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friends

We are just waiting, it seems

Busy day today. But it all felt like we were just waiting for the big game. Which, in a way, I guess we are.

Straightened things in the house. Then I made other messes and tried to keep them under control. We started the process of decorating the Christmas tree. We purchased it Wednesday night, carried it inside and it slipped right into the tree stand. It took two twists and then simply holding it straight while we tightened the screws. It was the easiest tree we’ve had so far. The man with the chainsaw knew his craft.

That evening we also put out the decorative trees outside, two three-foot tall pieces of exterior decoration. This involves a ladder. On the ladder I removed the porch light fixture. It exploded on contact, which was no worry because it was do for replacement after the holidays anyway. We removed the lightbulbs and installed one of those devices that turns your socket into an electric outlet. Then we plugged up the trees. Now, from a light switch inside, the trees can be lit. This is better than going outside and plugging and unplugging the things. We have simplified our pre-fab, pre-decorated trees.

By next year I’ll look for the technology that allows me to simply think “Light” and it will be so.

We went for a run this afternoon. I felt pretty bad at the start, with poor form and sore and sluggish in all the wrong places. So, I decided, the solution was to run more. I did the regular route through the neighborhood. That intersects with our town’s time trial route. When I’m riding that I sometimes see people running, so I decided to jog down that road. There’s a turn and I can make a big circle around a few neighborhoods. I managed to get in five miles. (I do not know what is happening.)

One of those miles actually felt good. And after a snack the rest of the day was grand.

We have company. Brian, a former co-worker and old friend, is in town to cover the big game. Scooby, a college friend, is in town for the big game. She joined The Yankee and I at the Celebrity Home Run Derby, benefiting the Hudson Family Foundation. Here’s the highlight package the athletics department produced:

Patrick Nix and Frank Sanders were there, too. They did not recreate their famous play:

Nix came off the bench, cold, against Alabama to throw that ball to Sanders on his first snap after Stan White went out with an injury. Nix is supposed to have said that he was born to complete that pass. Several years ago he told me once that, when he was a child, he tried to block Van Tiffin’s field goal in the Iron Bowl. He crouched behind his sofa and leaped into the air as Tiffin made The Kick. How could you not love a guy who believed like that?

The stars are lining up for Auburn. Sanders is being honored tomorrow. He was there with both of his college quarterbacks. Stan White made an appearance in the putting part of that video, alongside Philip Lutzenkirchen and PGA winner Jason Dufner. A large handful of great Auburn names have been filing into town for the big game tomorrow.

Had dinner at Niffer’s. They were packed, as you would expect for a game day weekend where everyone is waiting. Brian snagged us a good table.

We’ve all stayed up too late. Too busy with tasks, busy with visiting and busy with waiting for the game tomorrow. We’re going to have a great time, of course. Who’s going to win, I don’t know.

Auburn / friends / journalism / links / photo / Samford / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
5
Nov 13

42 is no longer the answer

And now a quick study in shutter speeds. This first moody shot was taken in bright, filtered morning sun at 1/4000th of a second at f/6.3. This would fall under the category of “Usually looks better in the camera’s LCD than on the computer screen:

Now, the same shot. Just a few heartbeats later, the composition altered only by the vagaries of imprecise body movement. Our subject is still in the bright, filtered morning sun. I shot this one at 1/400th of a second at f/6.3:

Mostly I’m amazed she stayed perfectly still for that, even at high shutter speeds.

Actually, she doesn’t mind the camera so much. She will not cast her countenance upon your phone, however. Every shot I’ve ever managed with the phone has been by some means of deception or another. And the camera is much larger and has the always-popular swaying strap.

Today’s study in autumn foliage is to the opposite side of the dogwood, where we can study the new buds, already present and patiently waiting for next year. Even if you grow maudlin at the passing into winter, there is always a sign of escape. Dogwoods, then, can be instrumental for your morale, should you need them.

The paper is happening as I write. Who knows where the paper is when you read this. The next newspaper could be happening. Next year’s staff could be happening over a newspaper next year. This could be printed in a paper at some later date when you read this. This could be the first thing anthropologists pull up when they figure out how to connect their power with ancient power supplies a few millennia from now.

Cats and leaves. Yes, great-great-great-great grandchildren, this is what we often did with the Internet at a slow moment. It truly was a marvelous time. Now come grab some of this hard candy before promptly getting off my lawn.

Spent the morning in the office, pecking away at things. Spent the afternoon in the library, pecking away at things. Spent the evening on The Editing Of Things. Now this, and then back to pecking and editing.

