adventures « Kenny Smith | Omnes hic sumus discere.

adventures

Unsteadily steady for a new week

It was a weekend with a little bit of lot of things. It wasn’t busy. It wasn’t overly productive. It was peaceful and some fun was had. The weather was nice. Then it was wet. And today was nice again. I caught up on some stuff. I’m dangerously close to getting ahead on some things. Also, there was a lot of cat cuddling.

I lived the bachelor life for part of the weekend. When the cats figure that out they get especially clingy. Also, we are coming up to cuddle season, when the temperatures dip just enough that they want the extra body heat. Last night a truce was declared in the sibling war and I went to sleep with one on either side of me.

Friday I went to campus for a tour with one of the rock star biology professors. She introduced us to the oldest tree on campus, a ginko, and an oak that’s believed to be older than the nation. We walked through the oak grove.

She hated on lawns. We talked about insects and other native bugs. We talked about how lawns are a traps for bugs and insects.

We saw a space that was designed to be an outdoor classroom. Almost no one uses it, apparently, but it also seemed like none of the faculty in our tour group even knew it existed. It’s only three-tenths of a mile from most of my classrooms. Maybe I should figure out a way to use the space.

We visited what they call the arboretum, which might be the case one day, but they’re overselling it now.

We walked through a meadow that they are returning to purely native plants. We walked through it. Reader, it sounded different. The critters chirped and critted. The birds tweeted. The bees buzzed. It somehow muted the nearby road noise.

It’s a narrow strip of land, in the scheme of things, but the things that live there can help other nearby plots of land. I’d be curious about how that works, but it surely varies species-to-species. Unfortunately, there wasn’t someone with that sort of expertise on the walk. The experts that were there were great, though. And, for a change, I tried not to turn this experience into a class-generating walk.

OK, my idea for the day was a Get To Know Your Campus course. Couple of days of walking. Couple of days of history. Couple of days of different resources and activities that are available to students … stuff that helps people build up investment in the campus community. Maybe it’d be a course for transfer students.

After that tour my lovely bride and I got our flu shots. I also got a tetanus shot because I fell, and also, when was my last tetanus shot? While the woman was giving me my shots I was very brave.

The person that stuck me, twice, offered me a sticker. I declined. We were just going home and there would be no one to propagandize. We did take her up on a lollipop, though. Because we are mature, responsible, pillars of our community, we drove home amusing ourselves by demonstrating weird, noisy ways to enjoy Dum-Dums.

I went for a ride Saturday, my first one since the Wednesday crash. The first day you’re sore. The second day you’re more sore. After that you’re just down lingering pain, or something real and lasting. You have to find out, so I went out.

I reproduced the first ride we took here when we moved three years ago. It was a good time of day for those particular roads and I hadn’t been that way in some time. For some reason I can’t explain it isn’t my favorite route, so I just don’t give it its due. But there are plenty of lovely views.

After you get over the water, get into the county seat, turn back toward home and then go over another bit of water, you get back into the farmland. Maybe that stretch is why I don’t like the route. There are some small hills which are just enough, and perfectly spaced, to break up any momentum I have.

It’s a 20-mile route, which is an easy ride, but I was a bit sore, still. The first six miles my neck and shoulders hurt. But, then, my shoulder felt exactly this way for about two years after my big crash in 2012. I had to stop at a red light, though, and managed to stretch things out just after something in my neck popped. After that, the next 12 miles felt great. I wasn’t fast, but it all felt smooth.

Physically speaking, anyway.

In the last five miles, or so, though, something weird started happening.

This whole route is a lot of straight lines. You turn left at a stop sign. You turn left at another stop sign. You turn left twice more with the flow of traffic. Then there’s the final left and right to get back home. Sprinkled in there are two red lights. The first one was where I had my little stretch. The second red light is four miles from home, and somewhere just before that I lost a lot of confidence in the stability of my machine. And in those last couple of turns after the light I realized I have lost all of my confidence in my limited cornering skills.

This is no way to ride.

Sunday it rained all day. All day. And all night. It rained so much that I even forgot about it. The only time it wasn’t raining was when I took the garbage can down to the end of the drive. I was able to get a lot of class prep done, though. Just as importantly, I plotted out the rest of the week. Just knowing when I’m going to get this or that done feels good. It was such a great use of time that I’m thinking that, by Thursday, I might be working on next week’s class prep.

Let’s see what happens next.

What happened today, though, was that I finished some grading. I wrote my online class. I wrote much of my next message to that class. I made the final changes to Tuesday’s slide deck. I finished Thursday’s slide deck. I ignored Wednesday’s slide deck. That’s for tomorrow.

