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cycling / hobby / Monday / photo — Comments Off
19
Mar 12

“We must be caught up.”

This guy was outside this morning:

In the afternoon I rode my little bicycle, turning the wheels around and around for what little I’m worth. I did an out-and-back, just down the long, hilly road from my neighborhood, out of town, past a handful of deputy sheriffs, through the neighboring town and than through two unincorporated communities. When I got to the point that was the farthest I’ve been on this particular road I felt great and pressed on.

And if the pros romanticize riding the cobblestones of Europe I invite them to enjoy the neglected country roads of this part of the world.

I road on a stretch that was little more than beaten shale until it turned into a still-smelling-of-tar new blacktop. It wasn’t much better, despite being brand new. Finally I had to turn around, riding over new asphalt covered in the red clay that means I’d traveled through at least three different soil regions.

On the way home I landed a sponsor, of sorts. I stopped at one of the crossroads gas stations to enjoy the shade and the last little bit of water. The guy working the till was sitting on a bench outside and invited me in to top off from the sink. So, Alice Faye’s Grocery, you guys are the best. And for the water refill and two handfuls of ice, I’ll mention you a lot. Also, I’ll stop back by, when I’m not in lycra, and buy a few things.

By the time I got home I’d managed 50 miles. And only the last few were uncomfortable. For the first 44 or so I felt as good as I ever have on the bike. I even set a personal best average speed over the course of the ride. It is still slow. I am not a very good cyclist.

At home the cable was out. A technician was due between 5-7 p.m. While we waited a contractor for the cable company showed up to bury the line the tech left in our yard on Saturday. He was scheduled for April but, as he said, “We must be caught up.”

This was a man of dirt and grass and heavy machinery. He has a dispatcher who tells him where to go, and that is enough. You have to admire the man’s work. Instead of a bright orange cable sprawled across the property there is now only a narrow cut line where he had to get under the grass. If you didn’t look hard you might not even see it.

As he worked the other guy showed up. And he was mystified.

These problems have persisted since we moved in. We go through a few months of mild problems, and then a long series of very persistent outages. When that happens we have experiences like this, three guys out in three days.

Oh they mean well, and they try hard. There are a few constants in the many visits. Most of them have something unflattering to say about the cable company they work for. They can never figure out the problem. They mostly just undo what the last guy did.

The guy that came out Saturday was little different. He told us the spectrum of numbers our streaming data should be at, and then told us the negative number we were at, which brought about the new cable stretched across the lawn. That worked until today.

The guy today yanked out an amplifier module one of his colleagues installed last year. It isn’t needed anymore, he said, because of the new, and newly buried, cable.

Why this wasn’t a problem for two days he couldn’t say. He couldn’t say a lot, really. He spent much of his time confused about the problem, which can’t be great for his morale. Here’s the customer, here’s the problem, here are your springtime allergens and your cat allergies.

“What is the deal with this?”

It doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, granted. But he got everything working in time. The cable got buried, everything is working as it should again. I had turkey for dinner. Life is good.

Also, we had this visitor today:

photo / weekend — 1 Comment
18
Mar 12

Catching up

The “Spring is here!” edition. Within the last week we’ve of course had the time change. And there’s been a rush to bathe ourselves in pollen. Also, lawn mowers and edge trimmers have all been fired up. There’s nothing like the smell of a freshly cut patch of grass.

From the library, as the sun went down. I wasn’t going to even mention the cable running through the yard. Charter has been here, and the temporary solution is to run a cord from the platform in the front of the yard, around the house and to the junction box. Sometime in April they’ll come bury the thing. We are very sophisticated around here:

The flowering dogwood in my yard is now, finally, flowering:

Everyone else’s has been in bloom, or has already turned to leaves. This one looks a bit like the monster flower from Little Shop of Horrors:

Some of the bushes in our flower beds. I do not know what they are called, but they don’t seem to mind:

Auburn / cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
16
Mar 12

The definition of only

So long, and thanks for all the flips:

Laura Lane and six of her teammates were honored on senior night which, thanks to unfortunate scheduling, took place during Auburn’s spring break. The gymnastics squad has a devoted student following, filling one half of the floor at Auburn Arena. Two of them were there, the rest were young families. So there’s some work to do on the scheduling side of things.

The Tigers did not have their best meet of the year, but they did enough to defeat BYU handily, 195.950-192.575.

But after this meet the stakes get bigger. The SEC championships are later this month in Georgia. Auburn will have to face the likes of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia and Florida, but they battled each of those squads within a point during the regular season.

In April the NCAA regionals will be at Auburn Arena.

