Auburn


31
Aug 14

Catching up

Did I mention the rain? It rained at the tailgate. The hot summer day turned into an impressively humid one. And then the sun came back out and we baked ourselves in the shade.

We loaded up on sunblock, went into the stadium and watched most of the game before the lightning came. Lightning means delays. And so they took everyone off the field. They asked the fans to go hide. Most of them did. The storm cells with the lightning passed.

And just before the teams came back on the field to resume play, the rain finally came. The stadium speakers blared rain-themed music, the hearty students that stuck around sang along:

That raindrop at the end of the video is pure art, no? Purely accidental art.

We’d talked to a guy earlier who recalled when he was in the student body during the great monsoon of 2009. He said that game, the West Virginia game, was the best day of his life.

I recall getting rained on once or twice when I sat in the student body. I did not have the same recollection of good cheer. But the football wasn’t quite as good at that moment, either.

Anyway, this was before the storm, the cheerleaders wave those giant flags after scores. They are quite cumbersome, even on a still day:

flags

And this is the storm as it wrapped around the northern end of the stadium. It was an impressive site:

clouds


30
Aug 14

Arkansas at Auburn

Football is here. Friends are here. Triple-digit temperatures are … close. Triple-digit heat indexes … are close. We sat outside and in the sun and shade and it was 94 degrees. The company was good:

tailgate

As we were walking up the ramps to the upper deck, we had a great view of fans coming in to the stadium:

fans

We could also see the storm that delayed the game coming in:

weather

Twitter’s new analytics tell me that almost 20,000 people saw that picture tonight. At least four different meteorologists retweeted it. But I didn’t get any lightning shots.

I did get a clear view of the rain shafts, though:

weather

Auburn won 45-21. It was hot. The friends were lovely.


14
Aug 14

Speaking of …

On my bike ride today, an Alabama fan honked at me three times, because Roll Tide, I guess. But, since it was an Alabama fan, I was really honked at 15 times, wasn’t I?

The SEC Network launched today, with much giddiness and silliness, and football season is around the corner. There will always be Bama jokes, it seems.

Also, on one portion of my ride — which involves a downhill, a turn lane and then an explosion onto a beautiful, freshly paved road — a car pull right out in front of me. The driver panicked. He stopped, filling the entire lane. So he’s perpendicular to traffic, me, because he is no longer making his left turn.

Bikes are agile, but they don’t exactly stop on a dime. The emergency stop, as it were, is to burn up your brakes, slip off the saddle and put your body behind the seat tube. This shifts the mass, and slows things down, but doesn’t mean you’re stopped. Also, I find, it is hard to unclip when you’re behind the seat, so there’s not really a graceful way to put your foot down and burn up your shoes.

Instead of turning, as I’m trying to stop, he’s waving me through, to pass across the front of his car, into the oncoming lane.

This would have been so much better if he’d just looked to his left before he tried to turn to his left.

Later, on the TT segment, I tried to best yesterday’s time. I fairly well buried myself, dropped two other cyclists and improved my time from 9:34 to 9:03. That moved me from seventh to fourth for the year. The leader sits on top with a time of 8:35. I’m not sure if I can find 28 more seconds to shave off that time. Something to shoot for, I guess.

Speaking of cycling, here’s one last incredible Robin Williams story. Famed designer Dario Pegoretti, fighting lymphoma, met Robin Williams at a convention:

“He talked to me about my situation, and gave me a lot of strength,” Dario Pegoretti said from Italy on Wednesday.

At dinner, the virtuoso comic actor and the virtuoso frame-builder talked about bikes, but they also talked about things besides bikes. Williams spoke a little Italian, and his Italian was pretty good. He recalled his visits to Rome, about once meeting Fellini. To everyone’s delight, by the end of the night, he also did an extended Pegoretti impression for the table.

“I was just rolling on the floor,” said one of the dinner guests, Nelson Frazier, a rep for Gita. “It’s the only time I’ve seen Dario pretty much speechless.”

“It was really a beautiful night,” Pegoretti said. “I have so many beautiful memories.”

And speaking of the SEC Network:

Consider the SEC Network as indirect pay-per-view for college football games involving your favorite team.

[…]

According to Sports Business Journal, the network will cost cable companies $1.40 per subscriber in states inside the SEC footprint. If you live outside that footprint, the cost is only 25 cents per subscriber.