Today was a beautiful day and after I’d done the day’s work I enjoyed another little bike ride. This time, I took what was one of our other regular routes. It was a long seven-mile stretch into a headwind. My next two turns gave me more speed because of a crosswind and a tailwind. But those were two turns that felt still felt shaky.

The problem with this route is that there are two ghost bikes on one road. They sit right before my next turn, and as I was trying to line up that turn I could hear a car approaching, I could see the little dot that represented it on my Garmin, I could watch it drawing close, I could see the ghost bikes. I could see the turn. I could see the poorly patched ruts in the new road right where I wanted to turn. And, anyway, I need to find my confidence again.

I made the turn safely, of course. Here we are, after all. And the payoff was riding under this lovely canopy of trees. This is a great road.

And the payoff was the sun over this field. It felt then, and looks now, like I’m pedaling through a knockoff Van Gogh painting. Just needs windmills and some of his other trademarks.

I took on some other roads I enjoy, a perfect one-mile ribbon, a long uphill stretch that I crushed, and then another up-and-down bit where the bottom is some oddly shaped pond-creek-canal thing I can’t understand that reeks of sulfur. Here I faced a conundrum. If I don’t get out of that little valley I might asphyxiate. Should I pedal faster to get up the hill and away from the smell? If I pedal faster I’ll have to breathe in more of this stuff. Also, what’s causing that? And why is it worse now than it usually is?

On the next road I ran across a cornhawk.

If you see it from the side, this strip of corn husks stretches almost all the way to the treeline. I wonder if it’ll still be standing when I go back by there later this week.

Anyway, on balance, my balance on the bike felt a little bit better. Still felt dreadful about each real turn, though. And some of the bumps, too! I didn’t even have a real hard crash — I still have a small bandage on my elbow, but my knee is fine, and most of the soreness has worked its way out as expected and I’m fine — but it has succeeded in getting in my head.

Oh, hey, that’s almost 1,500 words. And there’s new stuff to grade and other things to do. Let me see to those now.

adventures / friends / Philadelphia / photo / Rowan / Thursday / video — No Comments
8
Oct 26

Sore as anticipated

I am sore. My shoulders are feeling the jolt from yesterday’s little bike accident. My neck is starting to feel it as well. Otherwise, I am just fine. I’ve been re-bandaged, and my road rash looks nice and healthy and clean. Still icky, though. I’ll be more sore tomorrow.

I’ll be back riding Saturday, probably.

Class today was one of those ideas that came to me out of the blue and worked pretty well, only because the students were willing to play along. First, I told them about my bike accident. They’re either interested in road stories or they’re playing me to avoid our class topic. Anyway, we talked through it for a minute. Someone apologized to me like he’d down something, which was kind. Then I said, “But no one here has asked the most important question: How is your bike?”

I think it’s fine, we’ll find out this weekend.

Anyway, I had a few questions for them about the different kinds of data.

Explicit data — data you know and realize you are creating
Implicit data — data you don’t often realize you are creating
Inferred data — guesses about you made by powerful algorithmic processes
Aggregated data — “anonymized” data that are grouped together to analyze or train

They were most interested in answering which of those is most harmful to users. This great thing happened, where someone said one thing and another said another and finally a fifth person said all of them. During one of those answers I playfully stood up, buttoned my coat, and said “My work here is done,” and stepped over to the door.

I’d asked them to look at some social media platforms and then compare notes. I had asked them to think about a series of particular questions. All of this, I said, will be useful for some of our later work. This is the part that was a recent inspiration for the day. Happily, they went along with it, and gave it some careful thought, which was lovely.

Then we watched a bit of Monday night’s Daily Show episode. This group of students is very much interested in a variety of artificial intelligence implications. When we watched this the other night I asked my lvoely bride if I should show this in class. Absolutely, she said.

The interview segment was awkward, clearly uncomfortable for everyone, and also, sobering. It is certainly worth watching.

In class, we’ll watch some other things next week.

We went over the river this evening to have dinner with friends.

City Hall and the famous William Penn statue by Alexander Milne Calder. It is 37 feet tall, ways 25-plus tons, and has been up there for 132 years. One day I’ll get up close to it.

We parked and walked to the place where we were meeting everyone. Along the way we ran across this random light fixture. Given the time of day we passed by it looked better in person than in photo or video form. But someone looks great in any form …

I saw this sign. I’m going to have to share that with friends.

