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29
Jul 10

The pre-move

The heat index only made it up to 99 degrees today. And I did my part, I tried, to get that last extra degree so I could say “Hey, I moved furniture in triple-digit temperatures today.”

Because 99, somehow, doesn’t sound impressive.

And that’s when you know sunstroke has set in.

So the recliner went downstairs to the garage. One of the rocking chairs joined its mate. The living room chair found its way safely into the garage. Numerous boxes, all of our books all made it downstairs. The plan, since the move is tomorrow, is to sling everything from the garage onto the truck and call it a day.

This evening we packed up the kitchen. All of our clothes have been dutifully stored in wardrobe boxes. Later I’ll tear down the network and pack up the televisions.

Even still, I managed to do three voiceovers this morning. But the place looks entirely different from that, even 12 hours later. Now it looks like a cardboard factory explosion.

Pie Day

We had our last regular Pie Day with Ward tonight. (Incidentally, that’s the banana cream pie, which is new to Jim ‘N’ Nicks, and quite tasty.)

Ward

I’m a fairly sappy and sentimental person, and waxing on about it is possible, and would be silly. Ward, there, has looked after us for a long time. We’ve been coming here for five-and-a-half years. This is as much a part of our history and social culture as anything else we do. And we’ll still make it here when we are in town visiting, but this was our last regular visit.

Yes, barbecue means that much. Pie means that much. That it was the first excuse I had to get my eventual wife to have a bite to eat with me means even more. (As I’ve mentioned before, it was a competitor’s waitress’ line about how “Friday is Pie Day” that cinched the deal. When The Yankee and I were standing in a parking lot one afternoon I impulsively invited her for a barbecue sandwich. She hedged. And then I invited her for pie. Friday, I said, is Pie Day. You just can’t argue with logic like that, friends.)

We’ve had untold celebrations here. Birthdays, graduations, quiet nights of dinner for two, loud nights of dinner for a dozen. This has always been our date night and we’ve always incorporated everyone that wanted to come. I used to keep count of the people, stopping somewhere around four dozen, that joined us for Pie Day.

And now when I mention it — or even when I don’t mention it — on Twitter people respond to it even people I haven’t yet met in person.

Sure, The Yankee and I will still have Pie Day. Yes, I’m looking forward to finding the new home for the event. But, still, I hold onto things, tightly and closely. And this has been a wonderful event worth holding onto for a long time now.

We managed to sit in the same table where we ate there the first time.

And now, so I don’t waste any more of your time on it, cute cat pictures:

She's helping.

She’s helping.

She stopped helping ...

She stopped helping.

And now for a late night and early morning of last minute panic packing…

friends / memories / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
22
Jul 10

Remembering radio

Of the many things that have recently floated to the surface in the cleaning and packing are stacks and stacks of cassette tapes from my years in radio. I broadcast for eight years, what seems like a lifetime ago. When I consolidated the tapes in the cleaning of the garage it turned into one impressive box full of old material.

I’ve been hanging onto them because I’ve promised myself (for years, now) that I’d one day listen to them and digitize the good stuff. Somewhere in all those many tapes there has to be two or three good air checks. The world needs, I figure, dated jokes, aging soundbites and hard news leads delivered in a young man’s voice.

Mostly I keep the tapes to keep me humble. Putting one in and pressing play would crack me up, or make me grimace, for hours.

While I learned early on I was no disc jockey, thank goodness, I did turn into a strong news anchor and sports reporter. I had another dip into that memory today, when I had dinner with my radio mentor Chadd Scott. He taught me a lot, because he learned from a great one, who learned from two greats. We learned a lot together because when we worked together Chadd and I found ourselves in a position where the bosses left us alone to make mistakes. We created more successes than failures, though.

He’s in town from Atlanta for SEC Media Days. Since he made the trip, we’d asked him to pick us up a bookshelf from Ikea. He drug it across the state line, crammed into his car with his colleague and intern. I think he made his intern go fetch the bookshelf from the store, which would be the silliest thing I’ve ever had an intern do.

