Eggs. Eggs. Must get eggs. I’d been tasked with this important task because it wouldn’t be a weekend without breakfast.
To the meat lab. This is all in the timing. If you went early the eggs would not be there yet. If you show up late they’ll be gone. (They are a good deal, and popular with the in-crowd. They have a sign with the bad news that they’re out of eggs. They do not have a sign for when they run out of pork chops.)
I walk in. There is one flat of eggs left. Thirty delicious eggs at a terrific price and these are the last ones for the evening. I ask the lady working there if they are spoken for. She says yes. Crestfallen, I glance around at other things and, having failed at the original mission, decide to purchase nothing. I turn to leave.
“You’re not going to buy the eggs?”
Didn’t you say they were someone else’s?
“No. I meant that’s the last of them.”
Well. They are spoken for, then.
Moral: Don’t count your eggs before they are in your refrigerator. (If you count them in someone else’s refrigerator, you should get permission first.)
Visited the big blue box store, because I had to see what the hubbub was about. The place was packed like Christmas was coming or snow had arrived. It was all very orderly though, with people stopping and staring at exciting things like brushes and notebook paper for the longest amount of time.
I checked out behind a handsome elderly couple. They just managed to sneak in under the draconian Express Lane rules that most people do not bother to acknowledge. The lady staffing the register checked them out in silence. And then she struck up a conversation with me, offering me a credit card application and asking about my day and wishing me well. She did none of these things for the couple. Maybe she just talks to every other customer.
Moral: A leopard can’t change his spots, but you can pick yours.
Also hit the local bike shop, where I needed their help making two small adjustments to my bike. They have a tool I don’t — they have a lot of tools I don’t — which is required to make this particular pedal-to-crankset change. I learned this important, and costly, lesson last spring.
Picked up some new shoes, talked about chain lubrication and the upcoming chain replacement that I’ll be due. Chain work, he said, can sometimes open a Pandora’s Box. Because, really, my repair-and-upkeep luck needs the help.
“It might be more than the chain,” he said. “There could also be problem with the cassette.”
Or the derailleur. We could find out I’ve been riding around on the wrong tires. There could be a problem with the satellite in a neighbor’s home, and this responsibility to fall to me.
Step Sing, “Samford University’s most time-honored tradition. Since 1951, students” have been preoccupied from their classes while producing this song and dance revue show. It takes place this weekend. There are 14 teams competing for top honors. Thousands of people (tickets sell out in about an hour) will come onto campus to see the shows, which donate large sums to their annual philanthropy benefactor — this year it is Cornerstone Schools of Alabama.
The shows are great fun, very clever, inventive and entertaining. But the banners may be my favorite part.
And, yes, I went to lunch early, which is why the tables are empty in the photograph. There were things to do. There was a trip to take. I had to travel to Tuscaloosa to get a piece of paper filled out. One piece of paper, five signatures, or, more precisely, initials. This can’t be done electronically or by fax, because it has always been done the old fashioned way, I guess. I figured I wouldn’t get all five people, and I did not.
That was a three hour round trip for two sets of initials.
At least I got to see this:
Classic.
Late night for the student-journalists at the Crimson. Step Sing has an effect on everything. When I left sometime after 10 p.m. most of the staffers were still working on their dance steps. So they won’t sleep much. The things you can do when you’re young, right?
A new study of advertising in news by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, currently, even the top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online. The digital advertising they do get appears to be standard ads that are available across many websites. And with only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue.
Of the 22 news operations studied for this report, only three showed significant levels of targeting. A follow-up evaluation six months later found that two more sites had shown some movement in this direction, but only some, from virtually no targeting to a limited amount on inside pages. By contrast, highly targeted advertising is already a key component of the business model of operations such as Google and Facebook.
[…]
Overall, the analysis finds that while news organizations have tried to persuade their advertisers to buy space across multiple platforms, there was little evidence that they had succeeded. The kinds of products and services being advertised online were quite different than in legacy platforms, and often were seen across multiple websites.
Interesting findings, but they were only looking at the front page of sites. A lot of traffic comes from search engines, directly into interior pages. Indeed, many front pages aren’t built for the human aesthetic, but rather for the search engine spiders.
Sites selling specific ad space, or clients buying ads exclusively on sports pages or on automotive stories, don’t seem to figure into this. That’s worth studying (or practicing) but it would be incredibly labor intensive.
3. By “revamping the liveblog template” and turning it into a “second screen”
Heron recognises she is “lucky to count on about a dozen interactive developers as colleagues” on her team, “which is kind of a dream come true for a journalism nerd like me”.
She told the news:rewired conference that the “team of developer-journalists has rebuilt our traditional liveblog and transformed it into more of a second screen, social media-heavy experience – a one-stop-shop for reporting, analysis, newsworthy tweets, reader engagement, and interactive election results”.
4. By creating a “liveblog about liveblogs”
The New York Times team decided it should provide its “own coverage and analysis” for the “aforementioned media cacophony”.
Media reporters Brian Stelter and David Carr have been using Storify to collect the “news media’s tweets, videos and Facebook posts on primary nights”. They have been adding their own analysis as narrative within the Storify.
(T)his disruption has been even worse for AP and its ilk because they are primarily distributors, and the web has fundamentally democratized content distribution. Instead of trying to find ways to adapt to this new reality, however, the AP seems determined to fight it with everything it has, including lawsuits: On Tuesday, the service launched a lawsuit in New York against a digital news-aggregation service called Meltwater, accusing the service of copyright infringement and “free riding” on its content. The AP says it isn’t going after news aggregators as a whole, but this is clearly meant as a show of force.
The AP may try to charge me for linking to their release. (If they do, let’s all laugh at them together.)
Finally, one of the best Valentine’s tales you’ll read today. It is told through Twitter, making it unique in a way, but it has great pictures and a lovely story, making it traditional. The best work always stems from great stories.
The use of email has plunged by more than 30% in the last year among consumers under the age of 24, owing to the increased use of texting and Facebook to stay in touch.
[…]
A primary activity among wired individuals since the arrival of the Internet, email use in the last 12 months fell by more than 30% for those under the age of 24 and stayed absolutely flat among those aged 24-44, according to the audience measuring service. As illustrated below, only those aged 45-54 are pecking out more emails today than they were a year ago.
Twenty-two percent of the remainder is in my inbox. Six percent spam, eight percent meant for someone else.
I’m presently inundated with emails from seemingly every agency east of the Rockies that ships cars. Someone is intent on shipping their Volkswagen Jetta from Philadelphia to Chattanooga. The going rate, I can confidently say, ranges between $400 and $550. And the car transport people? They are big on correspondence.
Shipped off the headlight lamp that was supposed to fit my car, but did not fit my car. I clicked the buttons on Amazon, printed the return file, put everything back in the original boxes and carried it to the UPS store. That’s where you can buy UPSes.
The door just about pinched my finger off going in. The two guys working there feigned a mild concern. They were helping a young lady on crutches. She had all of their sympathy. Even the pre-existing injury on my finger didn’t win the day. I didn’t mind. The thing I printed meant I didn’t have to pay for shipping.
Amazon gives you several reasons to return your purchase. Some of them are very nuanced reasons, but some of them mean the difference between you paying a restocking fee, a shipping fee or nothing at all. Fortunately my reason to return the thing meant the seller was footing the bill. And that’s the first thing in the car drama that has worked in my favor.
Snuck in a few quick miles on the bike this evening. It is February, but it is finally turning cold. I could tell on my ride. Still nice and mild when I left home, but about two-thirds of the way through the ride I found myself in the shivers.
Tomorrow we’ll have big winds and maybe the 40s. I’ll just have to wait that out and pile it on Sunday afternoon.
If they edited trailers like they do today Rock Hudson would have been a total scene stealer, John Wayne would have punched someone and the love interest would have been slipped in at the end. And then Rock Hudson would say something like “Finding ourselves outnumbered is a fact of life we’ve gotten used to!”
