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A day on a cruise ship with no destination seemed silly in the abstract, but they are pretty indulgent in reality. Sleep in. Eat whenever. Read. Go somewhere else and read. Check out the scenery or read some more. Maybe catch a show or an event or take a nap. Meet the captain. (He’s not that busy.) You come to look forward to sea days.
A video:
A year and a half ago I picked up some music for video beds and, today, I got a take down notice about one of them from YouTube. Someone had filed a complaint and now I have “a strike.”
I looked up the company and it seems they are doing this a lot, granting licenses and then revoking them for whatever reason. I suppose they feel they can get some sort of monetary gain from that. It is, in the common parlance, a shakedown.
So the old video was gone, which meant a page on my site did not have the appropriate video. And if there is one thing around here that we don’t abide by it is Errors That We Know About.
We are perfectly fine with Errors Of Which We Are Unaware.
So when you spot the bountiful errors, point them out. They get fixed with equal parts chagrin and alacrity.
Anyway, I had to find the right page, which was easily narrowed down to three or four, based on the context. And then I had to find the proper video. Of course, I wanted to upload the video again, this time with music from someone who isn’t a con artist. So I had to dig up the original video, which took a few searches, but was easy to find in the scheme of things. Feeling as though I was lucky to still have it, I loaded it in the video editor, dropped out the now illicit music, made an edit and then put in some bed music that hasn’t been pulled out from under me. The other music was better, but this is fine. I had some graphic considerations, and I figured that, since I was there, I may as well put it in the new video style. And here it is, new template, old video, acceptable new tune:
Took 15 minutes.
And no, I’m not updating all of my old videos to this template. It will probably wear on me soon enough as it is.
On the other hand, I got to read through my notes and see the videos and photos that I took on our trip with Jessica and Adam to Ireland in the summer of 2013, and that was grand. And, in one of those happy little coincidences, all of the headers (randomized for your variety) that I get when I refresh the page are from Ireland. Delightful.
Here are a few of the pages, now: The Cliffs of Moher, On Inisheer, the Aran Islands and On Inishmore, the Aran Islands.
I should just make a category and link to that, so amazing was the entire trip. We could then just jump to that amazing time in a wonderous place with ease. Give me a minute …
OK, when you want to go to Ireland, just go to Ireland.
About three days into that one of us said “We should have kept count on how many times we said ‘Oh wow!’ as we rounded each curve.” And we should have.
On the eighth day, seriously, we started contemplating employment there. Just beautiful.
Today was also lovely. The wind chill was just at freezing this morning when I went out for a run:
It took 1.75 miles to get warm. The last 2.25 miles were just hard, but I got in four miles for the day.
And then we spent the rest of the day watching football and trying to stay warm.
Our sunset:
An altogether fine Monday, the last of the old year, and two cheers for that. Hope your week is filled with more relaxation than work. Stop back by here, though. There will be plenty going on, of course.
My grandmother dug through the furniture and who knows where else she keeps it all, but she produced three albums and four boxes of photos tonight. I started her down this path by asking about a CD someone brought over several years ago that traced my grandfather’s family back to his grandfather through photographs.
It was essentially half an hour of people I didn’t know, mysterious black-and-white shots of people my grandmother knew as adults and then the later, questionable, hair and clothing styles of those later adults.
So we watched the disc and she named people and guessed at others. And then, somehow, we found ourselves in the back of the house. I was staring at pictures of my grandparents looking into a camera two decades younger than I am now. My wife was taking pictures of me from three decades ago. Suddenly we all felt so young, and so old. And it was all interesting and weird, except to see those that are gone, now, and to count them all up in your head.
I want to hear these stories and one day I want to ask a lot of questions about them, for posterity’s sake. Some of that information should continue on, somewhere, but I’m not sure if there’s much of an appetite for it. So it should be me that does it, then. And then my grandmother says “They’re all gone now, except for those two girls,” it breaks your heart a little to ask her to think about it.
On the other hand, the two times that I’ve started to dig into this a little bit, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more real smile than when my grandmother is talking about her grandmother. It is worth it for that alone.
Anyway, some pictures.
That guy could straight up sing:
Stringbean, my grandmother said, always wore his pants like this. So he was fashion forward.
David Akeman and his wife were killed by burglars in their home in 1973. (One of their killers died in prison in 1973. The other was paroled just last month.)
But he could play that banjo, she insisted. No kidding. I picked this one because Porter Wagoner was my grandfather’s favorite, and Roger Miller shows up, he was one of my favorites:
If you hear the term clawhammer in a musical sense, this is the meaning. It is, now, considered the “old style” of banjo playing. (Earl Scruggs, who replaced Akeman in the great Bill Monroe band, is the pioneer of the “new” three-finger style.)
I don’t remember Akeman on Hee Haw reruns, but he was there. I’m sure we all laughed at his jokes, my grandparents and me, when the scarecrow was on camera. And now that entire show suddenly seems like a portal into a different time, my grandparents watching stars they’d grown up and were growing old with. Bright colors and bad puns beamed to their antennae, guest hosts and bad skits, all of the stuff in between hearing the songs they knew.
I’m even less certain why people collect head shots and autographs of politicians, but it makes the politicians happy. Once upon a time, at least, one of these was in a lot of homes in Alabama.
I wonder where my grandparents picked all of those up.
Here she is now. She figures she was about 18 or 19 in this picture.
“Let’s talk about this wallpaper,” I said.
“Let’s not,” she said.
She’s such a sweetheart.
Lovely warm day. I should have started my run a bit earlier. We are in a weather system that means the temperature drops 15 degrees as soon as three tree limbs conspire to block the sun. Before that, though, it was bright and surprising. Short-sleeve weather if you’ve ever needed it in December — and who doesn’t?
But I did my little neighborhood run late in the afternoon and into the early evening. It turned to a chill just as I wrapped up, but I had views like this:
And there is nothing wrong with views like that.
So another three miles down, after three miles yesterday and before a bunch more this week. I’m trying to make my run fast.
“Fast.”
There’s a word that mean a lot without any context. Let’s give it some: I look like a shuffler, I want to look like a runner. That, to me, would be fast at this point. In truth, I haven’t been fast in decades, and even then I was only faster than a person running slowly. I grew up around plenty of fast people.
I wonder if any of them had the chance to go for a run today, or got to see a sunset like that, wherever they are.
Things to read … because this stuff is good no matter where you are.
A nice example of dogged persistence, Meet the reporter who broke Philadelphia’s civil forfeiture story—two years ago:
Two years ago, an investigative reporter named Isaiah Thompson exposed the massive and troubling scale of “civil asset forfeiture” in Philadelphia—that is, how law enforcement exploited its authority to seize cash and personal property suspected to be connected to a crime. The idea is to take ill-gotten gains from drug dealers or other criminals, but Thompson showed that Philly authorities routinely claimed property in cases where the owners were not convicted—and in some instances, not even charged.
[…]
“It shows there’s no substitute for true reporting,” said Scott Bullock, a senior attorney with IJ. “He’s not just reading the law and talking to a couple people. He went to the courtroom over and over and over, and really explored what happened.”
There’s an accidental insight here, I think: A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link:
Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.
Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent.
That’s not the problem it used to be, unfortunately, even for the Times. I think I liked it better when that would have been the cause for some consternation.
We’re starting to see this sentiment in more and more think pieces, Defining quality in news has to value the user experience:
You could frame the big challenge for the next few years of digital news this way: How can we create a news user experience that’s as easy and friction-free as Facebook — but as good as the best a dedicated news power user could assemble?
[…]
“Quality” isn’t just about how many foreign bureaus you have or how long your big features can run. It’s about every step of the process that moves from a reporter’s idea to a reader’s eyes. Too many news outlets make too many of those steps frustrating — and frustrated readers are all too happy to go back to playing Candy Crush.
That conversation is a good and needed one. It signals a maturation of the medium. And what the author, Joshua Benton, is saying ultimately leads to an effort to create a variety of interfaces for a spectrum of users. Not every story must be print, or video, no. And not every example in this enterprise need to be the TV attempt at multimedia: the broadcast package over the text of the story. There comes a time where we ask consumers to choose what they want, and we shunt them into not only the stories they want and the format they want (and the advertising they’re looking for) but also give them control of those capsules. We build it, they select how they want these stories and where. We get it there. They move back and forth through the media.
They’re doing that already, just not under one shingle.
And here’s another way the audience is doing it, How Wearable Technology Will Impact Web Design:
A lot of naysayers are quick to write off wearable technology as a fad, but a recent report from Pew Research Center Internet Project indicates that 83% of industry experts believe that wearable technology will see huge growth within the next 10 years. By 2025, we’ll be fully immersed in the Internet of Things (IoT). This means that users will be accessing websites from various platforms, not just desktops and mobile devices.
As technology expands and more users embrace wearables, more of your clients will want to their sites to be accessible. If you’re unprepared for such requests, clients will search elsewhere to fit their needs.
Although wearable technology is in its infancy now, it’s rapidly growing. Expect it to develop like a kid in puberty– overnight.
Slowly, and then all at once.
My friend Ike Pigott wrote this fine piece, The Mammals of Journalism:
A weekly newspaper, serving three cities with a combined population of less than 40,000 people… has a TV studio.
The ubiquity of ways in which live pictures can become zeros and ones and become unscattered again on a device of your choosing
The great disruption has happened. It didn’t smack the Earth with a blinding blast; rather, it carried its impact more slowly over decades. The internet, and mobile technology, and codecs, and smaller gear that people can afford, and the ubiquity of ways in which live pictures can become zeros and ones and become unscattered again on a device of your choosing… blame them all.A weekly newspaper has a website, and now it has a TV studio.
The Tribune’s publisher, Scott Buttram, likes to say that the very technologies that have disrupted network television and movie studios and large daily newspapers have also empowered his end of the food chain. The small can feast on the big, because the rules of our media world favor the nimble and the swift.
Flexibility, low inertia, is a terrific attribute these days.
A great show, A&E’s highest rated show, was canceled. But along came Netflix: ‘Longmire’ Season 4 News: Why Cancellation Might Have Actually Helped The Series. These are truly strange times in the entertainment business.
Tomorrow, we run errands! And probably some more fun stuff, too.
Finals day today. My students feverishly were emailing in the last of the work I’ve challenged them with and made them endure this term. Well, some raced. One student turned in the final work on Friday.
The rest, well, they knew they had until 3 p.m., the end of our scheduled final block.
“Three p.m.,” I said, “does not mean 3:01. One minute after means that’s one less I have to grade.”
They’re going to live in a deadline-driven world.
The last paper came in at about 2:28, so the message was received. Also, I must now grade them all.
Want to see an amazing story?
“Why do it?”
“It makes me feel normal and whole.”
Watch this video. But you have to watch the entire thing. And it is absolutely worth watching the whole thing.
I ran errands today. Here are the three least exciting parts of that: I visited an eye doctor’s office to make an appointment for later in the week. A nice young lady answered all of my questions with a laugh an assuring assurance. They booked me for Thursday.
Are you riveted?
I washed my car. And then I took the floor mats out and dropped them through this shaker machine that gets 98 percent of the grass and leaves and crumbs off of them. And then I vacuumed the rest of the trash off of the mats and the floor boards. I noticed that my car wasn’t completely clean, but it was closer to clean than it has been in a while. I’d been enjoying an industrial grade of autumn dust lately.
I got gas. I dropped my card at the pump twice.
The other thing I did was slightly more interesting than that, somehow, and it will be the subject of Wednesday’s post.
To wrap up today, and in honor of finals — and because these are two of the last four clips I have at the moment, here are two old ads from mid-1980s Crimson issues. Two things you don’t think about so much any more, I’d bet:
John’s is closed now, but it has a special place in history. It was opened in 1959, the first color film processing lab in the state. John was 24. There used to be at least four locations. Two were in strip malls. One building is now vacant. The other now has either a hotel or a car dealership on the old lot. Based on some canceled trademarks registered to the owner, I’m assuming the stores closed about two years after this ad ran. He died just over six years ago.
Bet you haven’t said “I need to run to Kinko’s!” in a good long while:
There are apparently still over 2,000 FedEx stores, which is the brand now, of course. It is the seventh largest printing chain in the country and Kinko’s is nothing but a memory. And it was so close to becoming a proprietary eponym, too.
