That’s off of a fitness app. A company has a run app and a walk app and a walk-your-dog app (no kidding) and a cycling app. Naturally, that’s the one I got first. Why they don’t simply integrate these into one utility escapes me, but we do know that dog lobby is a powerful one. Anyway, I share that map with you because, on Monday, I tried out one of the gyms on campus I’d never been in before. It was built in the 1960s and has a track running around the outer ring.
Something about the building, though, interferes with the signal getting to the phone and the app. That’s two laps around a circular track floating above a standard gymnasium. The website tells you the distance, but the app was very much in disagreement. So I just turned it off and thought about downloading the walk-your-dog app.
Which probably would have been better than the run, or the way I’ve felt for the past two days. I still have grapefruits in my calves from the exertion, an easy five-mile run. (I knew the lap count and my general time.) Apparently I didn’t stretch enough and I’m reminded of this every time I walk down stairs right now.
Also, we have interesting little maintenance vehicles on campus. They are probably nicer than the older golf carts with plastic screens. And they have racing stripes:
I just thought you’d like to know that.
photo / weekend — Comments Off on Catching up 1 Feb 15
The post with the most — leftover photographs, that is.
First, a series of talented people flipping, and the always enjoyable people watching in the background:
It was “Are you shorter than Jeff Graba?” night. The promotion was, if you were smaller — Graba is five-foot-five — then you got in free. This is the only shot of him I got tonight, apparently:
Often, these are mixed vegetables. Occasionally, this is a vegetable medley. This week, they were Italian vegetables.
When they are Italian, I learned, that means they are the opposite of fresh.
Look who I’m hanging out with. They’re doing yoga. They call it black cat pose:
Owing to the details of life, today I took my second bike ride of the year. This makes me sad to even consider, which is something, I suppose. But travel interferes. Weather, other plans, the comfortable chair I’m sitting in at the time, whatever.
So, today, we ride. The Yankee got all set up and started her ride and I got all my various things together — shoes and helmet and water bottles and stretchy clothes — and chased off after her. She texted me just as I was leaving, so I knew where to follow. She had two miles on me and I wanted to get there. She made me work for it, too, but eight miles later — through the neighborhood, over the time trial and by the stores and up and over two hills and then through more shopping — I finally caught up to her.
Which meant I had to ride harder. But it all felt nice, through the old POW grounds and then up a slow, easy little mile-and-a-half hill where I actually increased my average pace. Then through a downhill segment where I kept the tempo high. Through there I increased my speed, but knew in every way — empirically and by feel and the sound of the wind and the hum of my tires — knew it was a pretty slow effort over familiar roads.
And finally those two last little molehills, those two slow rollers to get back home, something to grind and gasp over and feel your legs burning and “Why did I come home this way? Because I’m tired and I’m tired over a one hour ride. I really need to ride much, much more. I’ll ride tomorrow. It’ll rain tomorrow.”
You can think up a lot of things when you’re slowly, slowly making your way up a small hill.
The new SportsCenter set is the crown jewel of the building: 9,700 square feet of space that will be used to broadcast the show on ESPN’s mass of channels. The revamped set was designed to make SportsCenter more personal, to show anchors moving around and interacting, but also to help the show move at the speed of the internet. ESPN has long been criticized for allowing news to break overnight while it ran repeats of the previous day’s shows; now the premier show in sports can update and broadcast in real time.
TV still matters at ESPN, and in every way DC-2 is wired for the future of TV. It’s capable of broadcasting in 4K and 8K, and if by some miracle 3D actually takes off, ESPN will be ready for that, too. TV is still where the network makes most of its money, and it will be for the foreseeable future. But when – not if, but when — that changes, ESPN says it will be ready. It has moved staff, built buildings, and overhauled how the company operates to make sure of that.
The strategy to keep ESPN on top breaks down along two broad lines. The first is an adjustment in how ESPN sees itself: the company has reorganized to promote more sharing across platforms, even launching the buzzword-friendly Content Sharing Initiative. ESPN the TV network, ESPN the radio provider, ESPN the magazine, ESPN the Instagram account, and ESPN the app maker are all becoming one.
The keys, for all of us, are to understand which of our audience needs what story, ascertain where those stakeholders are, give them that story in the best way possible in the format or with the tool they are using and then to ensure that you’re keeping the thematic elements in tune with your larger branding.
From time to time an aspect of this topic comes up: being poor means different things across time. When Bread Bags Weren’t Funny:
I liked what Ernst said because it was real. And it reminded me of the old days.
There are a lot of Americans, and most of them seem to be on social media, who do not know some essentials about their country, but this is the way it was in America once, only 40 and 50 years ago:
America had less then. Americans had less.
If you were from a family that was barely or not quite getting by, you really had one pair of shoes. If your family was doing OK you had one pair of shoes for school and also a pair of what were called Sunday shoes — black leather or patent leather shoes. If you were really comfortable you had a pair of shoes for school, Sunday shoes, a pair of play shoes and even boots, which where I spent my childhood (Brooklyn, and Massapequa, Long Island) were called galoshes or rubbers.
Removing the prisoners — American, British, Canadian and others, who had dubbed themselves “Ghost Soldiers” — was an unexpected obstacle.
Conditioned by captivity, many POWs thought the raid a trick to kill them as they fled. Few recognized the green Ranger uniforms that evolved from blue or khaki uniforms during their years in captivity.
