Worked in a fun little 26 mile route this afternoon. It was a crisp, sunny and beautiful day for a ride. These are base miles or reacquainting myself with the saddle miles. Probably more of the latter, sadly. But great fun anyway!
(I should take more photos while I’m riding. I see other people’s shots — a guy who works for Apple and a newspaper editor I know are big culprits — and wonder how they do this, ride for as long and as hard as they want to, and then stop and take some incredible shots. Those are from Angelo Calilap, the guy who works for Apple, who is also a bike racer. And then he finds someone else’s beautiful cycling shots and says inspires him “to want to bring another camera other than my iPhone during a bike ride.” Like I’m carrying a real camera on my bike. Like I’m going to actually build up some momentum approaching respectable, see some nice view and then stop. I need my momentum! But I see those pictures and I want to go ride again. How’s right now for you?)
We worked our way through the back of the neighborhood, down one half of the time trial route and then past the city limit sign. We went by all of the shopping, through a sleepy little stretch of road that really lets you work out your legs and then down, down to a creek bed.
Which only means you have to come back up. And it feels like a long way up. It isn’t, really, numerically speaking. But I’m not a climber. And so when you crack on the first hill, know you have to still turn right and go up another one … well … I should be a better climber.
Thing I learned on the bike today: A few doughnuts and a banana are not good fuel.
I knew this already, but it is good to reinforce the basics.
Other thing I reinforced on the bike today: I enjoy riding my bike with her, especially on days when I can actually keep up. I even passed her a few times today, hence the pictures.
We were almost home and she said she had a craving for broccoli and brussel sprouts. She also remembered the rule about doughnuts and a banana. So we had vegetables for dinner. Is that something else worth learning? Eat what you crave on the bike?
It was my first ride of the new year. There’s been cold and things to do and waiting until we had everything just right and so on.
So we found the flattest 20 mile route we could think of nearby and then added an extra leg on that plan, all of which seemed uphill, which was brilliant in retrospect. We ended up doing just under 23 miles, which was great fun. Then The Yankee got a flat just before we were done. I was behind her, watching it go down before she noticed it, so when she stopped I was already throwing a leg over the top tube and reaching for my pump.
The crisis was no crisis. In a moment we were going over the last hill before home, where I took that picture, the scenery marked the end of a nice ride.
Today was meant to be a rest day. So late in the evening I was feeling antsy and went for a three-mile jog. I’m turning into one of those people, apparently.
Overcast this morning. Clear in the afternoon. The high was in the mid 40s. It was the kind of day that suggested a feeling that implied what flirting with spring might, one day, be like.
The forecasts call for another cold snap in a few days, making it our second of the year, meaning we’ll have an extra one that no one ordered. We’ll convince ourselves that, somehow, this means we’re going to have an incredibly nice spring.
Hit the pool, swam a mile. That makes three times in a week. Suddenly, I feel like I can breath in the pool again. That’s always a nice comfort-level skill to have. I’m a very bad lap swimmer, but I only kicked the lane lines twice today, so there’s that, too.
Appropos of nothing I came home the other night from somewhere and The Yankee was watching City of Angels. I remember seeing this in the theater, it was probably the perfect late-90s date movie, after all.
So we ended up watching the whole thing, because she likes the movie, and I can make Nick Cage jokes. And then, toward the end, at the climactic scene:
She yells at the television screen, “Wear a helmet!”
It has just become a reflexive thing, at this point.
Things to read … no helmet required.
The New New Newsweek.com: “it seems like every time you turn around there’s a new Newsweek.com.”
I remember when I first subscribed to Newsweek. It was the 7th grade. It was a class assignment. I was never that big of a nerd. We had the same English teacher four times in junior and high school and she gave us writing assignments out of the old magazines. Those were my first, real, writing assignments, summarizing news copy each week, every week, for four years. It was a decent start on learning the craft of writing. I remember when I finally dropped Newsweek, when they were running wildly divergent covers for different parts of the world. What you saw from one to the next was so different as to be insulting. And if that wasn’t insulting the American copy got the job done. I doubt I’ll be subscribing again anytime soon, despite new editors and a third round of new owners and so on, but having more publications out there is never a bad thing.
A vast majority of top congressional aides say in a new survey that they are concerned about the effects of Obamacare on their staff, ticking off worries about changes to their benefits, higher costs and whether they’ll have access to local health care providers.
Ninety percent of staffers surveyed for a report released Monday by the Congressional Management Foundation said they are concerned about benefit changes under the health care law, while 86 percent are anxious about the financial hit and 79 percent cited worries to access.
[…]
“The elimination of staff’s traditional health care has been a complete disaster,” one aide said in the survey. “If you wanted a legislative branch run by K Street lobbyists and 25-year-old staffers, mission accomplished.”
Guess you should have had your bosses read the bill before they passed it, huh?
Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood.
Businesses are tracking their customers and building profiles of their daily habits using a network of startups that have placed sensors in restaurants, yoga studios and other sites. Chris Gilpin, founder of one such site, Turnstyle, joins the News Hub.
And he gleans this information without his customers’ knowledge, or ever asking them a single question.
Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city.
