August « 2011 « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

August, 2011

adventures / iPhone / Samford / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
10
Aug 11

Travel day

We are on the road again, but this time only for a short trip. And our flight was in the late evening, which was a change. Usually we have the up early and rush-rush-rush itinerary, but with the 8 p.m. flight I could sleep, finish my presentation, eat, pack the day of the trip, run errands and so on.

So I bought stamps, which made me consider the wisdom of alternatively putting the destination address in the return address spot. Would that really work? I mean, aside from convincing the recipient that your a cheapskate? If you put an envelope in the mail and the to address was local and the return address was across the country, do you think the postal machines would catch on? Or does that just become the letter that is finally delivered 35 years from now that you occasionally read about?

Visited the bank, where I learned that the precise point of parking in front of the ATM is the exact spatial section of land not covered by satellite radio. And by satellite radio I mean terrestrial repeaters. We blame Washington and NASA for “killing the space program” when really they only mothballed the shuttle. But I think we should blame Sirius/XM for ruining us on space. Even the space radio people are grounded. Or not. They have between 700 and 1,500 repeaters in North America, depending on whom you believe. There are maps. And the system is in place to mitigate dead spots in tunnels, foliage cover and buildings. There’s four inches in my garage where I can’t get a signal and then at the ATM. What a country.

Even still, the satellite radio can’t find me in this age of wonders. How will I ever cope? I guess I could plug in my own recording of the song I was listening to. But what medium will I choose? The trusty CD or the ones and zeros I have tucked away on my phone and iPod? And is this going to lead to the massive music project that requires I store every song I’ve ever heard on one my mobile platforms?

These aren’t problems. And yet the letdown is still disappointing. You’re telling me I can’t hear that song while I conduct my banking business? My transactional experience will be forever ruined by the nice brick facade my bank has erected that affords me shade and multiple blindspots.

So, yes, there was time on my hands before we left town. And we left. Made it to the airport, where we passed through security, but the metal detector emitted a subtle beep at it’s human companion as I walked through, not the “you have aluminum foil and chewing gum in your pocket” beep, but a different tone, encouraging him to select me for random additional screening. My hands were swiped with a thin cotton swab and that was put in a Star Trek machine that made noises and featured flickering lights. Twenty seconds later the guy was assured I had not been fertilizing my lawn earlier in the day.

There could be several paragraphs here bemoaning the TSA process, where I generally accept the people that work in front of a frustrated and bored populace are doing what they can — bad apples notwithstanding — while basically being hamstrung by what is given them from above.

I could complain about the comfort and design of the plane seat, or the poor quality of the burrito, or just my thoughts on air travel at this stage of society in general. They all sound about the same. But that would make it sound more tedious than necessary.

Instead I’ll just leave you with this.

I’m traveling with my lovely wife, going to a place where we’ll see friends and do things we enjoy. It was a lovely day, on the whole.

errands / movies / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
9
Aug 11

There is a quiz at the bottom of this post

Visited the financial adviser. She advised that I should have more money. This must become a repetitive part of her day. But, then, the degree of serious intonation could change on grave market days. Now you really need more money.

I am reminded of the line from the country song, some one told the narrator that Wall Street fell, but, he said, he was so poor that he could not discern the problem or understand, really, the implications as it directly related to his hard scrabble lifestyle.

Instead, his father went to work for Roosevelt, moved, and bought appliances. And the middle of the century was born.

Where can people move today? The moon. What a great concept this would be. Now all we need is a catchy name and acronym. Lunar Citizen Division. When they get up there they can build the solar system’s largest LCD screen, which would be perfect. On those clear nights you could watch reruns of Seinfeld, and forget about all of your problems down here. “Sure, the financial adviser said I needed to think about my medium term investments, but Jerry’s date has man hands! No soup for her!”

Our friend the financial adviser is very nice, happy, laughs a lot and complimentary and optimistic. I suppose they all have to be at this point, right? Besides, she works on the second floor of a two-story building. Not a lot of options there like you read about from the 1930s. The Roaring Twenties gave way to the Howlin’, Splattin’ Thirties. No one speaks of these things if they don’t have to. (And, of course, no one wants to see that happen today for a variety of reasons. I only mention it to say the following.) We leave such heavy lifting to Jean Claude Van Damme.

What a terrible movie. But the most recent quote on YouTube is great: “Man, 2004 is going to awesome!”

I suspect that it will, young man, I suspect that it will. Someone else, meanwhile, commented about a plot hole in a Van Damme film. And that’s why you should never read YouTube comments.

He’s still working, by the way. Four movies this year and three next year, so good for him. You’ll see none of them, and they’ll all have a fighting chance of being better than Time Cop.

Mowed the lawn. Specifically the back of the property. The front and sides were shown who is the landscaping boss around here at an earlier date. I was drenched, not from exertion so much as humidity. We will soon need new ways to define area stickiness. Gross, hardened syrup sometimes just doesn’t cover it as a descriptor.

Also cleaned one gutter, pulling some 38 pounds of leaves and sediment from the aluminium tray. This is good news: they are well mounted. If that had been shoddy craftmanship they’d have landed on the ground long ago.

This was the first real exercise of our new ladder. It is one of those folding, finger-pinching modular jobs. One ladder which can take on 35 shapes. You must make your own transformer noises, but I spend a considerable part of my youth in the 1980s, so this is not a problem.

I’m not sure how many of the positions the ladder creates will actually be useful, only that we can reach our largest ceiling, and yet the thing is light enough to be carried by one person and can be stowed without drastically changing any current storage plans. I meticulously work on storage plans, carefully arranging the stacking and order of things on the likelihood that they will be needed in any emergent scenario. Occasionally I realize I’ve mis-prioritized, or worse, mis-judged the odds of a scenario and must reshape the attic, or the garage or some other small area. It doesn’t keep me up nights, but I have had moments of clarity about these things in that fugue before you open your eyes in the morning.

So the ladder fits in the scheme of things nicely. Until it bites off an index finger. And you could see that happening.

Meanwhile, we are still waiting on the coupler for the washing machine. That’s an inconvenience. And I have some words on slides. Now I am memorizing the things I want to say around them. It is an unfortunate waste of your morning to see someone read word-for-word, from a screen. I give one lecture in one class where I do that. And that is the first one. I put up lots of words, speak slowly and repeat them. This is crucial information for that class that should stick with the students for years. And, then, I tell them never to do that in a presentation. But be sure you got the completeness of my very important message.

After that my presentations are usually one or three words each. I have not yet reached that higher level of existences where my PowerPoint presentations are nothing but bad clip art. Perchance to dream.

Today’s pop quiz: What does this butter and the United States economy have in common?

The answer is not: neither one should be left on the counter.

journalism / links / Monday / video — Comments Off
8
Aug 11

London calling, they say there’s nothing on the telly

I could not sleep last night, or most of this morning. It was a fitful thing, falling asleep while the birds were rising to their day’s task. Whistle and tweet, and there’s the lightening sky, how neat.

It reminded me of every all-night ever pulled in the history of man. You remember the thrill of the first all-nighter. It was a great feeling, defeating the night, beating the sun to its sense of purpose, only to strangle yourself on snores a few hours later. Youth.

And here you are missing out on four deleted paragraphs devoted to the evolution of the all-nighter’s impact on your body. As you know, you begin to cope less and less with it.

Anyway. The problem with being wide awake at 3 a.m. is your choice of television, which is to say every shopping channel, SportsCenter’s greatest hits from 1983 and infomercials. The most challenging thing on television? The Transformers movie. You can’t fall asleep to that because you’re too busy being annoyed at how bad the thing is.

Headline News, searching for the sweet spot of news and entertainment irrelevance, had a package where Jersey Shore regulars give their insight into the economy. Here’s your tip: two guys from Jersey Shore have an opinion on the economy. Wrestle with that awhile. And then digest their take home message: Italy is in much better shape than the US just now. I refer you to this handy 2010 Economist infographic on the PIIGS. Judge for yourself. Me, I’ve now watched two minutes of people who’s stature in the world has been determined by their appearance on a show with the word Jersey in the title.

I have a strict rule: No Jersey Anything watching. And I have in-laws, lovely, thoughtful, sweet, lightyears beyond the stereotypes, in-laws in New Jersey. But, still.

What you think you know about the London riots is probably understated. This map, if accurate, gives one pause.

View Initial London riots / UK riots in a larger map

Not that you can see it on American television, but, then, that is why we have the Internet. The initial spark was a police shooting, but this now seems to be a bit of youthful discontent, hooliganism, opportunism and the slowest governmental response to a swelling issue in quite some time. Here’s a Sky News reporter, shooting in his neighborhood tonight:

Here’s an overview piece that basically says no one knows why, and no one has done much yet to stop it. It doesn’t seem if there will be any solutions anytime soon, given all of the dynamics in play.

Meanwhile, my little presentation is coming along. It now has a central point. I have also downloaded the appropriate PowerPoint template. Tomorrow words will begin appearing on it, as if by magic.

cycling / journalism / weekend — Comments Off
7
Aug 11

Not much stuff, precious few things

Normally I add photos to the Sunday slot as filler. These are things I haven’t shared elsewhere through the week. But, this week, I have none. The feature has this week fallen to the binge-purge nature of my shutterbuggery.

And so there’s this. We’re waiting on the magical coupler to appear. We ordered it yesterday in our attempt to cheaply fix the washing machine. After consulting Google and YouTube I discovered that this is a repair I can do myself. It takes less than an hour and should cost about $20 for the coupler.

Well. I disassembled the washer to find that, yes, the coupler was broken. We ventured out into the world to find that, no, there is not a coupler to be found. We returned home and ordered one on Amazon for $.50 cents. And now I am waiting for it to arrive. In the meantime, the laundry room is flaunting its disarray, and if ever there was a room that needed structure, that’s the one.

