iPhone « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

iPhone

Friday is Pie Day

Football

Are you ready for football? This is week two of the high school season. Drove by this one this evening as the team was warming up. I’ll try to get to a high school game this fall, the school I covered many years ago is doing very well, but we are especially excited about college football. That, of course, begins tomorrow.

Reading and class prep today. And resting. Strained my back at the gym this morning. Did squats and everything was fine. Did what I think of as the jail break exercise — the move started years ago by some anonymous person is slowly digging through the corner of the cinderblock wall — and everything was fine. Did a curl and dropped down a weight. Did another curl and my back tightened up. Wisely, I put the weight down.

A comfy chair and a heating pad this evening have helped. I’m fine, just moving a little gingerly. Tomorrow I’ll be good as new.

Pie Day tonight at Mama Q’s. We had the chicken tonight, which was delicious. The dutch apple pie, we decided is a consistent winner. Give them a visit.

We checked out the soccer game tonight. The fans got a great show.

At the AU soccer game

(I downloaded a pseudo tilt shift application for my iPhone — two of them, actually, but I think one is a bust — and I’m playing around with it a bit. Now I have to figure out which subjects look best in the tilt shift style. My apologies in advance.)

Florida State was controlling things with a disciplined effort on the ground. They snuck in a goal in the 28th minute and Auburn struggled against the fifth ranked Seminoles through the middle portion of the game.

In the 73rd minute Auburn’s Lydia Townsend found a glaring hole in the center of the FSU defense. She chipped in the ball over the goalkeeper on a breakaway.

Tigers celebrate

Florida State scored on a header in the 83rd minute and Auburn answered with a goal in the 87th minute to force overtime. In college they play two sudden death periods of 10 minutes each. After that you just settle for a draw. With two minutes remaining in the second overtime, so in the 107th minute, Katy Frierson picked up a loose ball outside the 18 off of a corner kick and struck the ball home.

Here’s Frierson earlier in the game:

Frierson over the ball

And here the Tigers celebrate the game winning goal:

Tigers celebrate

They are celebrating Auburn’s first win over the Seminoles since 1995 and the first win over a top-five team since 2004.

I’ll have more pictures in the photo gallery early next week.

Which leaves us with the last installment of the evening, YouTube Cover Theater, where we turn the place over to people pouring their talents and odes and ambitions or fears out there for our consumption. Tonight’s featured coveree is Duncan Sheik. We’ll start out with an incredible rendition of She Runs Away:

And now, for your listening pleasure, we have a nice run at That Says It All:

Sheik, apparently, has written a musical. Here’s one of his fans’ playing his favorite tune:

And, finally, we’ll hear from the original artist himself as Duncan Sheik covers … Radiohead?

Who doesn’t enjoy a good cover?

Who doesn’t enjoy football? Are you ready? Tomorrow Auburn has Arkansas State. Look for us. We’ll be the ones in blue.

Alabama / football / iPhone / journalism / photo / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
2
Sep 10

There’s a football in the air

The last few days have been … mildish. Given the recent weather the upper 80s were delightful. Over the weekend we actually enjoyed a day of weather that, in comparison, seemed almost cool. And, yes, Deep South, September. I understand. We have this conversation often, The Yankee and I. These are perfectly natural temperatures here, I remind her.

Doesn’t make you sweat less.

But, today, we returned to a heat index of 97 degrees at one point. I like summer, but there comes a point in September when it just begins to feel cruel. We’ll reach that point in a week or two, the point of Rubbing It In. The point of Oh, Really? The point of biology where the body says “You know, there’s no more sweat to be had.”

And suddenly a subarctic lifestyle doesn’t seem like a bad idea. That’s when you walk into a restaurant’s cooler and realize “A little more summer might not be so bad.”

Spent the morning researching media effects. Had a meeting with one of my committee members to start discussing my comprehensive exams. He’s such a cool guy. Very kind and energetic and incredibly intelligent.

So naturally we talked about NASCAR and iPhone applications.

At Samford I had a meeting with the new editor. She’s getting ready to run her first issue of the newspaper next week. The online editor joined us to hammer out a few policies for the new year.

We turned it into a teleconference, which turned into a site re-design project in the next few weeks. And from that conversation a lot of exciting things will happen. It was an enthusiastic afternoon full of a great deal of promise. We’re looking forward to new partnerships, bringing in more news outlets to the site, breaking more news on the web, adding more sports and more.

It’ll be a good year.