[…]
Rangers literally booted and shoved some POWs out. Rangers also removed their shirts to make stretchers to carry away sick and wounded prisoners and gave their clothes and boots to the emaciated, threadbare, barefoot men.
[…]
In the end, Allied casualties counted two Rangers dead and several wounded. No Filipinos died. More than 500 Japanese soldiers were killed or wounded. All 512 prisoners survived.
Everything is original — from the gas pumps and retro Saco signs to the fake brown owl in the rafters used to scare off birds.
Even tall blue posts to the right of the station still extend into the sky, holding up a blue bell that previous owner Dick Salmon would ring after every Auburn football win.
After being vacant for nine years after Salmon was shot and killed inside the station’s lobby in 2005, the Saco station, on the corner of Dean Road and Opelika Road, is being revived.
Mike Woodham, owner of Woodham’s Full Service, which will operate in the Saco building, will open his business Monday, hoping to carry on Salmon’s legacy.
Craig Biggio takes the kind of tour we all want, or, if you want to tour the archives, all you have to do is get voted in, Biggio like a kid in the Hall of Fame:
Craig Biggio giggled and shook his head in disbelief. The Astros’ first Hall of Famer grabbed Babe Ruth’s bat and gripped it tightly, locking his hands on a handle that he quickly realized was much thicker than today’s models.
“No way! Babe Ruth’s bat,” Biggio said with a chuckle that served as a soundtrack for most of his tour through the National Baseball Hall of Fame. “Man, it feels good.”
The gritty, determined look Biggio carried to the plate during 20 years with the Astros was softened by a fan’s child-like giddiness Friday morning as he toured the Hall of Fame for the first time since he was elected to the Hall’s 2015 class earlier this month.
He chuckled with enthusiasm often, but he really cherished his visit to the climate-controlled collections area where he got to hold bats that once were used by Yankees legends Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
Two videos I shot at the gymnastics meet this evening. They aren’t especially compelling, just my tinkering with different apps doing different things. This is just a proving ground, sometimes, and since I made it, I may as well upload it and share it.
This is Auburn on the beam. I shot this in the Miniatures Tilt-Shift Time-Lapse app. You can manipulate the saturation and the blurring in the app itself. I shot each of the gymnasts’ routines and then later edited them together on my computer. I put it to music that I made in 4Beats:
Here’s a video I made of visiting Air Force on the beam and Auburn on the floor to close the meet. I shot this in the Hyperlapse app panning my phone back and forth off the top of a camera lens. I also put this video to music I made tonight in 4Beats
You just don’t see a big mound of large bags of cereal every day. And, given the lunch the last few days, this was looking pretty good. They brought in this new vendor last fall — because food is definitely a place you seek out the lowest bidder. Meanwhile …
A group of more than 100 Army Rangers, Alamo Scouts and Filipino guerrillas traveled 30 miles behind Japanese lines to reach the camp. Along the route, other guerrillas in the villages muzzled dogs and put chickens in cages lest they alert the Japanese.
The 30-minute raid liberated 513 POWs.
Some of them weighed so little the Rangers could carry two men on their backs. At a rendezvous point, trucks and 26 carabao carts — local wooden carts — waited to carry them to safety. Villagers along the way contributed more carts because the Americans had little or no clothing and shoes, and it became increasingly difficult for them to walk. By the time they reached American lines, 106 carts were being used.
Audacious things are done by audacious individuals.
“It’s like ‘Where’d this thing come from?'” said Lee Shook, who’s making a documentary about the car. “It’s a time capsule. It’s amazing.”
The 1971 Ford Thunderbird is labeled the “Rescue Ship,” and three decades ago that’s exactly what it was.
In the early 1980s, Willie J. Perry drove the car around Birmingham looking for people who ran out of gas, had a flat tire or otherwise needed a helping hand. The Rescue Ship was an icon, covered with flashing lights and a flashy paint job, and equipped with a record player, toaster oven, and more inside.
Daniel Okrent, who served as The New York Times’ first public editor, made reference to a “downgrading” of the position, based mostly on financial constraints.
“At a time when newsrooms are shrinking and news holes are shrinking, the idea of paying someone to criticize a newspaper is perceived by management as more and more obtuse,” he said.
The position is often the first to go when news executives are trying to trim their budgets.
“Do we really want to be spending scarce resources on an in-house critic?” New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen asked, hypothetically. “There’s the sense that media criticism rains down on us from all sides. Isn’t it better to let outsiders handle it?”
Buzzfeed editor in chief Ben Smith has often said as much—that the instant Twitter critics make a formal ombudsman unneccessary for the company.
Maybe I’m alone in this, but it seems that this is exactly the reason we need public editors right now. There’s such a thing as getting in front of an issue.
A policy instituted by Principal Nichole Davis Williams in the fall states that “Students should not receive a grade lower than 50.” This means that students at the school can fail to turn in work, and still receive some credit for the work.
[…]
The policy, which is not a district-wide policy, was implemented after a parent questioned her child’s low score on a progress report, the teachers said. Some students who are aware of the policy aren’t doing classwork and projects, and just taking 50s. The teachers said they have noticed behavioral problems they believe to be connected to that policy.
“Students aren’t learning because we can’t get them to do the work,” one of the teachers told AL.com. “When do we hold the students accountable?”
Can’t imagine what that does to the culture of the campus.