We went to an amazing little Italian restaurant. Met the guy who’s name is on the sign. He’s an older gentleman, soft-spoken, happy to see and greet people at every table in his cramped little space. He told us about his favorite meals on the menu. I was listening carefully because we’ll definitely be back.

The dinner party was people from our university, but some folks from other places, too. There’s a conference of some sort in town bringing everyone together. A few folks wanted to chew the fat after they chewed their food, so we found a place to place some video games and throw some darts.

I threw these, but I did not win the little tournament.

I did win some pinball, though. Pinball is an art of angles, trajectory, timing, and the unknown. You have to appreciate it at that level to be as good as me. If you appreciate it at other levels you’ll be better than me. That will not be difficult.

Dodged two deer on the way home, but we’ve made it home safe, of course. Us and our Italian leftovers. I wonder if I can talk my way into eating both of them …

adventures / Auburn / cycling / memories / photo / Rowan / sport / video / Wednesday — No Comments
7
Oct 26

I crashed my bike again

I’m fine.

Just a perfect, beautiful, lovely, chamber of commerce day. The sort of day you want all the time. The sort of day that you know is really a marker. The sort of day that will stick around, for a while, if you’re lucky. The sort of day you know isn’t going to last.

But I got ahead of things, and so I found a way to sneak outside and enjoy it for a whole hour.

I invited my lovely bride out for a bike ride, so that I could chase her for 45 minutes and then slowly drift away from her, which has been the way it has worked this year.

After the turnaround, and before I got dropped, I managed a few photographs. We totally posed this.

And here’s me saying goodbye to her, because, for most of the rest of the way, she would be in the distance, and then gone, and I could just sit there and pedal into the wind with my thoughts and playing the rest of my week’s work out in my head. I wonder if I would go faster if I did that less. I wonder if I did that more I’d go slower, or if the work would be better. I didn’t have time to ask her, because soon after this, she was gone.

What happened next was, well, exactly what I said. The headwinds caught me, I sat up, started thinking about stuff and just casually pedaled my way home. I counted the vehicles that passed me dangerously. I’d just been thinking about how I’d gotten away from using that as a bit in class, and I should get back to that. Today, there was the commercial service van that almost hit The Yankee and gave me a little more room. Then there was the oversized black GMC pickup, which almost hit me, And then the white Chevy Silverado which almost clipped me while trying to save two seconds to immediately turn in front of me. I’m not sure why your two seconds are worth risking another person’s life, but that’s how it works.

Today, all of that happened within 36 minutes.

But the real fun was later! I completed much of the planned route, returned to the neighborhood, and then lost my back wheel. I felt it go to the right, felt me go to the left, and felt me hitting the ground. Heard myself saying “Ow! Ow!”

I landed on my surgically repaired shoulder, which is fine. I landed on my knee, which is scratched. I landed on my elbow and forearm, which has some nice road rash. For some reason I couldn’t get up in my bike shoes, so I kicked them off, and stood up, trying not to get a leg cramp at the same time. Looked around, surprised that no one saw this. Picked up my bike, where the left handlebar had gotten wedged beneath the top tube, the front wheel cranked all the way over. I couldn’t get undo that. Also, the handlebar was pushing the rear brake line, so the whole of my bike was shut down.

So I carried it, bleeding, the short distance home. I was very close.

Put my stuff away, inspected my helmet and was pleased to see I didn’t smack the ol’ noggin. I celebrated by hammering free the headset from the top tube, checked the wheels and the brakes, and then went inside.

Cleaned my wounds, took an angry, painful, shower. We did the first aid routine. Gauze, bandages, marveled that all of the bleeding parts are right on the bending parts of my limbs. So we made use of some ACE bandages. Then, I got ready to go to class.

Our department had an open house today, so the floor was filled with students. I tried to stay out of the way, hoping no one would bump into me. Already, I’m a bit sore, and that’ll become a problem tomorrow and Friday, but also, see above.

In class, I had to apologize for sitting sideways, because we mummified my leg. Also, I had to apologize for being delayed with grading a few papers. That was supposed to get done this afternoon, but the day got away from me, as you might imagine.

This class was about fan identity. I do this whole lecture through the lens of being an Auburn man. I make fun of Georgia. I discussed social identity theory, role identity, and identity fusion theory, which is my favorite of the bunch. I show this video, as an example of a shared experience. I show them where I was in the video.

They were a bit interested in that one, because it is surreal. And it was surreal. (Also, I think, it is why I don’t like being in crowds.)