Traffic? Not so great. Eight miles of construction to get through, all of it behind this guy:

Not speeding

Soon after I passed the buses carrying the Florida Atlantic football team. (Later: FAU blocked a UAB field goal attempt on the final play to win, 32-31.)

I also saw this guy:

Tailgaters

Temperatures or not, that’s the first sign of fall. Football is here!

In fact, there are five games on my television tonight, so if you’ll excuse me …

Auburn / iPhone / Monday / photo / Samford / video — Comments Off
30
Aug 10

The corn is not raw; it is mildly cooked

I’m going to wonder this for years — perhaps long after the chore is no longer mine, perhaps long after I’m in a different place in life entirely — but how does the organizing of a one day workshop take up so much time? My task these last few days, and for the next several days, will be to call teachers.

Do you know when the best time to catch teachers at work is? During the day.

Do you happen to also know what they typical spend their day doing?

Aren’t you surprised some office assistant somewhere in America hasn’t gone crazy and hacked up phone lines? After all, this is only the 6,428th time it has been said this school year, “She’s in class!”

So that was the morning. Emails and phone calls and searching for Email addresses and the proper person for whom to leave a message.

The afternoon I spent putting the final polish on the syllabus I’ll hand out tomorrow. I’m teaching an editing class this term. I’m giving spelling tests, among other things.

I don’t remember how this was received when I was in a similar class way back then, but I’m sure we thought the idea of a spelling test was a novel idea. And then we took those tests, carefully calculated to find the most challenging words in English or other languages that might one day be used by an American journalist. Having come full circle I’ve included some of those words on my list.

Tomorrow, on the first day of the class, I might also give a quiz. Set the tone. Or, as the hip kids say “Be THAT professor.”

I’m going to show a video, though, so I can also be THAT professor. And I’ll talk about typos in banners and semi-permanent paintings and … well, there is always this example if you really need one:

It was supposed to say “hopefuls,” but “when we’re typing and the computers freeze, sometimes it takes so long to unfreeze that we completely forget what we were trying to do when it froze,” explains the editor.

I’ve no doubt that was simply a horrible mistake. The Alligator is a fine paper. And the explanation strikes me as perfectly reasonable. The excuse could use a little more punching up. “We forget” might not satisfy the aggrieved parties.

Grilling

We grilled out tonight and I reminded myself of a painful less. When lighting fire to the grill, be careful you don’t catch an ember in your eye.

I’d never forgotten that one, actually, it is always good to say out loud, however.

What I did forget was the exact inventory of what was going on the grill. Two pork chops, I thought, I can be economical with the briquettes. But I’d forgotten the corn until The Yankee came home and reminded me that I’d requested roasted corn. So there was an attempt to cook everything over the small mass of charcoal. That proved unsatisfactory. So I spread a few more of the magical black rocks that give fire on the other side of the grill. And now I have a flame discrepancy. So I let it burn and then covered the grill thinking I’d starve the fire. Which I did, right out.

So now nothing was grilling at the proper pace and, really, this is the worst part of my day. Life is so good.

The pork chops were good. The Yankee has this nice seasoning that we must now order online. Stores stopped stocking it, so messengers from Jakarta now deliver it to our door. It goes great with pork and is the sort of thing that makes you think it should stand well on any dish. But, then, if you put it on fish the salmon would stand up and say “Keep it on the swine, friend.”

The corn was a little under-done, but 45 extra seconds on a grill for a fresh ear of corn is not a catastrophe.

Last thing for the night is a fun new iPhone app I discovered. Storyrobe is a free app that let’s you make slideshows (as mp4s) from your photos. You record narration, control when the image flips and can share your project via Email or YouTube.

The finished product is a bit small, but this could be a useful app for a journalist on the go, or to share events with friends and family. Or even storyboarding jokes. We’ve been doing that tonight too. You’d have a hard time finding something free that can make you laugh for as long as this has done.

You have to know all of the ways you can use the tools you download. Knowing the silly ways are important, too.

adventures / Friday / friends / iPhone / photo / Pie Day — Comments Off
27
Aug 10

Friday is Pie Day

If you need the ultimate time wasting device for your iPhone — and if there is one thing iPhone users need, it is something on which to waste their time — I suggest Draw. Hey, it is an app that let’s you draw with your fingers. There are at least three dozen of these and they might all have the same nice Email or Twitter feature. I picked this one, though, because of that. And, also Kelly is using it.

“(A) picture is worth a thousand words, but you only get 140 characters if you type. I’m clearly coming out ahead!”

You can’t argue with logic like that. Of course, Kelly is an artist. Also, she is drawing on an iPad. I am not artistically inclined and my digital canvas is a bit smaller.