If the SBJ report is correct, then the SEC Network could be the third most expensive channel for local viewers. Figures from the Wall Street Journal show ESPN ($6.04) and TNT ($1.48) are the only ones that would charge more.

Right now? No one cares. Football.


8
Aug 14

You can see it coming

The you-can’t-see-this-enough idea meets with the notion that life exists to be recreated as a Techmo Bowl video game and provides us with this piece of art, which, really, we should have seen coming:

You can quibble about the jersey colors, but there’s a still of Chris Davis and his grandmother (at 3:20 in this video), canceling out that quibble. And then there’s a screen shot of Bo Jackson’s Techmo status, which is the only real quibble. He was never average in Techmo Bowl.

Things to read … because reading interesting things makes us all superlative.

Because it would be a disaster if they did … Dear Twitter: Don’t use an algorithm for the stream:

If Twitter were to implement an algorithmic feed, it would lose its point of differentiation that would likely damage its de facto real-time information/news status unless a greater value proposition was offered (although it’s hard to see what this would be). Both as a professional tool for journalists and a point of record for regular users, Twitter offers a totally different kind of feed than say Facebook does because of its unfiltered stream of forced brevity. Every tweak with photos, cards and potentially new sell buttons drastically changes the delicate balance on the nuance — a nuance that should be protected.

Twitter is noisy, but it can be calmed.

The piece goes on, making excellent points that won’t be heard enough.

The answer is, it depends. Should you outsource your social media? And that article will help you figure out your best path.

This is India, but still interesting, and short-sighted. Newspaper asks staffers to refrain from tweeting other outlets’ stories

If you’ve read enough job advertisements and know how to read between the lines, this is an interesting collection that Jim Romenesko is offering. Here are the job descriptions for Gannett’s ‘Newsroom of the future’

This is just what it says it is, an all digital, invaluable resource. Verification Handbook: A definitive guide to verifying digital content for emergency coverage

This isn’t a standard thing, but it happens. And the HuffPo piece might have pulled back the curtain a bit too far for the comfort of some. Spy Agency Stole Scoop From Media Outlet And Handed It To The AP:

The government, it turned out, had “spoiled the scoop,” an informally forbidden practice in the world of journalism. To spoil a scoop, the subject of a story, when asked for comment, tips off a different, typically friendlier outlet in the hopes of diminishing the attention the first outlet would have received. Tuesday’s AP story was much friendlier to the government’s position, explaining the surge of individuals added to the watch list as an ongoing response to a foiled terror plot.

HBO trails in profits, but this is another in a series of interesting media tidbits in the last 18 months. Netflix now has more subscription revenue than HBO

This story is about health issues, and rightly so, but it applies in a lot of other respects, as well. What ails Appalachia ails the nation

Whoa boy. Relief official says Ebola crisis more serious than reported:

In stark, often chilling congressional testimony on Thursday, an official with a relief organization responding to the Ebola crisis in West Africa labeled efforts to control the virus a failure.

Ken Isaacs, a vice president with Samaritan’s Purse, a North Carolina-based Christian humanitarian organization, also said the number of Ebola cases and deaths reported by the World Health Organization are probably 25 percent to 50 percent below actual levels.

[…]

At one point, Isaacs even disputed the earlier testimony of a physician from the U.S. Agency for International Development, who said his agency had provided 35,000 protective suits for health care workers in West Africa.

Isaacs told lawmakers he had received an email in the last 90 minutes from a hospital in Liberia “asking us for more personal protection gear. This a problem everywhere,” he said.

It is virulent, sounds exotic, comes from an unfamiliar place, travels well and there are scary films about this general health theme. You can just see the panic coming.


26
Jul 14

I well and truly bonked on my ride today

Saw this near the top, not at the top, but near the top. of the biggest hill I climbed today:

road

It seemed a cruel place for such a message. And I wasn’t even on the bike ride that needed the note. But, high sun, heat of the day, and there’s still more hill to go. Have a rest stop. Only you can’t, because this spray paint is old. That’s the way it goes sometimes.

On the other side of the hill you are rewarded, of course. It must be nearly a mile of descending:

road

And I bonked miles from home. That’s a lonely feeling.

This evening we were invited to campus to watch something historic:

road

It was just another sweet reminder of the nice people all over this special place we get to enjoy.