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Alabama / iPhone / Monday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
21
Mar 11

The comps defense

The day has finally come to defend what I wrote a month ago. In fact, this day has come twice, but the previously scheduled meeting was canceled which was … inconvenient.

So it was rescheduled, and this was that day. I had to drive to Alabama, which you might know is more than a little commute. And I managed to do this behind every slow truck, 18-wheeler and septuagenarian who didn’t have anywhere important to be. Normally this isn’t a problem, but I had somewhere to be at a certain time, months in the making. And there were middle-of-nowhere two-lane roads to travel. Each time the road straightened out and the dotted lines gave me permission, another slow moving truck would come from the other direction.

This commute took ever second it should and a few more it shouldn’t have. I walked into the meeting where my adviser was on his phone, calling me. Later I heard a voicemail with myself in the background, which was unusual. But that would be hours later.

For almost two hours I was grilled on my comps answers. “Why did you write this? Why didn’t you write that? What would work better? What theory? Why this adjective?”

On and on it went, my brain already a little bit fried from the drive, the Mondayness of it all and this being the first day back from a week … not off, but a week with a lot less in it.

In the end the professors kicked me out of the room and voted on me. And now the comps are defended, I’m A.B.D. and can move on to the dissertation. This is good because I’ve been thinking and worrying over the comps since last Thanksgiving. You might remember I was supposed to take the comps in January, but those plans were snowed out. I’ve been living under this for a while. It will be nice to put this stuff behind me.

I celebrated at Samford with dinner and grading.

iPhone / photo / weekend — Comments Off
20
Mar 11

Catching up

I don’t normally take pictures of food because it never turns out like you want. The only reason I put this here is to share with you the awesome glory that is that cheddar. Do try some. Found at the Auburn gymnastics season ticket holder reception last week.

This is a picture of Aubie at the baseball stadium from about a week ago. It feels ancient now because it was bitter cold that night, and we wore shorts and flip flops to every game this weekend. (Auburn won a dramatic 8-7 game today, and so the 24th ranked Tigers take the series from the 9th ranked Razorbacks.

Brother and sister, before they’ve learned to fight constantly. The father brought his long lens, you can see on the margin, to shoot the game. He was missing out on the kids. Maybe he’s just accustomed to it.

She does not like to be disturbed from her naps. We feel the same way, but she hasn’t the decency to care. So we return the favor. Or, possibly, she’s always just paying us back for waking her up. Who can tell anymore?

We bought all of this, and two other items the lady had already bagged, from the local meat lab for less than $60. If you have a meat lab, I can’t recommend it enough. If you live in our town, the meat lab is closed from Monday through Sunday, and they are sorry for that inconvenience. (Don’t need you getting all the good cuts, you know.)

The pretty Bradford pear trees that line the path on our little walk to the grocery store. We are fortunate to live in a lovely little area.

From the Friday game. I believe I intended this picture for the LOMO blog, but now I can’t be certain. Never fear, there will be new additions to the LOMO blog next week. Visit often.

Auburn / baseball / iPhone / journalism / links / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
19
Mar 11

I can’t believe it is already Saturday

If you left it to some media outlets you’d think the South was still living in the 1960s.

But no one talks much about Worcy Crawford, who died in July at age 90, leaving a graveyard of decaying buses behind his house on the outskirts of Birmingham.

His private coaches, all of them tended by Mr. Crawford almost until the day he died, do not have the panache of the city buses that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to ride. But they have significance nonetheless.

With their cracked windows and rusting engines thick with brambles, they are remnants of something that was quite rare in the South: a bus company owned by an African-American.

Mr. Crawford’s work was simple. He kept a segregated population moving. Any Birmingham child who needed a ride to school, a football game or a Girl Scout outing during the Jim Crow era and beyond most likely rode one.

That’s a neat piece, don’t misunderstand. But let’s also be clear: the latest development in that particular story is Crawford’s death, last July. Everything else dates back two generations.

The reporter certainly has her share of accolades, but she’s from California and Alaska, so maybe that’s the problem. Every time you send another person South they have to gain some sort of institutional history and the Civil Rights Era is one place to start. Certainly this is a worthy era, but it discounts more than a little about what has happened in this region, you know, in more recent decades.

Just off the top of my head there’s biomedical research, medicine in general, automotive growth, the transition from heavy industry to service industry (which would be a nice follow up after the typical Civil Rights, five decades-old reporting), more corruption and governmental unscrupulousness than you can cram in a newshole and so on.

None of these things will ever be covered by that particular newsroom. Doesn’t fit the narrative.

One more journalism note. I foudn these three headlines grouped together. Google calls it an algorithm. Really, this is irony:

Arianna And AOL CEO Tim Armstrong Teach Journalism Class At Brooklyn Middle School.
AOL to De-emphasize Journalism, Focus On Brand.
Huffpo Claims Its Bloggers Aren’t Writers. Is That True?

So I guess my one recent visit to HuffPo might be my last. We’ve seen AOL brand things before, and this is just going to get unfortunate, I’m afraid. Shame, too, they have been massing together a lot of resources and talent, but if the point is just to get the logo on my browser, I’m going to be less and less interested.

Meanwhile, from the Middle East, comes a fascinating insight into life in Syria:

Syria recently gained the unpalatable title of being the most restrictive Middle Eastern country for internet censorship, formally held by Tunisia. Syria blocked (and still blocks) a number of sites ranging from pornography to Kurdish websites. These restrictions however are not uniform and inconsistencies such as blocking Hotmail but not YahooMail are not uncommon.

More or less every internet cafe I visited (albeit these were in the more touristy areas) already had the settings changed so that a proxy computer, usually in Saudi Arabia, was used so the public were free to browse banned sites at their leisure. There were even computer programmes that people would pass around to find a new proxy number should one stop working. Sometimes I had to ask for the proxy to be put in which the staff would do without a bat of the eye.

[…]

Speaking to my friend recently he told me people are still frightened because although these sites are now allowed, the internet is still heavily monitored and the rules may change at any time. As there has been no official announcement of the ban being lifted, predicting the mood of the regime is difficult.

The full piece is definitely worth a quick read.

More baseball today as the Tigers looked for revenge against the visiting Arkansas Razorbacks. The bases were loaded, Kevin Patterson had been in a mini-slump, but he’d been hacking away like someone kicked his puppy. And then the pitcher grooved one which wound up behind him, about 385 feet in his bullpen. That grand slam helped the Tigers win 9-5.

Also, they had fireworks.

(That’s from last night, but they go better with a grand slam story than an extra-innings loss.) If you’ll watch the video there’s something a little different in the second half.

errands / iPhone / links / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
17
Mar 11

Happy Green Bread Day

For about 14 minutes I was inconvenienced without computer or phone today. You see, I’d discovered an app I wanted — and one day I’ll use it — but I had to upgrade my phone’s software first. So I plug the phone into that great giver of bits, the laptop and call up the curious iTunes package. Click around for the right button and then discover that I must first update my iTunes program before I can upgrade my phone.

Sigh.

So I upgrade. My computer must shut down. This is another reason to not yet worry about computers taking over the world. So long as we require the software to reboot with updates we’ll always have a fighting chance. When the computers start to gain momentum, we must only convince them it is time for a new software patch and, darn it if you don’t have to shut down for it, too. And then we jump them.

Anyway, the computer shut down. All of the programs must be closed. And there was the first problem, as my computer seems to be the source of a time causality logic loop. My computer would not shut down because the programs were unwilling to close. And the error boxes that popped up only allowed for a program restart, which is antithetical to a hardware shutdown.

See? Why worry about a Terminator?

Finally I clicked through enough wormholes to shut the thing down. It powered back up nicely. And then I plugged the phone into the USB, the USB into the computer and activated T2000 — because iTunes is somehow tied to the computers who are plotting our end, if it wasn’t the thing would work better. So the phone updated, rebooted and I was able to download the audio recording app Audioboo — interesting possibilities, unfortunate name — and SkySafari. That’s the one where you hold the phone up to the sky and it tells you what you’re looking at. It must work and be awesome because it is two words jammed into one, which is the mark of all good things these days.

Spring is here. In the backyard there’s a tree that already has leaves clinging daintily to the branches.

In other news, I seem to be as smart as a computer that has played more than 200,000 rounds of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Game Theory would suggest this is an unusual outcome because humans are inherently predictable and this is a game of random third selections. The computer, with that repository of other human games, should be able to find enough trends to defeat you. But I’m smart. (Or not. I found myself changing tendencies, just to try and confuse the pattern-seeking computer logic.)