My own internship at ACES, once upon a long time ago, was an excellent experience. There were three communication specialists and me doing the job of six or eight people. I built web pages, produced television, practiced photography and dark room skills, wrote for newspapers, cut audio for radio and more. The least consequential thing I ever did was to collate photo copies, and that was a necessary thing for my projects. My internship was so useful I’ve always been conscientious to help interns have the opportunity to receive a similar experience.

And now some young man has been sent to Ikea to pick up a bookshelf in my name.

We had dinner with Chadd and Chuck Oliver and others tonight. We talked Internet, where just maybe I returned the favor and gave Chadd a little practiced advice.They are working on a big project, one I’m looking forward to seeing this fall.

The Yankee and I each enjoyed a frosty for dessert. I recorded two voiceovers. (Anybody need voice work? I used to be in radio, you know … ) We watched a bit of television and packed more. We’ve only a week more of this to go!

memories / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
21
Jul 10

My cardboard kingdom

Boxes, we have them.

“The irony is that for years the collection was just left in cardboard boxes. It’s only when they rather conscientiously dusted it off and launched this rather impressive exhibition that the whole issue has resurfaced again.”

I spent another afternoon in the garage today, cleaning and straightening and trying to tell myself that it wasn’t in vain, that I wasn’t wasting my time. I’ve lately become very interested in time. In another day or two, I figure, I’ll do something about it.

That’s the afternoon scene in the living room, above. We live in and around cardboard just now, and will for another week or so. On the one hand I’m glad we’ve started the packing process so early. Things have a tendency to creep up on you. Something happens that slows you down. It is good to be prepared. On the other hand, I’ll be sick of seeing cardboard by the time the big day rolls around.

Anyway. In the garage I’ve found a few interesting things. I have one more box of old paperwork to go through, hopefully it can all be shredded, burned by a blast furnace and then reduced to its chemical components by an exciting new enzymatic process I discovered on late night television. Before that happens, though, I must go through every scrap of paper to determine the likelihood of needing a power bill from 2001. (Not likely.)

But still, you never know what exciting information might be in that bill. Some future generation might gawk in awe and wonder at power consumption rates from the turn of the century. “And grok that wacky font, space cowboy!” Because this is how future generations will talk about the things that have been resting in my storage system for all those years.

But then you think about the things they won’t understand, or, worse, even care about. I found a paper from one of the classes from my master’s degree. It was titled “Campaign Homophily: Earning a Voter’s Perception of Similarity.” I just Googled an old paper I wrote, the height of vanity. Happily no one else has yet to use that eye-catching, page-turning title.

I don’t remember much about writing that particular paper — it has been about five years, or a lifetime, whichever comes first. I also discovered a little slip of paper from elementary school, this one I vaguely recall. It was a day when football players from Alabama visited our school to talk about studying hard, saying no to drugs and making good grades. I got all of their autographs.

As football players go it was a good group, Derrick Thomas and Keith McCants were the biggest stars, a murder’s row of defenders no one wanted to face. Thomas became a terror in the NFL, of course, died far too young and was posthumously inducted into the football Hall of Fame last year. McCants’ presence is now painfully ironic. He’s been arrested on five drug-related charges in the last two years. Another guy, Trent Patterson, is working as an athletic trainer near his home in Syracuse and was featured on The Biggest Loser two years ago. Two of the other signatures are from common names, so Google only lets us guess where they are today.

I’ve never given away a Hall of Famer’s autograph before, but an acquaintance claimed it for scrapbooking purposes, so I’ll stick it in an envelope and send a 20-year-old scrap of paper to someone who will glue it into a book. And then, someone in her family will stumble across it in 40 years and wonder why it has been in a cardboard box all this long.

The circle of life continues. I should continue more of it to donations or the garbage, but you just never know.

That quote? It is from British explorer Hugh Thomson, discussing early-20th-century Yale expeditions to Machu Picchu. Do you know how few worthwhile quotes on cardboard there are?

adventures / iPhone / memories / photo / weekend — Comments Off
18
Jul 10

AT&T Day (The iPhone is lovely)

Today was AT&T day. Most readers are already sympathetic. The rest nod knowingly.

Oh, but you do not know.

So The Yankee, who is wonderful and kind and awesome, decided to get me an iPhone. They arrived yesterday, we visited the Apple store today.

Only, and this will surprise you, what we were told last week by one talented and helpful AT&T phone representative was something entirely different from what we discovered today. Seems I’m eligible for an upgrade, but she’s not. So while The Yankee talked to AT&T, I chatted with the Apple store employees.

I learned where all the hipsters eat.

So the problem, we were told, would resolve itself if we visited an actual AT&T store. Having had that particular joyful experience in the past I had the sneaking suspicion that wouldn’t be the case, but you may as well try.

We drove down the street. We had a late lunch. The AT&T store opened, we met the manager who’s second item in the corporate protocol — and this is my favorite part — is to call an AT&T phone rep. Meanwhile, have a look at the AT&T talking points. You aren’t supposed to see this paperwork or, one presumes, the typos contained therein:

ATTFail

The manager couldn’t figure it out. So he’s going to call his boss tomorrow. We went back to the Apple store, where we found one of my former students who works there. She got my phone, set me up, extended the hold on The Yankee’s phone and we had a nice visit.

And while she didn’t get one, today, I got mine. And it is very pretty.

So far I’ve added bookmarks. I considered consolidating my laptop bookmarks and my cell phone bookmarks, but then I looked at what I have on my machine’s browser and realized I don’t need any of those things on my phone. On my previous phone I used Opera, so I had to pull bookmarks from that browser, which stores them in a proprietary file. It is called an adr file which, as you may know, stands for Opera Address Book. What you might also realize is that the good people at Opera don’t understand how acronyms work.

I liked the Opera browser on my Q, which is Windows based, and will be only a little sad to see it go. Safari on the iPhone works very well, at least off of the home WiFi network. I looked for a Firefox app in the store, but there’s only a non-browser browser available, which seems a bit too complicated for me at this point.

So instead, after I added all of my bookmarks. Somewhere I found directions to sync this through iTunes, but that platform and I don’t get along very well yet. So I did it the old fashioned way. I built a page with all the links I need — library search pages, the local Craigslist, school schedules, football schedules, cafeteria menus, E-bay, Digg, XM schedules, movie theaters and airline site — and then uploaded it to my server. Then I clicked each link and added them manually, all neatly categorized and, unfortunately, not alphabetized. One needs these things to be neatly organized, but that isn’t happening. Let’s see what Google has to say about that.

Oh, click, hold, drag. With a little effort — I accidentally deleted one link and moved some a bit too far, so link juggling was required — I now have a neatly organized bookmark list.

Which allows me to move on to applications. Facebook, Twitter, Boxcar, Grocery IQ, RedLaser, Dictionary, Wikipanion and a level (by Stanley) all made it on the phone for free.

So, if you need me, I’ll be able to share details on my social sites about the UPC codes of coupons for synonyms found on Wikipedia and, also, updates on whether they are crooked.

While I did all of this The Yankee went back to the AT&T store, this time armed with paperwork, to demonstrate her upgrade eligibility. We were comparing notes: she’s been with AT&T for the better part of a decade and had maybe three phones, I’ve been with AT&T before it was AT&T, (before it was Cingular, back when it was Bellsouth) for 15 years. I’ve never had a significant or unreasonable problem with the service in all of that time. Since they turned into AT&T in 2007 I, like many people, have found the human element of the company to be more than lacking.

But the iPhone is fancy. And now I must figure out how to change the background. I have a picture on my site I thought I’d use, but you can’t save it directly from the server on the iPhone. I successfully made a shortcut to the URL, but that does not a background make. So I turn to Google again, which tells me I must 1.) Save the picture 2.) Put it in iTunes 3.) Sync iTunes and my iPhone 4.) Be frustrated with that for a while 5.) On the sixth attempt figure it out and 6.) Realize I put the confounded picture in the wrong place.

But I finally I made it work. Looks nice, too:

The Yankee in Savannah

Took that on our first trip to Savannah five years ago. We got married there, not far from that spot, actually, last year.

The black and white looks striking as the phone background — and the screen on the iPhone is beautiful. Give it a try.

Friday / friends / memories / photo / Pie Day — Comments Off
16
Jul 10

Pie Day

Clinkies at Pie Day

Brian took this on his iPhone. Sad, happy times, since Pie Day will be changing and this one will be the last with the regulars for a while. Love you guys, mean it.