I got to hug my lovely bride today, and it was the most wonderful feeling in the world.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As is now apparently our way, we find things to do online and then convince each other to do them. That’s how we started doing triathlons and that’s why we did a half ironman relay recently and that’s why we ran a 10K today.
There’s a 5K we did on campus a month or two ago with a friend. She said she liked it. The Yankee liked it. So I looked around for other races, being wary of how far I’m wiling to drive a car to run a distance I can do in my neighborhood. There it was, the Callaway Gardens Twilight 10K, held just over the border into Georgia.
The premise is you get to run around the pretty place and see the Fantasy In Lights Christmas show before it is open to the public. Twilight is a misnomer, but who cares. So we signed up, our friend bailed out because “Brrr it is cold and I’m from New Jersey.” So it was just the two of us, which was fine.
We made our way to Callaway after lunch today — and by after lunch I mean I ate in the car.
We got there just in time. Here’s the scene at the race start:
And here we are, probably less than a mile in, looking strong and having a nice time:
We’re not winning anything, this is just an excuse to exercise some new, pretty place. And, also, to have roadside support like this guy:
We ran through a lot of interesting light decorations that I’m sure pop nicely in the dark. There were speakers blaring thing from the trees — and of course the 12 Days of Christmas section was the one that wouldn’t end. We ran under giant decorations like snowflakes and wreaths and barns and this Santa’s Workshop kind of thing:
And then after six miles you found yourself trotting up the last little hill, turning right and running with Robin Lake on your left and the finish line ahead of you. We pronounced the course is relatively flat and fast. I’d like to really run it and see how slow I am. Ren did really well. It was her first 10K, ever, and she was very pleased with her performance and her time, as she should be. After the run:
It was windy and a little chilly, Somewhere between there and the finish line I got a full, complete, laughing, joyful hug of pride and pleasure and accomplishment. I could write a lot more about that, what that means or what it felt like, but the most important part is this: Don’t ever let go of those too early.
I’m writing this at the end of a long day, in the middle of a short week, which feels like a long week. But I have a reasonable lecture prepared for tomorrow. The news crew has finished their paper for tomorrow’s edition. I’ve worked on running projects and I ran from working projects.
Wait. That’s not right. I worked on ongoing projects. Later, I went for a run. It was not a fun run. I’ve had one or two of those (I do not know what is happening) but this one wasn’t one of them.
I enjoyed the end of a lovely sunset, however:
And because I was looking that direction I saw this sign … I wonder how many people honked.
On the night of Oct. 15, 1854, the young college’s only building – which housed students, classrooms, laboratories, equipment, books – was destroyed by fire. All the young college’s property was lost, and one student died as a result of injuries sustained in the fire. Located at the time in Marion, Alabama, the college was not quite 13 years old and could have been devastated by the fire.
But, it was a story of heroism during the fire that has carried forward in the university’s history and folklore. Harry, the college janitor and a slave belonging to President Henry Talbird, was among the first to awaken after the fire was discovered. According to accounts of the tragic night, when told to escape while he could, Harry replied, “Not till I wake up the boys.”
He went door to door through the building on his “errand of mercy,” according to reports of the time. When he reached the last room on the upper floor, he was faced with flames where he could not reach the stairs. He jumped from the hall window and was fatally injured.
You notice there’s first a premium cable station and a broadcast going the same way. The dominos are at the very least moving. I can’t decide if this puts ABC’s ESPN properties in the sweet spot or puts them behind the eight ball. I’m leaning toward the side that suggests that gives ESPN all the power in the remaining deals.
White House journalists are creating an alternative system for distributing their media “pool” reports in response to the Obama administration’s involvement in approving and disapproving certain content in official reports.
[…]
Reporters have complained that the Obama White House exploits its role as distributor to demand changes in pool reports and that the press office has delayed or refused to distribute some reports until they are amended to officials’ satisfaction.
But now, some journalists are sharing their White House reporting using Google Groups — the digital service that allows registered users to receive and send information within a closed circle. In an early test of the supplemental system, journalists shared pool information about President Obama’s trip to Chicago this month. The system has been used for “advisories,” such as where the pool is assembling, when another pool report will be issued or whether a correction is in the works.
Apple was supposed to save publishers, but these days, it seems like publishers need to be saved from Apple.
Three years ago, Apple introduced Newsstand, a feature that gave iOS users a dedicated home for their digital magazines and newspapers. The app, designed to look like an actual physical newsstand, was good news, too, for publishers, which finally had a way to better stand out from other non-magazine apps.
But three years later, publishers say that Newsstand is holding them back and, in some cases, actively hurting them.
Three years ago, keen observers saw that coming.
