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Auburn / iPhone / photo / site / weekend — Comments Off
26
Feb 11

“Is he OK?”

I’m a laid back guy. At least I like to think I’m calm and easy going. My friend Brian made me this graphic six or so years ago. I’ve always taken it as a compliment. It could be that there’s a grave insult here and people think of me as a hot-head, these things could go either way, but I choose to believe people think I’m reasonably pleasant to be around. But we all like to think like that. It is better than the alternative of your friends thinking you’re Charles Bronson paired up with Dirty Harry on a Really Bad Day.

“And that’s when he’s on time.”

So I like to think that I’m normally very consistent and living in that green level. This morning, at about 3 a.m., I was on the dark yellow.

Because, you see, this has been a long week. And when I settled in on Thursday night I got a little rest. And then on Friday I discovered I was rather tired. So it only seemed logical to get a good night’s sleep because I hit the wall at the baseball game and found myself not even hungry for dinner thereafter.

So we came home with our extra pizza and I pretty much made my way directly to bed last night. And then the cat meowed awhile. Meow isn’t the right word. Howl doesn’t really describe it either, though it comes closer. There is no word that describes the urgency “Lassie fell in the well after Timmy and it looks bad and this time I didn’t even push, I promise. Come quick, really!” But this is what we deal with every night, and this tired-before-9 p.m. night was no different.

She’d quiet down and I’d doze of. Repeat. She’d quiet down and I’d dose off, but in some uncomfortable position.

I dozed off and woke up deciding to visit the restroom. So I got up, got the dizzies, took a knee and thought about it for a minute.

I came back to bed wide awake, which just makes me think Lassie should take Timmy out beyond the county line, really.

There’s nothing worse than staring at the ceiling, because when the mind wakes up the rest of you must too. The alternative is at least doing something. Because of this I only go to bed when I’m good and truly exhausted. I’ve been sleepless before, so I stay up. I’ve been so tired I couldn’t go to sleep before, and that’s annoying, sure, but this takes the cake. I was so tired I couldn’t stay asleep.

So I got up and cleaned out an Email account I never use anymore. I created some space on my server by cleaning out some old files. I caught up on a little reading. I changed the front page of my site. I found that graphic above from 2005. I built an entirely new blog.

Meet LOMO, the page I’ll update only from my phone, featuring only pictures I’ve taken with the lomographic filter. Trust me here: You need another diversion, particularly at 4 a.m.

And around 4:40 this morning I finally tried going back to sleep.

So here we are, another beautiful weekend day. Another glorious day at the park:

The Auburn Tigers won 3-2 today, bringing their series to a tie with the rubber match tomorrow. Wonderful day to be outdoors.

We also visited the farmers market — which appears a few times in the new LOMO blog, do check it out. We bought fruits and vegetables, because they are cheaper there, but not the gummy bears, which were far more expensive. We hit the grocery store, stocking up on items for the next few days and then the cupcake shop because you must sometimes be indulgent.

So that was today, which started in the early parts of yesterday and will carry over until the cat stops telling horrific tales sometime in the early a.m. hours. Tomorrow I’ll have to be productive again, but only after the baseball game.

iPhone / photo / site / weekend — Comments Off
20
Feb 11

Catching up

Troy University Chancellor Dr. Jack Hawkins delivers his “high-touch” message in his welcoming remarks to SEJC convention goers at the Troy campus on Friday.

Emulating the Great Sign, Pine Lakes chose that Holiday Inn feeling, and it is nice to see it persisting. Though the M looks to be sliding off. I wonder if it is a new addition.

There are certainly plenty of pines. I wonder if they have a lake.

My new bike arrived while I was off traveling.

And here it is, assembled and ready for pedals and a ride. I’ll get to do that next weekend.

Did you notice the new picture across the top of the blog? That’s from the Troy campus. The appropriate changes have been made to the banners page.

Alabama / Samford / site / weekend — Comments Off
12
Feb 11

Not quite silence

I’m not saying that this place will be dead silent for the next few days (two weeks, really). But this is the stretchiest of stretch runs. A lot of things are coming up in the next two weeks, work- and school-wise.

I figure you don’t really want to hear about image events or ideographs, within-subjects and between-subjects design, qualitative and quantitative research in political communication and the intricacies of recognition, recall and learning anyway.

So give me two weeks to navigate through all of these things and emerge from the brain cloud on the other side. There will still be a few things here, just to say I’ve written something here every day, but it will probably all be as thin and bland as this. I appreciate your understanding, you quiet and kind masses who come read this stuff.

(All 14 of you are delightful people, really.)

And I won’t ask you yet, because it would just lead to cramps, but soon I’ll hope you cross your fingers for me.

Samford / site / weekend — Comments Off
5
Feb 11

The bird that wouldn’t tweet

My eyes are going blind from too much staring at the monitor. Too much for a Saturday, anyway. Also the world’s worst bird took up a post outside of our bedroom window this morning. He has not been to any of the chirping conventions and his parents failed him. The thing sounds like a mule that’s just realized it’s fate. That was on top of a night of not good sleep. I’m blaming the cat.

So this will be brief and familiar and perhaps less than inspired.

Reading. Writing. Emailing. All but one of the smaller things are now out of the way so that I can get on to the larger projects.

One of those was the cleaning of the work Email account. It had grown full of data and would soon start kicking out rude auto-replies to people. So out when the junk and the trash and most of the sent mail. There are five pages of Emails in the Inbox. I like to keep that at two, so there will soon come a reckoning.

Made a lot of recruiting phone calls, talked with several enthusiastic high school seniors and a few parents with smiles on their faces. Three of the students were at Samford when I called. One mother wanted to give me her husband’s number, who was also on campus, because she couldn’t remember her daughter’s. “Isn’t that terrible?”

I don’t remember anyone’s number.

Let’s count. I know eight numbers. Two belong to me and two more I’ll never have need to call again. Three are numbers that haven’t changed in my lifetime and the last one is my mother’s. But I bet no one recalls numbers they’ve used since the proliferation of cell phones. They make our lives easier, or make us smarter, in many respects, but not in this way.

Got my Beta from Storify today. I signed up, because it is important to put my name everywhere on the off chance that I find yet another social media tool valuable. This one is an aggregator, of which there are now several. Memolane is one Intersect is yet another. There are, I think, at least three Auburn-themed sites now.) Not sure what I’ll do with Storify, though. It looks clean and simple, but I tend to like things on my own site and I’m overextended as it is with these third-party places.

At some point you aren’t putting yourself on a service, you’re simply helping add content to someone else’s money-making enterprise. The online life is all about being where the audience is, but the audience also has Google and Bing and I have good URL placement. That bird found me, after all.

If he comes back tomorrow I might make him famous on all of those sites.

movies / site / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
18
Jan 11

Amazing, really

We live in a miraculous age, really. Every time someone goes to the hospital you hear about some new procedure doing some amazing thing in an incredibly un-invasive way. And then the patient is back on their feet again in no time.

Scientists make great strides with impressive frequency on many of the big issues of our day.

I can beam a movie into my computer, just because I want to sit in my library and read, rather than walking into the next room to watch the same movie, beamed into the television.

These are amazing things.

I can’t keep an Internet connection when it rains.

Just before we moved here the good people voted to invite in some cable and ISP competition. Just before Christmas they dug through our neighborhood to install their new equipment.

Tiny flags sprouted up throughout the area marking underground this and buried that. Asphalt and sidewalk are painted in cryptic codes. There were two big holes in our yard. The came back along and fixed that part, at least.

But without fail the Internet turns demure at least once a day.

I stopped counting at six times today. Sure, I grouse and complain. A nice guy on Twitter who works for Charter in Missouri tried to help. But he’s in Missouri. The local folks are nice enough, too, when you can get them out here. They haven’t fixed it, yet, but at least they’re kind.

Science can do this: “We have built a wireless implantable microelectronic device for transmitting cortical signals transcutaneously.”

Get a guy out front with a shovel? You are sure to get rainwater into your conduit.

So I listened, when the Internet connection worked, to The Damned United while I read today. It was based on a friend’s recommendation, and is the fictionalized biopic about an English club manager in the 1970s. If you can’t study over that you’re just not trying.

It didn’t work out very well for the guy. He held the job just 42 days.

Later there was Death at a Funeral, last year’s American version. I’m betting the English version was better. IMDb agrees. It was probably more nuanced than the remake. Nothing is subtle about Martin Lawrence or Tracy Morgan, though.

After the rain stopped this evenin, and the Internet connection returned — Is there a list, somewhere of things that are disproportionately, irrationally disappointing? Does this top that list? — I watched Brothers, without reading.

This was the one to see undistracted. It has a reasonable flow and it possesses a sound story (it is based on a Danish story). I’d buy Tobey Maguire with a lower rank, but Jake Gyllenhaal as an ex-con works. The trailers, if you’ll recall them, did not do the film justice. The build is much slower and the end is almost uncertain.

Elsewhere, I read and studied. I tinkered with the site. You’re reading a new font. Thrilling, I know.

Tomorrow’s adventure will make today’s adventure look like … movies and reading and fonts. I hope your Wednesday is equally impressive.