Dinner at Cheeburger, including a basket of fries and a shake. I don’t mind the indulgence: I rode 27 miles this afternoon. And I’m now to the point where I said “I only rode 27 miles.”

I got scoffed at for that, but I was disappointed with the effort. I wanted more, but my energy levels disagreed. My hand hurt. (Remember a while back, I fell on my wrist? My chain slipped in a turn and jolted everything just right today.) It was hot. I forgot to press through. I was too busy trying to find reasons to stop after only 27 miles.

Terrible, I know. Tomorrow, then.

history / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / Samford / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
14
Mar 12

A random assemblage of stuff and things

My favorite meme of all time has become a campus group’s poster:

That, of course, is Joseph Ducreux, who was a French portrait painter at the court of Louis XVI and after the French Revolution. He liked physiognomy, assessing one’s personality by their facial expressions, hence his unorthodox portraiture, like this self-portait and, of course, the very famous Internet joke. You can’t even find the original set anymore, so buried are they amongst everyone’s contribution.

Two students showed this video in class today during a demonstration about advertising. The gasps from the rest of the class were great. See if you can figure out where this is going:

Happy birthday to The Birmingham News, which turned 124 today. This is the June 20, 1900, front page:

So the paper was 12 years old at the time. I haven’t seen any of the first volume’s front pages.

Things to read: Ad execs bullish on digital, marketers on social: Data reveals ‘disconnect’ with agencies:

Advertising executives -– both marketers and their agency representatives -– continue to increase their optimism toward digital media options, and are beginning to swing toward it as more of a “branding” than a performance “option,” but there are some significant disconnects between the way they look at various digital media silos. While agency executives tend to be far more bullish on the overall use of digital media, marketers are much more optimistic about budgeting for social media.

The findings, which are part of new, detailed analysis coming out of Advertiser Perceptions’ Fall 2011 survey on ad executive attitudes and optimism about media, show the overall index for digital -– including online display, search and video advertising –- trending upward, but the sentiment appears to be driven primarily by agencies. That insight is interesting, because the bottom line of big agencies appears to be benefitting from their continuing shift toward a greater reliance on digital media, according to a Pivotal Research analysis released Monday (OMD, March 13).

“But there is a discrepancy in the way marketers and agencies are seeing it,” says Randy Cohen, a partner in AP — which produces an ongoing series of ad industry tracking studies under its Advertiser Intelligence Reports banner, including this one. “It’s a disconnect,” he says, adding, “But agencies tend to do what marketers want them to.”

If that’s the case, social media should be the primary beneficiary, according to Cohen, because marketer sentiment is building much more favorably toward social networks versus the rest of the digital mix.

Things to read from my Samford blog:

iPhone / photo / Samford / Tuesday — 1 Comment
13
Mar 12

Among the reasons to love Samford

President Andy Westmoreland sends out a weekly message to students and faculty. In this week’s installment he wrote of a senior who’s father was struggling with terminal cancer. This is part of the note, from the student’s mother, that Westmoreland shared in his email:

“On January 10 of this year, we were told that it did not appear that my husband would survive until May for the graduation ceremony. He had been asking prayer for his situation in his Sunday School class. On Tuesday, January 17, his Sunday School teacher contacted Samford University and asked for help in arranging a surprise ceremony at our church so that my husband could see Taylor graduate college.

“Three days later, on January 20, Dean Finch and Professor Carson from the Brock School of Business were in our church with a certificate attesting to Taylor’s planned graduation, and a cap and gown. This was a complete surprise to my husband. Professor Carson spoke very personalized words of high praise for my daughter and Dean Finch addressed my husband personally with uplifting words of encouragement with regard to how my husband had prepared and equipped Taylor to succeed in life. Many of our family, friends and church family were able to attend. Several of Taylor’s friends from Samford were also there. This was the last time my husband left the house and he passed away eight days later on January 28. If the ceremony had been put off even until the next Monday, he would not have been able to attend. The sensitivity and sense of urgency that was given to this request could not have been more appropriate.

“My family received a precious gift that day that can never be measured. Even if the Lord had allowed my husband to live until May, he would never have heard such specific personalized words at a traditional ceremony. The decision to send our daughter to Samford was a costly one that met with most of our friends and family questioning the wisdom of such a decision with regard to the costs and our personal financial circumstances. Over the years, this decision has been reaffirmed several times but never more than on January 20. Yes it was a costly decision to send our daughter to Samford University, but that day, it became a ‘priceless’ one.”

Westmoreland ends his notes with a message like this, “The world is better because our people live out the core value of “service to God, to family, to one another, and to the community.”

Also, today was omelet day: