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15
Mar 11

“Oh, you meant with the Chex”

(Someone overheard me say that today and was apparently offended (or surprised). That was the one sentence I uttered, so they were offended without context, which is always amusing.)

So today we had breakfast at Barbecue House, where we could not yesterday. The place was more than slow late this morning. There were more people behind the counter than dining. But that’s Spring Break. The food is not taking off. Delicious as always.

The cable people had to come back out today. Last night we discovered a lot of pixelated programming had been recorded. There was a Les Mis special on PBS that The Yankee wanted to see and that was mangled so badly it hurt to watch. Shame, too, because what you could hear sounded great. And, then, the straw that broke the camel’s back was a ruined episode of 19 Kids and Counting. And you just don’t mess with the Duggars or they will show up and make you babysit.

So I walked out of the room for a moment to put a dish away and when I came back she was on the phone with the cable people, who helpfully booked an appointment for this afternoon, lest the Duggars hear about it and come visit the cable office.

And they mean business. Two guys came out today. Charter has been here so much, though, that they’re having to recycle techs. One of them had been here before.

He plugged up his tricorder to the cable, pronounced the numbers flatlined and then went outside to jiggle the wires, call a friend and have a sandwich. Do you really know what they’re doing out there? A second guy is inside and I am insistent that he explain everything to me — but in analogies I can understand (“So it is like water in a pipe, then?”) — and have no idea what the first guy is doing outside.

He comes back in after a few minutes with a few pieces of hardware in his hand. He has replaced some splitters. We now have the industrial strength Cabletronic 4000s, which is a step up from the 3000 series Crash-A-Lot model. It seems that we have now exhausted all of the possibilities for diagnosis, repair and replacement inside the house (they’ve been here approaching a dozen times in the last several months) and if this continues a systems tech will be airlifted in to examine things at the hub.

It sounds so ominous, but really, we’re just keen on a signal that plays audio and video, displays the channels for which we’re overpaying and keep a consistent Internet connection. (Though, to be fair, that last one hasn’t lately been a problem.)

They’re nice guys, these guys. They tell jokes. They notice the cat. We comment on the larger company and they spin tales about some of their better calls. The first guy plugged his tricorder back into the cable stream and found everything to be much better. Now we shouldn’t have a problem.

But there’s all kinds of problems you can have. Today I learned that, in addition to signal load, competing tech demands of phone/cable/Internet, rainwater and what your neighbors are watching, another thing that contributes to data transmission rates is temperature. It seems that when it is cold the insulation on the cable shrinks. That means less cable can get in your home. When the weather turns warm the insulation expands, letting cable in. When July gets here we’ll suddenly get a rush of things that couldn’t make it through in December, I suppose.

Drove to the grocery store for a few items today. We walked last night for two, drove today for two bags worth and yet we must still make the HEAP BIG trip sometime later this week. We think, though, we have this down to a science: farmers market for produce, Sam’s for poultry, Meat Lab for beef, sausage, eggs and bacon and Publix for everything else.

We planned this. We’re planners.

Saw a new item I hadn’t noticed before. I gave it a “Where have you been all my life?” moment:

There is a coco version too, apparently, which just seems evil. Don’t ask why one is OK, but another is not. I enjoyed more than my share of kid’s cereal (and still do on occasion) but the chocolate ones always seemed a bit over the top. Except for Cookie Crisp. There’s nothing wrong with that cereal except for their odd character erasures.

Speaking of cereal being erased. I read recently that Cap’n Crunch was going to walk the plank. (And now, who knows? Sad as that is, they’re just pulling on your heartstrings with the old graphic treatments:

Went to the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art tonight to see the documentary Awake, My Soul, which is about the oldest surviving form of American music: Sacred Harp.

It is an intriguing thing, mostly southern and western — which makes a great deal of sense as spelled out in the documentary — but growing across the country and, in several other countries as well. Most everyone interviewed for the documentary lives in Alabama or Georgia, however. They’re all very passionate and it makes for a nice documentary.