The thing I am editing is the upcoming family present project, which I have sort of alluded to here in passing from time to time. We are presenting the finished product this coming weekend, which means I am now finishing up the actual project. I’m ready for it to be done because I am anxious to deliver it because I am uncertain at how it will be received.

You always are, when you make something, aren’t you? How will this go over? It isn’t the same if you’re just buying a thing. Doesn’t fit? Wrong color? No problem. I have a receipt. What’s one trip to the store? To make something, to envision it, and to put in the effort, to visualize and re-visualize the finished version, to contextualize and add and subtract from the context of what it all means, to put it all together, hoping there are no typos or that everything is straight or accurate or the right color or under the proper protocol and on and on. It can get to you, if you are a crafty person.

My friend Kelly, who is easily one of the two or three craftiest people I know, agrees with me about this. You start out doing something, decide to do a nice thing for someone and then you introduce a little anxiety and stress about this nice thing … it is amazing, I think, that anyone ever makes anything for anyone.

But, then, I am not especially crafty.

I do, however, admire those that are. Even more so than I usually do. Which is why it is hard to let go of things people occasionally make for you. Which is why I always look forward to when the leaves turn because behind that comes cooler weather and that means I can dig out the awesome blanket that Kelly made me years ago. It is colorful and warm and sturdy and it was made with love.

Which I think will be the theme of the inevitable speech that will surely be given with this project this weekend. As it should be. That’s what it has been, an exercise in searching and exploring and persistence and assistance and, ultimately, love.

So, really, I’m down to the giving. With the giving comes some receiving, he said, staring off into the future, but also the past, while in the middle of The Editing Of Things.

I’m not a crafty person, but there are few things I’ve looked forward to giving so much as this. All will be revealed this weekend.

Today I learned that there are believed to be some 8.8 billion planets in our galaxy alone that fit in what we think of as the Goldilocks zone for life, as we know it. Tonight I got to use the expression “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”

I always smile when I get to use one of the old journalism cliches — which are the only ones you needn’t avoid like the plague, it seems. Even more with this. Verify what you’re told, being the point. If an astronomer tells you there are 8.8 billion planets, any of which could support life, just roll with it. “And the people that live on two or three of those planets, at least, are made of cookie dough. Hey, we’re astronomers. What are you going to do?”

Some of that is just how we perceive and conceive things. Comedian Steven Wright said “Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he’ll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it.” Whether or not you look up that quote probably says a lot about how you perceive and conceive reality and me in it. Whether he stole it from someone else, says a different thing.

But we all like cookie dough.

And that conversation right there, that’s probably how quantum physics or postmodernism or postmodern quantum physics got started.

Things to read …

Look how transparent Apple is and is not in this transparency report. And scroll to pages three and four to see tables demonstrating what your government is doing in your name. Compare that to other countries. Come up with your own observations.

This may be another perspective on something I’ve already linked to here, but I’m of the opinion that all of these perspectives matter. So let us Kirsten Berg’s thoughts on America’s Shackled Press:

Since its establishment by a group of American correspondents in 1981, the Committee to Protect Journalists has focused on defending the rights of its counterparts abroad, naming and shaming the most egregious offenses against press freedom around the world. Incarcerations in Iran. Crackdowns in China. Retaliations in Russia. Slayings in Syria.

But now, for the first time in its history, the CPJ said it felt compelled to commission a special report on its home country: The United States.

It’s an irony that is not lost on Joel Simon, the organization’s executive director. But, as he told an audience at the New America Foundation last Thursday, the recent actions taken by the Obama administration—from its aggressive pursuit of leakers to the campaign-like media relations firewall it erected to control the information that comes out of government agencies—led them to conclude that there had been a fundamental, chilling shift in the ability of journalists in this country to report the news.

This is the second of such features I’ve read recently. I like these stories. Doing good in the community, giving people confidence, meeting police officers and beating them up in the name of science? Good stuff. Lee County Sheriff’s Office offers class aimed at empowering women:

Alicia Cohill delivered one final blow to the aggressors and ran back to a cheering group of women.

“It’s exhilarating,” she said, catching her breath. “You kind of go to that place. Especially the last one, when you have to close your eyes and rely on touch. Once they grabbed me, it was automatic… It takes you out of your comfort zone. You just kick butt.”

While the women also learned grappling and quick escape techniques, Jones said the course is not just about physical self-defense.

“It is not a self-defense course, per se,” he said. “It is also about awareness, giving women the tools they need to avoid becoming a victim.”

Plus you get to wear the cool pads.

More here. If you are tempted to leave now, dear anthropologists of the future, please scroll on through. Our society’s answers to the meaning of life are hidden in these pages. Hint: It is the cookie dough.

friends / journalism / links / Monday / photo / Samford / things to read — Comments Off
4
Nov 13

The kind of Monday where the traffic clears before you get there

I got a call on the drive into work. It was a friend who was some miles ahead of me on the interstate. He was stuck in bumper to bumper traffic and was thoughtful enough to offer this heads up. He screen capped a picture of his favorite traffic app map and sent that to me. I compared what his phone said to what my phone said. I was able, while safely not in traffic, to consult a news source on line. Ten miles of interstate were closed.

Surely this means there was a nuclear reactor meltdown at a place where no one realized there was a nuclear reactor meltdown.

By the time I made it to the area, after a bite of lunch to wait out the traffic, it was all gone. The road had reopened. There was a car, Brian said, that had ran off the road. He also sent pictures of a fender-bender or two, the sort of thing that happens in the backup of a larger accident and just ruins your week. He never saw anything that merited a 10-mile shutdown.

Which still doesn’t mean that there aren’t spent fuel roads on some county road overpass.

But my friend called me from his stationary vehicle with a phone he wears on his hip. That signal went off a tower, probably to a satellite synched up to a static Mercury orbit, came back down to me and we conferred like air traffic controls. Then he sent me digital imagery, the stuff no one would have conceived of 50 years ago. And then he beamed me photographs, which would have been a fanciful plot device in a television show even 20 years ago.

And, what a world, we do all of this without thinking.

The only problem with autumn this far south — he said with a vacant sigh, as if any sigh could truly be vacant — is that it doesn’t last very long. Three days, The Yankee says. She’s being sarcastic about it, but only just. So you spend a little time in this beautiful weather, and it has been amazing the last few days, lingering a little bit longer under each tree, for no other reasons than you can and should.

The only problem with autumn anywhere — he said with a more resigned sigh, as if any sigh could be anything more than resigned — is that it is impossible to capture the feeling of autumn, even the muted version we get, in an image. You don’t get the sun just right and the air feels different and the smells you never notice are just shifting in that way that makes you notice them for 23 minutes on a Tuesday, but not again until some day early next spring. If spring is a shout to the senses and summer is a testament of being able to filter out the overwhelming then fall is a gentle nod at imperceptibility. It only barely says “I’m coming.” It usually only whispers “I’m here andnowI’mleaving.” There’s a big heave at the end, of course. “I was there.” Those are the leaves on the ground.

Makes you wonder why we call them leaves.

Here are a few from the yard. By the time I am back under this dogwood the entire thing will look sickly.

I’ll post a few more pictures like this this week. I know you can’t photograph autumn. I know it never catches the moment and, at the end of the day, you have nothing more than multihued tree extremities. But I keep trying, every year.

In class today we talked about public relations, what it is and isn’t. And we began discussing the all-important press release. This evening I worked on The Editing Of Things, which isn’t as ominous as it portends, just unending. I had a soup-and-sandwich dinner, because it was as cold inside as outside, which is to say mildly chilly outside, and ridiculous indoors.

I dipped the toasted herb focaccia bread into the vegetable soup, the flavors of which did odd things to the asiago, roasted tomatoes and basil pesto sauce on the slices of turkey. I say that just to make it sound healthy and exotic. Especially after I just mistakenly saw the nutritional value of that sandwich. Looks like I’ll need a new usual.

Things to read …

The list really shouldn’t include this. A local columnist, in his well-placed displeasure with people that have been elected to office and subsequently gotten themselves in heaps of legal trouble and the community in historic financial trouble, has gotten vivid:

That era of debt and corruption is going to burn for a lifetime. We laid ourselves down with Langford and these banks, and some of these lawyers, and woke up itching with an STD we can’t shake.

Commissioner George Bowman, the lone vote against the new deal, was right when he said poor people will be disproportionately hurt by perpetually rising rates.

Poor people are going to get hosed. Poor people – all residential customers but especially the poor – are going to get hosed worse than they did before the bankruptcy or during it. They are going to get hosed in perpetuity.

Shame there’s no municipal-grade penicillin.

Here’s the story: ” I was supposed to be there for her at that moment and I was.” The video is worth 53 seconds of your time:

The newest Pew surveys are out, and there’s so much to unpack. It all defies excerpting in a place like this, so I’ll just give you the headline, which is not as good as the actual read: Twitter News Consumers: Young, Mobile and Educated.

Follow me on Twitter, there is occasionally something for most everyone there. And be sure to come back tomorrow for more leaves and various other observations of the modern condition!

