Click to get started w Skyaak DIY deuce ($2.00)

I stuck some text over the extraordinary image above to act kinda as a watermark.

Pretty excited around here to let you know that our R&D is paying off again in SPADES!

Just received the first freshly-minted batch of Micro-Wings made out of ‘Lexan’.

Lexan is a virtually indestructible, super light-weight, exceptional tensile (spring)-strenth material.

This material upgrade ushers in a whole new level of performance, endurance and great looks for the Skyaak starter models.

Even better, we also have a mid-size version (18″ in length) that promises to MAXIMIZE the benefits of the Skyaak ring-wing-javelin hybrid design.

In the next couple of days (the week-end is coming up!) I am going to build the shafts and MAKE a few WORKING PROTOTYPES. But the proof will be in the pudding and the pudding will be live video of these little units zipping through the air between partners.

We will work it out pdq, I assure you!

Stay tuned friends, this will be fun to see how the Lexan units crank it up hard!

To which up until lately I would respond, “Picking away at it.”

However, in the past little while I have been taking deep long hauls of the heady stuff.

For a while there I really thought my head would explode.

Let me back up a bit.

A month or so ago my friend Fred sent me  “Tribes” by Seth Godin.

I devoured the slim but delicious morsel in three evenings.

The over-arcing theme in “Tribes” is that boring is a no-no.

If you can’t create a least a flutter of excitement, then stay home.

Ask yourself, “Am I ready for the big girl panties?”

C’mon, can you create original content or not?

Or do you just pass stuff on, shuffle stuff around?

Hot off the press:

This morning I got an alert that a person had bought a Skyaak DIY deuce.

(Several actually but let’s focus on this one in particular.)

That’s the download-able Skyaak ring wing glider if you are just joining us.

Turns out the guy is doing research on ring wing drag.

He googled that term and arrived at this blog.

From there he clicked to skyaak.com and grabbed a DIY deuce to check it out.

He then told me that he is an aero/mechanical engineer and was curious to see the deuce.

So my friends, at this very moment there is an engineer tossing around a ring wing glider in his lab, observing the curious aerodynamic properties of the design.

Makes for an interesting day here at Skyaak Enterprises.

Click here to watch the video

About the video:

Here’s a little bit of night flight with my new Skyaak Model 3 with the light kit. Flight is great, but more than that, this thing looks great at night and was surprisingly easy to catch (especially for people that had never thrown a Skyaak before). Distributed by Tubemogul.

Living in rural Western Canada has its pros and cons. Mostly pros.

I used to think that I was pretty far removed from the action of the great big world living here, but since the world is steadily shrinking thanks to communication and information-sharing advances this is really no longer an issue.

A case in point would be the above video that shows the Skyaak Model 3 Ultra-Glow flying around over Berkeley Campus! Now if that’s not getting out there into the slipstream, I don’t know what is.

The great thing about living here is that I get to pretty much do what I want most days.

As a professional artist/entrepreneur I am enjoying a life ‘off the grid’, meaning I get to spend time devoted to the things I feel passionate about. Sure, I have to do the daily grind to earn the money I need to pursue my interests, just like everybody else. But I also get to spend substantial chunks of time dedicated to ‘following my muse’.

Which is pretty wrapped up in the Skyaak project.

When pressed to come up with a number one reason for spending all this time and energy on the Skyaak project I say this: I get a great big buzz out of creating an object that I can toss into the air and watch as it takes on a life of its own in flight!

There’s something in my lizard brain that gets a wicked rush from the idea that I am in the process of developing a flight methodology, a design configuration that actually works. There is a visceral thrill to the notion that I have nurtured this concept over the years from its crude infancy to the rather advanced form that you see flying around over Berkeley Campus above!

More than this, I’m looking forward to all of the future advancements yet to come. I have lots of ideas in the wings for more sophisticated models that will keep me busy for years to come.

With all the amazing advances in materials, replication technology and IT, I feel like I have access to a steadily expanding tool-box that will never exhaust itself of creative potential.

What more can I ask for?

Copyright Tony Karp 2008

I want to share one of Clive’s pictures from the show here, as it rings a bell for us. Strikes a familiar note.

