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The road was quiet. Everyone had gotten to where they needed to be.
It was empty enough that when the occasional car came by it seemed to do so apologetically. They knew they were intruding on the empty asphalt and how lonely it should be.
When the hum of the road is your own noise, and yours alone, that’s worth chasing. That’s the moment you ride for.
We are so very fortunate those words did not define our generation. You’ll see why at the bottom of the post.
Riding through the neighborhood the other evening I found I’d picked the neighborhood time for bicycles. Usually I see the ladies walking, or a mixture of people taking their dogs for a stroll. I often find kids out in their yards, but never anyone riding a bike.
But on this particular weekend evening I found four of them. I caught up with two at the stop sign that leads to the creek. At least one of them was even greener than I am. He was struggling with something at the intersection and his friend had turned and was waiting for him up ahead, his thigh across his crossbar.
The second pair I met soon after. The first I passed easily enough, he was just out for a ride. His partner wanted a race. And so surged up the hill after the creek. He was pedaling furiously, constantly looking over his shoulder. I pedaled furiously, clicking down through the gears and tapping out a rhythm I’ve never tried on that little hill. At the top he turned right and I turned left, but I had him. I was no good for the next few miles after that, but I would have had him.
It would be better if I didn’t get competitive about this sort of thing, as I am a bad cyclist.
But today, when I sat in my office doing office things, I thought about that hill. I thought about that little attempt at rushing up it. I thought about how my legs weren’t burning. That was a nice thought, for sitting in the office.
In class one group of students did a presentation and part of that was asking the question “Is print dead?” What followed was the best conversation of the entire semester. There were many different stances. Some said yes, some no. Others took the middle ground and wondered why we don’t simply say that print is changing. There were strong opinions. It was so great we’re turning it into an assignment.
Maybe I should have started the semester asking that question.
Things to read from my journalism blog: The interactive infographic uses a fancy ProPublica design as an example.
The increasingly useful Internet radio where I realize how many streaming apps I have on my phone, and we are teased with next month’s announcement of even more surprising smartphone penetration.
Two prisms, two news brands pulls together two stories, one on Al Jazeera English and the other on the growing Patch network. Both good reads of successfully growing (in different directions) projects.
From my evening drive:
It was the kind of day that should last forever and not change at all. Only you’d get bored of it. Sunny, breezy and 79? Again?
Maybe you’d get bored of it. Not me.
And if you don’t believe me, here:
Look at that sky, check out those clouds, ignore the guy pretending he knows how to ride a bike.
Rode 30 miles today, my first time on the bike since Tuesday. I was just beginning to convince myself that I was figuring something out about my bike or my legs or … something … earlier in the week because everything felt great. And then I got sick, and then it rained and now here we are. I’m on some precipice where three days off feels like a long time for whatever I have that passes for conditioning. I thought that today might be feel like I’d taking a slide backward.
But it felt a lot better than I thought it might. My legs were fairly strong. On the particular route I took today, one third was familiar and the rest was new. It didn’t include the most daunting hills around, but I was moving up rollers and slight hills with ease. I’d look down and realize I hadn’t even changed from my smallest gear.
Not sure what to make of that.
Baseball: Auburn beat LSU 3-2 in another game where the outcome was in doubt until the last pitch.
Here are the highlights:
That’s eighth ranked LSU. Auburn has won five in a row and is tied for the division lead in the young season. And this is a young team, picked to finished closed to last, still learning to put it all together, still stranding almost 10 runners on base per game.
The future looks bright. Maybe all of the days will be as pleasant as this one.
… but I feel like this today:
Whatever is going around, as I’ve heard no one say recently, makes me want to sprawl on a chair arm for comfort.
My favorite meme of all time has become a campus group’s poster:
That, of course, is Joseph Ducreux, who was a French portrait painter at the court of Louis XVI and after the French Revolution. He liked physiognomy, assessing one’s personality by their facial expressions, hence his unorthodox portraiture, like this self-portait and, of course, the very famous Internet joke. You can’t even find the original set anymore, so buried are they amongst everyone’s contribution.
Two students showed this video in class today during a demonstration about advertising. The gasps from the rest of the class were great. See if you can figure out where this is going:
Happy birthday to The Birmingham News, which turned 124 today. This is the June 20, 1900, front page:
So the paper was 12 years old at the time. I haven’t seen any of the first volume’s front pages.
Things to read: Ad execs bullish on digital, marketers on social: Data reveals ‘disconnect’ with agencies:
Advertising executives -– both marketers and their agency representatives -– continue to increase their optimism toward digital media options, and are beginning to swing toward it as more of a “branding” than a performance “option,” but there are some significant disconnects between the way they look at various digital media silos. While agency executives tend to be far more bullish on the overall use of digital media, marketers are much more optimistic about budgeting for social media.
The findings, which are part of new, detailed analysis coming out of Advertiser Perceptions’ Fall 2011 survey on ad executive attitudes and optimism about media, show the overall index for digital -– including online display, search and video advertising –- trending upward, but the sentiment appears to be driven primarily by agencies. That insight is interesting, because the bottom line of big agencies appears to be benefitting from their continuing shift toward a greater reliance on digital media, according to a Pivotal Research analysis released Monday (OMD, March 13).
“But there is a discrepancy in the way marketers and agencies are seeing it,” says Randy Cohen, a partner in AP — which produces an ongoing series of ad industry tracking studies under its Advertiser Intelligence Reports banner, including this one. “It’s a disconnect,” he says, adding, “But agencies tend to do what marketers want them to.”
If that’s the case, social media should be the primary beneficiary, according to Cohen, because marketer sentiment is building much more favorably toward social networks versus the rest of the digital mix.
Things to read from my Samford blog:
