The thing about New Orleans, I’ve discovered already, is that everyone wants to give you their restaurant recommendations. This is a good thing, so long as restaurant suggestions don’t play like car mechanic recommendations. Everyone has a A Guy, and they are sure he is better than every other guy. And if you don’t go to your friend’s guy … well, you’re taking your carburetor into your own hands, aren’t you?
We have a list of suggestions — not a suggestion, but lists — from at least three different people. Our friends at this conference are arriving today with similar lists. It is a remarkable thing.
One of the places we were told that we must go was a little dive bar and grill. The directions were “Go here and look across the street.” The idea being that you’d never see this place if you were looking for it:
We were told two things. First, order the macaroni and cheese, which is not on the menu, and they will treat you like locals. We forgot this instruction entirely, mostly because we were trying to work up the courage to follow the second piece of advice. The second tip was that we had to order the peanut butter and bacon burger:
The burger was, we were told, life changing. As in you will leave the place a different person. That’s a lot to say, and a lot of pressure to put on a burger. Oh, but this burger brings peanut butter and bacon to the party, too. The waitress agreed, this was a good burger. So we ordered them:
It was OK. The peanut butter overwhelmed the burger and you only occasionally noticed the bacon. It was very filling, go figure. It was a half a pound of beef with a whole lot of peanut butter. But we’d walked five miles last night. When I woke up this morning I was sore and tired and dehydrated. And then we went down to the fitness center and ran a 5K before lunch. The burger was fine, but it wasn’t something that you should order often because beef, bacon and peanut butter. So maybe it is a “when in New Orleans” thing. And you wouldn’t need it very much more often anyway.
We emerged from the place the same people. But later tonight I found myself thinking about how a peanut butter burger sounded like a pretty good idea …
This is the view from our hotel room in the Sheraton. Down that road there are some great neon signs that I’ll have to take pictures of later. The river is nearby. We found Jackson Square last night. Bourbon Street, which we haven’t even considered visiting, isn’t too far away. We’re apparently in the center of the business/tourist haven.
Now almost all of our conference friends are here. The conference begins (and my first panel presentation is) tomorrow.
I’d tell you about the place we had dinner tonight, which was also on a list from well-meaning friends, but the dining experience left something to be desired. Let’s say it this way, the meal was so weird that someone looked at a watch and wondered how long it would take us to go from getting the check to leaving the table. Consult this post’s title, above.
Feeling a bit better. This will make no sense, really, but, in the ear, nose, throat area I feel like almost a new man. This is a relief since last night I was beginning to wonder if this was something more serious than allergies.
I still have a nice, powerful cough that can’t seem to clear the problem, but only irritates the throat. It is about to get to the point of having that handsome congested resonance to it. I think, perhaps, the tiny/mild fever has subsided. I’m still sniffly, but there is progress. I sound sick when I talk, but that’s not unusual.
I am exhausted. Not tired so much, though I haven’t slept well in the better part of a week, but I did have a decent night’s sleep last night and yesterday I took a blessedly amazing 20 minute nap. I just feel physically tired. And to think I was going to try to go run or ride today. Hah. So there are no grand stories or adventures about the day.
Things to read … because sometimes reading is the grandest adventure of them all.
This is one of those things that popped up ages ago. I read it, kept it, thought about it and never passed it along. (Because how would you find it on this Internet without my help, dear reader?) Since there is never going to be the right time, one supposes, here it is now: The Top 5 Regrets of The Dying
I came to the conclusion pretty quickly, and haven’t been able to change my mind since, that the biggest regrets I have are fairly small in the scheme of things, but they almost always center on something I didn’t do.
For the next several months, WBHM joins al.com and the Center for Investigative Reporting as part of the Alabama Media Group’s Investigative Journalism Lab. We’re taking a closer look at Alabama’s prison problems.
As part of this project, al.com reporter Kelsey Stein has interviewed many former inmates of the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women. The prison gained national attention earlier this year after a Department of Justice report detailed cases of rape and sexual abuse at the prison.
Surging prices for food staples from coffee to meat to vegetables are driving up the cost of groceries in the U.S., pinching consumers and companies that are still grappling with a sluggish economic recovery.
Federal forecasters estimate retail food prices will rise as much as 3.5% this year, the biggest annual increase in three years, as drought in parts of the U.S. and other producing regions drives up prices for many agricultural goods.
During the past 30 years, administrations have spent more than $100 million trying to automate the old-fashioned process in the mine and make it run at the speed of computers.
They couldn’t.
So now the mine continues to run at the speed of human fingers and feet. That failure imposes costs on federal retirees, who have to wait months for their full benefit checks. And it has imposed costs on the taxpayer: The Obama administration has now made the mine run faster, but mainly by paying for more fingers and feet.
The staff working in the mine has increased by at least 200 people in the past five years. And the cost of processing each claim has increased from $82 to $108, as total spending on the retirement system reached $55.8 million.
U.S. officials think that Russia may have recently obtained the ability to evade U.S. eavesdropping equipment while commandeering Crimea and amassing troops near Ukraine’s border.
The revelation reportedly has the White House “very nervous,” especially because it’s unclear how the Kremlin hid its plans from the National Security Agency’s snooping on digital and electronic communications.
One interesting parallel is the presence of Edward Snowden in Russia, where he has been living since flying to Moscow from Hong Kong on June 23.
As you might expect, the story concentrates on that one interesting parallel.
President Barack Obama is seeking to abolish two highly successful missile programs that experts say have helped the U.S. Navy maintain military superiority for the past several decades.
The Tomahawk missile program—known as “the world’s most advanced cruise missile”—is set to be cut by $128 million under Obama’s fiscal year 2015 budget proposal and completely eliminated by fiscal year 2016, according to budget documents released by the Navy.
In addition to the monetary cuts to the program, the number of actual Tomahawk missiles acquired by the United States would drop significantly—from 196 last year to just 100 in 2015. The number will then drop to zero in 2016.
The Navy will also be forced to cancel its acquisition of the well-regarded and highly effective Hellfire missiles in 2015, according to Obama’s proposal.
So you take two effective weapon systems with a finite inventory and shut down the supply. These are two successful force projection applications being removed from the table with no replacement in site. And if you look at subsonic-to-supersonic evolutionary trends that means your next gen weapon system needs new and more fuel and bigger engines which means larger missiles which means larger platforms and we aren’t upsizing the navy any time soon, either.
There’s never been a story that makes me long for elementary school again, but this one does. I would show up to school the next day with a shaved head myself. There is an update. The little girl is being allowed back into the school. It isn’t quite sanity that prevailed, since these educators still found themselves in a ridiculous position of voting (three to one!) on the issue, but widespread scorn and cynicism brought about part of the proper resolution. Funny how that works on “educators.”
My class visited Alabama Media Group today. I saw old friends, nice folks with whom I used to work that I don’t hardly get to see enough today. I didn’t even see everyone that I still know from al.com, but I saw enough of them to build that sense of melancholy of friends on hold or, the silly notion of being placed on hold. Silly because we are all still moving, because perhaps one day some of those circles will become concentric again.
Alex Walsh, an economist who does data journalism for AMG, was one of the people who spoke with my students.
The layout will be different. There will be less floor space in general and more room for collaboration. It is meant to be more open and inviting to the public. The new building will probably re-shape the culture of the company in ways they don’t understand yet. I suggested they need to install a Waffle House.
Then I’d have more reasons than friends to go visit.
Hit the pool tonight. I did it despite, for most of the first half of the thing I was trying to ignore my brain, which was urging me to get out of the water. My collarbone hurt. I drank a bit of the pool. The pool was closing soon. You’re surrounded by other people plodding along.
I don’t know how to process the information that I am faster than someone in the water. (I do not know what is happening.)
So I didn’t drown, but I did swim 1,750 yards. That’s still a mile.
Showered. Had dinner at Chic-fil-A and then visited Walmart. So I have a half-dozen new Walmart stories.
No?
Things to read … instead, then. This is another one of those quick, link only versions. But they are of high quality:
I had a four-and-a-half mile run this morning. I felt it through the first part of the afternoon. And by felt it I mean “Would you mind getting that for me so I don’t have to get up? Or even raise my arms?”
My office has been hot all week — spring almost shows up and they finally figure out the heat in our part of the building. That, combined with a base temperature that stayed around the “Oh yeah, we ran a lot this morning” range, I’ve tried not to move so as to not break into a sweat. This is considered a problem in my world. I’m pretty fortunate, I know. I’m starting to get into the running.
I do not know what is happening.
Had guest speakers in class this afternoon. Jeff Thompson is the executive editor and Madoline Markham is the managing editor of Starnes Publishing, a five community newspaper chain in the Birmingham metropolitan area. They talked about what Starnes does and what their careers held before their current stops. Somehow we got into a metaphor about how journalism is like heroin production. (It was a supply/demand example and turned out to be useful.)
