cycling

cycling / Friday / photo / Samford — Comments Off on And, now, a pet peeve
29
Aug 14

And, now, a pet peeve

This, surely, happens to everyone. It can’t be that the only people in the western world that do this are wherever I happen to be. It must happen to you, too.

doors

When one approaches the common dual door, one should always steer toward the one on the right. Not to the one that is open. That just impedes traffic, and is kind of lazy.

Also, it makes me wonder why I’m holding the door for you. I’m trying to get through it, after all, and this is my side.

Class today, where we discussed story types. We discussed this amazing story. More meetings, too, just wrapping up the first week. One or two more weeks of administrative and meeting minutiae and things can get down to normal.

And then phone calls, and then the drive home and the traffic therein.

I made it in just in time to push my bicycle around part of the town. I got in 15 fast miles before daytime turned to the latter part of twilight. My cycling app says I set three personal records on various segments. I also took the first place spot on an uphill course. (This defies all logic and previous performance. The reality is that not many people ride on that road.) Despite all of that, I need to be stronger and faster. I need to ride more.

I blame all of my door-holding.

cycling / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off on I would ride 5,000 more
20
Aug 14

I would ride 5,000 more

I choose the routes for all manner of different reasons. Sometimes, admitting my deficiency on climbs, I’ll set out for the biggest “hills” we have around here. On another day, hoping to feel fast, I’ll find an easier route. Boredom, adventure, the name of a road, a fleeting thought or spontaneity can all decide the plan.

Last night, though, I knew today’s ride would be a special one, so I set out for what would be a nice photograph. I broke 5,000 miles on my odometer and I didn’t want to do that in a neighborhood. I planned, instead, to find a nice quiet, woody road.

And I still managed to wind up by this silly little carport:

road

That’s the way it goes sometimes, I guess. That’s the view ahead. This is the view from whence I just came:

road

And here’s my proof:

Odometer

Did it all on this little guy:

bike

I’ve had a lot of fun on that bike. I’ve suffered on it, too. It has hurt me and I don’t think I’ve ever made it flinch. Sometimes it carries me along, more frequently I’m having to convince it I can ride. Occasionally, I feel like I need a new bike. It is a little undersized and sometimes (or perhaps in the same vein) I can generate more power than others and it feels shaky. But that’s a fine ride. Shame the cyclist isn’t better.

I’m also a little embarrassed by how long it took to get to 5,000 miles. Must ride more.

Things to read … because we should also read more, too.

This is interesting, How a Copyright Dispute Helped Give America Rock ‘n’ Roll:

We associate iconic musicians and musical genres with places, stars, and cultural narratives. Less often we recognize the markets and economic forces shaping popular music’s trajectory. But in 1940-41, a dispute over music royalties brought music once relegated to local audiences to national radio, spurring the popularity of blues, country, and, ultimately, rock ‘n’ roll. Were it not for a battle over how much radio should pay for music royalties, performers like Ray Charles and Elvis Presley may have never become classic American musicians.

[…]

The boycott lasted for almost a year. In late 1941, ASCAP signed an agreement with radio stations at terms less generous than it had before the boycott. The Justice Department also sued ASCAP again on antitrust grounds. This time ASCAP lost, and it was forced to accept regulations that opened it up to other musicians and set blanket rates for licensing deemed fair by third parties.

With the gatekeeper gone, the new genres maintained their national audience and anointed new stars, including the first rock and roll icons in the following years, a development that grew out of the once neglected genres like blues.

There is a lot to process here, and it is worth your time. This is a fine collection of information from the New York Times. The Iraq-ISIS Conflict in Maps, Photos and Video

Here’s another informative piece with some good takeaways. How a Norwegian public radio station is using Snapchat to connect young listeners with news

I’ll be honest, this one — Journalism Digital News Archive — had me at the pull quote:

“We should have had a historian running around saying ‘I don’t care if you are ever going to use them — we are going to keep them.'”

Alabama biz taxes account for 47.5% of all state and local taxes:

That represented an 1.8 percent increase from the previous fiscal year, giving it the ninth lowest state and local business tax growth in the U.S.

It works out to $7.2 billion dollars last year.

