This is all I did in January. It was not a lot, and the lack of red is depressing. Red is the bike. Darker blue is running. Lighter blue is swimming.
Next month I’ll just have do more.
swimming
31
Jan 14
So, so very tired
Before I went to bed last night I made a big cup of hot tea. I felt tired enough to need some caffeine so I could go to sleep. It helped.
Naturally I woke up tired this morning.
Breakfast at The Barbecue House. And then we went for a swim. It felt miserable. I was tired and sore and haven’t done anything since Monday. I was finding excuse after excuse to not swim.
I actually did a few hard laps. I found that I can swim 25 yards at about the same pace of the pool record — for the 50 yard race. So I’m twice as slow, which is fine. César Cielo, the guy that holds that is Brazil’s most decorated swimmer, with three Olympic medals, six World Championship gold medals and two world records.
I think I was ready to fall asleep in the pool, too. But I did manage to get in 2,150 yards before they closed.
Spent the rest of the afternoon fighting off a nap. Spent the evening wandering around the grocery store looking for naan. Finally one of the young ladies that works there told me it was in the bakery, “By the thing next to where the soft drinks are.”
Well, she was wrong, but she was in the right neighborhood. She was also eager to help, and she actually knew what the stuff was, so she gets points for that. And now we have enriched and whole wheat naan.
So, as Fridays go, pretty great.
Tomorrow it’ll be in the 60s. I’ll be awake for that.
18
Jan 14
Pink and purple
Yesterday was something of a trying day. We were holding vigil with friends all over the country as their little girl fought for her life. This adorable little 3-year-old suddenly got ill. It seems the first hospital missed something big and by the time the next morning rolled around bad had gone to worse and now tragic.
It has shown the best of us, though. People who are hurting for their friends now suddenly dealing with this huge hole in their world. And strangers who are generous because they read a good appeal and they saw a few beautiful photographs. Folks who empathized, maybe, because it could have been their child. In two days the Internet has helped raise almost $50,000 for that family’s hospital bills. You people are quite remarkable.
We’d ordered some things on Amazon to have shipped to them at the hospital. And then suddenly the facts on the ground made the shipment seem inappropriate, so we tried to cancel them. Four items were in the pipeline. I called Amazon, and Rachel told me that they have a half-hour cancellation policy. However, she was able to cancel three of the orders while we were on the phone. This, I thought, was great. The fourth item, though, had already passed Go. She contacted the merchant and the shippers this morning and got that item stopped. Amazon and Rachel didn’t have to do that, but they did. And she called to tell me about it this afternoon.
(Also, we spend so much time complaining about customer service, we should compliment the good examples, too.)
We ran today. I got in 4.25 miles, chasing The Yankee around the local running trail and down an adjoining road. I outran two horses. Of course they were being walked, slowly, but let’s not concentrate on that.
Also, at the pool yesterday, I swam 1.29 miles. Swimming is supposed to be mentioned in yards. I count it in laps. My online tracker uses miles. It was 2,250 yards if you’re interested.
Most important was that I did half of that freestyle. That’s 1,125 yards. My shoulder isn’t limiting me. Muscle fatigue, that’s a different story. Also, there was an Olympic swimmer on the pool deck. And I was told that my stroke looked good.
The Olympian didn’t say that, but it is pretty awesome when it reads that way, right?
Things to read … which even Olympians care about.
Alabama looks for next generation of farmers:
Farming and forestry are big business in Alabama. Combined, they account for nearly 12 percent of all of the state’s economic activity.
But after generations of change, the state’s bell cow industries may need some nurturing.
Over the past half century, the number of Alabama farms has dwindled from about 250,000 to around 60,000. Large farming operations have thrived but many medium-sized, family farms died away, said Alabama Cooperative Extension System Director Gary Lemme.
Department of Justice finds conditions at Julia Tutwiler Prison to be unconstitutional:
The U.S. Department of Justice said today that conditions at Julia Tutwiler Prison violate the Constitution, citing what it called “a history of unabated staff-on-prisoner sexual abuses and harassment.”
DOJ sent investigators to Tutwiler last April and reported their findings in a 36-page letter to Gov. Robert Bentley.
“The women at Tutwiler universally fear for their safety,” the report stated.
The New York Times’ Most Popular Story of 2013 Was Not an Article:
Think about that. A news app, a piece of software about the news made by in-house developers, generated more clicks than any article. And it did this in a tiny amount of time: The app only came out on December 21, 2013. That means that in the 11 days it was online in 2013, it generated more visits than any other piece.
