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errands

Valentinus, the unknown, celebrate him!

The view in the Caf:

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?

Things to read: Who advertises on news sites and how much those ads are targeted:

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.

Seven ways the New York Times is using social media for ‘deeper’ engagement has two really interesting ideas. The rest aren’t bad, they’re just obvious or common. But check out numbers three and four:

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.

The future of location-based marketing is cool. . . or scary. Yes it is. You knew that, but read that piece and see if your position changes.

Did the AP just declare war on news aggregators?

(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.

cycling / errands / Friday / links / movies / video — Comments Off
10
Feb 12

Emailed items are Undefeated

Email on the wane according to a new ComScore report, as relayed by Alan Mutter:

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.

Watched The Undefeated:

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.

errands / Friday / journalism / links / things to read — 2 Comments
3
Feb 12

A do over

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.

And my day was nothing like this guy’s:

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.

errands / Tuesday — Comments Off
17
Jan 12

Another broken thing

Spent a little time at the hardware store last evening, wondering What else do I need?

This is not the place to have that conversation with yourself.

The self-chat came about because of one we had in the kitchen on Sunday. I remember it well, I was adding food to the cat’s feeder when The Yankee said “I’m having a vision … and you’re not going to like it … ”

Because there was something else to fix, which is always an adventure here, which has been closely documented in this space. This time it was the tank on the toilet in the master bathroom, which has already been fixed once. Or so we thought.

Now, instead of the charm of the occasionally running toilet, we had the fun of a continually running toilet. We’re not talking about the bad seal of a bad flapper in the tank that allows water seepage and requires tank replenishment. No, this is was a malfunctioning float valve, sticking in the wrong position and threatening to flood the room from the storage tank.

If you go to the website for the piece of equipment they have a breadcrumb FAQ that allows you to ascertain what is causing your problem. The fourth level of questioning is “Is your device more than five years old?”

The response, if your answer is yes, is “Buy a new one.”

So I had to buy a new float device. The replacement was an upgrade of the same broken model, which was the second cheapest at the hardware store. I’m beginning to learn a lot about the previous owner of the house.

Bought that and nothing else. I’d gone through a mental walk of the house. Nothing is broken in that room. Don’t have to replace anything in there.

And then home to replace the thing, where I found just one more space that, had it been designed to be just four inches wider, would have been SO much more convenient.

You take off the tank cover, drain the basin, dry the bottom and start disconnecting things. First the old flapper and chain, and then the feeder tube. Finally you make it underneath the tank which almost abuts the cabinet. There is a threaded clamp and lug nut that must be removed from the bottom of the tank’s inlet tube. All three of these piece are made of plastic. One of them is a little more than hand tight.

So I have to gentle try to use a wrench on a piece of plastic, only there isn’t enough space between the porcelain and the cabinet. A lot of time and several mutterings happen. I disconnect the supply tube at the shutoff valve.

At this point I’m wondering if I should know more engineers, because they might get a good laugh out of this.

To unstick the stuck one I must re-tighten the freed plastic lug nut. After several attempts this is done, the offending inlet tube and broken float. Install the new one.

I’ve managed to jab and cut my finger and the palm of my hand in this process.

“Easy installation!” says the box. And it was, even the blister packet, the scourge of western capitalism, wasn’t a difficult obstacle. It was the removal that was tough. But we’ve gone so green with these devices that we’re using twice as much plastic as necessary to make a toilet go. Technology that the Romans mastered has been over-engineered.

There are now two chains in that particular basin, one from the flapper to the handle and another from a guard on the float (designed to save water) which also goes to the handle. This will not prevent anything.

There’s also a plastic roller device, which looks like it would excel at making miniature croissants, that attaches to the line that feeds water to the overflow tube. This is supposed to save water. That’s also the job of that little plastic fake screw that sits just to the side of the float, which regulates how much water goes into the tank before it ultimately goes into the bowl.

There are two pounds of plastic creating a triple redundancy of water usage control on a device which will be broken in five years. That should last just long enough for the plumbing techs to over-design the next chunk of plastic, so there’s that.

errands

Valentinus, the unknown, celebrate him!

Emailed items are Undefeated

More things to read, more on the car

A do over

Another broken thing