Wednesday

IU / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on The problem with amorphous sayings
20
Sep 17

The problem with amorphous sayings

We have this large classroom with stadium-style seating. And in the back of the room they built in a magic box that connects the room to the television control room. Take a few cameras up there, plug them into the magic box and then you can use the shots to make a show, record a lecture or whatever. We’re going to do that soon, perhaps for the first time. (We’ve only been in the building for a year, after all.)

So today we lugged a few cameras up to the third floor, and we carried a few armfuls of cables up there and plugged them all in to make sure it worked. And it worked, mostly. We now know what works and what we need to get the engineers to fine tune. And fine tune it, they will.

Anyway, in the back of that room next to that magic box there is a window with a nice view:

That’s the Student Building, which was recently renamed the Frances Morgan Swain Student Building. They picked a good name. Swain graduated from IU, married a man who would later become the school’s ninth president and she raised gobs of money for that building. (And even after they left for other roles at other schools, the Swains kept donating money to various IU funds and memorials.) That was originally to be the women’s building, but then a Rockefeller donation came through to make it the Student Building. All of this in a time when Swain was both an advocate for women in higher education and places for them to actually, you know, live.

When the Swains were at IU the population increased from 524 to 1,285 students. Today there are just over 49,000. He passed away in 1927 and she died in 1936. I wonder what they’d think of the place today.

The Yankee and I visited a bookstore today and I saw this:

The saying has always bothered me. I think, mostly, as a pragmatist. If I have the option to shoot for the moon or shoot for the stars, wouldn’t the latter be the more ambitious? Why do you see it as a consolation prize? I mean, sure, I could go visit the barren rock in orbit around us, or I could go see some other fusion-fission space phenomena, and maybe check out any planets moving around it.

But that’s the one part of it. And it occurred to me today what has always been off about the sentiment: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss you can use its gravity to go deeper into the solar system and we can still chat, until loss of signal, because you’re probably going to run out of battery power before you make it to another star, anyway.”

Now put that on a pencil tote and send the kids off to school with it.

We had a great dinner tonight:

I hope you did, too.

IU / photo / television / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Anyone want to go bowling?
13
Sep 17

Anyone want to go bowling?

I visited the surplus store this evening. The surplus store is where all of the furniture and old equipment and supplies from the nine Indiana University campuses come to find a new life. If you need binders or filing cabinets or random chairs or old classroom desks or Adidas gear you’ll come away happy every time. It is worth a periodic visit for other things, too, under the You Never Know principle.

Lately, though, most of the stuff I’ve seen worth admiring has been in some mysterious “Not for sale” section behind staff only rope lines.

Tonight, though, I found these:

They must have been on display in some larger athletic department area. The images are pixellated up close, but you’d be impressed by all of the old logos from middle-of-the-road bowl games of postseasons past.

A television show the students produced last night:

And here’s another one:

And there will be two more tomorrow night.

IU / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on That’s a nice upgrade
6
Sep 17

That’s a nice upgrade

Seventh best in the world.

Take that, planet earth.

photo / podcast / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Today’s notes
30
Aug 17

Today’s notes

I don’t mean to pile on to anyone’s circumstance. If you aren’t there and you don’t know, then it is about the farthest thing from walking a mile in someone else’s shoes as possible. So I don’t want to speculate, because there was, perhaps, a legitimate concern or distraction of some sort at play here. And not knowing the story, I’d just be making one up and doing a disservice, perhaps even an injustice, to another person. I want to be mindful of that.

Besides, I’m hard pressed to imagine the sequence of events that would lead to me forgetting my belt in a public restroom:

Preying Mantis

But I hope it makes it back to its rightful owner eventually.

Last Thursday, before we produced our first live television broadcast of the school year, I gave four guys a crash course in podcast production. And then, on Friday morning I gave them a glimpse into audio editing. And now they have a show. Here is their first episode:

Not bad for a bunch of print students, I think. It’s all there, if they but seize the initiative. It is so cool when they seize the initiative.

Meanwhile, in Houston:

That is a friendly neighborhood Spiderman, indeed.

photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Operation Splinter, part two
23
Aug 17

Operation Splinter, part two

We were invited to a colleague’s welcome back party on Sunday. People brought their children, and they were all delightful and well-behaved kiddos with over-developed intelligence and the precise amount of rambunctiousness. The kids’ presence meant toys, which also meant bubbles:

Bubble

And somewhere since then Allie The Black Cat ate the scraps off of my plate:

Allie

So things are going about as you’d imagine, which is to say wonderfully busy with nice dashes of color, just for the sake of variety.

And today, despite a busy day at the office I was able to spend the evening, the entirety of it, in fact, working on The Project. You might remember my previous notes on Operation Splinter from this space:

I also wrapped up the first stage of The Project. It needs a better name, but I’m not yet ready to name it, or even discuss it at length. What if it doesn’t work? What if I have to scrap the entire thing? What if it is just terrible? Do I really want to talk publicly about my time machine without knowing how it turns out?

I’ve said too much.

Anyway. The first stage is done. I suppose the true first step was material acquisition. This took place on Friday and Saturday. And then the first stage took place on Saturday and Sunday, and was more taxing than I’d imagined, even as I knew it would be time consuming. By Monday, though, I’d figured out how to to make the process move more quickly, and it did. Only to be slowed down, yesterday, by an equipment failure brought on by user error. So I fixed that issue today and completed the first stage.

Then I performed Operation Clean Up. The first stage took up a half of the garage, and so that ultimately led to reorganizing much of the shelf space in the garage and in bits and pieces these last few days and so even if the time machine it doesn’t work, the effort has been fruitful.

That was two weeks ago. Well, this evening I was able to do a considerable amount of the work involved in stage two of The Project. See, in order to build this rocket ship I figured the second stage would have three big steps. Tonight the first step — which some combination of common sense and necessity found should be doubled — and the second step were completed.

Now I will have to work on two separate series of precise calibrations — Werner von Braun, help me — so I can complete the third step of stage two. I might also revisit a bit of the second step of this stage. But that part should be easy. I’ll do both of those next Wednesday and then the second stage of The Project will be completed. After that there are only three stages remaining, and two of those will go quickly. This project will be wrapped up in two or three weeks. Huh. I thought it would take longer.

Did I say rocket ship? Ignore that. Just imagine I said something else like … hot air balloon or … post-modern remote controlled pterodactyl model. Yeah. That’s what I’m making. I’m about 12 to 14 hours into a remote controlled pterodactyl.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →