Today — hanging out with friends; editing pictures.
Lots of video below. Or you can see those and more, here.
Tons of new photographs — football, soccer, fans and more — are now in the September photo gallery.
links
1
Sep 10
And having turned the page
Poor soundbites from the president and indistinct ends aside, we’re now in the new post-modern when it comes to the United States in Iraq. There is a bit of dissembling and, of course, best-foot-possible posturing going into the spin, but the fighting isn’t over. There will still be combat and sacrifice and families separated from loved ones in this, the fourth chapter of the Iraq War.
I covered the launch of the war while in Washington D.C. Like many others I know friends or family who served there. Fortunately they’ve all come safely home. Here’s hoping the rest get back safe, too.
Random journalism observations of the day: Nice to see Chris Fowler can keep his journalistic distance and not shill for Nike. That sort of thing stopped mattering a long time ago, but still.
Check this out, I’m still working my way through the high school workshop circuit and I just found a school where every teacher has, and uses, a blog for classroom purposes. So every student is required to visit it, which means we now have the four R’s: reading, riting, ‘rithmetic and RSS.
Journalist, entrepreneur, philosopher, pundit Alan Mutter muses about a return to the Tampa Model, tying a newspaper and a television station into one newsroom to share coverage, merge manpower and effect cost savings. For a while the idea was thought of as the future of the news industry, but as Mutter notes, the joint Tampa Tribune and WFLA enterprise has not been without it’s difficulties. Others in the comments note a few other aborted examples.
At the macro level the problems are abundantly cultural. What newspapers are after and what television needs are different. The language the two newsrooms use are different. The skill sets, obviously have more than a little variation. Television staffers write differently than newspaper folk. Print reporters don’t always function in the visual medium as well as they might like. The presently natural place to put together a combined print and video product is on the web, but most traditional print and TV organizations aren’t exactly comfortable with that.
So, in a merger, the problems that Tampa model has exhibited for the last 10 years become apparent. Perhaps the problem is in the merger. Maybe the way to proceed would be with a creation of an entirely new news operation.
We’re working to converge our newsrooms at Samford and I’m hoping we can make great strides to do even more of that this year. In many ways these transitions have to happen slowly and, I think, culturally. The people doing the work have to see the need and the value, and that can only happen over time.
A new generation of students who are using the Internet as a matter of course in every classroom are already learning the values of accessibility, utility and multimedia.
On the site I’ve started a new September feature. I shot lot of pictures of Allie the other day, so I figure I’ll add a new cat picture every day. Because if the Internet isn’t powered by cat photographs yet some IT guy somewhere is working on making that happen.
Also I’ve split up some recent posts, pulling out the regular features from the daily entries. I’d been on the fence about it for some time, but figured if I was going to do it now was the time. Better to pull out a handful now than a few more handfuls in the future. This presumes I’ll decide to separate them in the future, of course. I separated them in the present because … let’s say a phone booth landed in the front yard with a future version of me and told me I came to that decision.
A phone booth? I hate to pick on Bill and Ted Excellent Adventure for the film’s otherwise excellent authenticity, but they really whiffed on the phone booth, didn’t they? The goofs on IMDB, they are priceless:
There is a heinous number of most egregious factual errors in the depiction of the famous historical dudes, their lives, their works, their time periods and the state of their hearing.
Someone, upon having that idea, was very happy to find that no one had written any notes for the movie on IMDB.
I forgot to mention that I made the front page of al.com yesterday. I could say that in some way or another every day once upon a time. The sports producer wrote me a few weeks ago to ask if I’d participate in a roundtable discussion throughout the football season. Here’s a segment of my first installment, the topic Auburn’s chief worry:
Break them down: QBs, wideouts (to a smaller extent) and every individual grouping on defense. These are the ones you have to look at. All of those guys have different numbers on the jersey, but the name on the back may as well be John Q. Potential. There’s loads of it, but it now simply has to develop. Stars no longer matter. Recruiting class rankings are now ancient window dressing. The feel good quotes from teammates and coaches must now be tested — and not against the Arkansas States of the world. At this point we must all just see who pans out and how.
[…]Even if one of the other elements can’t reach it’s potential, though, the regression to the mean seems an improvement over last year’s baseline. And you can worry less because there is no way humanly possible that each unit finds itself in that situation. Overall, Auburn finds everything looking shinier than this time last year.
Special teams, I concluded, is on the clock.
We’re grilling hamburgers tonight. I’m getting my act together for class tomorrow and, soon, uploading the newest additions to the 1939 World’s Fair section. Come back to see those, and more, soon.
18
Aug 10
Warming the lamp
That was the afternoon. A threat of meteorological drama which pittered and flittered into nothing. But for a while it looked as if something was about to descend from the clouds.
But that was just part of the day. There was scanning. And scanning! And also I reproduced a digital representation of some real-world items into my computer. Finally, I placed things on a glass that covers a light, pressed a button and watch the light move in a predetermined back and forth fashion.
Took The Yankee out to dinner at the local First Date Place. Haven’t been there in maybe 12 years. (I’ve had dates since then, but just not there.) Provino’s has moved since my last visit. The new place though manages to retain much of the look of the old location. The restaurant was a little cleaner and brighter than my memory — but my recollections can be dusty and dim.
It was good back then and Provino’s was good tonight, too. The garlic rolls still come out in a pool of melted garlic. The salad is cheesy and … well, it is a salad, OK? She had the chicken francese, I had something that was acceptable, but wouldn’t be my regular dish.
Before we ordered The Yankee said “Maybe it will be like Rome.” And then the waitress walks up and says “My name is Amy Leigh and — ”
Yes, exactly like Rome.
Random things: Noted the Eight Commandments of the gas pump. There were more, but they didn’t focus group well. The second one is well written. I do not follow the one about cell phones, because I am not orthodox. I had a picture re-published on The War Eagle Reader. And, tomorrow, it is back to class; so tonight it is back to ironing.
13
Aug 10
Friday stuff
Visited the meat lab today. Students process the meat that is farm raised on campus and the savings are passed along to me. The deals are outrageous. We picked up a few steaks for the weekend, but you couldn’t go wrong with any cut of beef, chicken or even eggs. You could buy 30 eggs for less than three bucks.
Put that with the fresh peaches and okra and tomatoes we picked up at the farmer’s market yesterday and we’ll be eating well. There’s apparently a fish market, too, and if we can figure out when and where that takes place you’ll have to read about the catfish and the shrimp and whatnot.
To live in a place where the shrimp and catfish come from “down there on the left” is really cool.
So I promised you scanned things. I finally finished the Glomerata project. That only took three-and-a-half years of on again off again scanning, editing and writing. But, I’ve made observations and jokes on four years of the yearbooks. The final 10 entries. I really like the way it ended, in a more complete and, I think, better way that I wouldn’t have expected when I started this in February of 2007.
And that just leads me to the next big scanning project. When I picked up those first two books from the early 1950s I started down a path that has turned into a serious collection. I have 76 books from the now 113 volume set. I want to scan all the covers and show them off, because there are some handsome ones worth seeing. If I offer you two of those a week we can stretch that out until February.
The other project is the guide to the 1939 World’s Fair. I’ve started scanning some of the models and pictures and illustrations and we’ll make fun of them together. I’ll start showing those off next week, and it should run until Thanksgiving.
And with that I’m going to head out into the dark and thunder and find some dinner.
11
Aug 10
From the library
I am not a father. Nor will I be one at any time in the near future. But this is terrific:
Except for that one line. They just left it out there like they knew you’d hate it. They knew they should have written something else, but they couldn’t make it work.
We received flowers today from Kelly (she’s the best, you should pick up a Kelly for yourself). They are beautiful hydrangeas, which have a lot of rules.
They were dropped off by the UPS lady, who probably spends exactly .16 seconds thinking about what is in each box she’s delivering. She left it at the door, rang the bell and was back to her truck before I managed to unlock the thing.
UPS drivers wear their keys on their thumbs so they don’t have to waste time fishing them out of their pocket. You have to think, for an agency that concerned with the seconds on the margins, that they are investing in teleportation technology. Sure, you could fly it, but why would you do that when you can beam it? As appealing as that sounds, I hope it is a generation or two in the future. My step-father is a UPS pilot. He might have hauled those flowers somewhere along the way for all we know.
Just a day in the house. Added apps to the iPhone. You’re intrigued, I know. I added two voice recorders, QuickVoice and BlueFiRe, because you never know when a soundbite will break out. I picked these two because any outfit confident enough to ignore the rules of grammar and capitalization must produce a good product. And also because they are free.
One day soon I’ll make a great point of all of this to the students. The things you can produce, from your phone, for free.
BlueFiRe, if you are interested, offers you a realtime waveform while you record, which is pretty fancy. I have two computers where I can do this. I have a voice recorder, a portable studio and a mixing board that gives me levels, but this is taking place in my phone.
When you spend a lot of time at home you get an interesting feel for the rhythms of the place — the heat, the sun, the plants or people or animals or shadows, whatever you’ve got — that go on without you. Even more interesting is to see how these rhythms are established in a new place.
The cat, for example.
She’s been especially vocal lately. Very demanding. I’ve begun to wonder who has fallen down the well. And I wonder if she is ever frustrated by our lack of understanding, or our apparent lack of cat vocabulary. We get frustrated when she’s doing this at 3 a.m.
Pardon me for a moment.
I just noticed that the books in the Keeping Library are out of order. I somehow have a book on FDR between a book on Reagan and Clinton. This is a shelf based on chronological organization and, thus, this error must not be allowed to stand. Sadly, the books had existed in this state for more than a week. Meanwhile, the DVDs remain unorganized.
Started scanning things up this evening. I have a book to show you, starting later this week, and a project to finish tomorrow.
Until then, may there be no weeds in your fescue.