Incoming...

Clive Gerada shows in “Unrealized” a series of selectively masked portraits. His credits hint that he knows all of the characters he has portrayed. His notes say “The bare thought of “Unemployment” has given me the idea of creating a series of 13 “Unfinished” portraits, which resemble the human being when s/he feels unrealized or incompleted, or unable to fulfill his wishes to fulfill himself as a human being.”

My take on this is that Gerada refuses to give in to a spirit of malaise. Rather, he examines the feelings of in-completion by a reckoning based on “I am what I do” or identification of one’s worth being inextricably tied to one’s occupation, job description, etc.

By taking a closer look at the ‘condition’, the artist affirms his own ‘employment’, is the working artist plying his trade in a very public way.

Photo by Natalia

The concept of a figure struggling to free itself from the confines of the medium (the ‘condition’) has been around for a long time. Michaelangelo expressed it vividly in his ‘Slave” sculptures where he shows us the figure struggling to free itself from the inert sculptor’s stone.

The images here struck me personally as a metaphor for starting a new era in one’s life, with blind spots and information gaps that can seem daunting at first. You have to gather your wits about you and tackle the challenges as they come up.

As with any creative, passionate act, all the effort and energy that goes into the construction of a new web-site can be seen as pushing of the envelope, stretching in all directions to finally arrive at a certain place where you feel fully employed, fully engaged and on fire with enthusiasm!

He talks in his usual frank and unflinching style about the ‘correct’ way to enter into the murky waters of e-mail marketing.

Scary stuff!

I have subscribed to quite a few e-mail newsletters over the year for example.

And un-subscribed from all but three of them.

I have signed up to RSS feeds from a few of my favorite web-based sites and actually find the ones that have survived the delete button to be a good healthy dose of very select information. Useful, entertaining or challenging is the key. Boring begets a quick painless death.

Bob Poole asked recently on his blog what readers were planning on doing differently this year than in 2008 to address current economic conditions. Now that’s a great question if you ask me.

My idea for 2009 is to LEAP out of my comfort zone (mmm, it’s nice and cozy in here…) out into the great unknown. After one of my websites languished for over three years (an eternity in cyberspace) I have torn it down and am now rebuilding it. Getting there. Almost done. Or not.

You know what they say, “If you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much room!”

Now I know my css from my ftp and my rss from a hole in the ground!

There’s still a ways to go yet…and confidentially… we are having so much fun experimenting with all our new toys that we will probably just keep on mashing it up, dialing it in, tweaking and the like.

It could take a little bit to massage it into shape.

So stay posted, it will be rapidly morphing in the coming days.

Ever have that feeling of intense disorientation when you are learning a new skill set or, say, on your first day at a new job? You know what I’m talking about, when everything is strangely fuzzy yet at the same time intensely magnified. You notice every little detail (at least on the surface…) while your head is in a bit of a fog?

I’ve been in this situation quite a few times in my life, as I am not shy about leaping out of my comfort zone. It’s kind of a rush in a weird way.

It would have been so easy for me just to hang on to one of the many (really good) jobs that I’ve had over the years, but some default mechanism in my hyper-creative frontal lobes always insisted on pressing the eject button.

One thing I’ve learned is to embrace this feeling of slight vertigo as the joy ride that it is.

Because it means that once again, you have taken that step sideways.

New things are on the horizon.

So what if you feel like you are plowing your nose through the dirt, you will soon make some sense of it all and then you will feel the air under you as your freshly acquired skill set gathers enough inertia to get you airborne.

I am writing about this today because I am right at that critical point (of vulnerability…) where everything is in a state of flux. I have just authorized the total strip-down of my darling ‘home-page’ at the website formerly known as www.skyaak.com.

You can still pop in, but wear a hard-hat.

So what’s up with the title of this post?!

I’m getting to that.

About a year ago I met this guy…we found each other on an inventor’s forum.

Started chatting, next thing we knew we had crafted an agreement to work together on a tangible idea.

And have been steadily gathering steam ever since, with ever-increasing momentum.

This guy is a Webby-Wizard…an SEO Sorcerer!

And yes, I am his apprentice.

Nothing like some good wholesome terrifying fun.