Meanwhile, Baxter International adding 200 new jobs in Opelika by 2016, means a $300 million 230,000-square-foot expansion for the dialyzer manufacturing facility.

cycling / iPhone / journalism / links / Monday / photo / things to read — Comments Off on This week is uphill
18
Aug 14

This week is uphill

This is where I turned around today. This was when my ride was still easy.

road

After this, I suffered. It wasn’t even the good kind of suffering, but more of the “What just happened to everything? And can I make it back home?” Almost all of the uphill was going that direction. There may have been an error in this plan.

It was just 30 miles, but my summer consisted of shorter, harder rides. I just looked through the route notes, and I’m a bit embarrassed by how long it has been since I’ve had a ride with a significant distance.

Elsewhere we’re just getting back to work. Classes start next week, which means I’m prepping things and being barraged by emails this week. Work is fun. Summer is more fun, that’s all.

So when the next several days or weeks seem thin around here, let’s blame that.

Things to read … because no one can blame me for not having interesting links.

Mr. T shows up for jury duty in Rolling Meadows and he’s ready to put people away:

Toting a Bible, T at one point joked that he wasn’t going to eat during the lunch break because if he did, he wouldn’t be able to be “mean on the criminal.”

So you can pity the defendant tried in front of him.

Terrifying, Dear Driver of the Silver SUV who ran into me on my bicycle this Saturday…:

Did I suddenly disappear from your view your vehicle drove over my back wheel and whipped my body sideways down to the ground?

I doubt you heard the crack of my ribs as my shoulder and head slammed into the ground. But maybe you heard the crunch of my bike under your tire and the loud pop that a modern bike frame makes when it snaps into pieces.

If not that, surely you felt your tire thump over my bike? Did you wonder if my body was caught under the wheel too?

The Future of Mobile Apps for News:

The mobile tsunami has just begun to unfurl. Soon, it might flood a solid half, then two thirds of all news pageviews — and we can expect further acceleration after the release of the next batch of iPhones: their larger screens will provide more attractive reading.

If mobile is to become the dominant vector for news, retaining readers will be much more challenging than it is on a PC or tablet (though the latter tends to engage readers 10x or sometimes 20x more). A news app needs to be steered with precision. Today’s digital marketing tools allow publishers to select multiple parameters monitoring the use of a application.

And that’ll do for now. May all of your hills be down.

Alabama / Auburn / cycling / football / links / Thursday — Comments Off on Speaking of …
14
Aug 14

Speaking of …

On my bike ride today, an Alabama fan honked at me three times, because Roll Tide, I guess. But, since it was an Alabama fan, I was really honked at 15 times, wasn’t I?

The SEC Network launched today, with much giddiness and silliness, and football season is around the corner. There will always be Bama jokes, it seems.

Also, on one portion of my ride — which involves a downhill, a turn lane and then an explosion onto a beautiful, freshly paved road — a car pull right out in front of me. The driver panicked. He stopped, filling the entire lane. So he’s perpendicular to traffic, me, because he is no longer making his left turn.

Bikes are agile, but they don’t exactly stop on a dime. The emergency stop, as it were, is to burn up your brakes, slip off the saddle and put your body behind the seat tube. This shifts the mass, and slows things down, but doesn’t mean you’re stopped. Also, I find, it is hard to unclip when you’re behind the seat, so there’s not really a graceful way to put your foot down and burn up your shoes.

Instead of turning, as I’m trying to stop, he’s waving me through, to pass across the front of his car, into the oncoming lane.

This would have been so much better if he’d just looked to his left before he tried to turn to his left.

Later, on the TT segment, I tried to best yesterday’s time. I fairly well buried myself, dropped two other cyclists and improved my time from 9:34 to 9:03. That moved me from seventh to fourth for the year. The leader sits on top with a time of 8:35. I’m not sure if I can find 28 more seconds to shave off that time. Something to shoot for, I guess.

Speaking of cycling, here’s one last incredible Robin Williams story. Famed designer Dario Pegoretti, fighting lymphoma, met Robin Williams at a convention:

“He talked to me about my situation, and gave me a lot of strength,” Dario Pegoretti said from Italy on Wednesday.

At dinner, the virtuoso comic actor and the virtuoso frame-builder talked about bikes, but they also talked about things besides bikes. Williams spoke a little Italian, and his Italian was pretty good. He recalled his visits to Rome, about once meeting Fellini. To everyone’s delight, by the end of the night, he also did an extended Pegoretti impression for the table.

