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IU / site / television / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
27
Oct 20

Tuesday, huh?

Have you ever had part of a day just vanish from memory? You know you did things, but you can’t really recall, precisely or vaguely, what those things were, even on the same day?

Welcome to my Tuesday!

I know I got up and puttered around the house and caught up on all the things I read in the news cycle and then at some point went to the office and did office things. I even held an office hour! Virtually! No one showed up.

I watched some videos and pounded out the emails and … anything else I could type about it would just be guessing at the routine. But it was there. Maybe that’s what it was fluorescent light-guided routine.

It’s a studio night for me, which reminds me to update you on some of the recent productions. And here they are now:

The spooky late night comedy show:

By the way, we learned this weekend that Not Too Late, which is the show above, earned an Honorable Mention in the national College Media Association’s Pinnacle Awards. A fine recognition, indeed. It’s a fun little program they’re building over there in Studio 5.

Meanwhile, and elsewhere … notably in Studio 7 …

Big Ten football is back and the subject of this longform talk show.

More sports! Now it feels like fall on campus:

And if you’re more of a morning person than a scary late night person, well I’m sorry we aren’t compatible in this respect, but, nevertheless, there’s a show for you as well:

And that has us all caught up on the last few days of television. I think. They also produce remote programs and social media and something like five different podcasts this semester. There’s a lot going on, is the point, even in this semester where there is, necessarily, less going on.

Forgot to mention: I updated the front page recently. Go check it out. It looks like this:

I have a several new photos I’m going to work through there. I’d like to have some random script do it, like the banners on this page. Around here, we are big fans of visual variety, as you might have noted. And the more you can automate that, the better.

Why not just use the same code?

Aren’t you a clever reader, you clever reader.

I’m tinkering with that. Maybe it’ll work. I might have to try something else to avoid breaking too many other rules on the site.

Why don’t you use javascript?

No thanks.

But —

Look, we’re trying to get away from that around here.

It’s something of an industry standard and —

Oh, believe me, construct I created just to have this conversation with myself, I know. But there’s some bloat and loading and security and some mobile-user issues and I’d just rather have a CSS and a PHP style solution, if you please.

Well, when you put it that way … why not just use the same code as this page?!?

Capital idea! Let me look into that.

memories / photo / site / Thursday — Comments Off
20
Aug 20

Happy National Radio Day

I worked in radio, a few lifetimes ago. I have a great radio transmitter sign, it reads:

CAUTION

HIGH LEVEL

RADIO FREQUENCY AREA

NO TRESSPASSING

A station engineer gave it to me once upon a time. Too bad he didn’t need to offload a transmitter and broadcast license that day, I suppose. Anyway, sitting right under it, and looking rather out of place because of it, is my Silvertone 8090 AM radio, from 1948.

You wonder what news and entertainment the original owners enjoyed through that cabinet, and how it came to my hands.

I purchased it from a retired educator about three years ago. Restoring radios, he said, was his retirement hobby. Feeling a bit like I was on a reality show, I got him to tell me all about his process and show me his other radios. He gave me a tour of the ones he was tinkering on in his garage, and the finished radios that held pride of place in his home. I got him to drop his price a bit and we loaded it up in the car. It still powers up, and I turned it on when I got it home. I listened to part of a football game on the local AM station.

One day I’ll actually put a Bluetooth speaker in there and play big band music from within the cabinet. But I have to move all of the things in my home office four or five more times first. (Another shuffle is coming this weekend!)

The gentleman I bought it from came to campus a few weeks later and I gave him and his wife a mini-tour of The Media School. They were quite pleased by all that we are doing for students. (I believe she was an educator, too.) On their way out he said he was thinking of selling one of his really, really nice radios. One of the few sorts I’d really want. It was an early console radio with station presets. I could put my old station call letters on the buttons. How neat this would be! We’d talked about them for some time in his home, and I knew better than to ask. But on his campus visit he said he was maybe thinking about selling one, one day.

Which was the time to say, if you do, I hope you’ll consider giving me a chance to make an offer.

I keep checking my Facebook messages to see if he’s ever written me about selling it … no luck on National Radio Day.

memories / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
5
Aug 20

Happy website anniversary

This blog started, on Blogger, this week in 2003. I was bored and it was a light day after work in a slow week in the studio. I’d been reading a lot of blogs and decided to try it myself with no expectations. And after 17 years and one day, here we are.

Jump forward a year, this same week in 2004, I bought the URL to this website. I think my co-workers talked me into it. Better to host your own than to jump from free site to free site. Tomorrow kennysmith.org turns 16 years old.

This is a basic view of the statistical trend of monthly growth of the site’s visitors.

The whole site, which I scaled back starting in 2016 or 2017, has welcomed almost 3.7 million visitors over the years. Not bad for a personal site.

Thanks for being a part of this.

photo / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
29
Jul 20

Mud, we’re going to talk very briefly about mud

I changed the website. It was due for a refresh, anyway, and I wanted to return to a simpler bit of code. For a long time the idea was to find the art in the simplicity. And then I found some other fancy things and did that for a few years. Like with so many fancy things, there’s a lot to like, and some elements to tolerate. Ultimately, it comes down to how much coding you want to do, and, again, there’s something special about doing it all with a little.

So go check it out. It looks like this:

Eventually I’ll change around the background, but all the buttons work and it is responsive to different browsers and different mobile orientations. Simple. Effective. We like that.

I’m working through the last of my latest haul of crinoids.

I’m looking forward to returning them to the wild.

Still need to work on the pictures of small things.

These next two are filled with a few millennia or so of sediment. You could drill that out. I’ve toyed with the idea. I prefer the open ones, but maybe a mud scientist, a pedologist or an edaphologist would like these more. Maybe they could learn something from it. Maybe it was a good year for mud when it seeped into the columns. Maybe it was a bad year for mud when it decided to stay.

There, I’ve anthropomorphized mud. It’s been a full day.

I’m not often lucky enough to find crinoids with these more involved characteristics in the center. It’s pretty cool.

Guess the mud knew to stay out of those.

IU / photo / podcast / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
3
Jun 20

Give this a listen

Today is going to be brief, because I have decided to take a bit of this day away from this glowing machine. So here’s a flower from a recent walk.

And if the photos look a bit larger around here today, they should. I decided to change the default photo size earlier this week. Mondays, first of the month and all of that. Usually these sorts of changes are made in August, in honor of the anniversary of the place. And, who knows, I have this vague idea that I’ve done this before and that somewhere along the way I forgot that and reverted to the older habit. Habits are like that sometimes.

Said the guy who knows he’s got too many of them.

I talked with sociologist Jessica Calarco today. She students social and socioeconomic inequities and their impacts on families, children and school. It seemed a good set up for the end of the school year, when the state’s school experts are expected to make their first announcements about next fall later this week. She gave us a really great interview.

On Topic with IU · On Topic with IU – Returning to school, with sociologist Jessica Calarco

I have at least three of them lined up for next week. More school issues, more economic issues, and who knows what else may appear. You should just go ahead and subscribe so you can get the latest episodes as they are released.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well.