Wednesday

photo / podcast / Wednesday — Comments Off on If the photos don’t make sounds the podcast will
29
Apr 20

If the photos don’t make sounds the podcast will

Remember how, a few days back I said I had to catch up on photos that I’d taken on my DSLR? We’re back to doing that today. These next few photos are from a walk we took … I dunno, three lifetimes or two weeks ago. Forgive me. I seem, today, to be having the day that a lot of people have been struggling with for the last four or five weeks. It’s something you bounce back from sooner or later, I’m sure.

Anyway, some version of a few of these are going to get used elsewhere on the site. (There are big plans! OK, average-sized plans. Alright, alright, very small plans with no real import at all.) Let’s see how they look!

Neighborhood trees in full bloom:

And I think we found our winner from that batch.

And some dandelions in the yard. This is a tough head-to-head competition here:

I know which one I think, but what about you?

Today on the show we talked computer and network and data security with Andrew Korty, who has the title chief information security officer. It’s easy to imagine a person with a title like that standing behind the captain on the bridge and scowling, but that’s just television. Andrew probably just has three or five computer monitors and a lot of blinking lights and some operating software that doesn’t exist beyond a television set.

I learned some things in there, and you might too. Primarily that I am supposed to pay attention to my IT experts. Who knew?

Won’t you give it a listen?

IU / journalism / podcast / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on A quick listen and a fast ride
22
Apr 20

A quick listen and a fast ride

Today! A bike ride!

A podcast!

Sustainable Food Systems Science’s Jodee Ellett works with the Indiana Food Council Network and local food councils throughout the state. She explains what’s going on in the food supply chain, how farmers may fare this year, and the growing trend toward community gardening and more.

She talked about the big shock to the system and all the market channels and the loss of farmers markets as a big impact on local producers. Also, some farmers markets going online are seeing tremendous success, she said, but it’s a lot of work.

Also, here’s video of my bike ride!

I was ahead of The Yankee the whole ride. And then I shot the little clips for that video. After that I sat up a little bit because there was less than two miles to go and she instantly caught me — and she was wake back there, too. She’d been sneaking up on me and I was oblivious. So now I had to try to hang onto her wheel, which isn’t always easy after you’ve sat up. I jumped her at the turn and she worked her way back to catching me again, as those last two miles alternate nicely between our respective strengths. And then the sprint into the neighborhood was on.

I had to kick four times to get a clean wheel. She’s fast.

photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on In the backyard
15
Apr 20

In the backyard

It is the middle of April and I read on some meteorological site — this is the problem, if you see something interesting two or three days prior and didn’t hang on to the link for citation purposes, you’re basically making stuff up — that this is the traditional last day of frost here. Oh, look, it was a government site. Probably accurate enough. The same table says the latest frost was on May 27, 1961 and that sounds like fake news.

We did have a frost this morning. We’ve been covering plants and ours are fine, Every small garbage can and beach bucket and what not have all been deployed and with good success so far. It would be touch-and-go for the ornamentals. We don’t have crops to worry about. Most of the things that get planted here are just now going in anyway, so it’s probably fine.

I mean, the grass is thick and crunchy.

I’d like to show you some of the flowering trees in the yard, because the buds and blooms never last long enough, but at least we can memorialize them here.

These are all from this morning, a few minutes well spent watching the sun poke its head up above the tree line, all sheepish.

As if that burning ball of fury is afraid I’ll be disappointed by it. As if that big burning ball of fury let me down.

But what am I? A savage? I know this isn’t the sun’s fault.

The blame here clearly belongs to the rotation of the earth. It’s not like it’s had 4.6 billion years of practice or anything.

But you know what they say. If you point your finger at the earth, you’re just pointing at the ground.

No, that’s not it. If you point your finger to the earth, four fingers are pointing back at Aristarchus and Anaxagoras.

Greek digit humor could be so ruthless sometimes.

That may seem like an awful lot for a backyard walk, but I was able to take my time with it before the day’s first meeting.

You can do that when you wake up obscenely early and can’t go back to sleep.

That’s not ever a problem I have, and brother, it isn’t one I’m intent on picking up now.

cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Hills and hills and hills and hills
8
Apr 20

Hills and hills and hills and hills

Today, she said, she was going to do hill repeats. I don’t have to do them, and I don’t get judged when I beg off of something, but she asked her coach to give her some hill repeats and it was a warm day and it was time for a ride.

A hill repeat is just that. You find a hill and ride up it over and over again. Or, in today’s case, you do it 10 times. Ten times up one hill. Except the hill she wanted to climb was flooded. I’ll wait for you here to figure out how that particular topography works.

