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A fast Thursday post

Wrote a long email today, in keeping with my email style. I went through it to edit and did manage to eliminate 42 words. I also used the word “countervailing,” which I felt like was a good reason to go for a bike ride.

So I managed to wrap up the day on my bike, catching the last few rays of sun from the saddle. It was late enough in the day that I didn’t even wear sunglasses, because that just made it look dark. As it was I found myself way over in the lane as I worked my way along shaded roads. No need to blend in, as Richard La China taught me:

This is why I ride in the middle of the lane. pic.twitter.com/bOPPniXzjA

— Richard La China (@richardlachina) August 29, 2013

I’d just started out and noticed my front derailleur wouldn’t shift. I could feel it in the shifter, and I could see it bolted onto the frame. I was in the big gear and it was staying there.

Everything was spinning, but I only had about six gears at my disposal. So I did a short, easy ride and stayed away from any hills. That’ll be something I get to look at tomorrow.

Things to read, which I found interesting today …

Speaking of riding the bike, here’s a local story from earlier today about the local bike scene. Hint: it ain’t bad.

The Garths scrimped and saved for two years before starting their tour in 2011 in Maine. After pedaling through 41 countries, the couple has experienced some of the best, and worst, areas for cycling.

“Our favorite place, as far as scenery goes, and natural beauty…was Patagonia,” Dave Garth said “For cycling, it’s terrible.”

He added Auburn is somewhere in the middle.

“Auburn is definitely getting better,” Garth said. “At this point, having been to some places that are really modeling this well…there is definitely room for improvement.”

Alabama currently holds the second-to-last spot in a nationwide ranking of bike friendliness by the League of American Bicyclists, coming in just above last-place finisher North Dakota. But with the implementation of Auburn University’s more pedestrian and bike friendly campus, the city as a whole is working to improve its biking infrastructure.

“Auburn is currently the only bicycle friendly community in Alabama,” said Brandy Ezelle, traffic engineer and bicycle coordinator for the city of Auburn. She added the city has received a bronze ranking in bike friendliness by the League of American Bicyclists.

Thomas McCrary, thought to be Alabama’s oldest farmer, dies 4 days before 102nd birthday:

Up until a year ago, when he was 101, Thomas McCrary drove a tractor around his 200-year-old farm, ensuring operations were running smoothly.

The humble man from New Market said in December he cherished the land that was settled by his namesake and great-grandfather, the first Thomas McCrary.

“It means a great bit to me,” McCrary said of the farm, which since its founding 203 years ago had been divided among family members.

Mr. McCrary died Monday.

There’s a book about that family, and that farm, perhaps the oldest one in the state, a decade older than the state itself. It was written by an old newsman, Joe Jones. About Thomas it says “he loves all and is loved by all.” He stayed on the farm his entire life, except when he was in Burma and China during the war. Here’s his obit, which is full of old-fashioned charm.

Thomas McCrary would have remembered his grandmother, who lived until his 18th year. She remembered the Civil War. A link just two generations removed is now gone. The first plane was flown in the state in March of 1910 by Orville Wright. McCrary was born 18 months later. Think of all he saw in his life.

And that’s what you lose when you lose a centenarian.

Sounds like a longform story, really. Here are some chat tips on one could do that:

It turns out that long and short writing are not necessarily in conflict. Think for a moment about your favorite magazines. Compared to newspapers, the long stories in magazines are longer, and the shorter pieces are shorter. It’s the combination of short and long that make a publication versatile for readers.

Although I’ve met some writers who tell me “I want to write shorter,” that is the exception. Most writers I know — including me — want to go longer. The daily beat reporter wants to do a Sunday feature. The Sunday feature writer wants to do a series. A series writer wants to do a book. The book author wants to do a trilogy.

And Twitter goes to emergency mode: Twitter Alerts: Critical information when you need it most:

We know from our users how important it is to be able to receive reliable information during these times. With that in mind, last year we announced Lifeline (a feature that helps Japanese users find emergency accounts during crises), and since then, we’ve been working on a related feature for people around the world.

If you sign up to receive an account’s Twitter Alerts, you will receive a notification directly to your phone whenever that account marks a Tweet as an alert. Notifications are delivered via SMS, and if you use Twitter for iPhone or Twitter for Android, you’ll also receive a push notification*. Alerts also appear differently on your home timeline from regular Tweets; they will be indicated with an orange bell.

You can see a list of participating organizations here.

More on the multimedia blog, Tumblr and Twitter.

collarbone / cycling / Friday / journalism / links / Samford / things to read — Comments Off
13
Sep 13

A brief one

Late in the day I got out for a little bike ride and found myself on a bad road. Six miles from home and everything in my shoulder locked up again. So, about that idea of a journal, one of the stimuli may be physical tension. I’d just spent a bit of time with my elbows locked, and my scapula pinched, after all.

In the last month or so I’ve just gotten mentally tired of the entire thing. I can’t explain it, but when it hurts it feels like it all hurts differently.

So I continue to do my exercises because I’m otherwise a healthy boy who should be able to overcome this.

All of this because of a big stick on a bike path. Funny, really. I’m almost never on a bike path. And I never run over sticks, nor do I ever intend to again. (This is also why I don’t ride a mountain bike.)

Things to read and listen to. This is what space sounds like, way, way out there. On the one hand Voyager has made it beyond the solar system. And this latest amazing achievement is another reminder that we have all but taken the people out of active space work. Robotics are interesting, but we should be out there taking steps to see and hear these things ourselves.

No doubt we’ll search each other when we do finally go. That’ll be all your fault. Ask this guy.

Well, fasten your flipping seatbelt because, according to a former DHS official, if you’ve been groped by TSA agents, you “can’t blame the TSA;” instead, he implied that you should blame privacy advocates.

[…]

“Unlike border officials, though, TSA ended up taking more time to inspect everyone, treating all travelers as potential terrorists, and subjecting many to whole-body imaging and enhanced pat-downs. We can’t blame TSA for this wrong turn, though. Privacy lobbies persuaded Congress that TSA couldn’t be trusted with data about the travelers it was screening. With no information about travelers, TSA had no choice but to treat them all alike, sending us down a long blind alley that has inconvenienced billions.”

What happens when the government tries to define journalists:

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., complained that the definition of a journalist was too broad. Pushing back, Feinstein said the intent was to set up a test to determine a bona fide journalist.

“I think journalism has a certain tradecraft. It’s a profession. I recognize that everyone can think they’re a journalist,” Feinstein said.

The government has no real place in saying who is a journalist.

These are people trying to define your freedoms. Think on that. Ed Morrissey, and then Matt Drudge, continue the thought:

“The entire approach is misguided. I think that journalism is an action, it’s not a status, it’s not a membership. And I think they’re treating it like a membership and they’re doing it in a way that is intended to be basically rent-seeking for the larger players in the field,” Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey told POLITICO. “It’s just a bad idea.”

[…]

“Gov’t declaring who qualifies for freedom of press in digital age is ridiculous! It belongs to anyone for any reason. No amendment necessary.”

Morrissey calls it a licensing law, which it may well be. Also, it is outrageous.

It will, as it always does, come down to control. And there’s plenty of control of journalists already.

Meanwhile, in a separate but related story:

The US FISA Court has ordered the government to declassify some aspects of its phone and internet surveillance program, the most recent of several disclosures in the past month. In the wake of leaks over the summer, the ACLU and many others have filed suit against the US government, looking for everything from more transparency to a way to take down a powerful surveillance program. The latter goal is still far from fruition, but the ACLU and Yahoo have both made progress in the former with a pair of recent court decisions.

The government would like to define and then restrict by shield law manipulation who can safely report on pressing issues of the day. What could go wrong?

Some nice news from Samford:

Samford University’s fall enrollment has reached an all-time high of 4,833 students, university officials announced today.

The total exceeds last year’s record-setting enrollment of 4,758 and marks the fifth consecutive year of record-setting enrollment for the university.

Explains the parking.

collarbone / cycling / movies / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off
12
Sep 13

Navel gazing gives way to Python

The nice people at Verge Pipe Media asked me to visit with them today to talk about storytelling and multimedia tools. I had a nice time. I hope they did.

I’d built an entire slideshow presentation, complete with silly and memorable clip art. Didn’t use it. Did talk about finding the real story in the story and the value of knowing which tool to use to tell the story. We talked about writing and, for the interns, the skill set that the job market is looking for today.

I was asked about the need for quality, which was a great topic in the slideshow that we didn’t get to. I used this example:

No video so far of tonight’s 8:30p CT bright fireball/meteor that streaked over the southern sky. Hundreds of reports from 5 states

— James Spann (@spann) September 10, 2013

Those two words “so far” are an important illustration of where we are. We have gone from “Oh wow, there’s video!?” to “Of course there’s video” in just a few years.

I used my wild west metaphor. I used the industry standards example. I was able to quote author Rick Atkinson’s great analytical line about “a great sorting out.” (Only he was discussing World War II in North Africa.) That let me suggest that we are in, or are approaching, the end of the beginning. And to stand out, the quality now matters because the expectation is that it will exist. Most everything is documented in some way these days. “Good enough” is close to becoming outmoded. How we tell stories now makes all the difference.

The owner gave me some very nice compliments.

Great day @VergePipe_Media started with @kennysmith speaking to the team. Made me miss Lewis Grizzard. That's the best compliment I have.

— Don Crow (@DonCrow) September 13, 2013

Compliments which I clearly don’t deserve.

Physical therapy after that. The therapist got almost all of the problems out of the right shoulder, which were really about my neck. We did the suddenly familiar exercises for the left side to deal with the actual and persistent problem.

You know how the Internet has given us the movie re-cut art form? We can close the genre:

The John Tanner Park aquabike

Early morning. Bad night of sleep. Comfortable hotel bed, but I’m lately struggling. Shoulder, other shoulder, neck, old age, perhaps. It’ll get better. But that doesn’t keep me from being tired today. But what a day!

This is at the largest sand beach in Georgia (non-ocean category), at John Tanner Park. We were here for a race earlier in the year, and this time The Yankee was out to show an even better time than she did on this same course in the late spring.

Here she is starting the 600 meter swim. She’s one of the pink dots. If this were video you’d know her from the almost perfect stroke. A lot of people are flailing around in these things.

You can just see some canoes and jet skis out there for the just-in-cases-of life. I only saw them fish out one person today. Everyone else did well, including this girl, who came out of the water third in her division:

And then off through the transition with an incredible time and then out to the 14 mile bike course. I rode this course the last time we were here. It has some hills. And they are different hills than we have at home. (You can have different kinds of hills.) These hills require you to keep working over the top of them, which is sometimes easier said than done. And yet, her she was, blowing away her previous time, sneaking inside the goal that she had set up.

And at the end of it all, there was great success. She finished second, and fairly close to the winner, time-wise. There will be a great rivalry at these events when they start up again next season.

Today the sky was bright and the sun was mild through the morning and everyone had a lovely time. I saw a man and a woman each lay down their bike right by the transition area. An older gentleman wrecked his bike coming back into the park. There is a speed bump and he tried to go over it, instead he twisted his ankle and scrapped up his shoulder and put his bicycle in every condition except the one he liked.

I saw him after the race. He was moving a little gingerly, but in good spirits.

And so now we have more race bling at home.