You can give it a try, too.

Meat Lab today, where we bought a great deal of meat for a wonderfully low price. Also I broke three eggs, but the nice lady did not charge me for them. We bought 30 eggs, too, for less than $3. And then we hit Sam’s Club for chicken and then Publix for charcoal and buns. We walked there, and so we bought only the small bag of charcoal, because carrying 15 pounds of briquettes home didn’t seem fun.

Less fun:

This is Rainbow Bread, but also it is green. By this point we’ve all been trained to think of green=bad when it comes to bread. No one’s buying this stuff, not even on St. Patrick’s Day.

Even less fun is the basketball tournament. Taking over the television and I’m not even winning the brackets. Yet. I’m in fourth in one and seven in the other, but I’ll come on later in the tournament. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother, but The Yankee is actually watching some of the games. I don’t understand. She doesn’t care for basketball, either.

We are going to the women’s first round game on Sunday, though. The ladies from Samford are playing in their first ever tournament appearance and we have tickets!

books / family / friends / iPhone / links / photo / site / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
16
Mar 11

Sadly they did not have strawberries

I made a video of our visit to the farmers market this morning. Enjoy.

The most important thing about this video is not that I shot it on my phone, but I edited it in the car on the ride home. After that the iMovie app offered an update. The description sounds promising. Can’t wait to see it in action.

I promised you two stories yesterday.

Here’s the first: My longtime friend and radio mentor, Chadd Scott, lost his job at an Atlanta sports talker this week. He was stuck in St. Louis, stranded by Delta and weather. He tweeted about it, Delta took offense and, being sponsors of his station, put a lot of pressure on his employer. So they fired him.

This is regrettable, but everyone in the business pretty much understands the tough spot the station was in. Less excusable was Delta’s overreaction. Here’s why. He tweeted about it on Tuesday and the power of the Internet took over.

He started that day with about 800 followers, and now has almost 1,200 as of this writing, but that’s not what is important. I collected his original tweets, minus one, which he deleted for his former employer, and the next nine hours of original tweets and posted them on Storify.

If you don’t read the entire thing, I ended with the important part. The last 50 tweets mentioning @chaddscott and thus, Delta, had (at that point) reached 19,113 potential airline customers, creating 22,711 impressions.

So this is unfortunate for Chadd, but he’s the kind of guy that lands on his feet. You don’t build the fastest growing syndicated show in the country as he did a few years ago or work at ESPN for two of their top shows as he has done without being the kind of talented person capable of landing on your feet. While no time is good to be out of a job, now especially so, Chadd’s going to move on to bigger things.

But poor thin-skinned, corporate Delta. The guy had a few jokes, sound observations, really, and a few people online saw it. Now he’s going on television, thousands and thousands and thousands of people saw this and, apparently, are making travel decisions around it. (And as soon as my already-booked next Delta trip is up, I’ll be sure to figure this into my personal calculus.) If they can’t figure out when to have deicer at which airport they might not be worth my money, either. Also, they did my friend wrong.

Here’s the second story: I went to a local bookstore last night, a Hastings. We don’t seem to have another one around (that isn’t attached to the university). I remember when this Hastings arrived, when I was in college. it was a novel thing, then, because they had books and music and movies. But only mildly novel. They had some of all of those things, but other places had more of any one given thing.

The writing was almost upon the wall then, but there’s no mistaking what it says now. These stores are dying, at least the ones that aren’t dead. It was like strolling through a video store — Can you still do that in your town? — the only thing you need is the preservative fluids.

Finally found the biography section. Two entire sets of shelves. Amazon has a few more selections.

Not much of a story, but Hastings, I learned, has used books. Then again, so does Amazon. I hope the place makes it. Towns need bookstores. College towns should have more than one. Several people work there and they have at least three chairs for sitting and reading. Also, they have free coffee, so if you need a fix, that might be a good place to try.

I don’t drink coffee, so I couldn’t say.

Worked on what will become a new section of the site. I’ll give you a hint:

Give up? That’s from an old 4th grade science book. It was published in 1940. It belonged to my grandfather. I have a few of his old books and I’m scanning the fun pictures for a small extra section of the site. Not in this book so much, but in one of his high school literature books, there are notes in the margins. I get the impression that he was a funny kid.

I’ll try and trot out part of that section next week.