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Samford

links / Monday / Samford / World Cup — Comments Off
28
Jun 10

Monday stuff

Now it makes perfect sense. It is only because you watch that there are problems with this World Cup. Look away, world, the poor officiating and obvious errors will go away. FIFA is infuriating. Even so, the games continue. Netherlands struggled to play their game and steal beat Slovakia easily. They are rapidly becoming a favorite of the remaining teams.

The Flying Dutchmen will face Brazil, who offed Chile 3-0. Suddenly, in the quarterfinals, we’ll have one of the matches of the tournament.

At the gym this evening I ran a 7:30 mile. That was painful, think I’ll have to dial it down from there. I only rode 10 miles on the bike. Showered, visited the grocery store and picked up a few things for the next few days. I felt like a big boy because I found the capers all by myself. I even told the cashier when he asked if I’d found everything OK. He was impressed, too.

And then I spent the evening working on the outcome assessment program for Samford. We test graduates on law, quantitative and qualitative. I’ve spent the last week or so harassing grads to return the material, so I can grade it. I’ve spent an hour or two telling people “No, you’ve graduated. This is for us. You can keep your diploma.”

Since there’s not much else I’ll leave you with a few things I’m reading today. From the oil spill there comes research opportunities. Anyone up for helping me brainstorm ideas? I don’t think there’s a lot of research there for me, but I’m sure there will come some great work from it.

Reasons the Sentinel and Philly.com have added mobile jobs:

“If there’s breaking news, you need to make sure it’s on mobile first and then online,” (Tribune Interactive’s Mobile Product Manager Jeff) Dalo said. “By having a mobile manager, you have someone who’s responsible for making sure that happens.”

Increasingly, mobile is where users tend to get their news. A recent Morgan Stanley study found that mobile users will surpass desktop Internet users by 2014 and that the mobile Web is growing much faster than desktop Internet usage ever did.

Maybe newsrooms will come around faster this time, too. The final quote in the piece: “If you don’t have someone responsible for your mobile content and parts of the revenue side of it, then who’s going to take responsibility for that?” (Philly.com President Ryan Davis) said by phone. “We hear so much about mobile and it’s because it’s so useful and because it enables us to reach people and places that we never could before. It has tremendous potential.”

Jeff Jarvis redefines, and defines down, hot news:

The most dangerous defensive tactic parried by legacy news organizations today is their attempt to claim ownership of “hot news” and prevent others from repeating what they gather at their expense for as long as they determine that news is still hot. It is a threat to free speech and the First Amendment and our doctrines of copyright and fair use. It is a threat to news.

[…]

Hot news is ridiculously obsolete. What’s hot today? As Tom Glocer, head of Thomson Reuters, said, his news is most valuable for “miliseconds.”

News, it’s gathering, the architecture of dissemination, it’s perception, audience, everything has changed in the 90 years since hot news was defined. In that view Jarvis is right, and change is past due. We’ve already seen it in practice and now it is left to the courts. Jarvis distills this down to rights. As he notes in his own comments “Considering that PEOPLE now send more links than aggregators — via Twitter and Facebook and blogs and such — do you think they, too, should be stopped? I doubt that.”

Want something webby? Fifty Powerful Time-Savers for Web Designers. There’s some good stuff in there for you.

And, finally, a delicious flank steak recipe.

photo / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
18
May 10

Working on an off day

Went to work today. I stayed through the afternoon, feeling self-satisfied about being in the office during my summer break.

I had a big stack of things to fax. So big, in fact, that our department’s fax machine wouldn’t take the entire stack of paperwork at one time. I had to send it in two batches.

And then I retreated up to my office. But, since this is summer, I sat on the sofa instead of at my desk. I wrote four letters of recommendation. I exchanged Emails generally had a productive day off while at work.

As I was leaving work I received a call from someone wanting an interview about newspaper use of Facebook and Twitter. We talked for about 25 minutes. None of my answers were in 140 characters. Hopefully it was useful.

I wrapped up my complete laundry project. I so thoroughly finished the job that the stack of unmated socks was put with another stack of unmated socks I didn’t even know about. There were six happy reunions. I considered throwing a little party for them.

And then I promptly threw a glass of tea over a white shirt. Sigh. Life gives you successes and stumbles in proportion so you can celebrate all the right little things. So back to the washing machine.

I did two voiceovers this evening. I’ve done just enough of them recently to remember how much fun they are. Hopefully a few more will come my way soon.

Alabama's Ricki Lebegern on the bars, earlier this year.

Late into the night I worked on a new project. I’ve been asked to contribute to a little gymnastics photography book. I poured over four years of photographs and found 47 images to submit for consideration. Maybe four or five are worth considering.

Work, laundry, voiceovers, photographs. That’s a nice day off.

Mathematical oddity of the day: My car boasts a 16-gallon gas tank. This evening I filled it up. It took 18.083 gallons.

Now, there’s no excuse to run out of gas in my car. There’s a gas mileage option, a current use graph and a miles to go readout in the display. At 50 miles the screen changes, as if to say “Hey, just wanted you to know.”

With around 30 miles to go the little exclamation point comes on and the numbers disappear. “You’re really toying with danger here.”

You can count the miles after that, turning off the air, coasting down hills and wondering if your tires are inflated for maximum efficiency. But only if you notice when the numbers disappeared. I didn’t catch that change today because I was doing that social media in the newsroom interview.

I’ve crunched the numbers and that means I coasted into the pump. Don’t do that, friends.

movies / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
12
May 10

The end of spring

One last hint of winter over the weekend. Sunday and Monday, in the second week of May, we never got above 60 degrees. All that’s over now. We touched 86 today, and it felt warmer. The gentle kiss of mild temperatures will go the way of the cool soon enough. Summer is almost upon us.

I know because the semester ended for me today. One last set of final presentations this afternoon, just like yesterday’s, neatly wrapped up the term.

It has been a productive one — taught two classes, worked with the paper, took two classes, presented six papers at conference — and it seemed to stretch longer than usual.

Finished the newsroom’s recycling, wrote up a policy memo or two, had a big lunch and worked on cameras with the rest of my day.

I bobbed and weaved my way through rush hour traffic. Stopped by the hair cutting emporium, where the wait was too long. I have a strict half-hour wait policy on cheap haircuts.

So I went to the library instead. Picked up a big stack of movies for the next week. I started with the television series and then moved from the A’s and moved all the way through the Z’s in an orderly, alphabetical fashion. Got nine DVDs, went through the self check out and escaped the library without anyone even glancing in my direction.

The Yankee and I visited the grocery store, where I learned there is such a thing as pure blended fruit to go. I’m a bigger fan of Van-zilla. I also learned about mojo chicken, which we had for dinner tonight. Pretty good stuff.

We watched Hancock, from the library. Zeus on a bender is a funny idea. Superheroes with consequences is worth considering. And, sure, this is a comic book movie, but it could have been better.

After that there was Leatherheads, which was OK, but I’d expected more. The blurb on the back of the DVD case promises “hilarious screwball antics!” I remain unconvinced.

On IMDB Hancock earns .4 more of a star than Leatherheads. In a real star that would be a lot of hydrogen. Amongst Will Smith fans and the forgiving nature of community movie ratings I’d think the distance is pretty narrow.

That sort of depth of insight will only improve around here now that the summer is upon us.

Samford / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
11
May 10

One final down …

One day to go.

Students gave their website presentations in one class at Samford this evening. We made them dress up and talk us through their site, describing their layout, thought process and explanation of why they added some features and omitted others.

The sites look good.

Dr. C., who’s been teaching for my entire lifetime, was impressed by their efforts. The students have only been working in Dreamweaver for three weeks, but many of them have created nice portfolio sites.

Now we just have to upload them.

At the end of the class I thanked them for the patience, bragged on them for struggling through the new software and encouraged them to keep at it.

They didn’t want to see mine. Something about getting home to see Lost.

Full day otherwise. Grading here, printing there, Emailing everyone. It was the this and that of putting the semester to bed. Somehow it ate up the day.

I did manage to scan a handful of things for Tumblr and the blog. These are all just ads from ancient editions of the campus newspaper. There are folders in a file cabinet by my desk and I’m leafing through them all. A lot of interesting things happened in the 1970s.

The Yankee and I spent the late night sitting on the sofa. No studying, no deadlines. It was a nice change of pace.

Tomorrow is the last final. The summer starts around 4 p.m.

Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
6
May 10

In-laws are in; outlaws are still out (of fashion)

Last class of the semester is in the books. Students have built websites. They’ll show them off in their final exams last week. So today was class and meetings and meetings about class and then discussing class and having class. After which some students stayed longer — because they are conscientious.

Many of these websites look very good.

I’m also recycling newspapers. Thankless job, that, but I do it for the earth. And also to get the extra copies out of my office, where it just sits there as potential kindling.

The best way to remove the old newsprint is to load it into a garbage can with wheels and roll it down the hall, down a flight out of stairs, down another hall, down a few more stairs and then across the parking lot to the giant green recycling bin.

On that first flight of stairs today the garbage can got away from me. Pulling the can from below, the weight shifted. My grip quickly shifted from above my head to below my waist. Thus, a wrenching of the shoulders ensued. To add insult to wrench-ury, I lost my grip on one of the handles, which flung the stuffed-to-overflowing can into the rest of my body. Having then eaten the garbage can in a most insulting way it then managed to land on my forearm, where I now have an owie.

Left work for the mall. Picked up $25 worth of Mother’s Day cards. My mother, my mother-in-law and four grandmothers. That’s a lot of great ladies. (Also, Hallmark, you’re welcome. I’ll be expecting my dividend check any day now.)

Dropped one of those cards in the mail — I’ll get to deliver the rest in person — and then headed home. My in-laws flew in tonight for the weekend. They are sweet, wonderful people. And they were patiently waiting on me to get home for dinner.

I was 15 minutes late. I’m blaming the guy at the card store with no concept of sharing an aisle or the personal space of others. His cards were great. A nice line formed behind him on the Mother’s Day aisle as he re-inspected each one of his cards. His mother being more important then the rest of ours, he had no problem shouldering us out of the way to get the perfect card. I’m sure she’s very proud of her son.

Anyway. We had steak at Logan’s. Wendy, who managed to get a night off from her job, joined us. We ate, laughed, told jokes, told stories on The Yankee and then went home where we basically did more of the same.

And that was the day. Not a bad one. How was yours?

Tomorrow: Two more meetings and Tuscaloosa.