Raymond Hamrick, the first gentleman you see in the trailer has a great story, and is a marvelous storyteller. Doesn’t hurt, then, that he has been a prolific composer in the genre. He’s still working, in his 90s, six days a week in a jewelry shop in Georgia.

The history, reaching back to pre-Revolutionary America, was nicely explained. It moves into the work and perception of those who brought it to this generation and then those who would be the prominent contemporary leaders. In the midst of all that are the lost bridge between the 19th Century and those very aged devotees. Somewhere in all of that nostalgia and hope and loss all mingle together, powered by this incredible, powerful sound.

Much of this documentary makes sense to me, or anyone that’s ever been to a primitive style church in the South. I’ve never been to a Sacred Harp singing and I don’t know these people, but I know these people. The documentary touched on the people in this singing community that had died before or during the recording. There was a shot or two that lingered on some old lady, and then a comment by an old gentleman who’d lost his wife and those just sat on the room for a while, until the next joke came along.

Matt Hinton, one of the filmmakers, was there for a Q&A. No one asked why he didn’t put a joke immediately after the most solemn moment of the film, but they should have. Instead, he fielded very intelligent questions for about half-an-hour. One of his central points is the participatory nature of this style, as compared to the performance-based styles of modern music. That becomes quickly evident in his film.

I came home to dinner, a baseball game (Auburn beat Alabama 2-1, in Montgomery’s Capitol City Classic) and two other anecdotes that I’m keeping for tomorrow. You have to come back now.

iPhone / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
14
Mar 11

The one problem of disappearing weeds

And the next day of your life starts with breakfast. Or it does if you’re the lucky sort, a group of whom I am most definitely included. After a long, long Sunday — eight hours or so in the car, getting back home just before 11 — we figured on sleeping in and then a hasty breakfast.

So with a baseball cap on my head we headed out just in time to get near the end of the traditional breakfast hour. We visited the Barbecue House, where I ate so much as an undergrad (thanks, Chuck) that they knew me by name. Don’t care for the barbecue (it is a preference of style) but the CoAg students know they have the best breakfast in town right across the street from all of their major buildings.

We took my in-laws there when they visited last fall. They enjoyed themselves so much the New Englanders came back for a second time during that brief trip.

But they couldn’t have visited today:

It is Spring Break in Auburn. You take the off days where you can. So we went down the street — where we learned that metered parking is free downtown this week — near the corner of College and Glenn, to try the new Waffle House at the site of the former Daylight Donuts. I eat at Waffle House once a year, Christmas, but we wanted breakfast and IHOP was the next choice, so we pulled in.

I sat facing the campus and telling stories of things I’d forgotten. Just down the street lived so and so. And right over there was where my car died that one time and I became so frustrated that I forgot my mother’s phone number while trying to call and tell her I wouldn’t be visiting that weekend. (In my defense: she’d just gotten her cell phone and I’m terrible with numbers.) Here was how she and I met. This is apparently how Daylight Donuts closed down.

So we drove home. The Yankee went to her office for a little work. I mowed the lawn. Well, the front yard. But with our lawn mower you have to hit everything six times, so really it is like everyone in the neighborhood got their grass cut.

“But now I won’t know where to spray for weeds,” she said when she got back home.

That’s the thing about weeds, though. They grow back.

We walked to the grocery store this evening. It is a mile-and-a-half from the house, with a nice, new, wide sidewalk the entire way. Bradford Pears line the first half of the walk, and they are in full bloom. We go by a golf course, a subdivision, some local businesses and a few houses. We did the walk just as the sun was going down for the night. Cars were depending on their headlights as we returned, with pasta and spaghetti.

Today I’ve just been reading. Tomorrow I’ll dive into more productive things. Later this week I have grading to do and a few phone calls to make. There’s a lot of scanning to wade through this week, too. Also, the joys of class prep.

Tomorrow I’m going to do a few of those things, and we’re going to have breakfast again, because we’re lucky enough to be able to do that. I’m going to a documentary showing tomorrow night and, who knows what else will come up. Stop by, though, to check it out. Follow along on Twitter, too.