This defies excerpting, but it is well said if you haven’t compiled this general sentiment in the last 10 years ago, The bad news about the bad news
After one of her peers at Montevallo Elementary died of cancer over the summer, first-grader Kayla SanRoman remembers the sight of the many yellow ribbons hanging in the school’s hallways.
At just 6 years old, Kayla knew she wanted to help somehow.
On a piece of white paper, she created a flyer that included a picture she drew of a stick figure with a frown and the words, “Donate muneye for cancer. We hope you can donate to childes hoseital.”
[…]
Kayla has raised $105 as of Wednesday in an effort to get as much as she can by the end of the month to help children with cancer at Children’s of Alabama in Birmingham.
“I’m trying to get a lot of money so I can donate there so they can probably maybe help them,” Kayla said.
The kids are better than alright, no?
Finally, I shot this today. Just put my photo in the windowsill and waited for something to happen. Nothing happened:
This was on the dessert stand in the cafeteria at lunch:
I did not eat any of them, nor did I even try to use my standard rationale: I ran five miles this morning. I can eat a cake. I think it was something about the message. Why does one eat love? How does one eat faith? You could go the metaphorical route, aim for the biblical teaching or, like me, just be a little weirded out by pink icing.
If you stare at those for a second you realize someone wrote all of those out by hand. That’s another thing. How do you expect me to eat that? You wrote faith on a cake square and now I devour it in two bites?
And what of the hope? 1 Corinthians is hardly complete without it.
Man, this is a great diet plan I’ve discovered, huh?
So, yeah, five miles. I can do six miles, no problem. (I do not know what is happening … ) I once knocked out eight miles around the neighborhood, with a fair bit of walking in it. But, still, eight miles. Here’s the problem: I need something to ward off the boredom. Around mile six I’m just ready to move on. Any tips?
Things to read … because you can always find helpful tips if you read enough.
I’m a big fan of making sure students never ask a rhetorical question in their copy. There are times it works. Too often, though, it leads to things like this non sequitur, “Are you a Red Bull Drinker? Do you want to be?” Red Bull Settlement: How to claim your piece of $13 million
Wright, who wore clothes he borrowed from Leonard, pleaded with the court to spare his son, who is facing the death penalty for fatally shooting three people and wounding three others during a party at the former University Heights apartment complex on June 9, 2012.
The dad is in and out of prison, he tells the judge and jury he was never really in his son’s life. He’s actually been hauled to this hearing from his prison sentence. And he’s had to borrow his son’s clothes. The reporter told me he’d noticed that the tie was familiar. He’d seen the defendant, and now his father, wear it. That’s the sort of reporting you can’t get over the phone or in a rewrite. Message: Go to the place you’re writing about.
We need to reshape how markets and financial stories are told to better reflect how they are consumed. What do I mean by that? Like most news sites, MarketWatch still leans too heavily on the 750-word story — a legacy of print newspapers that has outlived its usefulness. We want to go shorter – and longer.
The majority of our stories will soon be under 400 words — breaking everything down into short bursts of news and insight that cut straight to what is most important to readers, without all the empty calories and filler journalists love to stuff in the sausage . We will also do longer, deep dives on important stories that warrant such treatment. This is the way the digital news is going: tall and venti, no more grande.
Now that mobile traffic is at or near 50% at many newspapers, editors and publishers need to put ever more of their thinking – and resources – into optimizing products, content and advertising for not only smartphones and tablets but also for such emerging devices as smart watches, smart televisions and whatever smart stuff comes next. As discussed below, mobile publishing is as distinct from web publishing as web publishing is from web printing.
And it is happening fast, too, as expected. (For a few years now I’ve noted that the mobile move was one thing that was outpacing the web’s legendary rapid adaptability.)
Time to get better. Got in a nice little run this morning, because, I’d decided, the offseason was over. I hadn’t done anything in a week, hadn’t run in 10 days, so a 5K seemed a good place to start. The offseason was over. Let the sweating and straining and suffering and self-improvement begin.
Meanwhile, the Ironman world championships are about to take place in Hawai’i, which means there are way to many profiles of struggle and triumph and achievement and sheer cardiovascular stubbornness floating around. I might share one or two. Here’s a man more than twice my age who’s probably six or eight times in better shape: No Such Thing as “Aging Up”:
Scott had chest pain during a bike ride a decade ago, and did what any triathlete would do. He rode his bike to his doctor’s office. After an examination, his suspicions of cardiac disease confirmed, the doctor wanted Scott to head to the hospital for a cardiac cath. Scott agreed and started to put his helmet back on to ride his bike to the hospital. The doctor would have none of it and Scott was transported in the usual fashion. After a stent placement and recovery, he went on to set the Kona age group records for the next age group (75-79) as well.
Now, Scott, 83, is a 14-time IRONMAN World Championship finisher and course record holder in three age groups.
A multiple of six or eight might not be enough, actually.
Things to read … because I’m not a 14-time Ironman.
I assume that this is one of those things that gives some measure of completion to the people who were directly touched. If that really happens or not, I don’t know. This must surely be better than learning of the time they had to delay a hearing because they left this guy at the jail. Or the day we learned that he was caught up in some story about having sex with a corrections officer. Or when he was on the run. I remember we sat at home the night the police sat for hours outside a residential home in Montgomery, thinking they had the guy cornered in an attic. He was nowhere near there.
Newspaper night tonight. This is a feisty bunch. They are funny and they know their stuff. And they get done early. We’ve had staffs that worked way into the wee hours of the morning, into a time when the hours were distressingly no longer wee. This crowd is done by midnight, usually. And their work is pretty good, too. It makes the critiques, which we do on Wednesdays, fun. But it also makes it hard to find things to pick on them about.
It is a nice problem to have. Now I get to start challenging them to do bigger things. Time to get better.
One of my favorite memories of journalism classes as an undergrad was watching the story ideas form. I wasn’t a natural. I think some people are, and others can be taught. Some people have the ideas spring forth, but others have to work on it. Until I learned to come up with a reliable story idea process, I was enthralled by listening to others just riff off ideas.
That’s not right. I’m still impressed listening to really talented, curious, passionate people spit out story ideas.
So this is, perhaps, my favorite part of the semester. We’ve been discussing this in class. Today I broke them all up into groups and requested, nay, demanded story ideas. And once we got just around the corner from the traditional campus issues of parking and tuition, they had some good ones.
Next I’m going to make them put them into practice.
One of the ideas was the new cafeteria vendors. Things have changed. Some people find the food tastier. Others have pointed out there is an awful lot more pasta. To me, the food varies from decent to bland, with fewer options — once you remove the bushels of pasta. And there seems to be more chaos in the food serving area.
Also, this:
Surely we can do better than that.
I swam again today, about three-quarters of a mile, or 1,300 yards. My flip turns, new yesterday, looked basically the same today. Off-kilter, untargeted and more power than grace. But, hey, it seems to get me back down the lane a bit faster.
Also they are slow. And I forget to look for my knees, which probably explains a lot of the above. But, on those flip turns when I go down more than out I must also come up, which, I think, has the look a whale breach. That amuses me.
I hope no one else is looking.
This evening there were Crimson meetings, where we discussed the story they had on the changes in the cafeteria. It is a popular topic. Today’s was the first issue of the year, and in their critiques I got to brag on them a great deal. The paper looks pretty great for a first effort. There are some things they’ll work on, but there are always things to work on. I’m very pleased, I told them, about where they are starting. They have great potential for the year ahead — and so now I will challenge them.
Anyway, we did not discuss the sign above, but the pasta did come up.
The vendor, Sodexo, says they surveyed students on the campus where they have contracts and found that students wanted more of the stuff, so we have tons of carbs. There’s a lot of pasta in the cafeteria.
Things to read … which is as easy to boil up as spaghetti.
Man, I need a good drone. This was shot by my friend and a Samford grad, soaring high above campus. (He appears several times as the drone does flybys.) It is pretty awesome:
The couple have seen the doctor several times since the incident, and he always told the doctor how much he appreciated what he did, Andrea said.
“God and Dr. Hyrnkiw gave us an extra six months,” said Andrea Robinson. “And I can see why God gave me those extra six months.”
Did you watch anything from the Apple event? Interested in the mobile payments that were discussed. It is a game changer, as Alan Mutter explained years ago … Get ready for mobile payments
At a financial conference on Wednesday in New York, the CFO provided some hints about the feature roadmap that new head of product Daniel Graf — who came to Twitter from Google in April — has in mind for the service, a list that includes better search and a move into group chat. But he also suggested that the traditional reverse-chronological user stream could become a thing of the past, as the company tries to improve its relevance.
[…]
The most recent example of how stark the differences can be between a filtered feed and an unfiltered one was the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. and how that showed up so dramatically on Twitter but was barely present for most users of Facebook. As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted, that kind of filtering has social consequences — and journalism professor Emily Bell pointed out that doing this makes Facebook and Twitter into information gatekeepers in much the same way newspapers used to be.
The impetus for Twitter to filter is obvious: the service needs to show growth in both number of users and engagement in order to satisfy investors, and finding relevant content as a new user can be a challenge, which is why the company recently updated its so-called “on-boarding” process.
I’d hope there would be a classic version. I count myself in the group of users who have spent a fair amount of time developing a well-curated Twitter stream, and now they’ll turn it into Facebook. And, you’ll see in other stories, let you buy stuff directly from your feed. The ultimate impulse purchase!
The only thing I’d want would be to purchase the original Twitter format, chronological and curated by humans, me.
But that’s a complaint for a different day. Today I can only complain about my flip turns. And the pasta.
