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Enter the band

Visited the local college bookstores today so The Yankee could make sure her texts were on the shelves. Found seven at one store, found four at the second store and met the very nice manager. Found a few at the third store. At the university bookstore we found a big stash. They are all expensive, but textbooks always have been.

I pointed out the prices. It always aggravated me when a professor was shocked to hear how much the text he or she demanded was costing the students. It is a simple enough thing, stop by the store and empathize, for just a minute. So that’s what I do.

The bookstores here let students rent books for the term. Oh you can still buy a $90 text and sell it back for $12. You can rent it for half that price and return it at the end of the term. Wish we’d had that option during undergrad.

My favorite book, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style has stayed the same low price these last 15 years. I appreciate that.

On the way back to the car we listened to the marching band. Is it football season yet? Apparently we’ll have a tribute to Frank Sinatra this year. They sound good, but the director insists you’ll hear more trumpet in this number when they are on the field.

I’m not faux-marching, I promise. Apparently I’ll need to work on hand steadying techniques before pulling out the iPhone. After this take they had a break and were then going to spend 45 minutes on Luck Be a Lady Tonight.

We put a lot of pictures on the walls this evening. Just a few more rooms to go on that project. We had a delicious dinner:

Delicious

Just add the veggies, shrimp, cooking wine, butter, salt and pepper to taste, stir over a respectable heat and serve.

We stood outside and watched the first of the Perseids (Thursday night is the big show), hung out with Jupiter to the east and tried to pick out unfamiliar constellations thanks to my new app, Planets. (That’s a great, free download.)

We had a great day. How was yours?

On the site: New, artsyish banners across the top and bottom of the blog. The blur across the top is the cardinal I vainly chased this afternoon. The one along the bottom is the yard in late evening repose. This is an excellent opportunity, then, to remind about the new banners page, meant more for me than for you, but nevertheless, see ’em again. Also, there’s a new picture on the home page.

And someone stop me: I’m thinking of redesign ideas.

Monday / site / video / World Cup — Comments Off
12
Jul 10

Reaching out for Facetime

Just to catch up from yesterday: Watched the World Cup final, pitting a disappointing Netherlands versus an underwhelming Spain. Referee Howard Webb tied his hands early with cards and that hurt the game. Spain were the better team, so the outcome is neither a surprise nor upsetting, but the manner of the resolution was unfortunate. It is a shame, really. A game, no, the game was too easily swayed by one person who wasn’t even playing.

I’d rather have seen the two sides play, but Netherlands didn’t really oblige us of that either. The legendary Oranje temper came to play late after it was clear their game plan wasn’t going to work. Spain just kept moving until the opportunity presented itself, as they had the entire tournament. The resolution was unsatisfying for everyone not already a fan of La Roja. And now we have to wait four more years.

(I watched every game. Had a great time doing it.)

We visited Ann Taylor yesterday, marking my second time in almost as many days. The Yankee visited again today, but I declined. A third time in a week was just too much. I consoled myself at the Apple Store. I did not buy anything, but did play on the iPad. I’m no better at the air traffic controller game on a touch screen than I am with a mouse, making me believe I’ve made a good career choice there.

Played with the new iPhone, which has plenty of promise. The video is incredible. The speed is good, apps look strong and so on. Now they just have to convince everyone that antennae issue isn’t a flaw, but a feature. The first time someone calls that you don’t want to talk to? Finger over the antennae and disconnect. No more “I’m going through a tunnel!” That doesn’t work when the person on the other end knows there are no tunnels in your tri-state area.

And then there’s Facetime. It will, of course, catch on when there are enough phones in circulation. If the technology holds up there won’t even be any other way to look at this. (I’d like to be able to record Facetime, but that will come too.) So acknowledging the value and quality of the HD cameras and the opportunity that comes with Facetime I’d like to point out what is really important, the commercials.

These will be the most evocative commercials since the really good reach out and touch someone ads.

Is it a coincidence that both campaigns are for phones?

Upgraded WordPress tonight. The first step, the helpful tutorial says, is to back up your files and database. I’d assumed that WordPress was doing that for me and that all of these important messages I’ve been sharing with you were being preserved on some off-site, off-the-mainland island guarded by the mist from Lost, powered by the trees from some M. Night Shyamalan movie who were advised by aggressive ninjas amped on Red Bull and dozens of John Woo explosions.

These being important messages, and WordPress having been a free service I’d only assumed they went this extra mile. Turns out a guy named Earl, asleep in a rickety old chair leaned against a dingy wall next to the On/Off button has been serving as my backup. Earl, I read in the forums, doesn’t read none too good. But I don’t hold that against the guy. He’s got a lot of blogs to back up. It is only reasonable to expect reading comprehension to deteriorate over time and volume.

So I read on, now knowing that every moment I waited the threat to my data grew exponentially. There is no threat quite like the one you know you aren’t sure about.

The second step and the subsequent 15 steps became too much to consider this late into the evening. I found a widget that will back up my site automatically, so WordPress can do this, they just don’t offer outright. Safely backed up — I chose Email, offsite FTP, three Scandinavian children memorizing things in a limerick and a bird using a chisel and hammer — I could proceed to the next steps of the upgrade.

Which were, fortunately, incredibly easy steps. Click this, click that and you’re done.

I started playing around with the capability to host multiple blogs through 3.0, which kept me up late. Just to see if I could make it work I started an irregular snapshot photograph blog. (I back-dated a few posts, just to give it something to do.) The first few steps involved in starting that second blog using the new WordPress interface are a little more confusing than necessary, but once you get that figured out it the CMS is once again as you’ve come to know and love.

