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IU / photo / podcast / Wednesday — Comments Off
24
Jan 18

A national news reporter joins our little program

Sometimes I have to give a tour of our building and so I talk about the journalism and the sports media and the research area and all of our cool classroom technology and so on. And then sometimes there’s a great flier up. Like this one which is up this week, that would let me tell someone more about the video game programs:

Come to college! Play games!

I wonder how hard a sell that on parents. But once they get here, they have a really great setup, and some incredibly talented peers. Someone is down in the game lab as I’m writing this and they’re making some impossibly cool game. It’s another one of those worlds that most of us don’t understand. Then they’ll launch the beginning of a career or create another gaming success and all of us will think “Well why didn’t I come up with that?” while we download it or go buy it or whatever you do your video game purchases these days.

They should come up with a cool little easter egg to drop in the background shots, so we all know when we run across an IU developer.

NBC correspondent Chris Pollone joined the podcast today. He’s a good get, and this is a pretty great story he’s talking about. A reporter found, perhaps, what is thought to be the last ship to deliver slaves into the United States.

Chris will be back on the show next week, too. And tomorrow, we may really hit the big time. And I have now shifted all of the latest episodes to Podbean for hosting purposes. It just seemed a good time to up the game a little bit. Now I just need to get the thing syndicated to streaming sites.

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IU / photo / podcast / Tuesday — Comments Off
23
Jan 18

We are one famous house

The Yankee and I recorded an episode of my show today. We played it all cool, because it seemed the best approach considering the subject matter. Anyway, the ultimate goal has been reached. We are famous on the Internet:

That’s what we tell Allie, The Black Cat, when we take her picture. She is famous on the Internet:

Of course she’s more famous than both of us put together. Cats and the Internet, after all.

Why, it is entirely possible that the entire agenda of domesticated catdom has been aiming to this moment. Cats knew they should be famous and so they have spent generations buttering us up for the inevitable day that we would create something they could use.

And also, head scratches.

But it begs an important question. They have what they want, now what?

We had a speaker in the building tonight. I spent the night going from the studio to the commons listening to television shows our news crew were producing and Jamie Kalven, who has won a Polk and a Ridenhour Courage award.

And here’s the reason, you should always take the time to listen to people who are passionate about their subject matter. Kalven has that, in spades, for his journalism and what it means to our communities. And so he talked about the importance of what journalism students should set out to do. Truth, authority, power, the man, all of that remains.

“The danger,” he was saying as I took this picture near the end of his visit, “is that we make concessions of our own freedom.”

This is the story Jamie Kalven was talking about.

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Instagram / Monday / photo / podcast / Twitter / video — Comments Off
22
Jan 18

Our fingers walk somewhere else

This is new from earlier today. Indianapolis Star sports writer Zach Osterman joined me to talk about soccer, the nature of sports dynasties and a bit about how The New York Times is covering sports in Spain.

I don’t think I put this here last week. Here it is now:

‪Allie's snow video. #FamousOnTheInternet‬ #TheBlackCat

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on Jan 15, 2018 at 9:33am PST

This arrived today:

It has a lot of numbers, and a lot of information. It could use a few coupons. And I guess the time for spunky defiance has passed. The upper righthand corner is a sad concession to the times.

We didn’t get one last year. I’m not sure why we received one today, but I feel like I should hold on to it. One day the art inside will be humorous, at least. And we’ll be able to look back, in 30 or so years, at a few more industries that have disappeared. But maybe the phone book will make a comeback by then. Maybe

More on Twitter and check me out on Instagram, as well.

Someone is going to have to index our social and biomedia pages.

football / Friday / photo / podcast — Comments Off
19
Jan 18

There are two podcasts embedded in this post

I have this friend that is a designer in an architectural school. We used to sit and discuss things, trying to find some way that we could put this thought process and that expertise together. There was always something there, we thought, but we never could quite grasp it. Probably because the rest of us all think design is one of those things that is easy, and the folks who do that just generally graceful enough to not laugh at us in person.

What do the rest of us know, anyway? Just because we’re binge-watching E.R. right now, after all, doesn’t mean I’m ready to run a trauma code.

“Give me CBC, Chem-20, lights and dip the urine!”

See what I mean?

I, of course, know absolutely nothing about design. But I do love all of those pictures you see online about design versus user experience. They are an insufferable way to point out that we see, in retrospect, what someone else couldn’t get right beforehand. “Haha, we are nerdier than you nerds, but we are casual about it, and only making jokes about it online, using someone else’s designed interface that may, or may not, be a well designed user interface. But believe me, I’m getting to that, just as soon as I find where I stored all my really cool gifs.”

Really, what those photographs always suggest to me is that we are a path of least resistance species. And right angles, while aesthetically pleasing, are inherently asking a lot more than a lazy person is willing to give.

I thought of that this evening, when we were walking out to the car and I saw:

When there isn’t snow on the ground there is a slightly worn path there. I’d have to really check, but the user experience path might be even longer in the snow. Because it is cold, I suppose.

Hey, Spencer Elliott of The Tennessean joined me on the show today. We talked about Uber and Lyft and how you work and communicate with your peers when you don’t have bosses or colleagues and what it all means for the future and there is some really interesting stuff here:

This is another good argument for driverless cars, I think. But I’m not sure how I’d feel about my Nissan logging on and then getting bummed out by something it saw on thepeopleyouferryaround.com/forums

And because my Nissan is a car, and not a person, it would never crave Chinese, never get the pork noodle thing I ordered tonight and never read the fortune that came inside the cookie that the guy dashed into the bag at the last possible second:

Why, yes, I am already lucky boy. More lucky than I deserve, I am sure.

I actually recording another little thing today, just because I love this story and it will be dated before the weekend is up. It is only five minutes of my soothingly smooth monotone:

Indiana / IU / photo / podcast / Thursday — Comments Off
18
Jan 18

If you squint, the snow looks like sand

That’s what I’m telling myself. It reminds me of the sugar beaches of my youth. Sunburns and shade and hot feet and warm water and getting that sand everywhere. At least the snow doesn’t have that same persistence of sand. Indoors, anyway. At least it has the decency to melt inside. Otherwise? No way. This stuff has been on the ground for a week, tomorrow.

But if you squint, it could be sand. It has just the right amount of frost as a covering to sound like walking on sand in shoes. And those grassy bushes, those bushes that I run my hands through, you know, when the windchill isn’t six below as it was yesterday morning, or .5 degrees this morning …

Point five degrees? Point five degree? Why are we even bothering to consider the grammar, or even calculate this?

Those bushes, why if you keep your gaze low to the ground, you could almost convince yourself they are sea oats.

But then the wind blows, and you realize you’re a long way from the Gulf.

On today’s program I spoke with Jamie Zega. She’s a former editor-in-chief of the Pacemaker-winning Indiana Daily Student. Soon she’ll graduate and take her many talents and great potential to The Washington Post. But today, she’s talking about modern presidential language. This one, as the people say, is sorta NSFW. Give her a listen in the player below:

Did you listen yet? You should? She’s a very smart and thoughtful young reporter.

And, now, back to my pretending to hear sand beneath my feet.