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family

Scene chewing

Today I changed a doorknob. Four screws out, the new hardware in place and four more screws to install it.

I was listening to Pandora at the time. It took less than two songs, and that was because one of the screws was stripped.

But that wasn’t even the height of my industriousness today. I also built one of those shoe racks that you hang over a closet door and immediately regret having purchased! There’s just no end to my usefulness, it seems.

The door knob was on one of the houses that my great-grandfather built, let’s say, 60 years ago.

Here he is, the older gentleman:

He built three on some of his property for rental income. They’ve all stayed in the family over the years. A few years ago I sanded down door frames in one of the houses and went through all those decades of paint. It was a smooth glimpse of archeology.

At the time I wrote:

And suddenly I’ve found myself kneeling in the dust of the place, sanding smooth at least six layers of paint, peeling away the canvas of perhaps a dozen lives or more, letting that old lumber breathe again for the first time since the Eisenhower administration.

Sometimes I overwrite.

I walked around the side of that little rental and saw this, and wondered much the same thing as I did about the paint: Did he hang this?

That’s a small question that’ll never be answered. Who would remember? Who is left to know? Who would pay attention to the details of when a screen door went in? And is that the original, or something put up during the Reagan years?

I noodled up and down the road for five miles and then jogged one, the last effort before the Sunday race. We’ll see how much I come to regret that.

Usually, by this time, I am very much aware of how unprepared I am for the thing. This time I am choosing to not consciously acknowledge how unprepared I am.

Because, you know, I am.

Played with my grandparents’ dog:

She’s a smart one.

Things to read … so you can be smart, too.

There’s a super moon tomorrow night. Pretty large tonight, too.

US GIVEN HEADS UP ABOUT NEWSPAPER DATA DESTRUCTION:

In a statement to the AP, the Guardian said it was disappointed to learn that “cross-Atlantic conversations were taking place at the very highest levels of government ahead of the bizarre destruction of journalistic material that took place in the Guardian’s basement last July.”

“What’s perhaps most concerning is that the disclosure of these emails appears to contradict the White House’s comments about these events last year, when they questioned the appropriateness of the U.K. government’s intervention,” the newspaper said.

The White House said Thursday that the British government had acted on its own in destroying the Guardian drives.

Digital advertising will pass 25% of total ad spending this year:

Global spending on advertising will hit $545.4 billion this year, according to a report from eMarketer, and digital ads will make up more than a quarter of that spending.
Digital ad spending is likely to hit $140.15 billion this year, with $32.71 billion spent on ads for smartphones and tablets.
Growth in total media ad spending should be 5.7 percent this year, eMarketer said, more than twice the growth rate a year ago, which was 2.6 percent.

A properly sanitized report, from ESPN. Pete Carroll headed to Trojans HOF

And when ESPN disappoints you like that, they redeem themselves like this. Marcus Lattimore doesn’t walk alone

The Widespread Effects of Facebook’s Latest Outage:

The lesson, therefore, is a poignant one: When utilizing any third-party tags, particularly ones that have such a big effect on your end users interaction with your site, it’s imperative that you make sure the code is asynchronous with your own to prevent it from affecting your entire site’s performance.

Whoops. Anthrax investigation turns up ‘distressing’ issues at CDC

Stuff on my Tumblr: The mysteries of modern shipping, an examination of modern currency, an old Scout and an older swing.

On Twitter:

Maybe I should just start using this as a sarcasm face … pic.twitter.com/TuOzfR6NO4

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) July 12, 2014

Leonard Nimoy had just stolen all of William Shatner’s scene chewing.

I made fun of the Horta episode, with plenty of photos. Check it out.

adventures / family / friends / memories / photo — Comments Off
20
Jun 14

An anniversary

“We’ll make our own history,” he said, a good long while before asking her “Would you like to have more adventures with me?”

“Yes, of course!” she said.

So their families and closest friends gathered on the hottest day of the year.

Five years. Time flies. Hearts deepen. Affections widen. Romance grows. Respect multiplies. Blessings. Challenges. Successes, triumphs, joy. Laughter. Beautiful smiles. Favorite phrases and lilting voices.

Five years. Adventures. History.

Auburn / family / football / history / memories / photo — Comments Off
18
Jun 14

Famed raptor dies at Auburn

Tiger, War Eagle VI, has died, the university has announced.

Tiger never yielded, which is what you want out of an eagle that you ask to fly down a field. So long associated with Auburn, she was thought to be among the oldest golden eagles in captivity.

Tiger started that uniquely Auburn tradition, superlative to almost every other pre-game routine everywhere, at the beginning of the 2000 season.

A friend of mine was a member of the service fraternity who took care of her back then, when she lived in the aviary just off the concourse. You could see them training her at a particular time most any afternoon.