I talk about Warren St. John’s Rammer Jammer, which has some incredible anecdotes about fan sacrifice. I show them videos of the viral Roll Tide Willie guy. Some of them know of him, but one of the local stations did a nice little profile package on him, and it is entirely different.

While it is playing I’m trying to count the number of people I know who are that guy. More than one. He looks like a caricature, but he’s a real guy. And since I’ve been asking them to think of fans as a client rather than as being a fan themselves, it seems important to give the guy a little understanding.

I show a terrific NFL hype video, which won’t embed here, but does allow me to point out roughly all of the positive things we’ve been talking about.

As a test, I showed this video. It doesn’t really get laughs. I don’t know why.

After I gave them my big Go Vote speech we got out a few minutes early.

I drove home, called my mom to tell her I got her grandfather’s pocket watch working. Missed a turn and wound up way off course before I figured it out. Every nondescript field looks the same in total darkness.

Got home and learned that I’d bled through the bandage on my elbow. Bled into a white shirt. I could feel it during class. Didn’t want to make a scene. All of that blood will come out of the shirt, though. And it’s an old shirt, so that’s not a problem. But, I need to figure out how to clean the elbow of my sport coat. And now I get to figure out how sore I’ll be tomorrow, how much more sore I’ll be on Friday, and what Saturday might feel like.

adventures / photo / Rowan / Tuesday — Comments Off
29
Sep 26

Yes, I put Rockwell in my slide deck

My car is wonderful. It is almost 20 years old, and aside from being hard on tires for a while, it has been great the entire time. I need to do a little regular maintenance, but every car needs that. This weekend I drove a newer car, and when we go somewhere in my wife’s car, I think about this story, which is on its third iteration, and still not bothering people enough. Your car’s data privacy problems are worse than you think<:

(R)esearchers from Northeastern University, in collaboration with Consumer Reports, published an in-depth examination of connected vehicle privacy behaviors. Utilizing nearly two dozen vehicles from CR’s test fleet, the team sought to answer critical questions: Which cars transmit data? Who receives it? Does it cross international borders? And what personally identifiable information is actually being exposed?

David Choffnes, project lead and former director of Northeastern’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, said the goal was to reveal the sheer scale of modern vehicle data tracking and highlight how little visibility or control owners truly have over it.

“I think the conclusion is that there’s a lot to be worried about,” Choffnes said in an interview.

To get a complete picture, researchers analyzed 21 late-model vehicles from 19 brands currently sold in the US, along with 30 companion mobile apps linked to active vehicles.

Manufacturers, enthralled with selling you off something you bought from them, are happy to sell you out to advertisers, to your insurance company, and probably to anyone that asks. They’re counting on motorists to forget about this because they’ve got to get from A-to-B and, besides, Spotify connects easily.

This is going to be an opportunity for a company to offer some other option. I don’t need a touchscreen, I don’t need moodlighting, and I don’t need you to report my driving to anyone without context. (There’s a lot of crap in the road, and sometimes you just want to dodge it.)

If no one takes that part of the marketplace then we basically find ourselves in a loose-to-strict technological cartel.

I think of that for a lot of reasons. One of them is because, today. My office hours were interrupted because of a fire alarm. I dutifully gathered my things, trying to make a quick assessment of whether anything else in my office needed to go, just in case, and then walked down the six flights of stairs into a cement chamber merrily repeating the sheer trill of the fire alarm. Students stood on the sidewalk outside on three different sidewalks. Ours is a big building. Everything in the frame is the same building.

There is housing, a gym, some sort of offices, and a bunch of academic stuff in there. The alarm could be about anything, anywhere. Even still, I decided to stand on the opposite side of the street, even though there’s no smoke emerging from anywhere. After a few minutes, I walked over to where my class meets, and finished my

we started talking about surveillance in my digital media class. The students had to read a brief chapter about it. This becomes a curious part of the subject matter because they think they know about this. I used a cool slide-shattering transition for this one. No one laughed at the joke I’d prepared for it.

We start talking about databases and data mining and implicit data and, much like that car example, above, people don’t necessarily want to think about this all of the time. The platforms quite obviously count on that. It is within their best interests to be less than transparent and forthcoming, to allow you to think of the good, and not the potential. And so I put up this slide.

People, after all, just want to post their thing or see the thing that others posted. And, yet, they’re going to hear about various parts of this for about four meetings in a row.

We talked, among other things, about the new Meta Muse, and how it’s breaking rules and what that means, and … well, first I had to explain Meta’s Muse. What it presently is is a dangerous mess masquerading as a product that you have to use, because marketing.

