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Wednesday

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11
Apr 12

Travel day

The Yankee planted this and we’re watching it grow:

Admire that while I’m on my plane.

Later, from San Antonio: we have arrived safely and in time for the Southern States Communication Association’s annual conference. The Yankee and I hold positions in the organization. We also have four or five papers and a panel to present during the conference.

Sadly, the banana pudding I purchased from Dreamland to take to all of the old Alabama grads did not make the trip. It turns out the federal government is afraid of it.

Let me say that again: the Transportation Security Administration feels that bananas, wafers and creme are dangerous.

The problem, you see, was that it was only partially frozen. Had it been solid they would not have been scared, because the guy who was making it up as he went along said, frozen things can’t be explosives.

We’ll wait as the chemists in the crowd have a little chortle.

So the pudding didn’t make it. I apologized profusely to a few people who’d been waiting on it since I promised it last year. But next year’s conference is within driving distance. Unless the TSA is going through my car by then — and at this rate … — we’ll all be indulging next April.

Saw this sign as we walked to a Mexican restaurant for dinner:

Dinner was at Rosario’s, which is apparently considered the best Mexican in town. It was quite delicious. And within walking distance of our hotel. One of the local conference-goers took us there.

I’ve been promised some barbecue this trip. I wonder if it will be at County Line.

Hey look, here’s River Walk:

It is quiet at this time of day on a Wednesday, I’m sure it will pick up.

Tomorrow the conference begins. I’ll post pictures, and spare you all of the conference details. Unless you want to hear about the methodology on this content analysis, or that discussion on the primaries, or the response I’m giving to a handful of mass comm papers, or our Super PAC paper, which promises to be a big hit …

Yeah, pictures then.

iPhone / movies / photo / Samford / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
4
Apr 12

Biscuits, rust and authors

The second-biggest problem with the camera in the iPhone is the depth of field. This looks like a lot more food than it really is.

But, then again, there’s the app that let’s you blur out everything but your focus. (And that biscuit was delicious.) There are also apps that turn your HDR photo into HDRerer, which makes rust look magestic. This is through my dirty windshield, in an oddly lit part of the day, so it doesn’t pop as it could, but:

Think that guy is a beach bum in training? His flip flops do.

To see the real work of an HDR app, consider this picture from a few years ago:

And here’s the treatment:

It really jumps, doesn’t it?

There’s no real particular point to that, other than to say that I had a biscuit for lunch. If you didn’t, you should have. And also, the amount rest of the food really wasn’t that impressive. I’m blaming the frame of the barbecue chicken. The biscuit was the best part, though.

We had a bestseller speak in our class today. Nancy Dorman-Hickson co-wrote the biography on Joanne King Herring, who is a icon of the Republican party in Texas. You might recall her from Charlie Wilson’s War, which demonstrated her role in drumming up support for the United States’ proxy role in the Russo-Afghanistan war:

She was upset, Hickson said, by how overtly sexual she was portrayed in the movie. She is a gentile, Southern lady and so on.

Hickson was great in the class where she talked about freelancing and becoming a book author. She said she got that book contract, in part, because Herring’s people Googled “Southern writer” and “Christian.” And when they did, a small magazine piece she wrote on a Lutheran church event got her foot in the door.

There was a small handful of writers they decided to try out. The prospective authors were to have a phone conversation with Herring, and from there write one of her stories, trying to capture her tone and rhythm.

Hickson says “She was to share one story. Joanne is Southern. Multiple stories ensued.”

Well, yeah. That’s as natural as biscuits.

cycling / iPhone / journalism / links / memories / Samford / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
28
Mar 12

Oh snap!

We are so very fortunate those words did not define our generation. You’ll see why at the bottom of the post.

Riding through the neighborhood the other evening I found I’d picked the neighborhood time for bicycles. Usually I see the ladies walking, or a mixture of people taking their dogs for a stroll. I often find kids out in their yards, but never anyone riding a bike.