That’s just before the conversation between Hudson’s fleeing rebels and the soon-to-be assaulting Mexican bandits. Their detente doesn’t go well. The bad guys attack. They are turned back by the confederates and then ambushed twice, first by Wayne’s calvary and then by Wayne’s adopted son’s friends.
Later a Juarista general double-crosses Hudson. After a speech, an execution, dilemma and then a running gunfight that takes place in a barely controlled horse stampede we reach the conclusion. And there it is hard to picture a colonel and family man, in the next-to-last scene, having a toast with the man who’d previously held them all hostage.
There had to be at least 100 people shot and killed in the movie, which held a G rating.
Which is better than three percent of the email currently sitting in my spam folder.
Best story I read today, Robert Johnson spent a night in a homeless shelter. Johnson is a journalism grad student at NYU. He tried to get into a shelter in New York, but was turned away. Wondering what they had to hide he found his way into an Atlantic City facility.
The pictures alone are worth seeing.
Seven PR tips from the Komen experience. We’ve been talking a lot about this and the more I listen and learn the more it seems to me that the public relations problem has been the biggest error in the ordeal.
Also, Poynter ran a piece on how the reporter got the scoop on Komen reversing course. It seems that the Dallas Morning News called a PR practitioner at Komen and that person sent him a press release. Riveting stuff, there.
Defense lawyer Mike Shores said his client had taken great pains that night to shield the children from the fact he had just killed their mother. That showed Johnson has redeeming qualities deserving of a sentence just above the 20-year minimum in this case, Shores argued.
The judge didn’t buy it and sentenced the defendant to life in prison.
So. The car. You might remember the recent fun. Took it late today to a shop as the first mechanic recommended. Remember, I’d already been there once, so that’s two people I’ve seen about this.
I bought aftermarket parts because the factory stuff is an incredibly expensive, cost-prohibitive and officially sanctioned rip off.
Dropped off the car, returned home. We’d made it inside and done precisely one chore — cleaning up the snowmen since spring is temporarily here — when the phone rang. Seems the part I’d purchased was wrong, despite it being right. (The site had a search function which verified the model!)
Jerry, the man at the body shop was great, though. He took me back, explained it all. We discussed it again. He’d appraised it on the first visit, but apparently something about saying exactly the same thing clicked differently today. All of this, the aftermarket stuff, the expensive parts, the third visit to see a mechanic, remember, is for a headlight. Nissan deserves my thanks. And you deserve this tip: When you shop for cars, investigate the headlights.
So Jhe decides, over the course of a detailed conversation about chemistry, electronics, standing water and the importance of being earnest, that we should just plug in one of the new headlights and see what happens. I agree. Jerry goes back to speak with the actual guy who’s doing the work — this process has involved dropping the bumper, which he’s done, reattached and now must remove again, poor guy — and has the bulb installed.
A bit later he comes back and says “This just isn’t your day.” Seems the new bulb doesn’t work either. So it is either the new bulb, which is pristine, or the headlight ballast module.
Jerry can’t tell for certain, though. He suggests I go back to see Rick, who sent me to him. Rick, Jerry says, can test the ballast module in much the same way you might take a voltmeter to test something around the house. I called Rick, because it was past closing time. He happened to be in the office and so I explained all of this to him. We set up an appointment for next week.
Making the fourth different attempt to try and resolve the issue. A headlight.
(To be fair, they could have fixed it that first day if I was willing to pay almost $900 for it. Even the guys working in the service centers agree this is obscene and have been very decent about trying to find some cheaper resolution.)
Today, I decided, would be the day that I would fix a few things that need fixing.
I should have picked a different day.
So I set out to Walmart, where they have many things I don’t need, but exactly one of the things I do need. (One thing I need but could not get at the store: batteries. This should have been the signal to go do something else, anything else.)
But I did find a specific headlight bulb. The gentleman working in automotive had to unlock the bulb — which cost $7.88 — from the display hook. The cardboard, he said “has some sort of security device in it.”
They’re like currency on the inside.
He did not laugh, and so we know he doesn’t watch movies set in prisons. He was a very nice guy. I’d picked the wrong bulb and he patiently explained the difference between the two and then had to unlock the proper bulb. I learned more about halogen in one box store conversation than I’d ever thought possible.
They did not have the other things I needed, so I returned home to improve my headlight situation. Only I can’t, because I drive a Nissan, which means to get to the headlight you have to go through the wheel well.
There are three rivets that must be removed from the wheel well — and, truly, if you find instructions for headlights beginning with “Turn the wheel all the well to the right” just stop. When you’ve removed the rivets you must pull out a screw that attaches the wheel well from the bumper.
I’m changing a headlight.
You peel back the wheel well. From there you crane your neck, turn your flashlight to anti-gravity mode so it floats in just the right spot and, well, good luck.
This is where the directions diverged from my car’s reality. And I can’t take the entire plastic light globe off. This is important because I have some fancy 24th century headlight that requires a perfectly dry operating environment — because they are more efficient — or it kills the bulb. And my globe has moisture in it. So I have to take it to someone to fix.
I called a dealership about this, and the polite word for this procedure is extortion.
So I put the wheel well back inside the bumper, reapply the screw holding the two together and then insert the three rivets to their mounted position. I turned the wheel back to the standard position and went to the hardware store.
Imagine walking into a place with saws and drills and drywall putty with this playing over the speakers:
I did find the sink repair kit. We have a slow drip in the kitchen. If you hop on one foot and the wind is blowing out of the northwest you can find a sweet spot and stop the leak. Otherwise you’re going to hear a drop of water every so often.
I pick up the set of springs, washers and other things. Having watched a video, and read the instructions, I’m confident this is a quick fix, somewhere in the easy category.
I find the batteries I need that Walmart did not have. I check out.
I return home to the dripping sink and assemble my tools. The first step is to remove the handle from the rest of the apparatus. One allen wrench later and the handle is in the sink. Success! Now the cap assembly must come off so that we can find the parts that need to be replaced.
The cap assembly will not come off. It seems that the water has fused one piece of metal to another. Twisting, turning, banging, spinning, muttering, nothing would set the thing free. I torqued it so hard that I could turn the entire faucet assembly from the sink. This is where you hear your parents voices in your head: Don’t force it.
So the repair kit is going back to the store and I’ll just blame my impressively hard water and the curse of whatever spirits we’ve angered that live on this property. If you’re keeping score:
Thermostat
Shower head
Refrigerator
Dishwasher
Dishwasher again
Cable, multiple times
Garage door button
Air conditioner contact
Two separate minor plumbing issues
The sink of doom
We’ve lived here 17 months.
Finally, I replaced the battery in the key fob to my car. There’s a telltale in the dash that tells you when the battery is low. This is a precise operation. In fact, operation is a good term, because you need to work in a completely sterile environment and operate your Fulcrumbot 6000 with a precise caliper measurement to remove and replace the batter. And, I guess also because my car is a Nissan, it requires a battery that merely glancing at with human eyes “significantly reduces the battery’s charge.”
Having separated the fob, prying free the dying battery and maneuvering the new battery into place with a complex series of electromagnetic acrobatics, I have gotten at least one item off the list. Go out to the car, crank the engine and … the low battery telltale is still on.
Also, I received my third piece of correspondence telling me that I wouldn’t be paid for an article I wrote last year. For a publisher that is apparently shirking their responsibilities while going out of business they certainly are prolific.
The tornado ripped the roof and wall off of half of the the Snider’s home, including their baby’s room. He credits the siren with saving their lives, particularly his daughter’s life.
“If that siren had not gone off, my baby would have been gone,” he said. “The crib was still there, but it sucked the sheets off of it.”
Lucky guy. You aren’t supposed to depend on those outdoor sirens as a warning — they aren’t designed for indoor alarms or to wake up people in the middle of the night, but are rather intended to get people back inside to safety — but Charles Snider will never live out of earshot of one.
