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iPhone

The magic of lights and trees and things

My view in the Caf today:

Those aren’t new leaves. That’s a species of oak which stays green. Everything is still sticks and and twigs — everything except the Bradfords, at least. Some of the maples are starting to get those crisp red buds of future promises, and all of that seems a bit early, perhaps. But we’re still looking at too much brown and not enough green.

I love what is to come, that week or 10 day period where you are overwhelmed by just how verdant everything has suddenly become.

Still, the dreary sticks and twigs of winter have an appeal. You can see things that would be hidden the rest of the year. Leaving campus this evening I had a great view of the steeple on Reid Chapel. It seemed to be lit in such a way that dramatically lit the side closest to you, with the rest in shadow for effect. It was an optical illusion of course, but what a neat trick it would be. When the leaves return you won’t be able to see it from there.

At the mall:

They’ve closed this parking deck. If you walk around inside it you see they’re painting. First the columns. Perhaps they’re re-doing the ceiling as well. It is colder in the parking deck than normal, no exhaust. But it also smells a bit better. More importantly you have to park somewhere else.

Which I did, about 50 feet away. A parking deck closed and still plenty of spaces. That has to trouble the mall managers, right?

But economists say things are due to improve locally:

The center forecasts gross domestic product growth of 2.5 percent in 2012, compared to 2.2 percent in 2011. They also expect employment to increase 1.1 percent in 2012, compared to 0.8 percent last year.

Every little bit.

A guy named AUltered Ego made me this:

That’s one of the two new crosswalk warnings — because nothing says pedestrian safety like a “LOOK AT ME!” sign high above the road — on Magnolia in Auburn. AUltered was kind enough to hack the sign with his magical Photoshop skills. I will only turn the sign on when there are no cars coming. Wouldn’t want to cause any traffic problems.

Two tech stories that fell neatly side-by-side: E&P says some newspapers still unsure how to use the iPad for publishing. Alan Mutter writes:

Two years after the debut of the iPad, most newspaper publishers still are fretting and fumbling over what to do about it.

Even though the iPad 2 was one of the most popular items last Christmas and the third-generation version of the product is likely to turn up well before Santa returns this year, many newspapers have yet to develop their very first app. Of the publishers who took the plunge, most were so unclear on their concept that they shouldn’t have bothered.

Mutter says it is all a big flub at this point.

Meanwhile, the app that keeps you from contacting your ex. ” It allows users to block text messages, emails, and phone calls to thier (sic) ex. It even tracks the number of days you go without contacting your ex.”

If you download that, you are co-dependent on technology. And, also, we’re going to laugh at you. (Though we will remain sad about your broken heart. Truly.)

Finally, this: Auburn great Ben Tamburello’s, Ben Jr., was all set to attend school and play football at Samford. And then the Naval Academy called. at Samford. Now he’s going to be a Middie. (Go Navy! Beat Army!) Samford’s coach, Pat Sullivan:

“I’ve known that family forever,” Sullivan said. “I helped recruit his dad, I sold insurance to his grandfather. But whether it’s Ben or (Shelby County signee) Denzel Williams, I really want what’s best for these kids.

“Am I disappointed I won’t coach Ben? Yes. But, in the end, this is what’s best for the young man, and that’s what we’re all about.”

Can’t say enough good things about Sullivan. Though I used 2,000 words to try last year.

What else? Two brief things on the journalism blog. One on FOI help. The other has a checklist for breaking online news.

history / iPhone / Monday / music / Samford / video — Comments Off
6
Feb 12

Trav’lin’ Light, but with plenty of safety

Some of the awards floating around in the Crimson office. We have another room in another building with quite a few awards. A lot of these honors go home with students. Even still, there’s an end table sitting here with these things, waiting to be joined by others. Every now and then I move them around, putting the ones in the back to the front. It is a good excuse to wipe a little dust away from them.

These are a bit older, so the names of the kids that won them are unrecognizable to the student-journalists working here now. One day I’ll look them all up and see what they’re doing now. These were people who were students before I came to Samford, so odds are I might have heard a name or two, but haven’t met them.

It is not unlike one of the drawers in my desk. A student signed it in the early 1990s, along with a note urging future people that sat there to save it because “it will be worth something some day.” He’s out in California and he has been at MySpace (at the right time) and at Netflix, so maybe he was on to something. There’s another name written in permanent marker within that desk drawer. It is his wife’s name.

I have a large stack of archived newspapers sitting next to my desk. One of my chairs was handed down from Maxwell Air Force Base — it still has their ID tag on the bottom — and I’ve learned a fair amount about the history of this place and a great deal about the sometimes colorful history of our department. But those two autographs in the desk are my favorite details.

And they graduated a several years before those awards were won, so really, between the autographs, the see-through trophies and today’s students we’re talking about four or five generations of students. Time does flit about prodigiously.

That picture was taking with my iPhone, which is indispensable as a snapshot tool. Of course this weekend, I’ll take a picture with my DSLR and be amazed at how much better that lens is. It should be, of course, but in tech you think of recency, and my phone is a few years old. The primary lens on my DSLR is a little more than a decade old, just a bit older than those awards. (I bought it as a replacement for one I dropped in a creek in Tennessee.) Maybe prodigious isn’t an expressive enough word.

Anyway, that picture is on the iPhone, filtered through Trey Ratcliff’s brilliant 100 Cameras app. I think the screen filter was called “When I was dirty and you laughed.” It gave the picture a certain level of cool color to an already monotone composition. I liked it, I posted it because I never use that app. Shame.

I have three folders of photography apps on my phone. I should never miss an important moment.

I did not talk about phones in class today. The “we’re all reporters now” speech will come up a bit later this semester. We did talk about Joe Paterno and the unverified night of mistaken news. I walked the class through the details and showed off the Storify I made that night to demonstrate how rapidly all of this unfolded. Looking back, only this far removed, the errors in minutes seem staggering. The lesson, friends, is verification. So we talked about that. The class was very much interested in the Onward State’s apology and resignation from the managing editor.

It is a great way to give the “We practice our craft in the public eye” speech again. I give that one a lot, it seems.

We also set up WordPress sites today. I have my tutorial on that down pat, now. “Let’s say I want to do this … but that only gives me a link and I wanted to embed the video.” In two clicks I’ve demonstrated that mistakes are possible, correctable and given students a better way of presenting information.

I’d like to thank WordPress for cooperating entirely in that effort.

It has been an adventurous day. In short order I was almost sideswiped by a car hauler, a dump truck and an 18-wheeler. It seems my car has that new invisible paint we’ve all heard so much about.

The tradeoff was hearing the DJ crack his microphone between songs and say “Monday in America in the middle of winter.” Then Etta Jones began to sing Trav’lin’ Light. Surprisingly her version, a superior take in my opinion, of the now 70-year-old Johnny Mercer song doesn’t seem to exist on the Internet.

The song played and I found myself stuck in the DJ’s aperitif. He had this husky, breathy, beatnik tone. And I thought what a remarkably obvious and obviously unremarkable series of things to say together.

Monday — we feel it
America — oh that’s where I am
Middle of winter — the trees are bare

The song wears on though, this delicate, unfolding and Etta Jones just sighs “No one to see I’m free as the breeze No one but me
And my memories.” And you think, yeah, OK, Monday, America, Winter. I see what he means. Look at that sky.

And then a song later he does it again. “February. Pitchers and catchers report in … 10 days” and a song. I’m unfamiliar with this particular DJ’s work, but I wonder if he can carry this all year long. I bet late July and August he becomes desperate for things to say. There isn’t a lot to say between the fireworks and Labor Day.

“Hot today. How’s that pool? Feels good, doesn’t it?”

“Four more weeks before the kids are back in school.”

“Hot dogs. On the grill again. Try it with some relish this time,” and then you hear Thelonious Monk.

So while there is no Etta Jones version on the Internet, there are plenty of Ella Fitzgerald renditions as you might imagine. This one is from 1964. The song was 18 years old. She’d been singing for three decades already:

Anita Day, in her prime, did it in 1963 in Tokyo, where there was apparently a big demand for big band/jazz.

But we’re skipping over that because of course there’s Billie Holiday:

And now you have your Valentine’s Day music. Push play on that album in the kitchen, or in the hallway. Louis Armstrong’s trumpet works in unexpected places.

Anyway. No one can see my car. Tonight I was in the left lane of a two-lane, one way street. Sitting at the red light waiting for the change of the signal and a woman from the side street turns right, which is almost into me. She bites the corner instead, dragging her exhaust probably saying a few things under her breath about the problem. Several, I am sure, were aimed at me. But then again I was in the right lane, which in this case was the left lane.

Do they make blaze orange vests for cars? It might be the season.

Auburn / cycling / history / iPhone / photo / site / weekend — Comments Off
29
Jan 12

Catching up

This is the weekly opportunity to post a lot of pictures that haven’t yet landed elsewhere on the site. Here’s a handful, there are even more in the January photo gallery.

One day one of the gymnasts will leap into the air and forget to land:

Look at the expressions on her teammates’ faces in the background:

Nobody has more fun on the floor than Bri Guy:

In the Hunt Seat arena. Horses jump things there, and this is currently the extent of my ability to comment on the sport intelligently. I’ll have to fix that:

I’ve never seen Nosa Eguae anywhere around town where he didn’t have a handful of people come talk to him. He likes equestrian events, too, apparently:

Oklahoma State’s team is called the Cowgirls. The name is bejeweled on the back of their outfits. It was in juxtaposition of all of their serious, championship-caliber riders. You can just see her championship belt buckle in this shot:

Stop! This is part of the routine:

On today’s big bike ride, mile 20, middle of nowhere and feeling fine:

At 26.4 miles in I’ve already gotten lost, figured out where I missed a turn and thought to myself “You’ve always wanted to see what is happening in Crawford. Press on …”

Here’s Crawford in a nutshell, an unincorporated community of perhaps less than 1,000 people, it was settled in 1832, as Crocketsville. A few decades later the state legislature changed the name. It boasts one of the oldest Masonic lodges in the state. A prominent church was built in 1910 using bricks from the original county courthouse. You can apparently see some of the workers’ (slaves mostly) handprints in those old courthouse bricks now making up the church.

Didn’t see that church, I was going in the wrong direction. Not sure about the history of this building though:

Nothing happening at the local co-op, about 34 miles into the ride:

I don’t know if the church planners put this place up with an idea of how the sunsets would play, but it worked out for them:

This next picture is 41 miles into my ride. I’ve been here before — behind where I’m standing as the photographer there is a gas station full of nice people that sold me Gatorade one hot summer day last year — but I didn’t notice this advertisement:

It is safe to say this mural is pre-1980, when Texaco drilled on Louisiana’s Lake Pelgneur and accidentally pierced the roof of the Diamond Crystal salt dome beneath the lake:

Within seven hours the entire 1,100-acre lake was empty and two drilling rigs, a tugboat, eleven barges, a barge loading-dock, seventy acres of Jefferson Island and its botanical gardens, parts of greenhouses, a house trailer, trucks, tractors, a parking lot, tons of mud and trees and three dogs had disappeared into the sinkhole at the bottom of the lake. The whole scene was described by witnesses as resembling a draining bathtub with boats bobbing around like toys before being sucked under. About 30 shrimp boats that were in the canal were beached as the canal emptied into the sinkhole, and were refloated later when the lake and canal refilled with water. Nine of the eleven barges would eventually pop back to the surface. Amazingly, no human life was lost in this spectacular accident.

What does that say? I haven’t been able to afford exterior paint in 30 years? No one has come along and offered to make it say “See Rock City”? I really like salt and my sodium levels are unfortunately high?

For more Jefferson Island murals, go here.

I wanted to do 60 miles today. This is with about 14 miles to go, and it was the last I would see of the sun:

I managed to get 52 miles. It was dark and cold. When you can’t see the bumps in the road you call it an evening. And then you put on several layers to warm up.

cycling / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Thursday — 2 Comments
19
Jan 12

Another lovely Thursday

Thirty-five miles on the bike today. I stopped around mile to do a little bike maintenance, looked up and saw this sky. (As with all panoramas on the site, click to embiggen.)

And that’s winter in the deep south to me. The high was 59 today, but I waited until it got to 57 before taking a ride. Even then I wore a jacket. It was chilly in the breeze and the late afternoon shade. Riding in the sun, or huffing up a hill, the temperature was perfect.

But 35 miles was a great distance for the day. It took me to the other side of little wide spots in the road that I have, on occasion, thought were too far to drive to.

Elsewhere I dabbled in spreadsheets and emails all day. Did some reading. Lot of that coming up tomorrow and beyond, as well. It was a full and lovely day in almost every way, except for the things I did not get done. But what doesn’t get done today will be on the list tomorrow. That’s always the way of it. Tomorrow is often a good second chance.

In the small world department: At dinner tonight we ran into the young lady who last week lost a wheel off her SUV. (We found it in our yard.) She had gotten it back after a rotate and balance at the dealership, but someone neglected to properly mount the front-passenger wheel, which, as gravity insists, is important.

When we saw them last her father had called AAA and was hauling the SUV back to the dealership. She told us tonight that they’d paid for all the repairs. She got it out of the shop and then, immediately, the radiator went bad.

That makes three visits to the dealership in less than two weeks. She needs to catch a break.

