Samford « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Samford

You can park here

The parking wars.

We’re having a lot of fun with emails around campus about the current parking crisis. None of this is new, of course. You go back to the first cars on a college campus and the first campus that installed parking lots and you find these same problems. (Seriously, I’ve seen it in archives.) This year we have a record enrollment — so more students and cars — and some ongoing construction eating into preexisting parking.

To the credit of the Samford administration, they are doing great work in solving the problem. We have shuttles and golf carts driving people back and forth. The university president and various vice presidents have been driving the carts around. And they’ve wasted no time in building a new parking lot which is already starting to accept cars. Meanwhile the construction equipment is starting to move out and go on to some other project, destined to ruin someone else’s parking.

So things are finally starting to return to normal a bit. And then the emails today. A campus-wide note told us of new cones for reserving spots. And then the reply-all emails, noting those times when cones are put in place to reserve a spot for some guest, only to never be used.

Like the ones above, which sat there, untouched, all day. And apparently that happens in a lot of the parking lots, according to the other emails. It made for an entertaining read. But, again, nothing of this is new. I have been pleased to share with colleagues that my president is out in the driving rain driving commuters and the vice president of student of affairs is doing this and that and the vice president of business and financial affairs is outside driving a shuttle. Truly, it is a unique place with an extraordinary response to a predictable problem. We’re pretty fortunate.

Today’s podcast features Jeremy Henderson following up on a story he wrote about a guy who wrote somethings on Facebook that have landed him in more than a little trouble:

This evening I had a 2,000 yard swim and a sloppy five-mile run. That follows yesterday’s 10K run. Now if all of my run could be on a flat track.

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24
Aug 15

What’s on your whiteboard?

A couple of our faculty members have these by their doors:

They didn’t give me one. Probably for the best. Who knows what I would write on it. Probably koans:

Shuzan held out his short staff and said, “If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?

I do have access to a giant chalkboard. Maybe I should write about the philosophical mysteries of faith, reality and the universe there.

Today I had a few students come up to the office studio to record a few intro and outro tracks for a podcast project we’re launching tomorrow. They sound impressive, which means we must now make the rest of the project sound equally good.

No pressure or anything.

Things to read: Because we haven’t used this gimmick here in a long while.

Agricultural drones may change the way we farm:

For centuries much of farming has been legwork: walking down rows, through patches, going plant-by-plant to check for weeds, bugs, parched soil, any sign of distress. Modern machinery, soil-testing, computers, and ground-based sensors have made crop monitoring and tending more efficient, but still lots goes unnoticed.

Even with a trained eye, there also are inevitably data that can’t be detected at scale, such as nitrogen deficiency or diminished photosynthesis, the chlorophyll-powered process that is crucial for a healthy plant. And if one ailing plant is found, what is the impact on the sometimes hundreds of thousands of plants that surround it? Farmers were long left to guess.

Not for much longer: Agriculture drones may soon be flying across America’s farmland.

I ask an ag journalist and an ag tech person I know about this story. “What unconventional things related to the use of drones are you seeing?”

They aren’t seeing anything unconventional, because the idea of convention is a bit thin at the moment as it relates to drones in agriculture.

You knew this already, if you’ve been reading me anywhere … Digital Media Consumption Is Booming as Investment Floods In:

Here’s some good news for online publishers: People in the U.S. are consuming more digital media than ever before, and their appetite for it is only growing.

According to data from online measurement firm comScore, the total amount of time spent with digital media in the U.S. increased by a whopping 49% over the past two years, driven largely by the use of non-desktop devices.

Time spent with digital media on smartphones grew 90% between June 2013 and June 2015, comScore said, compared with a 64% increase on tablets.

In case you were wondering: Scientists are crediting the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge for breakthroughs in research.

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21
Aug 15

A Friday quickie

When you want to go home, but they won’t let you …

… because they must paint this door frame.

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20
Aug 15

Hey look down here

No, farther down.

Down here! This is a new pet peeve:

If every media outlet uses an interrogative as a social media tease, every time, they stop working. Be clever, avoid question mark fatigue.

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) August 20, 2015

The striking thing, to me, about the sport of football is that we can easily forget the human element of the game. Every so often you get a very sharp reminder of that. This is one of those examples:

I had my first meeting with the newsroom staff tonight. As we all got settled in I realized that I know more of this bunch at the beginning of the year than I ever have. And they are talented young journalists. We expect a big year.

Here’s something you never expect, a shopping cart road block:

Like they’re saying, “You didn’t buy enough stuff! Go back inside!”

I didn’t buy anything because, for four days in a row I’ve been there for a specific thing and they have managed to not have it in stock.

Ran a nice 10K today. That was all in one continuous motion, even. According to those classic gym charts I was at 70 percent of my max heart rate. My last mile was under nine minutes.

It was a nice workout, begging the question “Why didn’t I feel like this on Sunday when I was falling apart in the Chattahoochee Olympic?”

Finally, I’ve been watching the third season of Newsradio on Crackle recently. I haven’t watched the show in some time, long enough to have forgotten how smart the writing routinely was. In the third season it gets difficult to watch Phil Hartman, though, because there’s something in his eyes that makes you wonder what difficulties he and his wife were already dealing with at home. But that could just be because you know what would happen a short time later. But this is an exception to that, and perhaps one of the best three or four studio scenes from the entire series:

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19
Aug 15

“We could give ’em Christmas pants”

Talked about this video in my social media practices class today:

This is the first time I’ve taught this class, but I’m pretty excited about it. We’ll talk about the personal usage aspects for the first week or so and then get into more professional applications. I know a handful of the students from other classes or projects and as a group they are a sharp bunch. I hope they get something out of it.

I tend to spend a lot of my time on campus in just two or three buildings which are all nearby. But today I had to go across the quad to pick some equipment that had been, let us say, misplaced. And I saw a food truck:

That was a new one to me.

I remember, last week, watching the GOP debate thinking This should be pretty fun on Saturday Night Live. But that was a 20th century response. I should have been thinking about a modern response, because this is brilliant:

Kasich inspired this post’s title.