My four tokens to the general usefulness of things today:
I graded a lot of things.
I prepared a bit for my comps defense.
I read a lot about Libya, the slow-motion thing that can’t be stopped, with fascination.
And I built a mobile version of my website.
The world really needed that last one. Someone poked fun that I didn’t have a mobile version to the blog yet. But late this evening I added a plugin for that too. So you can easily see this drivel anytime.
I tinkered with this one for a while, but couldn’t make it go. So I found another one to build from. I’m on the fence about it, but what do you think? The mobile site is here. The mobile version of the blog is … well, found on your phone.
It is a curious thing, but I like that particular mobile theme on a friend’s site, but I’m not sure it works here. When these are the problems in your life you’re doing OK, though, so I won’t be too upset about it.
My comps defense is rumored to be next week. So I’ve been consolidating a few ideas I’d like to incorporate into that conversation.
On Libya, these types of stories are always good reading, and the reporting here is fine:
“This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values,” a senior administration official said at the meeting, telling the experts this sentence came from Obama himself. The president was referring to the broader change going on in the Middle East and the need to rebalance U.S. foreign policy toward a greater focus on democracy and human rights.
It will be interesting to see how long this shiny spin on things remains in place.
“In the case of Libya, they just threw out their playbook,” said Steve Clemons, the foreign policy chief at the New America Foundation. “The fact that Obama pivoted on a dime shows that the White House is flying without a strategy and that we have a reactive presidency right now and not a strategic one.”
So the next few weeks should be interesting.
Baseball this evening, Auburn hosts Arkansas this weekend, but dropped the opener 6-5 in 11 innnings. The bullpen is still working itself out and Auburn stranded eight runners on base and seven of those were in scoring position.
We had pizza after the game at Mellow Mushroom. We noticed that Moe’s Original Barbecue is now open downtown. Finally, our style of ‘cue. Now we just have to become regulars.
YouTube Cover Theater is a little feature intending to point out the art of people making music in their homes to their video camera. There’s a lot of talent out there, some of it is more than worth sharing. I hurriedly picked REM as this week’s featured cover act. It didn’t seem the best pick at the time, but now I’m glad of it. Their music seems to have a lot of room in it for others to play. Unfortunately none of these particular three covers have been seen by more than 2,000 people.
Doug McKenna is an independent artist, but unfortunately his site has been neglected. Nevertheless, Sweetness Follows is a good tune and he does a nice job here:
My favorite REM song, and it is a shame this has only 59 views. Unfortunately there’s not much biographical information about the guy here, but his treatment of Driver 8 is good fun:
In a different career on those rare times when I had to play music at radio stations I’d always end my shift with this song, so we’ll end this post the same way.
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.)
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!
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.
I have a new gimmick for this space on Mondays. Since the day is spent pinned beneath the computer — picture it, the machine has fallen on top of me, on the monitor is a vaguely human expression of determination, I am feebly trying to crawl out from under it — I’m just going to make this the day of a great dumping of links.
Oh there’s still Monday history, for the 1.4 people who come here to find out what I find interesting. That’s been transmorgified (Now there’s a wonderful word. It means something, but as yet has not been defined. We just know it is something about a mutation, but that G sound in there just makes it sound … unpleasant.) into a little elaboration on what I put on Twitter in the morning.
And I do that every morning on Twitter. There the habit seems to be recent history, mostly American or culturally impactful things that I find in a daily history app. I’d do more meaningful tidbits, but it is hard to explain 16th Century context in such a small forum. So I limit it to the baby boomer set when I can. From there and the two following generations people just know stuff. Right? That’s why President Obama talked about Sputnik, because it has seeped into the public consciousness, even if it was someone else’s actual event. Everyone knows what “we” did with Sputnik. And certainly the recitation of that storied tale was accurately told in the brief news packages the next day. Sputnik, when Russia launched us into space! It was Sputnik that put us on the moon!
This isn’t a new phenomenon, actually. There’s a great quote by John Adams after Benjamin Franklin died, where in his most bitter, paranoid way imagined the way the story of the American Revolution would be:
The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislation, and war.
The word insecure, in the psychological sense, only dates back to the early 20th Century (make your jokes here). But if they’d had that concept at Philadelphia, New York and Washington, they might have used it to describe Adams.
Stories change, is the point. Maybe it is enough that people remember Sputnik with fear and wonder, or bemusement, and tell their kids. And then one of those children grows up to inject it into a speech that his boss, the president, gives before a joint session of Congress and the nation. Anything is possible when that kid grew up with a father who used Old Spice.
Did you know there’s a new Old Spice commercial?
I wildly digress, but that’s OK because Monday, in the original Latin, means Stream of Consciousness.
If you’re really suddenly very curious about what recently historical things I’m trying to condense into 140 characters, then by all means, follow me.
From that storied feed of valuable historical information we remembered that today:
In 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed. This is oversimplified, of course. It took about two years, but on this particular day the Central Committee let loose of it’s power. They’d finally gotten around to watching Rocky IV and saw the writing on the wall.
I remember watching television when the Berlin Wall fell, but not this day in particular. So let’s make it up. This day in 1990 was a Wednesday. I was in class. I was in the seventh grade. So let’s say I was in … Coach Tucker’s social studies class. Why not?
This was before my time, but I remember reading about it on the 40th anniversary. In 1967, at a rooftop fine dining restaurant in Montgomery, Ala. a fire broke out in a cloakroom. The flames quickly spread, blocking access to the elevator and stairs. When they finally put out the flames they pulled out 25 bodies, including a prominent former state official, the wife of a newspaper editor and one of Jimmy Hoffa’s chief lobbyists. Here are two contemporary accounts, including one from a reporter who had dined there the night before, and considered returning that night.
Here are the recollections of survivors and firefighters:
In 1964 the Beatles invaded. In 1962 the United States stopped trade with Cuba. If I could have lived in the sixties I would have stopped just after the British invasion began. After that it was a long time to sit around for something fun. Sure, there was Apollo and the moon in ’69, but that would mean wading through five more years of that decade.
My mother asked me once, I’m sure I’ve written of this here, if the moon landing meant us much to my generation as it did her’s. From the exploration and science standpoint, sure, it is incredible. But, on the other hand to my age bracket we’ve always been on the moon. The previous generation got the experience of seeing it happen.
Of course, they didn’t have Google Moon. Come to think of it, they might have won this round.
Other links of varied merit: AOL is paying $315 million for Huffington Post, approximately 10 times HuffPo’s reported last year. From a financial point of view they overpaid. From an intangible point of view, it is anyone’s guess. I’m siding with Alan Mutter:
If HuffPo’s revenues triple this year to $90 million, then Armstrong can tell his shareholders he paid “only” 3.5x more for HuffPo than its sales are worth. If HuffPo sales triple again to $270 million in 2012, then the value of the deal is likely to be about 1x HuffPo’s revenues at that point and Armstrong, assuming he remains on the job, can tell the skeptics he was right.
The question to ask yourself in evaluating the long-term financial benefit of the acquisition to AOL is whether you think HuffPo is capable of bringing in a $270 million in annual sales within a couple of years.
Poynter’s Damon Kiesow finds some problems with Rupert Murdoch’s newest venture, The Daily:
I have been reading The Daily regularly since it launched on Wednesday, and almost every time I open the app, I’ve been confused to see a message telling me that “a new issue” is being delivered.
The Daily is published every morning, but Editor Jesse Angelo also said that it wouldn’t be “static” and would be updated as events warranted.
He’s quite forgiving of the experience, which is a better reception than The Daily has received in many corners. Of course there will be problems to overcome, this is a new enterprise, after all. These things must be done in full view of your audience, which is tough, but familiar to news types.
If only they’d announced it as a beta, everyone would be more willing to accept the learning curve.
Finished up a social media presentation for tomorrow. Three dozen slides should just about do it, right?
Try to make sense of that if you like, but it is mostly images and not too much text. The places with text will be, I suspect, where notes get taken. More to the point, though, I’m hoping to demonstrate the virtue of a PowerPoint presentation where every word isn’t read from the screen. This is an entry-level class and this is meant as something of a not-quite-vague overview.
