This is important because The Yankee was in a conference. The Maurer School of Law promoted the event and everything. The moderator should have jumped in more, though. Moderators, always be on the lookout against monopolization:
If you somehow didn't know, surely an improbability in our connected times, @IUMediaSchool's @LaurnSmith is on @IUMaurerLaw's panel, "A Woman’s Worth: The Disparity in Pay & Representation."
Everything worked out pretty well with the mobile site. Click this image and you can go see it for yourself.
So that’s now live. For some time I’ve been tinkering with a mobile version as a Monday project. But then I hit some snags with my ideas and life gets busy and you start making concessions to that or just going to sleep on time and you place on the back burner the mobile version of your website that everyone is just dying to see on their phones and tablets and what not.
You know how it goes.
But I started tinkering with it again yesterday, because in doing a few quick things elsewhere on the site I remembered ‘This was a project you’ve forgotten about.‘ Much to my chagrin.
This is all just a coding exercise, of course. An in-expensive hobby. And if there’s some utility to it for you or me, then even better.
It started in college. The summer between my freshman and sophomore year I was hanging out with a friend who had graduated, gone into the world and come back for grad school. He told me that if I learned to code I’d add $10,000 a year to my paycheck. So I had another friend, who was legitimately one of the smartest people any of us knew, help get me started while he was working as a student staffer in a computer lab. And, because I was cool I spent that summer learning things by trial and error.
This was, of course, back in the days when we used to code by hand, in Notepad. And I found a rhythm for making a few changes, saving the file, uploading it and refreshing pages that I liked. The trial-and-error of it was usually relaxing. The first guy in that anecdote is now a big shot economist and university lecturer. The second one, last I checked, was a successful salesman. And here I am. Coding was a part of my internship during college and an important part of my professional career for more than a dozen years. I am still waiting on those coding bonuses to show up in my checks.
Indeed, for more than four years it was a primary function of my work, back when al.com was a growing-out-of-being-a-secondary consideration. I was coding something everyday. And I was a journalist, what’s more. Probably there were a dozen or so people in the state who could do both back then. In my first interview there I made this tortured analogy about how I was a driver, more than a mechanic. I can take care of your car while you are abroad for a year or two, but you wouldn’t ask me to build you a race car from the ground up.
They hired me anyway.
Anyway, there’s a new mobile version. It’s responsive to size and which angle you are holding your phone in. And the secondary picture accidentally matches the primary photo, so now there’s a color scheme. Wish me luck keeping that consistent.
As we continue in our pre-season binging we are now in the section that prominently features the Lady Olena.
I'm hoping the Kelvin timeline of #GoT is really an A-Team knockoff with her, Arya Stark, Tyrion Lannister and Sandor Clegane. pic.twitter.com/idCmgLTa7G
Oh, look, the morning show crew brought back an old favorite game show.
Sure, it is The Dating Game, but local in all of its local glory. Plus college students! I watched them shoot this last week. The original run ended four years ago, at least, which means this particular set of people had never done this show before. They did a pretty nice job with it. And the guests were fun! And tarot!
My favorite part might be the “interesting thing about you.” As ice breakers go, it is a classic. Some are better than others and sometimes the ice breaker itself goes over better than others. I’m always intrigued by the things people say. You’re all interesting and all of us have varied experiences. I’ve no doubt that, given a minute or two, anyone could pull one or two or four notes from the memory banks with which to wow us. Now, the bear thing, from the title, that’s in the video. As interesting facts about a person might go, that’s pretty good. I am always intrigued by how a person arrives on sharing their particular tidbit.
Anyway, one of the station’s managers dug up some old archives of the original Big Red Love. It was a different studio, which was in the basement of a dorm. It featured different production values, a Barkeresque microphone, delightfully awkward interactions and a cubicle wall that “separated” bachelorette from contestants. It was a wonderful college television show. If they brought this new version back and streamlined their production, it would be an even better and more wonderful college television show.
This evening we went for a run on campus. Because hills! Hills are great to run in concept, and I am lousy at it in execution. The Yankee was done with her day a bit earlier, and wanted to go a bit longer than I did. So she started out, looped back and then picked me up. Here we are at the top of the very last hill for the day:
I was four miles in and she was about, or so. I finished with six and she finished at 10. And, also, it was about 30 degrees.
A young woman with flaming red hair passed us earlier in the run. She was so fast I couldn’t figure out if she was saying something encouraging or suggesting we get out of her way. Her voice dopplered very quickly because she was fast. And she had on a little cape. She might have been an actual superhero!
Generally, we avoid amateur nights. In a college town this includes New Years, St. Patrick’s Day and Valentine’s. Part of that might be because we spent so many years not in the same town on Valentine’s Day. (I started counting that and then stopped.) Mostly it is because we generally observe today as the anniversary of us being a couple.