We talked about all of the bad stuff. How hard it is to land the job. The hours you sometimes work. The frustrations that you sometimes encounter. I want the students to have a worts-and-all perspective. Give ’em everything, I always say.
I asked “Short answer, is it worth it?”
So you are listening to a guy who takes on the crusty, hard-bitten, cynical newsman role. You let him go on and on until you think he’s turned off the entire crowd, two classes worth of students, and then he gives a sheepish little grin.
“Yes. Winning is good. Every small victory is a big thing.”
The amount of data collected on the Internet is overwhelming. Facebook alone collects 500 terabytes a day. As of 2013, there are 667 exabytes of data flowing over the Internet annually. And these numbers, as hard as they are to wrap our heads around, are only going to continue to increase — rapidly.
In the journalism sphere, massive data collection has produced data journalist roles. These writers and editors use data collected by third-party agencies to create some of the most viral images on the Web. Anytime The Atlantic publishes a map of the states with the highest poverty levels, they use big data. Anytime The New York Times publishes a quiz about where your accent comes from, they use big data.
These stories and photos get shared hundreds of thousands of times and are driving much needed traffic to publishers. This is about much more than an interesting listsicle. Data journalism is about taking big data concepts, visualizing them for the audience and showing readers who they are — or at least, who the data says they are.
This, as they say, changes a great deal about the active role of journalism. Read on to see how.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer, sat in his small office at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva and started work on a new system called the World Wide Web.
On Wednesday, that project, now simply called the web, will celebrate its 25th anniversary, and Mr. Berners-Lee is looking ahead at the next 25.
But this moment comes with a cloud. The creators of the web, including Mr. Berners-Lee, worry that companies and telecommunications outlets could destroy the open nature that made it flourish in their quest to make more money.
This is an important topic, so here’s another excerpt from the same story:
The idea behind net neutrality is simple: The web material we see on our laptops and smartphones, whether from Google or a nondescript blog, should flow freely through the Internet, regardless of its origin or creator. No one gets special treatment. But companies like Verizon hope some people will pay more to get preferential treatment and reach customers quicker.
“The web should be a neutral medium. The openness of the web is really, really important,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “It’s important for the open markets, for the economy and for democracy.”
He worries that people online have no idea what could be at stake if large telecommunications companies took control of the web and the type of material we now have access to without any blockades or speed barriers.
(U)sers coming to these news sites through a desktop or laptop computer, direct visitors spend, on average, 4 minutes and 36 seconds per visit. That is roughly three times as long as those who wind up on a news media website through a search engine (1 minute 42 seconds) or from Facebook (1 minute 41 seconds). Direct visitors also view roughly five times as many pages per month (24.8 on average) as those coming via Facebook referrals (4.2 pages) or through search engines (4.9 pages). And they visit a site three times as often (10.9) as Facebook and search visitors.
[…]
The data also suggest that converting social media or search eyeballs to dedicated readers is difficult to do.
Two Alabama men will travel the country opening lost and abandoned safes as part of a new TruTV series called “The Safecrackers”.
The show, which will center around locksmith Phil Crawford and his safe-cracking partner Blaze, will allow viewers to get a look at lost valuables from various eras as the duo tracks down and cracks a range of safes, including giant bank vaults, intricate antique safes, armored vehicles and more.
I hope this is, shall we say, less fake, than the warehouse storage shows.
Medal of Honor recipient Ola Lee Mize dies at 82. The story doesn’t offer an appropriate summary, so I’ll do it the old fashioned way. The son of a sharecropper, Mize would become a member of special forces, serve in Korea and VIetnam. It was in Korea, when he was about 22, that he took part in a fierce battle which would ultimately make him a recipient of the Medal of Honor. His face was supposedly so badly burned that, after the battle, his officers couldn’t even recognize him. He retired a colonel.