Sadly I won’t be talking about cool stuff like this, where Coke is looking to move into SMS as a mobile priority:
“If you want to reach every consumer on the planet, texting is the way to do that,” said Daly, speaking Friday at MediaPost’s Mobile Summit conference in Miami. To underscore his point, he noted that 2.3 trillion text messages were sent worldwide last year. And as one of the world’s most pervasive consumer brands, Coca-Cola is always interested in reaching as wide an audience as possible.
Texting has even helped the beverage giant sell more Cokes through vending machines equipped to handle mobile short codes and cashless payments. The unlikely combination of traditional and newer technologies has given vending sales a 14% lift where the specialized machines have been rolled out, said Daly.
That’s just fascinating. You don’t often see Coke making bad marketing moves, so if Coke says they’re concentrating on SMS, you should be the next group.
Did you know our accents are changing in the South? Seems that way. Language is a fluid thing and it is always changing, everywhere. There’s a lot of neat stuff in this story as researchers ponder how and why this happens. I’m surprised no one is thinking of mediated influence. Naturally that wouldn’t be the only cause, but certainly it could be a significant contributor in modern times. Television and radio shape and influence patters, too.
But then I’m a media effects scholar. Here’s my hammer, there’s a nail.
This week Dr. Oz is unveiling his choice of Unhealthiest Cook in America. And Paula Deen’s boys are somehow involved in the promotional aspect of this, but it isn’t Paula. That’s odd. There are less healthy cooks than Paula Deen and her sons — it’s good, food, sure, but your doc would be displeased. Would you eat this:
Place burger patties on English muffins or buns, and if desired, on glazed donuts, as the buns. Top each burger with 2 pieces of bacon and a fried egg.
I made fun of this on Twitter, just as The Yankee uploaded a picture of the cupcakes we bought this evening for dessert. The secret to comedy is timing.
Mondays, apparently, have become my least interesting day. You’re naturally riveted six days ago. OK, maybe five. (Four? Two? Any?) That being the case, we can all forgive a Monday that is spent buried in a computer screen or a book. So I’m just falling back on Twitter, here, which is something I haven’t in a long while.
And since it is Monday, and since Monday is history day around here, the On This Day section rides again!
In 1990 McDonald’s opened their first restaurant in Moscow. That means most of the college students have been able to eat a Big Mac in Russia their entire life, had they visited Pushkin Square. Here’s the scene. They serve an estimated 30,000 people a day.
In 1971 Apollo 14 launched.
They were the third mission on the moon. They almost had to try the landing without radar because of a software glitch, but an in the nick of time fix put them down closer to their original target than any of their fellow astronauts.
This was also the trip with the famous moon trees. Five of them are planted in Alabama. I’ve been near four and didn’t even realize it. Need to fix that.
Fifty-three years ago Explorer 1, the first satellite from the United States made orbit. Sure, Sputnik got there first by three months, but the value was largely propaganda. Otherwise the thing was not quite useless. It helped with some atmosphere detection and then tumbled out of the sky in three months. Explorer, on the other hand, transmitted data for almost four months and stayed in orbit for 12 years. It achieved more than 58,000 orbits, says Wikipedia, and began a series of 90 Explorer satellites.
Sputnik moment? Let’s try another Explorer moment.
And way back when, in 1930, 3M starting marketing scotch tape. Did you know? The Scotch Tape Test measures the adhesion strength of conducting polymers adhered to indium tin oxide glass slides? Neither did anyone else. Also, it can make X-rays.
Other links: Sometimes I like to find the outrage of the day and consider it’s relative merits to the big scheme of things. When you do that, you realize modern life could be a lot worse.
Pay walls! More pay walls! Also, and still, a bad idea. The problem for the industry being that there aren’t a lot of other prominent and viable ideas at the moment.
Finally I watched American Pickers tonight. (They aren’t letting you embed the episode for some strange reason.) Love that show. Love the premise, love the show, love the thing the guys do. Everything about it is fun. \
They subtitled a Kentucky man, suggesting he was unintelligible. I found this to be unnecessary. But, before I became my own outrage of the day, I called my Connecticut bride into the room and played clips of the man for her. “Don’t look, just listen.” She couldn’t make him out. So what do I know?