Elsewhere, there’s Tumblr, Twitter and the rest of the site. Tomorrow there will be … something. Be sure to come back and check it out.

site / weekend / World Cup — Comments Off
10
Jul 10

Saturday: World Cup, gym, being sore

Watched the World Cup consolation game this afternoon. Germany and Uruguay, two of the teams I’m less interested in, play in what is typically the most interesting game of the tournament. There’s less of a concession to strategy in the consolation game for obvious reasons. The battle for third place was not stuck at midfield. In fact, after the first few minutes the ball seldom lingered there.

Germany won, 3-2, but Uruguay, true to form made it a mystery until the very last kick. They could have tied it at the whistle, but the last freekick smacked the crossbar, and everyone was sent home from the rainy game.

Tomorrow’s game, the final, probably won’t be quite so entertaining. Both Spain and Netherlands are saying otherwise and we’d all like it if that comes to pass. Don’t be surprised if that isn’t the case.

Forgot to mention the estate sale story from yesterday. The woman was selling everything, house, contents and all. I talked the briefest little bit with her husband. The Yankee, talking with the woman, learned that her first husband had died and she later remarried. They have a home together in Atlanta and she was trying to get everything out of Birmingham.

She said she was having a real estate sale, having hired a company that does that type of work. But, she had fears that they wouldn’t take the job for all of her things. She once owned a used book store, you see — hence the massive collection — and she was now having an everything-must-go sale before she had the estate sale.

Big day at the gym. The Yankee gave me a new work out regimen to try. So I did legs and then back and then road 20 miles on the bike. I watched the rain fall. I watched the sun come blaze down into an excessively humid afternoon. I did not see a rainbow.

After that, the store, home, dinner, brownies, a lot of stretching and groaning from the gym and now this.

Site stuff: I’ve added a new page to the side of the blog after I updated the banners. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and if I’d thought to do it from the beginning of this style I’d have a comprehensive list. But I think I have a big chunk of the photos that have graced the top and bottoms of the blog. This page will no doubt be more for me than you — but that’s probably always the case. If you’re interested, though, you can see a lot of old familiar scenes, with a little note for each image, on the new banners page.

Four new items made it to Tumblr today. Follow me there, if you like. Check me out on Twitter, too.

Tomorrow: The World Cup final and other adventures.

site / Tumblr / Wednesday / World Cup — Comments Off
7
Jul 10

If the swing is long and slow developing, I’m back in it.

The day didn’t seem to want to start. Oh it was going on out there. The world was moving. People, presumably, were moving either with or against the rotation of the earth. Or, perhaps the earth had stopped moving, gravity failed and everyone floated away. Maybe, I figured, I’m still here only because I was trapped in a snug blanket seal this morning. Being short-sheeted could have poss

More likely I couldn’t get to sleep last night, where the evening turned to morning and fatigue never found me. It took a while to adjust to a new day. Some time around noon the concept began to grow on me. Around 2 p.m. I found the strength for food. This was during the World Cup semifinal, and such a boring game too. It was disappointing, but not unexpected given the teams. Spain wins on a nice goal, which was one of the few opportunities of the game. At some point the people doing the scoring for television started inflated even the shots. No way Spain managed four in five minutes.

That was the fulcrum of the day, odd that the fulcrum happened so early, but such is a sunny summer day.

On the other hand, while I couldn’t sleep the last two nights I’ve created a survey to use next fall, so there’s something to be said for having a maladjusted sleep schedule.

Worked out late this evening. The Yankee swam while I rode the bike. She did almost a mile in the pool. I did 20 miles in the saddle. She burned more calories than I did. Not to get too detailed about this, but when I got home I discovered a blister from the toe bucket. A closer look shows a blister on a blister. That’s talent.

Tomorrow I’ll ride 30 or 40 miles, I hope. I’m ifnally back to riding hard (for me) and finding it invigorating (for me).

We picked up dinner at Chipotle. To go. I was still very sweaty and apparently offending the delicate sensibilities of one of the diners. Not that I wanted to be seen in that condition, but it was on the way home. As we discussed yesterday, there’s a certain order to these things. It just wouldn’t do to pass the burrito place, to go home, to turn around and go back to the burrito place.

Fussed with the site while watching American Pickers. Two guys drive all over and commit to television, and the inevitable History Channel DVD series, that old saw about one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. They seem like nice guys. They build a good rapport with people, hear their stories and buy their stuff. And then there’s the unfortunate part, where they show their projected profit. On the one hand that seems a bit cynical, but no one makes people sell to them. On the other hand, it seem like a great job, crawling through people’s stuff, making great discoveries. Maybe that can be my career in retirement.

Figured out the Tumblr import problem. There was an RSS feed that wasn’t doing anything. I found a widget that promises to do something. It is now in the rail to the right. I posted three images to Tumblr today. I scanned more this evening. You can follow that feed should you use the service, as there is a lot more to come. You’ll also be able to see the images as they appear on the site here. To be sure, you should check out both.

Tomorrow: I’ll be here. I’ll be at the gym. I’ll be donating old things I no longer need. There will be more on Twitter and on Tumblr, too. See you soon.

adventures / photo / site / weekend — Comments Off
4
Jul 10

Happy Fourth of July

Thunder Over the Mountain, launched from Vulcan Park.

Vulcan stands on top of Red Mountain (we’re in the city, down in the valley). His pedestal is 123 feet tall. Vulcan himself measures 56 feet, the largest cast iron statue in the world. We’re about a mile away here.

Last-minute donations made up for a $20,000 shortfall that threatened to scale back this year’s show. The entire show costs $40,000 for 20 minutes of pyrotechnics. Vulcan Park was going to ask the city for a substantial portion of the shortfall, but removed the request when city employees, facing pay cuts, complained.

The show has run for 10 years now, preceded by SkyConcert, which ran for 16 years. It is the largest fireworks show in the state and is seen by all the neighboring cities.

More photos here.