“I was just rolling on the floor,” said one of the dinner guests, Nelson Frazier, a rep for Gita. “It’s the only time I’ve seen Dario pretty much speechless.”

“It was really a beautiful night,” Pegoretti said. “I have so many beautiful memories.”

And speaking of the SEC Network:

Consider the SEC Network as indirect pay-per-view for college football games involving your favorite team.

[…]

According to Sports Business Journal, the network will cost cable companies $1.40 per subscriber in states inside the SEC footprint. If you live outside that footprint, the cost is only 25 cents per subscriber.

If the SBJ report is correct, then the SEC Network could be the third most expensive channel for local viewers. Figures from the Wall Street Journal show ESPN ($6.04) and TNT ($1.48) are the only ones that would charge more.

Right now? No one cares. Football.

cycling / family / food / history / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Twitter / Wednesday — 1 Comment
13
Aug 14

A 60 year-old ad, a new sign, a race and food

Last night’s adventures in insomnia included this guy.

Jim

That’s my great-great grandfather, Jim. He was born in the winter of 1871, a year when the crops didn’t come in and the cotton caterpillars ravaged what was there. Jim married Sarah in 1904 and and they lived on a farm that her grandfather bought in 1854. They had 11 children. He died in 1953, his wife in 1970. So while I don’t know them, I did meet one of their kid’s, my great-grandfather. But I don’t remember him. My grandmother remembers her grandparents well, but I don’t know much more than what you find in this paragraph beyond where he’s buried. I do like that bicycle, though. So I found some old newspapers online and I’m looking for mentions, but turn up nothing.

I did find this, though:

In 1953 the church ads told you what the evening’s sermon was going to be about. This one wasn’t about Old Hickory Bourbon, or temperance. The topic was “A Methodist sermon by a Baptist preacher.” A different church had an ad in the next day’s paper, the preacher had promised to answer the question of a generation, “Should a woman wear a hat to church?”

The pressing stuff of their time.

I guess that branch of my family didn’t believe in obituaries, or care for the local paper. I don’t find a mention of him there. Otherwise, he must have been the quiet type. You don’t get in the paper until you do something wrong or something bad happens. Maybe that’s a good sign for the couple.

On my bike ride today, something of a casual ride around the greater neighborhood just to get in a few miles, I passed one of the better church signs I know. They’ve got personality here, as noted by most any previous message, one of the best in recent memory suggesting that you bring your sin and “drop it like it’s hot.”

This week’s note:

sign

It is a quiet little church, a lovely little place:

church

I also learned during this ride that I was on one of the local segments that the cycling apps chart as races. Without knowing it, I currently have the eighth fastest time on it for the year. I’ll have to try it again tomorrow to see if I can go any faster.

For dinner, we grilled pork chops and had beans which we discovered a few weeks ago:

dinner

I said to the lady that made them, a family friend, “You must give me your recipe or — ” which was the moment a look of embarrassment crossed her face. ” — or tell me what brand they are, because they are just about the best beans I’ve ever had.”

And they were. And they are. Also, they are from a can — Margaret Holmes. We discovered we didn’t necessarily need the lard — which is fine. The lady that made them, she’s a retired school teacher. She told me that her father, a man I knew a bit, was so old-fashioned the type that would not allow anything in his home that involved shortcuts. In this case that meant no canned foods. He made an exception for Margaret Holmes.

That’s an endorsement.

Things to read … because there’s probably something worth endorsing in here somewhere.

First, the journalism stuff:

How digital retailing could roil local media

Solving the Journalism Riddle — Somehow

Radio Disney Moving Off Air to Digital

If Disney is making that move …

Closer to home, 108 immigrant children relocated to Alabama in last 3 weeks:

Included among the children are those from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador who have crossed into the U.S. as part of a massive wave of immigration that has set off a humanitarian crisis and political firestorm.

The data does not include information on where the children were placed or whether they are residing with family members or foster care. The children will remain with the sponsors until a judge orders they be deported; until they turn 18 and are transferred back to DHS; or they are given permission to stay by immigrantion courts.

Finally, Ferguson:

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