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things to read

“You are pretty strong … for a professor”

I spent a few moments loading up a queue with posts for my Samford blog. Here are two I wrote today, a morning tweet, which I think might become a new feature. There’s also a little post about reverse publishing.

Here are a few more things I wrote, last week, that I neglected to cross-post here:

The business of the business

Digital first, the only way?

On the big switch in local media

Also, I noticed that the particular them I’m using there allows for rotating banners. (Apparently I like them, no?) So I’m loading up on campus shots, which is probably the best part of that blog.

Spent some time in the library today. Spent some time writing letters.

I visited city hall. I learned that while there is the old saying “You can’t fight city hall” you can write a check there.

I had to visit the City Revenue Office, which looks more like a hospital’s information desk. There was a nice lady there who took my check. I needed little tags that would signal the garbage crew to pick up my dead appliances. Stick them on, roll the old washer and dryer out to the curb and, come morning, they’ll all be gone.

That doesn’t even give you time to be sentimental about it. “I had you, washer and dryer, for about 10 years, four homes and countless loads of laundry. Just think of all the dates you helped me get! I’m going to … I promised myself I wouldn’t … sniff … ” So it is good that the system moves so fast; that would just be silly.

So while I’m working on a small project for a guy this evening The Yankee says “Someone is taking our stuff.”

I walk outside and meet Mr. Lauderdale, one of our elderly neighbors who talks fast and thinks big. He’s a retired engineer, worked for AT&T for more than three decades and about half as many corporate names. One of his friendly spies in the neighborhood saw the old appliances and gave him a call. He drove his pickup down the road and there he was, trying to get this stuff in the bed by himself.

So I helped him. Turns out his son is an attorney, his daughter-in-law is a professor of some sort. I told him I was a professor too. And he said “You are pretty strong … for a professor.”

I was moving things one-handed, bad shoulder and all that.

Nice guy. He gave me tips for how to fix some things. Told me precisely what it would cost. Told me how much a telephone pole costs. Gave me a brief history of a river in northwest Alabama. Let me go back inside just in time for dinner.

And now I’ll copyedit a journal article into the early morning hours. Living the dream.

Auburn / football / friends / history / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / site / things to read / Tumblr / Twitter — Comments Off
29
Sep 12

A Saturday mishmash

Something I wrote, and photographs I took, last spring made it on to the Smithsonian Magazine’s website.

It has some formatting problems that weren’t there in my submission or the version they returned to double check. No matter. There’s a better, longer version, published here, but, still, Smithsonian.

This is hardly the biggest thing in the world or even the best publication news I’ve had in the last month. But I get to say I’m published on the Smithsonian’s site.

Again.

Back in the old days — and I mean about 1996, which is in no way old, or far enough removed to suggest they are the old days — I perfected my dry sarcasm and speed typing on a chatroom site that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. As we have learned is the norm, a bigger company bought the little company. They made changes, ruined the aesthetic and people left. Some of those people stuck together on ICQ. My ICQ number, which I can’t grab at just this moment, was shockingly low. But the friends stuck together, from Maryland and out west and the Deep South and somewhere in London and in Australia.

One by one they all sort of fell away. Life demanded them. They grew bored. They lost their password or their Internet connection. And finally that group was down to just two people. So there was me and this Australian lady. We’d talked for a couple of years by then. Carol was friendly, and liked folk music and all manner of interesting decorative styles. She worked in the government in Canberra and had a big burly husband who sounded hysterical.

We even talked on the phone a few times. We discussed the virtues of the Australian accent in the United States and my accent, which she found charming, in Australia. I was well underway in my broadcast career by then and thinking a lot about sound. Carol figured I could do very well in Australia. I hatched the sort of plan that you never even try to implement — summer in Australia wooing girls with my southern accent and then running from the winter there to have summer at home in the States, wooing girls with a blended Aussie, Southern accent.

She was my mother’s age, almost. So I jokingly called her my Internet mom. Or, mum, being Australian and all. Her parents were English, but she was raised in Australia, so she had a terrific mixture of both sense of humor. She was a sweet lady.

And yesterday she found me on Twitter.

“You remember me!” she said.

It was the biggest, dumbest smile of the day, lasting into the afternoon.

Saw that this is closing.

Sent the picture to The War Eagle Reader. They made a few calls and turned it into a story.

I have claimed DIBS! on the neon sign out front. You. Can’t. Have. It.

Legendary Auburn quarterback Pat Sullivan told me his Heart of Auburn story last year:

Sullivan looks at his career through those relationships he’s cultivated along the way. His Heisman Trophy experience was no different.

Back in those days the announcement came as a halftime feature during the Georgia-Georgia Tech game. Instead of being on the front row in New York, Sullivan was in Auburn.

“We were actually at practice that day because we had Alabama on Saturday. My parents had come down to hear the announcement … Our TV went on the blink so we had to go rent a room at the Heart of Auburn. We watched it on TV just like everybody else,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan, perhaps the last Heisman Trophy winner to stay at the Heart of Auburn, says his room number has been lost to history. There are plenty of clear memories from the night, though.

