Today I purchased the 2013 sticker for my car tag. Take that, Mayans.
My DMV experience lasted 33 minutes, which was the longest I’ve ever waited in my two years visiting this particular office. But it is the end of the month.
Usually the post office here takes longer than the DMV. I’m pretty sure I’ve tapped my toe in our post office for longer than 33 minutes.
This was nowhere near my longest DMV experience. I seem to mention the DMV every year. Once, in Bessemer, I read the better part of a book while in line. I seem to recall I took a two-hour lunch break to mutter at the DMV in Homewood one year. The other times I’ve bothered to quantify it have all been four, six, 20 minutes or noted as “painless.” I checked.
I’ve had a big week, coupled with a long few days, where I did too many things and now my shoulder is informing me I regret those decisions. Can’t wait to tell the ortho about it next week.
Suffice it to say, because I’m tired of even writing about it: I’ve figured out it takes precious little to aggravate my collarbone, the muscles in my one shoulder and, when that really gets going, across my back into the other shoulder and up into my neck. Maybe I should do less.
Maybe I should do like these guys:
This is studying on the Samford quad. Hammocks are a big part of the culture here. I’m surprised the administration allows it to continue, but I’m proud they do. I’m also surprised the hammock scenes don’t make their way into more of the promotional literature they send out.
I should write a memo about that …
Nah. I’m taking the rest of the evening off from writing.
Our regular critique of The Crimson was moved to this afternoon. Here is a big stack of newspapers:
We had four pages in color. It was a 12-page paper today. We went through every one of those issues, just to see if we could find the typos in the same places in each copy. We did.
(Find the same errors. We did not go through every issue. We are thorough, but we have other responsibilities, too.)
And now, a few pictures. This is meant to reflect a full day of newspaper topics, email, meetings, text messages, library time and cleaning my office and is in no way designed to get us over 100 photos for the month. That is purely a happy coincidence.
This is the Davis Library at Samford. I visit there from time to time to enjoy the plush leather seats and the many books they have. And also access to scholarly topics. Yesterday I read through about 30 papers in here:
Here’s a side view. Every so often I catch the perfect moment of the afternoon. The sun is at this precise moment realizing it is no longer high and suddenly sinks far more rapidly. But first it sets that window on fire:
And, just a moment or two later, now looking to the west, here is the view of Hodges Chapel, with vinyl canopies going up for some Friday function:
Samford does have a beautiful campus. I took these shots while playing with Picle. Audio! Video! On the iPhone! Together! With no editing-in-post! Drag and drop! And then I learned Picle doesn’t let you embed. That would be an oversight, guys. Embedding is important.
Anyway, here are a few quad shots taken while the carillon was playing the afternoon concert.
Lucky to go to work there.
Video of the carillon? Sure. I shot this in April:
Steve Knight, an amazing man, is the carillonneur.
A new photo found its way onto my Tumblr. And, of course, plenty more ramblings on Twitter.
Did you know that the history of video has recently been re-written?
British photographer Edward Raymond Turner patented color motion picture film in 1899, but the credit for the first fully functional system went to George Albert Smith’s Kinemacolor in 1906. Researchers at the National Media Museum recently discovered that Turner had in fact shot a few rolls of color film that were languishing in the museum’s archives and set out to see if they worked.
Edward Raymond Turner had no idea in 1899 that you would see this:
From the first parrot, the first people shot in color, to the biggest blockbuster of 2012, re-imagined by the people at Honest Trailers:
A friend had this to say about that trailer:
OK, as a Marvel pseudo-expert, allow me to punch some holes in this “honest” trailer. First, Bruce Banner has ALWAYS been able to turn into the Hulk, just not the other way around. He spends most of his life trying NOT to turn into the Hulk. If you want misunderstood character, see Edward Norton’s Hulk. Anger is what sets off the Hulk, not heart rate. However, in the very first Hulk comic, he changed whenever it turned night. Back stories change. But this one got it right.
Second, every true comic fan knows who Thanos is. If you don’t know who Thanos is, then you aren’t a fan, you are someone who went to see a movie. And that’s fine. But don’t hate because you like superheroes with S’s and bats on their chest so you know who to root for.
Third, Loki didn’t die at the end of Thor, he just let go. He’s a god. He’s immortal. He also has inter-dimensional teleportation capability, see character back story.
And that’s what happens when the comic book set chimes in.
Story about news of the day: Alex Green is the editor of the student newspaper at Bryan College in Dayton, Tenn. One of his professors, he learned, was leaving school. Green started looking into into the public records and learned the professor was facing of “having attempted to meet with a minor child” at a gas station. He wrote a story. School president Dr. Stephen Livesay ordered it killed.
All of that to get you to the latest, from Jim Romenesko:
This morning I talked to Bryan College Triangle adviser John Carpenter and asked: Are you aware that Alex Green called and asked me to remove the post?
The adviser said he was.
Did you or someone else at the college tell him to make that call? I asked.
“I can’t comment on that,” Carpenter said.
OK, that answers that question, I thought. (Someone else I talked to this morning believes the editor “has been guilted” by the college president to believe he did something wrong by publishing a story about a professor charged with trying to hook up with a minor. Green hasn’t returned a message that I left this morning.)
And that, friends, is a president big timing a student. (For even more, here are notes from a meeting the president had in the aftermath. He would not allow that meeting to be recorded because he can flex that particular puny muscle.)
Yes sir. For all sorts of reasons. First, while The Triangle is a class project, and thus under the purview of the administration, Green published this of his own accord after you shut him down. Second, you overreached in your reaction with regard to the intrepid young report. Third, from the university’s PR perspective you’ve now made this much bigger for you than it had to be.
Sure, this is a private school, and we can talk all about the case law. But there should be more to the ethical and moral leadership of students than the case law. The good folks at Bryan, as Dr. Livesay said tried “doing the right thing to protect the privacy of a man charged, but not convicted, of a crime” briefly forgot about their other obligation. Seems that everything is being righted now.
Quick links: When the Tuscaloosa News won their Pulitzer last year for tornado coverage, an important part of that was how they used Twitter. But don’t tell the Associated Press, which is vowing to not break news on social media.
The slides that accompanied the headlines lecture can be found over here.
I love Slideshare. It is free. You can find presentations about most anything there. You can always learn something or get a few great ideas over there. It isn’t quite the same because the person delivering the talk isn’t always there. Slideshare does let you upload audio or YouTube, though, so you can follow along easily. I didn’t have the need for that for a classroom, so I wrote a lot of words on a lot of slides. Hopefully even the student that tuned me out bothered to jot down a few of the words.
Later the students working on this week’s paper have this great idea of a cool way to do a great thing. But they can’t do this great thing in this cool way because it would be against the Rules and those are just there to force you to re-create things and find a solution to this problem in an entirely new way.
It took them about 20 minutes. Smart people.
The nice thing was that the problem came about because we had too many ads. Or so they thought. We have a full paper of ads this week, which we haven’t been able to say in a long time. Maybe this problem will happen again.
Nola Media Group announced it will fund a half-million dollars worth of initiatives to increase public access to digital media in New Orleans. New Orleans has one of the lowest rates of broadband access in the country.
The technology works with conductive inks that enable capacative touch, but full details are sketchy.
Project participants also say the technology can be used to print interactive advertisements. Interactive Newsprint collects click counts and engagement time for publishers and marketers to analyse.
Dundee University product design researcher Jon Rogers says: ”For pretty much the first time, in a scaleable and manufacturable way, we’re going to connect the internet to paper. When you start to connect that to news, we’re in a goldmine zone.”
So many applications. I want three of them, special delivered today.
This shot is from standing just off the quad on the Samford campus, which is probably humming with people throwing frisbees whenever you read this. It doesn’t really matter when you read this. Frisbees are being thrown.
Anyway, I’m lucky enough to go in this building to work every day:
My office is on the third floor, and off the left side of the photograph.
Or, if you’re reading it at night, there is a small chance that some of the students are trying their luck wading through one of the fountains without getting caught. There are differing opinions on the challenge involved with that.
Samford is a great place, a happy place. I think I’ve met one person there who was not smiling. This is my fifth year on campus. That’s a pretty good ratio.
Oh, I’m sure some students have less than happy moments. Most people don’t like tests, or last minute projects.
Which is why I’m working long and hard on tomorrow’s lecture topic: Headlines. Everybody loves them, until they have to write them.
Occasionally I take a break from writing this stuff and pulling examples, surfing some of the best newspaper design across the country that landed on doorsteps this morning. (It is difficult to provide a good example on question marks in headlines, for example.) When I do push back from this PowerPoint there are two or three other tasks demanding attention.
Emails to write, letters to compose, numbers to crunch.
Living the Monday dream, friends.
Sad to learn of Paul Davis’ death. He was one of those strong regional voices of journalism. He helped launch a lot of careers. And those careers served communities and inspired others.
There are different audiences here, of course. AP sells news to media companies who sell the news to the general public. But the public, of course, have ways of seeking out the information they want. They’re often using Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter for their own wires.
And, sometimes, with poorly written, unhappy headlines.