M/Sgt. Mize, a member of Company K, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and outstanding courage above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy. Company K was committed to the defense of “Outpost Harry”, a strategically valuable position, when the enemy launched a heavy attack. Learning that a comrade on a friendly listening post had been wounded he moved through the intense barrage, accompanied by a medical aid man, and rescued the wounded soldier. On returning to the main position he established an effective defense system and inflicted heavy casualties against attacks from determined enemy assault forces which had penetrated into trenches within the outpost area. During his fearless actions he was blown down by artillery and grenade blasts 3 times but each time he dauntlessly returned to his position, tenaciously fighting and successfully repelling hostile attacks. When enemy onslaughts ceased he took his few men and moved from bunker to bunker, firing through apertures and throwing grenades at the foe, neutralizing their positions. When an enemy soldier stepped out behind a comrade, prepared to fire, M/Sgt. Mize killed him, saving the life of his fellow soldier. After rejoining the platoon, moving from man to man, distributing ammunition, and shouting words of encouragement he observed a friendly machine gun position overrun. He immediately fought his way to the position, killing 10 of the enemy and dispersing the remainder. Fighting back to the command post, and finding several friendly wounded there, he took a position to protect them. Later, securing a radio, he directed friendly artillery fire upon the attacking enemy’s routes of approach. At dawn he helped regroup for a counterattack which successfully drove the enemy from the outpost. M/Sgt. Mize’s valorous conduct and unflinching courage reflect lasting glory upon himself and uphold the noble traditions of the military service.
He is believed to have killed as many as 65 members of the enemy in that one engagement. In his career, he earned five Purple Hearts:
“That terrible night in 1953 in Korea at Outpost Harry was one I would never want to repeat,” he wrote in a foreword to “Uncommon Valor,” a book about Medal of Honor recipients from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Too many good young men . . . gave their lives to take or hold that miserable piece of high ground.”
In conclusion, the embarrassing gentlewoman from Texas:
Serious question:
Who's more dumb, Sheila Jackson Lee or the people who keep voting her into office?
One of those days where the morning meeting melts into the midday meeting (which came with lunch) which transitioned into a conversation which filled up the time nicely before the next meeting.
Actually not true. I did have just enough time to miss my turn, come back around, try again and then sit in my car and tap at the keyboard for 15 minutes. In my car.
It is even more glamorous than I’d hoped it would be ever since I first saw it casually dropped in a minivan commercial all those years ago. There’s a stream, and a van with sliding doors on both sides. And in between them is the van owner, pecking away at the never ending TPS reports.
He wrote a memo about it once, but the memo was ignored because, in his passive aggressive way, he did not put the cover sheet on the TPS memo. And previous office literature had clearly stated, no cover sheet, no memo.
That was before the minivan. And he’s much better now, thanks. He can exit out of both sides! Stream? Turn left! Field of wildflowers? Exit right? How could you be bothered about problems at the office? Or even TPS reports. You’ve got a laptop in your van. Down by the river!
Yes, I just mixed imagery from three different sources. That’s been the sort of fun, delightful, not tiring, but full, not tangible, but productive day it has been. I’ve not made anything with my hands today. I haven’t anything on which to put a cover sheet. But it was a good day.
This afternoon my class took a field trip to see the nice people at WIAT CBS 42. The news director introduced them to the director, who’s been in broadcasting, it turns out, longer than I’ve been alive. We walked them through the interim studios — they are rebuilding. We visited the old set up. We sat in the newsroom and talked with one of the evening anchors and had passing conversations with other employees.
The news director, Scott MacDowell then asked his trick questions. He says he asks these in every interview. I’ll share one of them: What three things does every story need?
A beginning, a middle and an end.
He showed us the new backpacks some of the reporters are using. Think cell signals and air cards. He said they can run for two hours continuously, generate different shots than you’ve ever seen on a regular newscast (changing the way they approach storytelling, no doubt) and cost a fraction of what those suddenly unnecessary microwave trucks cost. In a time when you see iPad and iPhone videos on the newscasts, here’s equipment that ways about 20 pounds, that requires one cord and lets you go deep into buildings or weaving anywhere else a person can walk. Game changer.
I think I was the one the most interested in that.
We had the opportunity to watch the first block of the newscast. Here are a few of the students checking out the 5 p.m. newscast at WIAT:
One of our graduates, Kaitlin McCulley, had the lead story in the newscast.
And then that led into the day’s next meeting, the weekly critique of the Crimson. They’re doing such a nice job with the print product at this point. I’m proud of them. We found only three obvious errors and one more judgment call in the entire paper this week. Their hard work is paying off, too. I arrive to emails and walk into meetings and receive compliments on their behalf. That’s great to watch happen for the students, because I know how much hard work they put into the product.
Anyway, that meeting skipped right into dinner … and now I’m looking for some TPS cover sheets. I probably left them in the car.