The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones.
Whenever I talk in class about how we’re going to be leveraging technology in the near future — which is here, now — this is the one that always makes the students squirmy. You can see why.
This is the best story of the day. I have a feeling no one will mess with Jeanna Harris anymore, except maybe reporters, to whom she gives great quotes. Woman with shotgun chases away burglar:
Jeanna Harris, of Decatur, said the man she woke up early Tuesday to find rifling through her bedroom belongings is welcome to come back and try to steal from her again.
“He better be glad I had my nightgown on. The Lord’s hand was on him,” said Harris, 43, who armed herself with a 20-gauge shotgun and chased the intruder from her home. “I’m waiting on him, and I will not have on my Victoria Secret nightgown. I will have on my running shoes. It didn’t scare me; it made me mad.”
[…]
Harris said she’s glad she didn’t fire, partly because “it could have been a very dirty mess to clean up.
A suspect was arrested. And, Decatur, where this happened, puts mugshots on Facebook. People comment. “They” would do that without booking information being published online, but fewer people would hear about it. In some circumstances that could be a good thing.
cycling / running — Comments Off on The month’s workouts 1 Jan 14
Another poor month. Let’s blame the holidays and all that comes with that. And the weather.
Next month, I’ll do a lot more than this.
For the year, I rode 1,722 miles. The calendars say I ran about 100 miles, give or take. But I didn’t start put the spring running in there, so that’s incomplete.
I’m thinking of using that headline every Monday. I don’t know what it is about the day, but they never lend themselves to anything insightful, curiosity-inducing, oblique or funny. TDoesn’t matter if they are busy days or quiet days or anything. They all seem to exist in the category of “They just are.”
And if that is the extent of your Monday problems, well, just try to keep it together, would ya, bub?
I took the opportunity for a quick ride this afternoon. I was going to go farther, but I started too late in the day. I was going to try a new route, but it seemed wise to get home in the daylight rather than the twilight.
Besides, I was just trying to stretch my legs and clear my head.
Which had a soda cup tossed at it. So that was charming.
That’s never happened before. But the best part was that I almost caught up with the guy in the white pickup, license plate redacted to protect the owner in case the truck was stolen for a joy ride by a guy with a taste for Sonic, at the next stop sign.
I’d decided I’d stop right by his window and nicely say “How awkward for you.”
But he got through the intersection before I could catch him. So that’s a good reason to get faster.
The printing press put a generation of scribes out of a job, and the telegraph sent couriers scurrying to find new employment.
Could software robots do the same for reporters?
That’s one of many questions raised by the emergence of Narrative Science and Automated Insights, two startups that have developed sophisticated computer programs that analyze large amounts of data and automatically generate news stories.
Someone told me once, when I was first starting out, this could never happen. She no longer works in news, but for different reasons. That story does a nice job identifying a lot of the interesting work done in automated/robotic/AI reporting. In the short and middle distance we’ll see a place where programs do some really awesome augmenting and complimenting the work of human reporters. In the long term? Don’t bet against this stuff. Or someone might refer to you vaguely, as I did to start this paragraph.
Once again, this was all foreseen by Back to the Future II. Though they’ve yet to deliver on the hover boards.
“Frankly, this kind of sourcing is ridiculous,” says Alicia Shepard, a journalist and NPR’s former ombudsman. She adds: “I get it that [news organizations] are trying to be transparent, but it doesn’t enhance the believability of the anonymous quote. The only thing worthwhile about the convoluted sourcing explainers is how funny they are.”
In fact, such descriptions can do more harm than good, says Matt Carlson, an associate professor at St. Louis University and the author of “On Condition of Anonymity: Unnamed Sources and the Battle for Journalism,” published in 2011. Rather than enhancing a reader’s understanding, the descriptions used by reporters can be disingenuous and misleading about a source’s affiliation or motives, Carlson says.
Using anonymity in reporting has a venerable place in the craft, but it is becoming a crutch.
I read some wire copy today that five times (five!) referred to unnamed sources. How many reporters, branded or generic, do you trust that you’ll, as a reader, allow five references to anonymity and no names on the record?
By the way, that was a sports story.
Related only in that these are stories and they are about sports: perhaps you’ve seen the Together We Make Football promos on television? Well, the finalists include some incredible tales.
Here’s a quote: “It took me a while to realize I was still alive. I thought, ‘This is what it feels like to be dead.'”
This video is of mom recording her son receiving his acceptance letter to Samford. Fun stuff:
In a somewhat similar vein, this reporter covered a story and then got involved personally. Two years later and the Boston Globe’s Billy Baker is updating the tale on Twitter, where it was a huge hit today. Now it is a story in the traditional format. Two critically poor kids. VIetnamese parents. Dad killed himself. Kids struggle. Reporter comes along and gives them a nudge here and there. They scrape and save, these kids. They worked hard:
In the fall, Johnny left for his freshman year at UMass Amherst.
As college application time rolled around for George a few months later, we knew he was in a good position. His grades were outstanding. He had a compelling story. And so he aimed high. Very high.
These boys are the nearest I’ve come to that thing we call the American Dream. But when George texted me on Monday evening …