Things to read: Textbook publishers? Apple is looking at you:

Digital textbooks available for iBooks 2 on iPad will come at a significant discount over regular paper-based books, with prices at $14.99 or less from major publishers like McGraw Hill and Pearson.

The implications will be widespread.

Who? Whom? Geoffrey Pullum will tell you, in just 786 words.

Is HDR photography acceptable in journalism? Interesting ethical question. Is it news only if it is in the human visible spectrum? (No.) Is it acceptable to publish a photograph treated in any number of techniques as NASA frequently does? (Yes.)

The old-school photojournalism professor — like the man I studied under, a talented old veteran who spent his formative years covering civil rights marches — would say that what is in the viewfinder is the news. His point was that cropping a picture is editorializing. (We all know that even the presence, if not the interaction, of a photojournalist can impact the news event, so in that strictest sense this becomes a thorny issue: any opened shutter is potentially changing the story.) I spoke with a younger photojournalism professor about this recently and he laughed at the notion. To him that is an ideal of a photographer who hasn’t had to get a job in years.

Ultimately, if you open a photo in Photoshop or video in After Effects or your software of choice you can improve the shot, or you can alter your story. After the Iranian faux-missile launch story a few years ago Guardian leapt into the debate. Others have similarly chimed in on both sides of the Photoshop/photojournalism “Does it lie?” issue.

It can, but this is increasingly difficult to get away with. (So don’t be tempted.) It doesn’t even take long to get caught. (To be fair, that one was on the hands of a stringer, and not a staff pro. And herein lies the key, it comes down to trust. It comes down to credibility. So hard to earn, so easy to lose.

Scrupulous photogs, scrupulous people of any industry, know that and guard it credibility with zeal.

And then you get into grey areas. The court won’t let cameras in, so a television station is re-creating “the more absurd aspects” of a corruption trial with muppets. (Video is at the link.) I’m sure it is useful and captivating and will probably be remembered by the newscast’s audience for a good long while, but I could see it also making people queasy, though it is just another way to reach audiences. I bet a lot of the people working on that project never imagined themselves as puppeteers.

Pew research says it is the economy:

The public’s interest in news about the economy far outreaches media coverage of it for the second week in a row this year, with 20 percent of people surveyed saying it was the story they were following most closely, while only 6 percent of news coverage was devoted to it. The week before, 19 percent of people said it was their top story, while 8 percent of coverage was devoted to it. This discrepancy continues a trend from last year, during which the economy was one of the most closely followed stories 32 out of 52 weeks, and was the top story of 2011 with 20 percent of coverage devoted to it. And yet in December alone, there was about twice as much interest in the economy as there was coverage of it.

Even during weeks when the economy was the top story, interest surpassed coverage.

Smart comments on that Poynter story, by the way.

All of these journalism topics land on my Samford blog, should be so inclined. Over there I don’t talk about riding my bike!

I also didn’t talk about the possum that brought the New York City subway to a halt:

The D train was evacuated after arriving at the West Fourth Street station in Manhattan, where a group of police officers, armed with heavy-duty gloves and a canvas bag, were on hand to nab their perp. The officers were turned back, however, after the animal bared its teeth and snarled, the police said.

This, apparently, was a job for the experts. The officers arranged for animal control agents to meet the train in a subway yard next to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, according to Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman. Normal D train service was then resumed, after a 27-minute delay.

I could tell you about The Yankee’s experience with a possum just after we got married. She grew up 45 minutes from New York City and had a similar run-in.

I should probably get her permission before telling that tale though …

cycling / iPhone / photo / weekend — Comments Off
15
Jan 12

Catching up

Pictures from today’s bike ride. This one is nine miles in, out near the country club:

About 13 miles in, a few barns by the railroad tracks:

A better shot of one of the barns:

One of the more useless mental games I play on the bike. Whenever Party in the USA comes on the iPod — don’t judge, it is not the worst tune in the world — I take a picture:

Doubling back over the railroad tracks. This bridge doesn’t look like much, but the sign says it will support seven tons:

Believe it or not, this was once one of the better restaurants in the area. But rising prices closed the place late last summer. Doesn’t look like much on the inside these days:

You can tell a lot about a town by the post office:

Not to be outdone, right next door is the town hall:

Across the street:

An abandoned general store about 25 miles into the ride. Note the remnants of the old sign on the right:

Just after I took this shadow portrait I ran across a beautiful white tail doe. I was about 20 feet from her before she ran from the shoulder into the tree line.

Sunset close to home. Just did make it back as the temperatures dipped.