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10
Mar 11

All cafeterias should have choral accompaniment

Billy Kim and the Korean Youth Choir performed at the Convocation at Samford. They had lunch in the campus cafeteria and then serenaded students with an impromptu show featuring Oh Susanna, God Bless America, Jesus Loves Me and more.

And then this cute little moment, right at the end of their show …

Otherwise, my comps defense got rescheduled. That was supposed to be tomorrow, but external frustrating things sometime happen. So now they’ll be in another week-and-a-half, four weeks after taking the comps. They are supposed to be defended within two weeks, but what can you do?

Made a great deal of organizational progress in the digital video center today. Taught a class. Had a meeting with the boss. Cleaned off two of my desks. (I have four surfaces in my office with stuff to do. Lately the notes are crawling up the side of a filing cabinet, too.) All of the grading will get done this weekend, though.

Something new on the LOMO blog. One addition to Tumblr today. An update to the Glomerata section is on the way.

books / iPhone / LOMO / photo / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
9
Mar 11

Rainy and busy

Rain, lots of rain. Even the radar doesn’t know what to make of it. I tried to time my dinner in between storms and managed to get caught outside in the rain twice. Only one line had shown up on the radar. So that was just lovely. If you’d been standing outside for the last two or three days you’d find somewhere between five and eight inches of rain on your head, depending on your neighborhood.

Beware of falling exclamation points. They may strike you on the head, whereby you may then slip on a pile of bacon.

They think of everything on our campus, really they do.

Samford named a new athletic director today. He’s a Samford grad who’s coming home from Kentucky. The paper came out with a story on his appointment just as they held the official press conference. On the same front page you could see the women’s basketball team. They’d just won their conference tournament and secured their first berth in the NCAA tournament. Meanwhile, the debate team has won a top seed in the national debate tournament. Also, the mock trial team qualified for their national tournament. And the Brock School of Business named a new dean.

Been a nice week on campus.

Meetings with the boss, the editor-in-chief, the managing editor, the web editor today. Also phone calls with a person carrying the impressive title of operations manager. Another with a camera repair expert. And another chat with my dissertation advisor.

At lunch I read through Remini’s The House through World War II. At dinner I made my way through Korea and into the Eisenhower administration. He had an interesting one-paragraph final analysis of FDR through the prism of the 22nd amendment. I think he misreads Eisenhower a bit. (Or maybe my understanding does not comport with the esteemed historian. This is more probably the case.) It is a fine book, if you find yourself thinking about history or about the House of Representatives. And I know you do.

Curiously, though, I find I was more intrigued by earlier eras than what it has to offer for the second half of the 20th century. I’m sure it is a case of the untouchable mythology of some previous period when compared to the high water marks of Newt Gingrich and Tip O’Neill.

(O’Neill, by the way, served for the second longest period as House speaker, behind only Texas’ Sam Rayburn. The pictures of Mr. Sam, as they called him, don’t look right. To me he’ll always be James Gammon (at 34:08) or, in a pinch, James Gammon. That’s what you get watching made-for-television movies before you read about the real people. But reading about them is always more interesting than the screen version.)

Maybe I’m ready to move on to the next book, which was a gift so promising I moved it right to the top of the list. Maybe next week.

Which is Spring Break. Which is already booked solid. And that’s lovely, too.

That’s all for now. Check out the LOMO blog, which features a new update that dates back to the 1950s. I’ll have something else there tomorrow. Look for at least one thing on Tumblr tomorrow, too. And, of course, I’ll see you on Twitter as always.

Hope you have a great, productive, busy and dry Thursday!

iPhone / photo / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
8
Mar 11

Just two pictures

C-130 on approach into Maxwell Air Force Base. This is shot from the hip, with my phone, on the interstate and not even looking at the screen. A moment later another one came in from a slightly different approach.

Samford flies this flag whenever their teams win. And the women’s basketball team won big, claiming the SoCon tournament title and their first ever appearance in the NCAA tournament. Good for them.