So we went up another hill, which featured ascents of 10 to 13 degrees, which is not unsubstantial. We climbed up two minutes, turned around, descended, and climbed back up two minutes again. Happily, the place where I turned around was the same spot each time. So I didn’t get more tired on the seventh, eighth or ninth repetition. I was just slow on each of them.

We had 10 hills to climb, and I felt that I could climb that joker the ninth time, keep on going, finish the rest of the hill and call it 10. But that is not what we did.

We turned around, went by that barn and made our escape by climb up an even steeper hill. There was a section with a 15-degree ascent and the hardest parts continued burning my tired legs for about half a mile. After that it was just a regular little road, and we were finally going fast-ish. When the road joined another, which was our route home, we ran across a cyclist we know. Maarten is a national-caliber triathlete and we decided we would try to catch him. We cut into his lead, but we were going from a dead stop, joining his road and he was already underway and, this part is important, he’s a national-caliber triathlete.

Later in the evening we learned that our hill repeats and all those very steep inclines might have been ambitious. The Yankee’s coach says he had something else in mind, really. He knows the roads, of course, and can see the data. He was thinking more like that road where we tried to chase down Maarten. I just looked at the profile for that segment. It tops out at 5.7 percent which, after six miles uphill felt like a launch pad.

Oh well, next time then.

This evening’s storms brought a lot of rain and wind. At one point the power browned out, came back, browned out, came back and then it finally just gave up. My solar lights experiment got their first real trial!

I picked up a few of these at the hardware store for about five bucks a few months back. I keep them on a windowsill. The days are so long now that they store a fair amount of light, even like that. And, if the power goes out and we need light most of the day and some of the night is already over anyway. These should provide enough light to wrap something up, go upstairs, whatever.

Tonight, we used them to find our flashlights, or as I like to think of them, the metal cases holding our dead batteries. So we loaded up fresh batteries in all of the flashlights by the bright LEDs of the solar lamps.

And just as we finished that chore the power came back on. Soon after the storms moved on and our power stayed stable. Our trip on the Oregon Trail, then, was a short one tonight. But we were fortunate. Some people have been out for a good long while now.

Because they needed a new kind of challenge, I guess. My challenge this evening was simply getting up the stairs. Those hills …

IU / journalism / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Tonight on #IUZoomington
1
Apr 20

Tonight on #IUZoomington

Since I was just yesterday briefly opining about why some bike rides are better than others, I won’t do the same again as it pertains to today’s bike ride, which will definitely be categorized as among the others. The why was actually known, today, however. The Yankee said “Let’s go find some hills,” and that is why that ride was hard and it was slow.

And also cold, which is what you want out of April Fools Day: no jokes and an almost bitter chill.

This evening I held a Zoom chat, #IUZoomington we’re calling them, with my old friend Chris Pollone. You’ve seen him on NBC stations around the country, as he is a national correspondent and a producer for the network. We all worked in Birmingham at the same time, and he’s very generous with his time. It’s one of the great things about this business: people are always willing to do this sort of thing:

Students who took part in the discussion, I think, learned a great deal from a pro’s pro. I’m going to try to have weekly #IUZoomington sessions with broadcasters through the rest of the semester. It’s not the same, but it could be helpful to those who want to take part.

Of course, after the fact, being TV nerds we talked about how we could have all added monitors to make over-the-shoulder graphics and such.

This was … let me count now … my seventh or eighth or so professional Zoom. I’ve had a few people join me in classes this way and conducted a few interviews this way, but now we’re all experts in the format, or soon will be. That total doesn’t count the occasional video chat with friends, of course. Somehow they’re the same, but different.

I wonder how everyone else’s dynamics work. Obviously, for a more formal meeting style the roles can be pretty clear — and there’s a lot of listening and waiting.

What if the circumstances are different? What if it is like this, a more casual setting? If you are the supposed host do you feel the need to keep the conversation moving? I feel as though I need to have two open-ended questions ready to go at all times. It’s a party host function, I guess. I invited you here, and so I must make sure this doesn’t devolve into something wasteful. If you’re an invitee, though, do you bring more of a reaction-style to your computer screen? No board games necessary, right?

It’s flat, a coworker said, and you can see that. Everyone is just beginning to figure out the dynamics, I suppose. But it’s almost as good as being there, and you don’t have to drive home afterward, or clean up everyone’s dishes when they leave. Is it allowed to have a a nice show-and-tell? Maybe that becomes weird. I think there’s a cat show for cat people in this format. I also want, even in these basic chats, for there to be multiple camera angles and graphics (I’m making my own out of paper and tape.) and games on the screen. What would liven up a chat more than a handful of Connect Four games you’re playing against each person in the room?

You know what would? Custom backgrounds. And that’s where I’ll be spending some of my time later this week, making more of them.

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