iPhone « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

iPhone

iPhone / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
25
Aug 10

Got your days confused?

I do, apparently, but as personal problems go it is mild and worth working through. There could be so many more. Your starter may not start, for example. Worse still, your alternator may not alternate.

Happily all of the various mechanical parts of my lovely automobile are doing just what they are supposed to do — taking the action, adding the -ER at the end to give it a name and then safely transporting me from A to B. I have my health. I have many other wonderful things we sometimes ask overlook. In that context, my confusion over whether it is the 25, the 26 or the twenty-thirtheighth is not the biggest problem in the world.

Oh, you didn’t even notice, but I’d mistakenly dated the blog. You didn’t notice, did you? Oh, good. If you had I would go out back and make a flogging spectacle of self-flagellation. So, a thousand humble apologies.

Beyond maintaining a straight gig line I don’t recall having any sort of obsession of minute detail before I built my first web page. I blame Tim Berners-Lee and the summer of 1996.

Anyway. Hit the phones today, in a terribly exacting way. Tis the season to call all of the high schools in the region and remind them about the upcoming journalism workshop for high school students at Samford. It is a tricky thing, catching teachers on the job. Often they are in class, as you might expect.

Some of them have voicemail. For others you must simply leave a message the old-fashioned way, with an office aide, and hope it gets through. Those I’ll be calling again next week.

The workshop, though, is a strong one. We’ll have several hundred students for a day of magazine, newspaper, yearbook and broadcast sessions. The high school students get to meet our faculty, visit our beautiful campus and hear from industry leaders. They get war stories, advice, the chance to get a little insight on what kind of work they could do one day and so on. It is a fine workshop, I’m glad I’ve had the chance to work on it the last two years.

Somehow, during the day of calling, I managed to get the operator. That’s not right. I landed in the operator’s voicemail. This would surprise most people, as we still think of the operator as a bank of individuals with a nasal voice sitting at a giant console full of patch cords. Operators have voicemail?

And what would the function of that be, anyway? I needed your assistance with a particularly tricky area code, and also, was feeling a bit lonely and wanted to chat. But you’re not there. So … I guess I’ll just Google it. Thanks, though.

So I left a message in a nasal tone, asking if they could ring me back and put me in touch with someone in Peoria.

I don’t know anyone in Peoria, but I’ve always been anxious to learn how a great many things played there. This would seem to be the time to find out.

I’m still waiting for the operator to return that call.

Made jambalaya for dinner. We’d picked up fresh sausage at the meat lab recently and I’d mentioned it to The Yankee. She thought that might be a good idea. For jambalaya, though, you need musical accompaniment. I considered Pandora, but I guard my minutes there carefully now. To the App Store!

You want zydeco? There is no app for that.

You can, however, get a stream from the legendary WWOZ. (Rush right now to grab yourself a wonderful community-supported radio experience.) It was jazz night, and that works for sausage and Cajun concoctions. Ultimately I think the Italian seasonings in the sausage muted the festivities in the jambalaya, but you live and learn.

I listened to jazz, from New Orleans, almost 400 miles away in my kitchen tonight over my phone, via my wireless network. This modern world, and the Internet will never cease to impress me. I credit Berners-Lee for that, too.

Alabama / Auburn / iPhone / Monday / video — Comments Off
16
Aug 10

Anyone for a drive?

Monday. As I have said here before, but only rarely, I seldom have the typical Monday experience. Came fairly close today, the details of which aren’t especially riveting.

I shot a video.

I shot a video on my phone. I edited the video on my phone. I edited video with my fingertips.

Those sentences were never uttered in the 20th Century.

So it was a Monday. Even still, the day ended with dinner in a mansion. Life is pretty great.

books / friends / iPhone / links / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
11
Aug 10

From the library

I am not a father. Nor will I be one at any time in the near future. But this is terrific:

Except for that one line. They just left it out there like they knew you’d hate it. They knew they should have written something else, but they couldn’t make it work.

We received flowers today from Kelly (she’s the best, you should pick up a Kelly for yourself). They are beautiful hydrangeas, which have a lot of rules.

They were dropped off by the UPS lady, who probably spends exactly .16 seconds thinking about what is in each box she’s delivering. She left it at the door, rang the bell and was back to her truck before I managed to unlock the thing.

UPS drivers wear their keys on their thumbs so they don’t have to waste time fishing them out of their pocket. You have to think, for an agency that concerned with the seconds on the margins, that they are investing in teleportation technology. Sure, you could fly it, but why would you do that when you can beam it? As appealing as that sounds, I hope it is a generation or two in the future. My step-father is a UPS pilot. He might have hauled those flowers somewhere along the way for all we know.

Just a day in the house. Added apps to the iPhone. You’re intrigued, I know. I added two voice recorders, QuickVoice and BlueFiRe, because you never know when a soundbite will break out. I picked these two because any outfit confident enough to ignore the rules of grammar and capitalization must produce a good product. And also because they are free.

One day soon I’ll make a great point of all of this to the students. The things you can produce, from your phone, for free.

BlueFiRe, if you are interested, offers you a realtime waveform while you record, which is pretty fancy. I have two computers where I can do this. I have a voice recorder, a portable studio and a mixing board that gives me levels, but this is taking place in my phone.