You need one other thing for this time wasting activity: someone to whom you can send your brilliant masterpieces. (It isn’t spam if they laugh out loud.) By brilliant masterpieces I mean stick figures. And by stick figures I mean drawing a poorly envisioned thing and then labeling it with an error and chicken scratch so the viewer can understand that is a car, or a dinosaur, or a comb.

For example:

sliced bread

So pick your person carefully. They need patience and laughter and they have to have the personality to download the app themselves and send you some of their own artwork.

All evening I’ve been sending pictures to Brian, And then I’ll send a picture to The Yankee. I am emailing this to her, having composed a piece of art on my phone, emailed it through my wireless network — so into the other room, through the router, down the cable line, out to the Internet Email Headquarters (conveniently located only three-quarters of a mile from my home) where it is then beamed to a cell phone tower, possibly outer space, back to another tower, and ultimately down the cable line, over the wireless network and into her phone.

She is sitting next to me on the sofa.

These are truly amazing times in which we live.

Anyway. Draw. It is wonderful. And silly, but that’s what Friday evenings are for.

Friday is also Pie Day, of course. We’re on week three of the new Pie Day experiment. We’ve tried Mike and Ed’s, which is owned by neither Mike nor Ed. They had pie, but the barbecue wasn’t of the style we prefer. We’ve tried Chuck’s, which is housed in an old and infamous Dairy Queen. They had good barbecue, but no pie.

So tonight, we visited MaMa Q’s:

Mama Q's

Someone will correct me, but I believe this is the former home of Chuck’s, or a former barbecue place of the same name. Either way, the place is nearly empty, but it had turned into a messy evening. The reviews were very promising. Today was rib day — we’ll have to set them straight on that — and you could have a Southern style dry rub or the house special, the Chamorro style.

We got one of each, just to sample them both. And both were very good. The Chamorro is probably more of an acquired taste, as it features a soy, sugar, ginger, vinegar combination of things. The dry rub isn’t the best I’ve ever had, but I’ve had the best dry rubbed ribs in the world. MaMa Q’s can can fall on the short list with no problem.

We actually met MaMa Q. Mrs. Quitugua was working the counter. Her husband, who said he was not a big fan of sweets, recommended the pie. We tried the dutch apple:

Pie

They buy their veggies fresh from the farmer’s market. So they run out of some things, but fresher is always better. And while they do not have a romantic Punt Bama Punt corner we camped out under an old Butter Bread ad, near the television. We felt good about our ribs while watching some guy pound down wings on a show called Man versus Food.

And the pie was delicious. So MaMa Q’s made the cut into the second round, I think. Meanwhile, the Pie Day adventure will continue next week.

Happy weekend!

Alabama / iPhone / Samford / Thursday / video — Comments Off
26
Aug 10

A loooongish Thursday

Occasionally, when you wake up before the sun, you want to spend all day in sunglasses.

When you spend the early morning hours trying to figure out a particularly tricky issue that involves mathematics and then still wake up before the sun … well, it is best to reach for the welder’s eye guard.

Spent the morning discussing experimental designs to research media effects in class. The guy next to me brought strawberries. And because I had forsaken breakfast they smelled even 16 percent better than normal. He then returned to his coffee mug. And then he produced a bottle of water. Who knows what else was in his bag.

The class is a good one though. Our professor is internationally renowned, a very kind and engaging man. He has a deep stash of jokes and a very personable way about his seminar class. I suspect it will become an incredibly useful class by the time it is finished.

He’s also on my dissertation committee, so I’m doubly lucky.

After class I found my dissertation chair, another prolific and well respected researcher. We have nice conversations and he always has a handful of good ideas. We’re getting close to answering all the biggest questions and solving the largest fundamental problems with my dissertation idea. Ultimately it is making the whole thing a little bit easier, I think.

Had a meeting with my boss at Samford. We’re co-teaching a class together this semester. Should be a good class, now that the prep has been formalized. I will teach a bit about Strunk & White. Just doing my part to pass along the idea of omitting needless words.

I also met with the editor of the paper, who will hopefully omit many needless words, and the ad manager, who will hopefully add many paid words. It is the circle of news.

That’s about it for the day. Oh, and one other video. Did you know that Calera is, apparently, the fastest growing city in the state? The Oracle at Wikipedia says their population has tripled since the 2000 census. Here is a little snippet of town:

This time next week we’ll be visiting a new section on the site. I’m very excited for it. This time tomorrow we’ll be celebrating Pie Day. I’m always very excited about that as well.