When my family came to visit my freshman year I took my grandmother by to meet Tiger. She had her picture made with her. “That’s just something you don’t get to do every day.”

My grandmother did it again the next year too. Then she said “I bet nobody ever gets to do that!”

The first eagle to fly free in Jordan-Hare Stadium soared through the 2006 installment of the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry. For her last Iron Bowl, the 2005 “Honk if you sacked Brodie” game, Tiger landed near us on the field. They’d named the field itself after Pat Dye. It was Carl Stephen’s last game as the voice of the stadium. Tiger sacked Brodie twice.

During Tiger’s years of mascot service Auburn amassed a record of 75-27 with the SEC championship in 2004.

A grateful nation also asked her to fly in the 2002 Olympics.

After Nova and Spirit took over the pre-game flights, Tiger kept touring and teaching as part of her role at the Southeast Raptor Center.

She helped educate audiences throughout the region. Her likeness remains a fund raiser. Believed to be one of the oldest golden eagles in captivity, Auburn announced today that she has died at 34.

War Eagle! Fly down the field! Ever to conquer, never to yield!

(A brief version of this post appeared at The War Eagle Reader.)

adventures / family / I do not know what is happening. / links / running / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
4
Jun 14

A river runs through me

Yesterday I learned a bit about your basic fly fishing cast. I grew up fishing for bass and bream and catfish so this is all new to me. My father-in-law is an old pro, though. So I got the motion down in a yard yesterday. This evening we stood in a chilly stretch of river and threw little tiny bits of plastic and hair at hungry fish.

Here I am, showing off how good a pair of borrowed waders can look:

Here’s Bob, showing us where all the good fish are:

The Yankee got one. Her dad got one. I had one on the line early, but I couldn’t get him in. I spent most of the time just making the fish hungry for the guy a little farther down stream, who was catching everything in site. Fish from other rivers where getting in to this water for the pleasure of being on that guy’s hook.

Things to read … because reading is always worth a nibble.

Mastering the Internet of everything:

The IoE is about the intersection of people, processes, data, and things. Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is a framework for making sense of data, information, and knowledge flows. Processes, data, and things are relatively easy to control, but people are complex adaptive systems in their own right. How can people be part of the IoE but not be overly controlled by the other three dimensions? What new skills will be needed to master the internet of everything?

Much of PKM is about finding balance. This will be even more important with the IoE. In seeking knowledge sources, we have to balance aggregation, or getting as much information as possible, with filtering, or ensuring that we have more signal than noise. What happens when we add processes and things to all these data sources? Will it make things easier, or perhaps less visible? Our networks of people may help, as long as they are diverse enough, as we will be ever decreasingly able to keep track of [the internet of] everything.

We will have to get skilled at constantly lumping data and things together, then filtering and categorizing the changing landscape. We will have to become adept at breathing information in and out, able to only make sense of a small portion at a time. Our reliance on other people for sense-making will increase.

Will algorithms do that for you? There are only more sophisticated questions coming as we swap paradigms.

How Not to Pay the Price for Free Wi-Fi:

Part of globe-trotting nowadays is flitting from one free Wi-Fi network to the next. From hotel lobby to coffee shop to subway platform to park, each time we join a public network we put our personal information and privacy at risk. Yet few travelers are concerned enough to turn down free Wi-Fi. Rather, many of us hastily give away an email address in exchange for 15 minutes of free airport Internet access.

So how to feed your addiction while also safeguarding your passwords and privacy?

Ever wonder how some historic football team would fare against their modern counterparts? Check out this infographic on player size and you’ll see, they’d be mauled.

Two media prospectuses:

The Pricewaterhouse Cooper Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2014-2018

Ericsson predicts tenfold increase in mobile data traffic in five years

Ran three miles today. My mother-in-law, who is a thoughtful and giving lady, picked us up something called the Arctic Chill Towel which … oh, let’s let this enthusiastic corporate spokesman explain it to us:

Felt pretty great around my neck on the track today and it should come in very handy this summer.

family / photo / weekend — Comments Off
11
May 14

Happy Mother’s Day

I know a lot of great ladies. And I know many wonderful women who were mothers and, to me, strong maternal influences. I wouldn’t be the guy I am without any of them — grandmothers and family friends and my friends’ mothers. I should probably apologize to most all of them for wherever I come up short. Despite the limitations of who they were working with, they managed to do things big and small to help raise me a bit here and there.

My mom, of course, remains the best of them all:

Happy Mother’s Day to all of them, and to all of the many wonderful mothers who try so hard to turn us into upstanding people. Some of the time we listen. Some of the time it sticks. Later, a lot more of it comes back to us. That’s when we figure out how lucky we are.