When you spend a lot of time at home you get an interesting feel for the rhythms of the place — the heat, the sun, the plants or people or animals or shadows, whatever you’ve got — that go on without you. Even more interesting is to see how these rhythms are established in a new place.

The cat, for example.

She’s been especially vocal lately. Very demanding. I’ve begun to wonder who has fallen down the well. And I wonder if she is ever frustrated by our lack of understanding, or our apparent lack of cat vocabulary. We get frustrated when she’s doing this at 3 a.m.

Pardon me for a moment.

I just noticed that the books in the Keeping Library are out of order. I somehow have a book on FDR between a book on Reagan and Clinton. This is a shelf based on chronological organization and, thus, this error must not be allowed to stand. Sadly, the books had existed in this state for more than a week. Meanwhile, the DVDs remain unorganized.

Started scanning things up this evening. I have a book to show you, starting later this week, and a project to finish tomorrow.

Until then, may there be no weeds in your fescue.

adventures / Auburn / books / iPhone / recipes / site / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
10
Aug 10

Enter the band

Visited the local college bookstores today so The Yankee could make sure her texts were on the shelves. Found seven at one store, found four at the second store and met the very nice manager. Found a few at the third store. At the university bookstore we found a big stash. They are all expensive, but textbooks always have been.

I pointed out the prices. It always aggravated me when a professor was shocked to hear how much the text he or she demanded was costing the students. It is a simple enough thing, stop by the store and empathize, for just a minute. So that’s what I do.

The bookstores here let students rent books for the term. Oh you can still buy a $90 text and sell it back for $12. You can rent it for half that price and return it at the end of the term. Wish we’d had that option during undergrad.

My favorite book, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style has stayed the same low price these last 15 years. I appreciate that.

On the way back to the car we listened to the marching band. Is it football season yet? Apparently we’ll have a tribute to Frank Sinatra this year. They sound good, but the director insists you’ll hear more trumpet in this number when they are on the field.

I’m not faux-marching, I promise. Apparently I’ll need to work on hand steadying techniques before pulling out the iPhone. After this take they had a break and were then going to spend 45 minutes on Luck Be a Lady Tonight.

We put a lot of pictures on the walls this evening. Just a few more rooms to go on that project. We had a delicious dinner:

Delicious

Just add the veggies, shrimp, cooking wine, butter, salt and pepper to taste, stir over a respectable heat and serve.

We stood outside and watched the first of the Perseids (Thursday night is the big show), hung out with Jupiter to the east and tried to pick out unfamiliar constellations thanks to my new app, Planets. (That’s a great, free download.)

We had a great day. How was yours?

On the site: New, artsyish banners across the top and bottom of the blog. The blur across the top is the cardinal I vainly chased this afternoon. The one along the bottom is the yard in late evening repose. This is an excellent opportunity, then, to remind about the new banners page, meant more for me than for you, but nevertheless, see ’em again. Also, there’s a new picture on the home page.

And someone stop me: I’m thinking of redesign ideas.

Auburn / iPhone / memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
3
Aug 10

And now for something slightly different

We had lunch at the original Momma Goldberg’s today. You’re jealous, I can feel it from here. And I understand.

For the first time in a long time I did not hear Dave Matthews while we dined. Same slanted floors. Same newspapers covering the walls. Though, while waiting for our sandwiches I did hear two guys talking about the wall they were going to move and the expansion they were going to make.

I’m not sure how comfortable I am with that.

Momma G’s, if you are unaware, is one of those older, funky with time and dirt and graffiti places you have to experience. The food isn’t bad either. The place opened in 1976, still sits on the same choice corner lot and, despite a recent amount of franchise expansion, has remained perfect in its timelessness. It was the first place I ever ate, here, some now 15 years ago. Little has changed in that time.

C&A 4ever Aug. 1987

They’d still recognize it. You wonder if they made it to 4ever. They could be celebrating the 23rd anniversary of this little scrawl on the wall any day now. Maybe they’ve brought their kids to see it. Maybe they’ve been here with their eventual partner and sheepishly sat at some table, any other table than this one. We may never know.

But if you know, let me know.

I took a picture of the sign out front:

Momma G's

And then I ran it through an iPhone app, HDRforFree that I picked up last week:

Momma G's

Makes rust and distressed wood look great, but what do you think?

While sweating in the attic once again (this will never end, I fear) the police came by to visit. The Yankee did it.

I heard a voice at the door and walked back through the mudroom to investigate. Two nice young officers had knocked to deliver Official Literature. They want us to Do Something. (Seems The Yankee got away with whatever she did. And, just to throw the police off of her trail, she made some joke about how this and that had caught up to me. The police officers weren’t terribly concerned by this.)

This was National Night Out or National Get to Know Your Neighbors or National Get Bitten By Mosquitoes Night or something.

On the homefront: We are to that stage of unpacking, I believe, where we are trying to hide all of the things we need only occasionally. The attic situation is under control, the garage storage situation has been revamped twice more — but we’ve advanced now beyond that point and are merely focusing on emptying and removing the boxes. Progress continues apace.