I’ll repeat: It took a news app only 11 days to “beat” every other story the Times published in 2013. It’s staggering.
You don’t know them, but do a little dance — or a few burpees, she liked burpees — for ZB and her parents. Pink and purple were her favorite colors. Wearing those might be a nice touch.
15
Jan 14
Mugshots liked on Facebook
Overcast this morning. Clear in the afternoon. The high was in the mid 40s. It was the kind of day that suggested a feeling that implied what flirting with spring might, one day, be like.
The forecasts call for another cold snap in a few days, making it our second of the year, meaning we’ll have an extra one that no one ordered. We’ll convince ourselves that, somehow, this means we’re going to have an incredibly nice spring.
Hit the pool, swam a mile. That makes three times in a week. Suddenly, I feel like I can breath in the pool again. That’s always a nice comfort-level skill to have. I’m a very bad lap swimmer, but I only kicked the lane lines twice today, so there’s that, too.
Appropos of nothing I came home the other night from somewhere and The Yankee was watching City of Angels. I remember seeing this in the theater, it was probably the perfect late-90s date movie, after all.
So we ended up watching the whole thing, because she likes the movie, and I can make Nick Cage jokes. And then, toward the end, at the climactic scene:
She yells at the television screen, “Wear a helmet!”
It has just become a reflexive thing, at this point.
Things to read … no helmet required.
The New New Newsweek.com: “it seems like every time you turn around there’s a new Newsweek.com.”
I remember when I first subscribed to Newsweek. It was the 7th grade. It was a class assignment. I was never that big of a nerd. We had the same English teacher four times in junior and high school and she gave us writing assignments out of the old magazines. Those were my first, real, writing assignments, summarizing news copy each week, every week, for four years. It was a decent start on learning the craft of writing. I remember when I finally dropped Newsweek, when they were running wildly divergent covers for different parts of the world. What you saw from one to the next was so different as to be insulting. And if that wasn’t insulting the American copy got the job done. I doubt I’ll be subscribing again anytime soon, despite new editors and a third round of new owners and so on, but having more publications out there is never a bad thing.
Survey: Obamacare worries Hill aides:
A vast majority of top congressional aides say in a new survey that they are concerned about the effects of Obamacare on their staff, ticking off worries about changes to their benefits, higher costs and whether they’ll have access to local health care providers.
Ninety percent of staffers surveyed for a report released Monday by the Congressional Management Foundation said they are concerned about benefit changes under the health care law, while 86 percent are anxious about the financial hit and 79 percent cited worries to access.
[…]
“The elimination of staff’s traditional health care has been a complete disaster,” one aide said in the survey. “If you wanted a legislative branch run by K Street lobbyists and 25-year-old staffers, mission accomplished.”
Guess you should have had your bosses read the bill before they passed it, huh?
What Secrets Your Phone Is Sharing About You:
Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood.
Businesses are tracking their customers and building profiles of their daily habits using a network of startups that have placed sensors in restaurants, yoga studios and other sites. Chris Gilpin, founder of one such site, Turnstyle, joins the News Hub.
And he gleans this information without his customers’ knowledge, or ever asking them a single question.
Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city.
The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones.
Whenever I talk in class about how we’re going to be leveraging technology in the near future — which is here, now — this is the one that always makes the students squirmy. You can see why.
This is the best story of the day. I have a feeling no one will mess with Jeanna Harris anymore, except maybe reporters, to whom she gives great quotes. Woman with shotgun chases away burglar:
Jeanna Harris, of Decatur, said the man she woke up early Tuesday to find rifling through her bedroom belongings is welcome to come back and try to steal from her again.
“He better be glad I had my nightgown on. The Lord’s hand was on him,” said Harris, 43, who armed herself with a 20-gauge shotgun and chased the intruder from her home. “I’m waiting on him, and I will not have on my Victoria Secret nightgown. I will have on my running shoes. It didn’t scare me; it made me mad.”
[…]
Harris said she’s glad she didn’t fire, partly because “it could have been a very dirty mess to clean up.
A suspect was arrested. And, Decatur, where this happened, puts mugshots on Facebook. People comment. “They” would do that without booking information being published online, but fewer people would hear about it. In some circumstances that could be a good thing.
13
Jan 14
Do not do math underwater
Swimming again this morning. I got in 1650 yards, which apparently used to be measured as a mile in the pool. That’s weird because, when you swim as slowly as I do, you have plenty of time to do multiplication and division in your head — several times — and realize, Hey, that math isn’t right.