It’s worth pointing out: no one needs that product, but the company absolutely needs to convince you otherwise. And we could, perhaps, say that about quite a few of these tools and toys.

After class I walked back over to my building. Happily, it was still standing. The fire trucks were gone, and people were moving about as normal. On the way, though, I walked by the statue, Contact. I wrote about it here. Then, last week, we looked a bit more closely at the couple’s hands.

Today, a quick study of the man’s jacket.

You have to love that texture. It’d be comfortable, and probably quite breathable. I am trying my best not to think that the artist, Seward Johnson, was leaving a code for one of his fans to find his secret, buried treasure.

I can tell you the code doesn’t say anything about looking inside these subjects pockets for the treasure. Realistic feeling as a lot of this feels, you can’t reach in the pockets. Or so I’ve heard.

But in looking at the code that we can’t crack at a glance, you might notice some interesting small details. He really nailed the wear on the jacket vent. I’m pretty sure most of my jackets look like this.

The jacket also has wide lapels, and an oversized pocket. And the man seems to have a bit of stubble on his face, which is almost tucked out of site. I know this isn’t for everyone, but it is easy to marvel at the detail put into this project.

We’re going to study the faces next week. But, for now, I have to do a bit of studying on what I’ll be discussing in class tomorrow. So, until then, keep your hands at 10 and 2, just in case your car is telling on you.

adventures / family / Monday / photo — Comments Off
28
Sep 26

Back where the heavy land and the green sands meet

A period of time can move quickly. A period of time can move slowly. This weekend was more of the former. I had about 84 hours on the ground on this trip, a strict limit I impose so that no one gets too weary of my antics. Here’s one last photograph from my Alabama sojourn.

I touched on this on Friday, but the water has defined and developed and dictated terms in that little corner of the world. And, right there below that sunset and at the bottom of that hill is a bit of that water, a tributary of the river that does all of those things. That particular part itself being full of mystery, awe and normalcy.

I’ve never lived on the water, so my levels of appreciation about it are all over the place. But if I sit here and write about this for too long it could become a classic Southern Gothic tale. (Right through here passed the Trail of Tears, after all. In fact, I’ve spent much of my life going back and forth across one segment of that route, for goodness sake.) So we won’t dwell, for now.

This morning, after a bit of work I watched my flight get delayed … hours in advance … we sat around a while. And then we moseyed our way to drive toward the airport. Mentally saying “until next time” to these familiar, old, family haunts, while counting the unimpressive amount of yard signs for the upcoming midterm elections. (There are not a lot. None for the Republican running for governor. One for his opponent. And, in deep red Alabama, in three-plus days of traveling the highways and byways of two counties, I saw exactly one sign that bragged of a presidential endorsement. Even in Alabama there is no juice left in those coattails, mixaphorically speaking.)

We stopped outside of Nashville and had one of those time warp lunches. When we sat down we figured we could walk around a few shops to kill a few more minutes. Before I knew it I was calculating the remaining travel time and demanding the check. Then we got diverted and — I don’t know if you know this — Nashville will demonstrate to you 24.7 why the people in east and west Tennessee hate middle Tennessee. There just aren’t enough “bless your heart” sayings go around. And, sure, word has gotten out about “bless your heart,” but we have other, deeper, more profound, more biting ways to insult people in the South. Not all of them have made it to the national discourse yet. Most of them were inspired by Nashville.

Anyway, made it to the airport just in time. Breezed through security like a rock star. Got down to the gate … and waited. Also, we waited. Got on the plane and we waited.

I don’t know how it is that the third-largest airline in the world is so bad at the basic demands of the job, but it really makes you want to avoid the fourth and fifth carrier.

Give them this: I asked for a tomato juice (because I read one of those pieces that says this is the drink that signals to the flight crew that you know the score, something about altitude, cabin pressure, and salt content) and they were suddenly, “Yes sir. Absolutely, sir. Another can of our hand-crushed tomato juice, sir?”

They did not. Also, it tasted like tomato juice, just like the last time I had it on a plane. Or the last time I had it sitting on terra firma. It’s enough to make me wonder whether I can believe everything I see on the web.

The flight was fine. Got in about two hours later than I should have. Read my way through all of it. Left the plane, managed to escape the airport, mostly by ignoring signs, following the crowd, and a vague sense of muscle memory. Happily reunited with my lovely bride, who made the sacrifice of waiting on me for dinner. We ate dinner. Now I’m working on class stuff for tomorrow.

There’s a lot to get through this week. Let’s get through it!