“After the announcement we went back over to (Beard-Eaves-Memorial) Coliseum and all my teammates, coaches and their families, (Auburn President Dr. Harry) Philpot and Coach Jeff Beard (then the Auburn athletic director) were all there and I was able to share that with them. That was something that I’ll never forget because I know I didn’t win it by myself, they were a part of it.”

Remember, I’m claiming the neon sign out front.

Links: Iranian news agency uses The Onion. And that says pretty much everything about the gulf between two cultures.

Hints that water once flowed on Mars. In every previous instance of water in human history scientists have found life. Does that project out to Mars?

Sadly, Birmingham News staffers depart as paper ceases daily publication. On Monday the new company, Alabama Media Group opens for business. I have friends and colleagues at both. There are plenty of talented and caring people involved. I project, after a slow start, big things.

Presidential ad spending soars past $700 million means I’m glad I don’t live in a battleground state.

This page will one day be replaced by interactive paper

The slides that accompanied the headlines lecture can be found over here.

I love Slideshare. It is free. You can find presentations about most anything there. You can always learn something or get a few great ideas over there. It isn’t quite the same because the person delivering the talk isn’t always there. Slideshare does let you upload audio or YouTube, though, so you can follow along easily. I didn’t have the need for that for a classroom, so I wrote a lot of words on a lot of slides. Hopefully even the student that tuned me out bothered to jot down a few of the words.

Later the students working on this week’s paper have this great idea of a cool way to do a great thing. But they can’t do this great thing in this cool way because it would be against the Rules and those are just there to force you to re-create things and find a solution to this problem in an entirely new way.

It took them about 20 minutes. Smart people.

The nice thing was that the problem came about because we had too many ads. Or so they thought. We have a full paper of ads this week, which we haven’t been able to say in a long time. Maybe this problem will happen again.

Things to read: PBS Mediashift is running a new series on new storytelling. Meanwhile Storify has storified items from ONA, curating a list of The latest online news tools and great connections.

Twitter is giving best practice advice to journalists, which would seem odd, but then you realize it is Mark Luckie, and you figure there’s probably something there.

Nola Media Group is buying iPads, among other things:

Nola Media Group announced it will fund a half-million dollars worth of initiatives to increase public access to digital media in New Orleans. New Orleans has one of the lowest rates of broadband access in the country.

Newsprint joins the internet of things, interactive paper:

The technology works with conductive inks that enable capacative touch, but full details are sketchy.

Project participants also say the technology can be used to print interactive advertisements. Interactive Newsprint collects click counts and engagement time for publishers and marketers to analyse.

Dundee University product design researcher Jon Rogers says: ”For pretty much the first time, in a scaleable and manufacturable way, we’re going to connect the internet to paper. When you start to connect that to news, we’re in a goldmine zone.”

So many applications. I want three of them, special delivered today.

iPhone / journalism / links / photo / Samford / things to read / Tumblr / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
5
Sep 12

A cute dog is found below

Any day that starts with fruit and grading can’t be bad, right? I think so. Also, apple slices are delicious.

I’m a phase eater. Sometimes I eat a lot. And then, for a brief while, I’ll eat very little. There’s nothing consistent about it, except when I’m in the habit of eating the same things over and over. Lately I’ve been on a fruit kick, which is not particularly interesting to anyone but me, and only then given how many bad-for-me things I typically ingest.

There is a boy in my family who apparently reminds me of me — how he talks and walks and laughs — and I think, “Poor kid.” And then I text his mother and say “If he is like me tell him to study harder and eat fewer candy bars.”

“Enjoy more grapes.”

So I had a small fruit tray for breakfast and graded quizzes this morning. I had lunch with one of our recent grads. We had barbecue, my first ever trip to Saw’s. It is a small little place in a roadside strip mall. There are maybe eight tables inside, we had the corner window. The lady at the register is managing chaos, but thanks everyone who writes out a tip. It doesn’t feel particularly clean, but you can’t make respectable barbecue in a place that aces the health code rules.

A young man brings out your lunch on paper plates. They leave you alone otherwise, despite the lunch crowd and the few tables. There are framed newspaper articles and magazine covers on every inch of the walls. There are license plates above the doors. It is all a thin and perfectly random homage to a sub-genre of food.

Longtime readers know barbecue would be the center of all of my food streaks if it were actually healthy. All things in moderation though, even slow cooked, pulled pork.

Back on campus I had a brief meeting with the editor to discuss distribution patterns and then a visit with my chair, who’s the nicest guy around, and some students about various student things. I wrote plenty of emails.

The guy that can fix my office phone called my cell. He stopped by near the end of the day. This is what he did: glanced at my phone, followed the path of the two cords coming out of it with his eyes, picked one up and plugged it into the wall.

The phone paused, lit up and turned on.

Naturally, I feel like a dope. Turns out he’d had to do some electrical work in a panel in a Jeffries tube somewhere in the building. He did that after I called to complain that my phone wouldn’t work. I didn’t know that, and hadn’t thought to test the highly technical technique of plugging the phone back in to see if it was working this week where it did not last week.