Don’t do math in the pool. Because the sequence of events that follows is not unlike those Directv ads. And the inevitable “What lap am I on?” is only the beginning.
Don’t do math in the pool.
This evening I went for a run. It seems that if I get a route in my head some part of me feels obligated to do the entire thing, if possible. And there I was, wondering how this felt and why that ached, and enjoying that it was cold, but I was sweating. Wondering how my hair could be wet, the temperature could be 46 and I find that I’m enjoying myself. So I ran and walked eight miles. OK, really it was 7.94 miles, but my first rule of running is to round up. I walked the hills, because of whatever is going on with my legs. The entire route was on sidewalks or bike paths, except for one little bridge. I fairly well sprinted over that.
I don’t sprint.
I do not know what is happening.
Now, as I sit resting quietly, Allie has come for a visit. I moved to take a picture of her cuddliness and my poor posture, and she does this:
I can take photos of her with my camera all day long. She’ll tolerate an iPad being shoved in her face. You pull out your phone, and that is just going to ruin her night, you filthy paparazzo.
Things to read … because reading is fundamental.
A conversation on Mobile Content Strategy with Mark Coatney, Al Jazeera America:
Mark reads books on his commute so he believes that long form is absolutely possible on mobile. In his eyes a 5-minute video is long form. Short form means anything that is a steady stream of consumption: ‘stock and flow’. When asked if he was encompassing that theory by combining into one or splitting into two apps he replied “Two, but I hadn’t really thought of it like that”. One will give the steady stream of information and be more social. The other is a second screen, a companion that will give you more information, go deeper whenever a consumer wants to.
There is a ton of stuff, in that one simple paragraph.
Enhanced fan experiences: The sportd strategy of the second screen:
Consider this: 83% of fans say they use social media during games. Sixty-nine percent prefer phones as second-screen alternatives; 48 percent check scores and 20 percent watch highlights via mobile, according to data from March 2013.
[…]
Not enough is said or written about the engagement teams are having with fans in social. I feel conversations are not genuine enough and too many teams and leagues have built a barrier, not engaging fully with those who appreciate them most.
That is because most teams are terrible at the practice. The exemplar Tom Buchheim uses are the Boston Bruins. “The team uses replies to many fan tweets, even personalizing each response with the initials of those behind the scenes.”
So someone there understands Twitter is a conversation. Good for the Bruins. Why are most professional and big-time college franchises have difficulty grasping the attendant concepts? Buchheim continues:
Game time is go time in social media, and it can be chaotic. But teams should dedicate resources to connect one-to-one with fans more. Share their content. Have conversations. Build stronger bonds. This will only drive further engagement during the off-season and help fulfill social media’s true value — breaking down barriers and connecting people in authentic ways.
[…]
A sports fan’s second-screen options are endless. So are the ways teams and leagues can reach them during live events. It’s imperative fans find value in these experiences, whether they’re watching online, on their couches or in the bleachers. As it becomes ingrained into the sports experience, the second screen must be about the fan, providing deeper engagement, better access and increasing value.
The standard if/then/so structure there is heartening. These programs will figure it out, though I’m not sure why it will take them that long.
Who’s poor in America? 50 years into the ‘War on Poverty,’ a data portrait:
Today, most poor Americans are in their prime working years: In 2012, 57% of poor Americans were ages 18 to 64, versus 41.7% in 1959.
[…]
Today’s poor families are structured differently: In 1973, the first year for which data are available, more than half (51.4%) of poor families were headed by a married couple; 45.4% were headed by women. In 2012, just over half (50.3%) of poor families were female-headed, while 38.9% were headed by married couples.
Poverty is more evenly distributed, though still heaviest in the South: In 1969, 45.9% of poor Americans lived in the South, a region that accounted for 31% of the U.S. population at the time. At 17.9%, the South’s poverty rate was far above other regions. In 2012, the South was home to 37.3% of all Americans and 41.1% of the nation’s poor people; though the South’s poverty rate, 16.5%, was the highest among the four Census-designated regions, it was only 3.2 percentage points above the lowest (the Midwest).
Pew has a chart and a map on that page which say a lot, quickly.
And a more localized view, from Kaiser Family Foundation researchers:
All 10 southeastern states have poverty rates above the national figure. Mississippi (27 percent, second-highest) and Louisiana (26 percent, third-highest) are near the top of the rankings, while North Carolina and Florida, each at 21 percent, are just slightly above the U.S. rate.
Alabama, meanwhile, sits at 22 percent, ranked 15th overall.