But on this particular weekend evening I found four of them. I caught up with two at the stop sign that leads to the creek. At least one of them was even greener than I am. He was struggling with something at the intersection and his friend had turned and was waiting for him up ahead, his thigh across his crossbar.

The second pair I met soon after. The first I passed easily enough, he was just out for a ride. His partner wanted a race. And so surged up the hill after the creek. He was pedaling furiously, constantly looking over his shoulder. I pedaled furiously, clicking down through the gears and tapping out a rhythm I’ve never tried on that little hill. At the top he turned right and I turned left, but I had him. I was no good for the next few miles after that, but I would have had him.

It would be better if I didn’t get competitive about this sort of thing, as I am a bad cyclist.

But today, when I sat in my office doing office things, I thought about that hill. I thought about that little attempt at rushing up it. I thought about how my legs weren’t burning. That was a nice thought, for sitting in the office.

In class one group of students did a presentation and part of that was asking the question “Is print dead?” What followed was the best conversation of the entire semester. There were many different stances. Some said yes, some no. Others took the middle ground and wondered why we don’t simply say that print is changing. There were strong opinions. It was so great we’re turning it into an assignment.

Maybe I should have started the semester asking that question.

Things to read from my journalism blog: The interactive infographic uses a fancy ProPublica design as an example.

The increasingly useful Internet radio where I realize how many streaming apps I have on my phone, and we are teased with next month’s announcement of even more surprising smartphone penetration.

Two prisms, two news brands pulls together two stories, one on Al Jazeera English and the other on the growing Patch network. Both good reads of successfully growing (in different directions) projects.

From my evening drive:

iPhone / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
21
Mar 12

All will be better tomorrow

… but I feel like this today:

Whatever is going around, as I’ve heard no one say recently, makes me want to sprawl on a chair arm for comfort.

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14
Mar 12

A random assemblage of stuff and things

My favorite meme of all time has become a campus group’s poster:

That, of course, is Joseph Ducreux, who was a French portrait painter at the court of Louis XVI and after the French Revolution. He liked physiognomy, assessing one’s personality by their facial expressions, hence his unorthodox portraiture, like this self-portait and, of course, the very famous Internet joke. You can’t even find the original set anymore, so buried are they amongst everyone’s contribution.

Two students showed this video in class today during a demonstration about advertising. The gasps from the rest of the class were great. See if you can figure out where this is going:

Happy birthday to The Birmingham News, which turned 124 today. This is the June 20, 1900, front page:

So the paper was 12 years old at the time. I haven’t seen any of the first volume’s front pages.

Things to read: Ad execs bullish on digital, marketers on social: Data reveals ‘disconnect’ with agencies:

Advertising executives -– both marketers and their agency representatives -– continue to increase their optimism toward digital media options, and are beginning to swing toward it as more of a “branding” than a performance “option,” but there are some significant disconnects between the way they look at various digital media silos. While agency executives tend to be far more bullish on the overall use of digital media, marketers are much more optimistic about budgeting for social media.

The findings, which are part of new, detailed analysis coming out of Advertiser Perceptions’ Fall 2011 survey on ad executive attitudes and optimism about media, show the overall index for digital -– including online display, search and video advertising –- trending upward, but the sentiment appears to be driven primarily by agencies. That insight is interesting, because the bottom line of big agencies appears to be benefitting from their continuing shift toward a greater reliance on digital media, according to a Pivotal Research analysis released Monday (OMD, March 13).

“But there is a discrepancy in the way marketers and agencies are seeing it,” says Randy Cohen, a partner in AP — which produces an ongoing series of ad industry tracking studies under its Advertiser Intelligence Reports banner, including this one. “It’s a disconnect,” he says, adding, “But agencies tend to do what marketers want them to.”

If that’s the case, social media should be the primary beneficiary, according to Cohen, because marketer sentiment is building much more favorably toward social networks versus the rest of the digital mix.

Things to read from my Samford blog: