve got one such proposal on my desk right now. The author is someone known to me, a proven writer, and that makes it harder for me to reject his proposal without careful consideration. He wants to write about medical issues. Normally I’d toss such a suggestion out with hardly a second thought — Airstream Life is not about such things. But in this case the author makes an impassioned case for the need to address the topic of medical care and how an Airstream can be an essential tool when you find yourself supporting a loved one (or yourself) who is spending a lot of time in the hospital.

This recently happened to some friends of mine, an Airstream couple who suddenly discovered that one of them needed some fairly serious surgery. This meant two weeks of diagnostic procedures, consults, and pre-operative examinations — and then the surgery itself, followed by another four days in the hospital. Where’s a spouse to stay when you need to do all of this at a specialty care center far from home? The Airstream, parked nearby, provides an ideal solution.

My good friend Bert Gildart also wrote in his blog a couple of years ago about how he parked his Airstream right in the heart of Washington DC at a care facility, to stay near his father when he was dying. Other friends have used their Airstreams to visit the Mayo Clinic. It’s done all the time. What a comfort it must be to have “home” and family right there outside the doors of the monolithic concrete building where you’re being poked and prodded.

Health is a big topic in my mind right now. We are all generally fine, but nonetheless we have relocated to Tucson and that means we have all new doctors. Being new patients, we’ve been subjected to a raft of examinations and tests, and between the three of us, we’ve managed to flunk a few. My cholesterol is “slightly” elevated. There’s a slight lump here, an odd mole there, a bit of anemia, etc. Nobody’s perfect, and of course every little thing needs to be checked out.

Well, don’t worry about us. We’re fine. I mention this because it has opened my eyes to yet another element in our nation’s healthcare insurance crisis. Like a lot of small businesses, we’ve been forced by the high cost of health insurance to switch to a high-deductible health plan combined with a Health Spending Account. In short, we now have a deductible of $3,850 per year, and we have to pay 100% of all our health care costs until we reach that deductible. The Health Spending Account, financed by company contributions and tax-sheltered, pays the deductible. This is cheaper overall than the type of coverage we used to have, which paid “first dollar” coverage on nearly every medical expense but cost a lot more each month in premiums. If you don’t have this sort of plan, pay attention, because you probably will soon.

Having to pay for every doctor visit and prescription means you start to notice what healthcare costs. That’s a good thing, if you don’t have a heart attack when you see the bill. Several of our office visits were quoted as costing between $190 and $285. We braced ourselves, then were pleasantly surprised to find that after the insurance company received the bills, they “repriced” the fees to much lower levels. The $190 visit became just $70 after the insurance company waved its magic wand. The $285 visit dropped to $120. On average, we paid only about 1/3 of what the original bills stated.

This happens because the insurance companies all negotiate preferential rates with the doctors and hospitals. Anyone covered by their insurance gets the cheaper rates. Thus, we are discovering that the real value of having health insurance in the short term is not the elimination of financial risk, but the enormous discounts that come with it. If we’d gone “bare” we’d be facing huge medical bills — and we’re healthy. No wonder millions of Americans are forced into bankruptcy by their medical expenses. If you don’t have insurance, you’re going to pay two or three times more than you really should for medical services.

So here I am, a relatively healthy guy with a relatively healthy family. We try to take care of ourselves in our diet and our activities. And yet, I am thinking a lot about healthcare these days. It’s a sign of the times, I think, more than it is a sign that I’m in my mid-forties. And I wonder: Is this indeed something Airstream Life needs to discuss?

This is why I hesitate to reject the article proposal. It still sits in my Inbox, awaiting an answer. The little part of my brain that considers proposals is still spinning, thinking, working on the problem of how to make this kernel of an idea into something that we can publish in the context of Airstream Life. It feels like a social obligation — to somehow address this critical issue.

You probably never realized that this kind of thought goes into a quarterly travel magazine. But this is what good editors really do. It’s not about punctuation and grammar — it’s about feeling what the audience needs and what they are ready for. Editors are like chefs, mixing up ideas to get just the right result. Sure, it’s nice to keep your sleeves clean, but in the end you get judged on the flavors of the finished product.

In this case, I’m leaning toward shelving the proposal until we can find an opportunity to work it in logically, perhaps year or two down the road when another topic comes up that would be a good companion. But the internal debate isn’t over yet. I’ll keep considering a while longer.