Auburn / football / friends / photo / weekend — Comments Off
26
Oct 13

Football fans — Florida Atlantic at Auburn

Auburn hosted overmatched Florida Atlantic today. So instead of worrying about football, here’s an opportunity to concentrate on the important people surrounding it. The Yankee approves:

I’m using a Holga lens, a gift from a friend who was cleaning off his shelf and sent the thing to me. The premise behind the Holga lens is to emulate the poor quality of the Holga, a cheap, plastic camera marketed in China. Even the lenses on some of those cameras were plastic, which allowed for a lots of soft focus, fuzzy edges and showed off whatever was happening in the emulsion of your film. (Remember film?) So Holga shots became hip, or hipster depending on how you see it, and now we have a niche lens. These are my first shots with it.

This first set are some of the people with whom we tailgate.

These are the hosts of our tent, Kim and Murphy. You’d have to look hard to find sweeter people:

In the stadium they’re running this feature before the game begins. The winner tonight was a guy who was unaware he was on the screen for 44 seconds. We saw him eat a fair amount of his hot dog. These guys were all on their phones, so the name of the feature was apropos. The young woman on the left was singing along, but she had no idea …

A few people inside the stadium:

Auburn won 45-10, in a game that was truthfully under control after the first two scores within the first five minutes.

books / friends / history / journalism / links / photo / Samford / things to read / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Oct 13

Darth Vader is bad and his assistant is a mouse

I wrote, on Monday, about my lunch book, Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light, the last installment of his trilogy on the European Theater of World War II. I discussed Atkinson’s descriptions as “filled with detail and insight and passages from three generations ago that feel like they are fresh today.” This passage is in his prologue which, again, is 41 delicious pages long:

One concise paragraph touches on a millennia of history and technological firsts. It offers a description, a quip and a
discarded plan on how to address the English Channel problem. The guy is good.

Who else is good? The staff at the Crimson. We held our weekly critique meeting today. We’re almost a third of the way through their production run and we’re down things like punctuation in quotes and synonyms. They are working hard and showing their talent. I’m quite proud for them.

This video showed up somehow today, in that delightful way that modern life gives you things from so many directions you’re never sure from which they came. It is, as the kids say, completely insane.

Turns out this guy only finished second in this ridiculous display of gravity, speed and a complete disregard for survival instinct.

This is an entirely different kind of ride than I’d ever want to do. The first time I ever heard people talking about mountain bikes they were celebrating the ways they got hurt, like that was the competition. That’s not for me. One of our friends is a big time, travel across the country, day-long race mountain bike types. I sent him this video and he carefully noted “We can’t all do that!”

Not sure that would have been my first response.

But what a great testimonial for the GoPro camera, no? Ours will not be pressed into such a service.

We fired up the grill at home this evening. The Yankee made a London broil. We kissed it with just enough flame and it was delicious enough for seconds. Adam came over to enjoy the flank steak and catch up on a bit of Game of Thrones.

We’ve been watching them all again. They actually get better on the second viewing. There’s a lot you didn’t catch the first time.

For example:

Things to read …
You wonder how Netflix will stay on top of their entertainment niche as others build their own platforms to compete with in-house productions. They have some plans. Five things Netflix is going to disrupt next

The company has big plans for next year, and its executives previewed some of them during Netflix’s Q3 earnings call earlier this week.

This is a topic that’s been going around a few days because of an essay at The Atlantic, which for about 48 hours tried to be something of a continental divide in journalism and education. USC’s Professor Robert Hernandez chimes in. Those required courses in journalism school are there for a reason:

A modern journalist needs to know how the web works, needs to be exposed to and respect all journalistic crafts (including code), and needs to know their role in working with others. And that role is an active role, not a passive one. They need to use these digital tools to produce relevant, quality journalism.

A digital journalist (or web journalist) focuses on producing journalism of the web, not just on the web. That can manifest itself in a diverse set of roles — being the homepage editor, becoming a multimedia storyteller, or developing a news app, alone or with a team. They can use the tools, but they can also build tools when needed.

If you’re a student, I’m not going to debate which path you should take. I’m not even going to debate what level of instruction in digital journalism or code you need to take. (It’s 2013 — are you really arguing against learning technology?)

But what I will say is that, like those other required parts of your education, you are better off for being exposed to it, whether in a journalism career or in life.

How Website Statistics Changed Our Programs

Good news we can all use. Alabama’s economic development prospects improving, officials say:

Birmingham and state economic development experts said plenty of new projects and expansions are looking to invest money and add jobs, but recent history has proven there is a big difference between getting looks and breaking ground.

A panel of economic development experts spoke to members of the Society for Marketing Professional Services Alabama at a luncheon in Vestavia Hills today.

And two items from the multimedia blog:

Twitter, Vine and people the world over make a film

Google media tools

Thanks for stopping by. Much more on Twitter. Hope you have a great day tomorrow.