memories « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

memories

A thousand words, and none about sleep

Another long day and late night. And it will continue on well into tomorrow.

I am writing an amazing presentation and slideshow, or at least one that will, hopefully, be helpful. I get to address the Alabama Press Association’s winter convention tomorrow and I’d like to at least make a good use of their valuable time.

I only have one Brian Williams joke in the entire thing. And, now, sadly, a David Carr observation. I just happened to be online when that started to unfold, just in from dinner, and it was strangely handled, which would amuse Carr. I found a recent video of him and he was just a shell of himself; the guy must have been going through something terrible.

You’ll see this again this weekend:

It has been a quarter of a century, by the way.

I was once told by a professor, in the 90s, that Michael Jordan no longer had any marketing star power. Pretty laughable in retrospect. But, here again, no one ages in an age when everything is available for recall and repeat.

Trying to think of an athlete with similar retirement advertising power. The Joe Greene Coke ad ran after he retired. Not the same. 1/4

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) February 12, 2015

Trying to think of an athlete with similar retirement advertising power. Bob Ueker did, but not on his baseball player "celebrity." 2/4

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) February 12, 2015

Trying to think of an athlete with similar retirement advertising power. Keith Hernandez, Walt Frazier did Just For Men spots, but no. 3/4

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) February 12, 2015

Trying to think of an athlete with similar retirement advertising power. Emmitt Smith does ads post-football, to a lesser degree. 4/4

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) February 12, 2015

Trying to think of an athlete with similar retirement advertising power. The best I can think of is George Foreman. Any I'm missing? 5/4

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) February 12, 2015

Let's stipulate that Muhammad Ali is in this post-sports marketing conversation if his health held up and that OJ Simpson is disqualified.

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) February 12, 2015

Things to read … because they’re better than my sports tweets.

From the If You’re Not Doing Anything Wrong You Have Nothing To Worry About Dept, Government wonders: What’s in your old emails?

If you’ve been remiss in cleaning out your email in-box, here’s some incentive: The federal government can read any emails that are more than six months old without a warrant.

Little known to most Americans, ambiguous language in a communications law passed in 1986 extends Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure only to electronic communications sent or received fewer than 180 days ago.

The language, known as the “180-day rule,” allows government officials to treat any emails, text messages or documents stored on remote servers – popularly known as the cloud – as “abandoned” and therefore accessible using administrative subpoena power, a tactic that critics say circumvents due process.

As you rush to purge your Gmail and Dropbox accounts, however, be forewarned that even deleted files still could be fair game as long as copies exist on a third-party server somewhere.

There’s nothing especially new in that excerpt, but it remains spooky. If you’re snooping around for intel on bad guys or crimes, the contemporaneous information would seem to be more valuable. So what makes this so important?

This is pretty great, Telling stories in 3-D in an immersive, interactive and integrative way:

Professions like architecture and the gaming industry have integrated 3-D technologies into their day-to-day workflow. But journalism hasn’t been as fast to integrate. To demonstrate 3-D capabilities in journalism, we’ve been working on a story about a young fashion designer who draws inspiration from a University of Missouri 175th anniversary exhibit of historic costumes. This story also forms a good backdrop to illustrate a near-term future scenario where 3-D content can be an integral part of the stories we consume and share.

The story was appealing for multiple reasons. The historic costume collection features pieces from prominent university leaders whose names are associated with some of the landmark buildings on campus. The three-dimensional nature of these dresses and richness of detail present interesting workflow challenges to produce 3-D content for storytelling. Moreover, the viewers who see this exhibit in person are not allowed to touch them, given their age and fragility. This provides an interesting opportunity for 3-D technologies to present an engaging story allowing the viewers to interact with virtual representations of these historic costumes. We were also keen to use off-the-shelf hardware and software technologies that are affordable for any news organization.

I like that last point a lot.

She’s a 4-foot-11 college senior with a constant smile. She’s also a lot tougher than you or me. Auburn gymnast Bri Guy inspires Tigers with incredible recovery from two torn Achilles tendons:

Guy was actually dealing with an injury few trainers ever see. Gymnasts are prone to tearing one Achilles tendon; tearing both at the same time is a little like a trainer’s version of seeing a unicorn.

“I have never heard of it,” Auburn trainer Janet Taylor said. “The doctors that we worked with hadn’t heard of it, either.”

A single Achilles tear takes roughly six months to resume normal activity. A gymnast usually takes six to eight months to return to action. Doctors figured tearing both should take even longer.

“I don’t think they had any idea of me doing anything remotely close to what I’m doing right now,” Guy said. “They thought, ‘it’s February, maybe she’ll start doing one or two events’ not ‘she’s going full speed on three events, trying to do a fourth.'”

We were there when it happened. It was a loud and boisterous meet. She was taking the floor, the last routine and her team was very possibly going to get an upset win. It looked like she felt the tendons go and she did what she could, but she landed on her head.

She was still. The place got very quiet very fast. She protected her head and neck somehow and by the time they carted her off she had that beautiful smile on her face again. It was great to see it on her face again last weekend and she continues working on her comeback. Can’t wait to see her do that fourth event, the floor, again.

adventures / Friday / iPhone / memories / photo — Comments Off
6
Feb 15

Don’t forget your sea boots

You know, when you look back on it, that’s an enviously pretty view.

Miami from sea.

The phones had just died and we stood there on the deck talking in a small group and wondered how far away we were, how the distance and your perspective is skewed because your mind and your eyes are so limited. That’s just right over there. Look, you can see the buildings!

Trouble is, you can see so many buildings. So many small buildings.

But, you know, if you dropped into the water, here, this is a traffic lane. And at least seeing the shore and all of those distant buildings would give a boost to your morale. Better than being surrounded by empty horizon.

You think of that story of the football player who swam nine miles to shore, because he had an indomitable will.

I tried to tell, and told it so poorly that I just stopped, the tale of John Aldridge, the 45 year old crabber who fell off his boat off Long Island. He could really only remember the boots and the buoy, but the details woven into this january 2014 story remains impressive.

The news about Aldridge was also spreading through Montauk’s fishing community. Much of the town’s commercial fleet was out on the water that morning. Some fishermen heard Sosinski’s anguished first call for help. Others heard Sean Davis’s pan-pan broadcast. And then word traveled from boat to boat, back to the dock and then all over Montauk. The mood in town was grim. Everyone knew the odds: a man overboard, that far off the coast, would very likely never be found alive.

He was in the Atlantic for 12 hours before they found him. Said he’d spent his career conditioning himself for that moment. Surely, though, it wouldn’t take you 12 hours from that shot above to the coast. No way. And this picture is from Miami, not the north Atlantic.

I got the boots part of the story wrong in my telling of Aldridge’s story. (It has been a year since I read it.) But they were important, and I did remember that part.

Hey, it’s Friday.

memories / Monday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
26
Jan 15

Welcome back

Who knows how long this will last, but as we’ve taken great nostalgic joy in noting the gas price signs in movies, we may as well document this unintentional slide in gas prices. Thanks, Saudis.

Who, here, ever says that, by the way? In November of 2008 gas was nationally dipping to $1.87 — and there was no mention of the Middle East in the story. That was my first fall at Samford. We are typically a bit below the national average, but I can’t readily find a state story to verify it for that time.

Anyway, today was the first day of classes. Got into the office, noticed with resigned expectation that the printer was on the fritz. It wouldn’t be a Monday or a first day of classes if you can’t print.

And it isn’t like I ask it to print a lot. I’m going to print one syllabus here and then go down to the copy room where the Xerox machine lives and make duplicates for everyone. That machine staples. And collates. And faxes. It will also send an autoreply to those Nigerian prince emails and give you periodic updates of your stock portfolio. The Xerox machine is nice.

The HP in my office has a minimum state unsteady aerodynamic force coefficient matrix of what constitutes a paper jam is something the guys at JPL are still working on. It is a highly sensitive 20th century machine and it “jams” constantly. Take it apart and you find a wave in the paper barely perceptible to a Lilliputian’s most sensitive measuring equipment has caused the problem.

So, no, I’m not concerned about the machines taking over, just yet.

Class was fun. Met a room full of students, sitting in the room where I did my job interview several years ago. I’ve never actually taught in that room, though, until today. I sat at the front of the room, as I did on that August day, when I learned beyond doubt there’s no such thing as “summer wool.” Happily, they liked what I had to say and I’ve been having a great time working there ever since.

This class is on storytelling, so today we talked about the various challenges and obstacles. We’ll spend a day or two on information glut and go from there.

And the rest of my day was spent making phone calls. The last round of recruiting calls of the year. There are 220-some high school students on my list. I spend a lot of time on the phone. This was not one of those things we discussed in that interview, but it helps the department, which has a story to tell, a good one, and we think that those seniors should hear it.

It helps them make decisions, we figure, between how the campus sells itself and all of the literature we send them over time and then these high touch phone calls — and have you heard about our scholarships yet? — and then in the next year or so they are showing up in my classes. There are three or four from this class today whose names I remember from an old spreadsheet.

And that, I suppose, helps pay for the gas in my car.

So we’ve come full circle.

adventures / Caribbean / memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
20
Jan 15

Looking back

Instead of catching up, and because I needed to put something here for today, I’m offering up these deliberately fuzzy photos. I took them this way intentionally, but I’m not sure that I was aware, at any given time, that I had more than one or two of them in hand.

So, before the memories grow fuzzy, let’s let the pictures do it.

This one isn’t fuzzy, but if the sky and the ocean are showing off they deserve to be seen, wouldn’t you agree?

adventures / friends / I do not know what is happening. / memories / Monday / photo / running / video — Comments Off
29
Dec 14

“Due to a copyright takedown notice …”

A year and a half ago I picked up some music for video beds and, today, I got a take down notice about one of them from YouTube. Someone had filed a complaint and now I have “a strike.”

I looked up the company and it seems they are doing this a lot, granting licenses and then revoking them for whatever reason. I suppose they feel they can get some sort of monetary gain from that. It is, in the common parlance, a shakedown.

So the old video was gone, which meant a page on my site did not have the appropriate video. And if there is one thing around here that we don’t abide by it is Errors That We Know About.

We are perfectly fine with Errors Of Which We Are Unaware.

So when you spot the bountiful errors, point them out. They get fixed with equal parts chagrin and alacrity.

Anyway, I had to find the right page, which was easily narrowed down to three or four, based on the context. And then I had to find the proper video. Of course, I wanted to upload the video again, this time with music from someone who isn’t a con artist. So I had to dig up the original video, which took a few searches, but was easy to find in the scheme of things. Feeling as though I was lucky to still have it, I loaded it in the video editor, dropped out the now illicit music, made an edit and then put in some bed music that hasn’t been pulled out from under me. The other music was better, but this is fine. I had some graphic considerations, and I figured that, since I was there, I may as well put it in the new video style. And here it is, new template, old video, acceptable new tune:

Took 15 minutes.

And no, I’m not updating all of my old videos to this template. It will probably wear on me soon enough as it is.

On the other hand, I got to read through my notes and see the videos and photos that I took on our trip with Jessica and Adam to Ireland in the summer of 2013, and that was grand. And, in one of those happy little coincidences, all of the headers (randomized for your variety) that I get when I refresh the page are from Ireland. Delightful.

Here are a few of the pages, now: The Cliffs of Moher, On Inisheer, the Aran Islands and On Inishmore, the Aran Islands.

I should just make a category and link to that, so amazing was the entire trip. We could then just jump to that amazing time in a wonderous place with ease. Give me a minute …

OK, when you want to go to Ireland, just go to Ireland.

About three days into that one of us said “We should have kept count on how many times we said ‘Oh wow!’ as we rounded each curve.” And we should have.

On the eighth day, seriously, we started contemplating employment there. Just beautiful.

Today was also lovely. The wind chill was just at freezing this morning when I went out for a run:

It took 1.75 miles to get warm. The last 2.25 miles were just hard, but I got in four miles for the day.

And then we spent the rest of the day watching football and trying to stay warm.

Our sunset:

An altogether fine Monday, the last of the old year, and two cheers for that. Hope your week is filled with more relaxation than work. Stop back by here, though. There will be plenty going on, of course.