Rode 26.9 miles on the bike this evening. It was a very sluggish experience, having lost my legs yet again, and exhausted them yesterday afternoon. I did meet one of my silly goals, however. On the next-to-last road on the route I was passed by a golf cart. And then, soon after, a pickup. The truck had to slow a bit for the golf cart, and there was a young kid in the back seat of the cart who’d waved. So I decided I would make a pace with them. And I did so, ultimately passing the pickup truck.

I also passed the cart for about two-hundredths of a second, but had to yield the way to a tricky little spot in the road. It was my one nice sprint of the day, surely never to be repeated.

I started working on a presentation today, which is to say I began reading things on which I will discuss on Thursday. The topic? The future of journalism. How can you go wrong? This is the level of punditry that is easily forgettable if you guess wrong. Should you guess right, however, someone might say “That guy in that presentation at that one hotel at the conference in — where was it? Minneapolis? Burbank? Yeah, I think that was it, Baltimore — was right. Wow!”

In reality there are plenty of ways to go wrong. But there are also lots of places to make wise, wry observations. Some of these are very obvious. Some are pure guesses grounded in wishes. I want a holodeck on which I can watch the news. Who wouldn’t? Others are already here and happening. Robot reporters? Complete video packages produced on my phone? None of these things would make sense to Edward Murrow, and yet they are among us here today.

I’ve done the math. A woman retiring from a newsroom today in her mid-60s started working around 1964 or so. Think of all that’s changed in the interim. And the young students who are just starting out today in their early 20s? What will they have the opportunity to work with in 2050? What a great topic for a presentation.

I’ll be in none of those cities, by the way, but perhaps my prognostication will be closer to the mark. More on that later, I guess.

adventures / cycling / memories / video / weekend — Comments Off
6
Aug 11

Would you believe … something broke?

This man was almost your president, and since that didn’t work out, he’s become a media consultant:

The Politico version of that story is the first hit if you Google “Kerry equal time.” The second is the inevitable (and immediate) retort, which is the use of archival footage demonstrating a person contradicting themselves at some previous point. This never gets old:

That makes it the classic voted-for-it-before-I-voted against-it, then. Just so we’re clear. There’s not much of a retort for this sort of thing, other than the obvious and honest “It suited my needs at the time.” You don’t expect that anytime soon, either.

Wait —

There’s a noise from the other room.

And that’d be the washing machine.

Which is terrific, because nothing has broken around here since June.

[To quickly recap, in the first year of our lovely home we’ve broke the thermostat (Which costed me $50, a lot of sweat, a dislocated thumb and a big jolt of electricity), the shower (should have cost $1,400, but the home warranty and parts ran us $100), the refrigerator ($50, plus ice and dry ice), the dishwasher ($50 and another electric shock for a friend), the dishwasher again ($50 more), the garage door button ($8), a contact in the air conditioner ($50) and two toilet flappers ($8).]

“Owning a house is fun!” people say. I have a suggestion about that, but I am afraid to say it with too much enthusiasm as a ceiling fan blade may fall out of the sky and give me a concussion.

So the washing machine. The water fills. It grinds and clunks, but does not spin. It drains. Repeat the cycle, give it the technical tap, no change. This just six days after we renewed the home warranty (which is a life saver) with the newly boosted $100 minimum appearance fee. Well, that’s pricey, and washers are even more expensive. To the Googles!

Whirlpool. Washer. Clunking sound.

Two forums — is there a more hit-or-miss effort in modern society than a forum? — and one fix-it page later and I’ve determined the problem may be a coupler. The forums suggest this can be a do-it-yourself exercise that will cost about $20 and take about an hour.

I found this beautiful video:

And took apart the washer and determined that, yes, the coupler had broken. This took 10 minutes.

Now I need a new coupler.

To Lowe’s, where exactly two guys were working the floor. And the second red shirt, or vest as I was corrected on Twitter, tells me they do not sell this part. But I am more than welcome to call their parts place and … he gives me a card as I resign myself to visiting Home Depot. I dislike Home Depot. Their floor staff is even less helpful and the guy who’s eye I finally caught did not know what a coupler was. But I can try the website.

There’s an actual parts place in town, but they are closed on Saturday. Ace? True Value? Nowhere to be found. Home Depot’s website? They don’t carry couplers. Ditto the Lowe’s site. To Amazon! I can buy one for $.20. Yes, friends, just 20 percent of one dollar and it will be mine, minus the shipping and handling and the postal wait. Only that guy is out of stock. To the next option then, where we bought one for $.50, horrified by the notion that this may be the last coupler left in America.

You knew Standard and Poor’s would have an impact, but yeesh.

So we have to wait on that to show up so we can finish the laundry. When all else fails, hit the bike.

So we rode. I did 38.4 miles this evening, covering most of the loop around the city, by the golf course and the airport, through one of the big shopping districts and back out into the country, which you can be in in four minutes in any direction. That last part was entirely racing the sun home.

And the sun won, but only barely.

Steak for dinner, which is good. That supplemented the four pieces of toast I’d eaten today. (It was French Toast, so there were eggs involved.)

It was then that I had the idea: I could take apart the other washing machine and cannibalize that coupler. There’s a reason I’ve kept that thing around … So that will be tomorrow.