It was a friend group, you see. There were about six of us who were all in the same grad school cohort and then within the group there were the two of us palling around all the time. People, in our group and in the larger cohort and some of our professors too, started thinking of us as a couple. Where there was the one there was the other. And then we realized that’s what people thought and so on and so forth. And that realization came today, 14 years ago. So we celebrate today. And the celebration is typically a low key dinner at the hibachi steakhouse because it is a tradition at this point.
So there we were, at 8 p.m., cleaned up after our run. The local place had two people sitting in the hibachi side of the restaurant. They didn’t look a day over 15 and one of them looked almost exactly like my second-cousin. His wife, I assume they were married, was an over-sharer. A nice couple, but before the man had wheeled out his cart to spin the spatula and pour the sauces and cook for us, we learned they had a 4-year-old. The cart comes out, the cook makes a great deal of noise with his cutlery, cooks the food, does the flaming onion bit, busts out the little squirt joke the restaurant likes so much, cleans everything up and thanks us again and again. As he leaves I said, “So a 4-year-old, huh?”
To which she immediately launched into a 20-minute speech about the dogs, and their territorial habits and, here, check out some pictures. Oh, and finally here’s one of our daughter. Who does she favor?
That’s always a loaded question for some reason or another, of course. We all know that. But she obviously favored the dad, who looks almost perfectly like my second-cousin. Only the kid isn’t his, biologically. And this is an intriguing conversation to be having with someone over fried rice. Oh and she had just had her gall bladder removed and he doesn’t eat anything green and … they were nice, truly.
Also, I can now tell you where to get the best sushi in town, and where you should absolutely not get sushi. No one had asked.
Anyway, in the back of the restaurant, by the restrooms, there’s a door into the kitchen area. And this is on the door:
If it ever said anything other than “Your uniform hangup” then I’m just going to assume it has a story to tell. I guess we’ll just have to keep going back until we figure it out. Oh, darn.
I haven’t told this story in a while, so I may as well tell it again.
We were somewhere in England, see. I know precisely where we were, but it just seems to sound better that way. We were somewhere in England when someone took this picture:
We were in England, you see. And that was the first leg of a terrific multi-nation trip. And I was tired of taking pictures where you could see a lot of us and a little of what was going on behind us. Rather impulsively, for me, I went to a store that sold clothes and other odd things that people think are a good idea in the store and bought a selfie stick. A friend took the picture above. The picture I was taking looked like this:
Right now we’re discussing a vacation for this summer and starting to dive into the details of it. We’re planning a friend trip. And one of the selling points is, apparently, that I have a selfie stick.
Oh, sure, The Yankee made fun of it, but she quickly came to admit that it occasionally helps make better photos. She still makes fun of it.
So since everything, included the roads, are frozen here, still*, let’s talk about some place warmer. Here are a few pictures I took yesterday just before we left Savannah. (Truly, we toted our luggage inside.)
The diocese was installed by Pope Pius IX in 1850. At the time, it covered all of Georgia and part of Florida, totaling about 5,500 Catholics. Another Pope Pius, the XII, split the territory in 1956. So now this covers south Georgia. Much of what was the original church at this location was destroyed in an 1898 fire. The outside walls and two spires were saved.
There was a big renovation project in the middle of the 20th century and a massive repair project in the 1980s put the high altar in the background. Then there was another round of renovation in the late Nineties. So the pews aren’t that old.
Indeed, much of everything here is new compared to some of the beautiful church buildings we have seen over the years, but this one is still lovely, and as impressive to me as the first time I saw it 14 years ago.
The stained glass windows went in around 1904:
Many, if not all of them, were removed, cleaned and re-leaded during the last restoration project.
I didn’t realize you had to do that to windows.
Now, about that organ …
The first recorded organ at the cathedral was installed in 1837. (They held a fundraiser in 1836.) That original organ is now on display, but not in use, at the First African Baptist Church a few blocks away. Organs came and went, one was rebuilt after a hurricane, but lost in the fire. At the turn of the century an organ builder in Delaware installed a new one. That one was removed after 1938, and some of the pipes wound up in local classrooms. During the reconstruction in the 1980s a Massachusetts firm, Noack Company, was selected to build the new organ. A protestant, a Lutheran even, helped bring the organ project to life. The cathedral’s website says that was a first. And that man’s church choir, from the local St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, was the first Protestant concert in the cathedral in 1991.
*The snow was Saturday. You could barely drive around downtown today for the ice in the roads. They have some kind of plan, I’m sure. You’d like to see it activated. You’d like to see warmer temperatures, too. They’ve got about 13 degrees on us today.
