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Friday / photo — Comments Off
4
Aug 17

Meditations on time

I saw this sign while walking about downtown today:

I wonder how long you have to stare at that until you came up with that idea. And when exactly is Kanye time, anyway? It is always time for some things, and common sense tells us that it is never time for other things. But does this artisanally-crafted sign imply that you can park at all of the times that aren’t Kanye time? And when is Kanye time?

Also, this sign, because nothing brings people back into your store after a series of health and sanitation woes like a celebrity ingredientologist!

They’re driving their audience to a website where your ingredients are musical. You can create some interesting stuff from the samples. I plugged in my usual order. It makes better sense as a food than it does as a song, which you can listen to here, but the site itself is really quite impressive.

And, finally, I was in the car, the stereo was blaring, the sun was finally suggesting it would, once again, sink softly below the western horizon, when I figured out something I’ve been pondering for a lifetime. It was the sort of thing that you don’t even know you’re considering it, until the consideration is resolved with the peskiness of a realization. I now know what the best part of the week — in your standard westernized context, anyway — is. The best moment of the week is 7:45 p.m., on a Friday.

What’s better than that? You’ve left the week behind, you have the weekend ahead, there’s a reason the sun is right there and the stereo is blaring. It is 7:45, and that’s … well maybe not legendary, but certainly memorable.

markers / photo / site / Thursday / video — Comments Off
3
Aug 17

There’s a lot of odd stuff in this post, so, the usual

Do you know the significance of this building? It has some important history.

You’ll learn about this building on the most recent addition to the historic markers site. If you just can’t get enough of the historical markers you can see them all right here.

Today I helped put stickers on cameras for a few minutes. All of that Sunday school training paid off. Except for on the few stickers that were a millimeter or two off-center here or there. (But don’t tell.) Four stickers per camera. One on the body, one on the lens, another on the power adaptor — it does a slow focus pull in video mode — and another on the external microphone.

This is the funniest cruel thing — is it the funniest, cruel thing or the cruelest, funny thing? — that I’ll watch. The premise is the expert explains the topic over hot peppers. Some people get through it just fine, this lady tells an interesting story and she’s really hurting. And I’m sympathetic to her plight. But I learned some neat things:

We watched this last night. Just an incredible hour of television, which took place in 2005 and I just discovered. It is amazing, in a way, that this made it to network television. And it was the fourth highest rated episode of the last season of West Wing. And of course, this would never happen in real life, ever. But it is a fun watch:

The West Wing S 7 Ep 07 – The Debate

Or maybe you just have to be a certain kind of viewer to appreciate that. But I enjoyed that, didn’t want it to end. I dreaded it ending, and how often do you say that about a single episode of television? I realized why Alan Alda is there and put away, for an hour, my Unifying Theory of Alda, because this was more important, than that. Which is saying something for a fictitious debate in a non-existent presidential campaign in a world that we don’t live in — with issues similar to ours.

But, then, I spent a lot of my master’s degree working on debates and writing and researching campaign material, so maybe you have to be an especially specific kind of viewer. I’m going to have to stop it during the opening credits right now, or I’ll end up watching the thing again …

IU / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
2
Aug 17

There is no such thing as too many cameras

We’re still working on those cameras. It turns out that preparing 150 of these things takes some time. Tomorrow they’ll be barcoded. At some point they’ll get put into The System. We’ve put them together in a room that is ordinarily an 18-computer classroom. And the finished cameras fill up all of the tabletop space in the room. Here’s a small sample:

One hundred and fifty cameras. We found that you could get into and out of one box in about eight minutes. You could get six or seven ready, then, per hour. That’s if your fingers were behaving at the time which, for me, is something easier said than done.

Saw these Black-eyed Susans at lunchtime today:

At which point we could discuss the passage of time and the second half of summer and the early hours of August and what comes next. But it is a beautiful day and the flowers are still showing off. There will be time for all of that later, it is inevitable. Enjoy the sunshine, he says to himself, knowing one day it might take.

IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
1
Aug 17

Say cheese

Today I helped a few people build out some cameras. One of our classrooms had 75 brown boxes. And in each brown shipping box we found two Canon boxes. And in each of those colorful Canon boxes there were three other boxes. Those boxes contained a camera body, a lens and a microphone. And a lot of packaging.

I didn’t think to take a photo of all of the bubble wrap and cardboard and the many piles of literature. There were two manuals, a registration, a warranty and some other stuff too. This was just one pile:

It took all day and then some, unpacking, removing the tape, wrestling with, and sometimes failing to avoid cardboard cuts. Then you had to deal with each part’s individual wrapping. Then put the lens on the body, the microphone in the hot shoe, and then thread the neck strap through the body. Do all of that 150 times. It took all day. They look nice, though:

Students are going to have a lot of cool new gear this year.
Tomorrow

cycling / Monday / photo / running — Comments Off
31
Jul 17

Hello leg muscles

I went for my first bike ride in a while on Saturday. It was hard in the way that the usual becomes hard after too much time off. I’d been fighting off a mild respiratory or sinus thing for a bit and then a separate throat thing and we were in a hot spell and I didn’t have to ride, so I didn’t. But, I thought Saturday, maybe I should have anyway.

And then yesterday afternoon I returned to the untied sneaker exercises:

It had been three or four weeks since my last ride and a great deal longer since my last run. And that wasn’t easy, either. It wasn’t hard so much as slow and full of the usual aches and pains you forget about in the early part of a run. But the weather was nice and the scenery was lovely:

If you run slow, you see it longer, that’s what I always say:

I say that a lot, because I’m slow. And my run was slow, but today, my walk might have been just a touch slower, too.