So I spent a few minutes playing with the settings. Turns out you can run your computer off this phone. You can both phone home and phone the Internet from this Cisco IP device. It does not have the ringtone from 24, however. I’m sure there’s a way to do — yes there is.

The engineer that fixed the phone left his notebook in my office. It looked important, so I called his office and someone was still there. He answered his phone, on this same server networked phone. Sounded like he was standing in my doorway.

Pin drop nothing, I could hear the creases in his slacks settling.

So I walked the book over, because this is one thing the phone won’t do. The phone guy will thank me in the morning.

He’ll send an email, no doubt.

Hot day today, even into the evening. I believe she had the right idea:

She does it, her owner said, more than he would like. But the fountains at Samford are just so tempting.

Burr and Forman, by the way, are not buried beneath that fountain. That is a large regional law firm. Some 55 of their lawyers graduated from Samford with their undergrad or with their JD from Cumberland.

Two things to read on the student blog. Steve Yelvington dives into what drives local media traffic and Alan Mutter discusses how Apple and Google are threatening local mobile providers.

Do follow that Crimson blog if you like journalism and think pieces. Also Twitter and Tumblr

collarbone / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
24
Jul 12

Feeling better about chasing ourselves

Our cat acts like a kitten.

We played for a long time today, until she finally chased me around the house at a walking pace a few times — you know, the game kids love but cats can’t figure out. I didn’t get the chance to change directions. And Allie didn’t realize that if she only stood still the green ribbon thing she loves would come back around from the other doorway in just a moment.

“You look like you feel better today,” The Yankee said.

And she was right.

The cat and I started playing because, as I was minding my own business, she started attacking a string she found on one of my socks.

After two or three strafing runs I decided to find a string I could tie to my toe. This would be great, I thought, because now she can scratch up my feet! So I looked around the house. There was not a string or thread or cable to be found. Everything has a use already, you see. Congratulations to us, two people who seem to have all of their long strandy things well accounted for.

I’m sure if I flipped over the sofa I’d find that Allie has stashed every loose string in the house there.

And so it was that we played with one of her long chase toys. It is a red stick with a red string that leads out to a green ribbon:

Feel like I’ve turned a corner today. Not quite a million bucks, but I’ve got titanium inside me and inflation is upon us, so who knows, but I could be like Lee Majors by the end of this update.

We went out for lunch today. I had a sandwich at Niffer’s Place and then settled back in for a day of reading and writing. Now here we are.

So, here. Have a look at some of the things I’ve been reading today, including Doug Mataconis walking through ABC’s poor reporting from the Colorado shooting:

First, soon after the Aurora police revealed the name of the man they had in custody, there was Ross himself on the air with a report claiming to link James Holmes the shooter with a man named Jim Holmes who happened to be listed on the website of a Colorado Tea Party group. That was later revealed to be untrue, and ABC News was later forced to issue an apology:

Editor’s Note: An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect. ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.

Properly vetted? It strikes me that there was no vetting of the information at all. There’s really only two ways that Ross could have stumbled across this, either he went directly to a Tea Party site and looked to see if he could find a James Holmes listed. Or he did a Google search of something along the lines of ” “James Holmes” and “Aurora, CO” ” and looked to see what would come up. Neither one is really responsible journalism, and if it was the first one, if he just decided to go to a Tea Party site and look for Holmes’s name even though there was no evidence that anyone affiliated with the Tea Party was involved in this, then it wasn’t just irresponsible it was potentially malicious.

You could say worse. Many have.

Karol Sheinin immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union 34 years ago today:

It’s hard for Americans, even the ones who see America’s greatness and love this country for it, to understand the lack of opportunity that my family left. As Communism retreats into the rear-view mirror of history it’s easy to gloss over the everyday ways that Communism is meant to crush the individual and make everyone equal–equally poor, equally scared, equally hopeless.

Great essay, go read it all.

Surprising exactly no one, the Affordable Healthcare Act just got a lot more expensive:

“According to the updated estimates, the amount of deficit reduction from penalty payments and other effects on tax revenues under the ACA will be $5 billion more than previously estimated,” the CBO reported today. “That change primarily effects a $4 billion increase in collections from such payments by employers, a $1 billion increase in such payments by individuals, and an increase of less than $500 million in tax revenues stemming from a small reduction in employment-based coverage, which will lead to a larger share of total compensation taking the form of taxable wages and salaries and a smaller share taking the form of nontaxable health benefits.”

In short, CBO revised the Obamacare tax burden upward by $4 billion for businesses and $1 billion to $1.5 billion for individual workers.

While we’re on the subject, employers get ready to drop their health coverage:

Around one in 10 employers in the U.S. plans to drop health coverage for workers in the next few years as the bulk of the federal health-care law begins, and more indicated they may do so over time, according to a study to be released Tuesday by consulting company Deloitte.

Those employer numbers dropping health coverage is likely to continue in the coming years. And so we’ll go, chasing this shiny thing. And like the cat, we’ll go around and around, never realizing we could just turn around.