photo « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

photo

errands / iPhone / links / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
17
Mar 11

Happy Green Bread Day

For about 14 minutes I was inconvenienced without computer or phone today. You see, I’d discovered an app I wanted — and one day I’ll use it — but I had to upgrade my phone’s software first. So I plug the phone into that great giver of bits, the laptop and call up the curious iTunes package. Click around for the right button and then discover that I must first update my iTunes program before I can upgrade my phone.

Sigh.

So I upgrade. My computer must shut down. This is another reason to not yet worry about computers taking over the world. So long as we require the software to reboot with updates we’ll always have a fighting chance. When the computers start to gain momentum, we must only convince them it is time for a new software patch and, darn it if you don’t have to shut down for it, too. And then we jump them.

Anyway, the computer shut down. All of the programs must be closed. And there was the first problem, as my computer seems to be the source of a time causality logic loop. My computer would not shut down because the programs were unwilling to close. And the error boxes that popped up only allowed for a program restart, which is antithetical to a hardware shutdown.

See? Why worry about a Terminator?

Finally I clicked through enough wormholes to shut the thing down. It powered back up nicely. And then I plugged the phone into the USB, the USB into the computer and activated T2000 — because iTunes is somehow tied to the computers who are plotting our end, if it wasn’t the thing would work better. So the phone updated, rebooted and I was able to download the audio recording app Audioboo — interesting possibilities, unfortunate name — and SkySafari. That’s the one where you hold the phone up to the sky and it tells you what you’re looking at. It must work and be awesome because it is two words jammed into one, which is the mark of all good things these days.

Spring is here. In the backyard there’s a tree that already has leaves clinging daintily to the branches.

In other news, I seem to be as smart as a computer that has played more than 200,000 rounds of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Game Theory would suggest this is an unusual outcome because humans are inherently predictable and this is a game of random third selections. The computer, with that repository of other human games, should be able to find enough trends to defeat you. But I’m smart. (Or not. I found myself changing tendencies, just to try and confuse the pattern-seeking computer logic.)

You can give it a try, too.

Meat Lab today, where we bought a great deal of meat for a wonderfully low price. Also I broke three eggs, but the nice lady did not charge me for them. We bought 30 eggs, too, for less than $3. And then we hit Sam’s Club for chicken and then Publix for charcoal and buns. We walked there, and so we bought only the small bag of charcoal, because carrying 15 pounds of briquettes home didn’t seem fun.

Less fun:

This is Rainbow Bread, but also it is green. By this point we’ve all been trained to think of green=bad when it comes to bread. No one’s buying this stuff, not even on St. Patrick’s Day.

Even less fun is the basketball tournament. Taking over the television and I’m not even winning the brackets. Yet. I’m in fourth in one and seven in the other, but I’ll come on later in the tournament. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother, but The Yankee is actually watching some of the games. I don’t understand. She doesn’t care for basketball, either.

We are going to the women’s first round game on Sunday, though. The ladies from Samford are playing in their first ever tournament appearance and we have tickets!

books / family / friends / iPhone / links / photo / site / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
16
Mar 11

Sadly they did not have strawberries

I made a video of our visit to the farmers market this morning. Enjoy.

The most important thing about this video is not that I shot it on my phone, but I edited it in the car on the ride home. After that the iMovie app offered an update. The description sounds promising. Can’t wait to see it in action.

I promised you two stories yesterday.

Here’s the first: My longtime friend and radio mentor, Chadd Scott, lost his job at an Atlanta sports talker this week. He was stuck in St. Louis, stranded by Delta and weather. He tweeted about it, Delta took offense and, being sponsors of his station, put a lot of pressure on his employer. So they fired him.

This is regrettable, but everyone in the business pretty much understands the tough spot the station was in. Less excusable was Delta’s overreaction. Here’s why. He tweeted about it on Tuesday and the power of the Internet took over.

He started that day with about 800 followers, and now has almost 1,200 as of this writing, but that’s not what is important. I collected his original tweets, minus one, which he deleted for his former employer, and the next nine hours of original tweets and posted them on Storify.

If you don’t read the entire thing, I ended with the important part. The last 50 tweets mentioning @chaddscott and thus, Delta, had (at that point) reached 19,113 potential airline customers, creating 22,711 impressions.

So this is unfortunate for Chadd, but he’s the kind of guy that lands on his feet. You don’t build the fastest growing syndicated show in the country as he did a few years ago or work at ESPN for two of their top shows as he has done without being the kind of talented person capable of landing on your feet. While no time is good to be out of a job, now especially so, Chadd’s going to move on to bigger things.

But poor thin-skinned, corporate Delta. The guy had a few jokes, sound observations, really, and a few people online saw it. Now he’s going on television, thousands and thousands and thousands of people saw this and, apparently, are making travel decisions around it. (And as soon as my already-booked next Delta trip is up, I’ll be sure to figure this into my personal calculus.) If they can’t figure out when to have deicer at which airport they might not be worth my money, either. Also, they did my friend wrong.

Here’s the second story: I went to a local bookstore last night, a Hastings. We don’t seem to have another one around (that isn’t attached to the university). I remember when this Hastings arrived, when I was in college. it was a novel thing, then, because they had books and music and movies. But only mildly novel. They had some of all of those things, but other places had more of any one given thing.

The writing was almost upon the wall then, but there’s no mistaking what it says now. These stores are dying, at least the ones that aren’t dead. It was like strolling through a video store — Can you still do that in your town? — the only thing you need is the preservative fluids.

Finally found the biography section. Two entire sets of shelves. Amazon has a few more selections.

Not much of a story, but Hastings, I learned, has used books. Then again, so does Amazon. I hope the place makes it. Towns need bookstores. College towns should have more than one. Several people work there and they have at least three chairs for sitting and reading. Also, they have free coffee, so if you need a fix, that might be a good place to try.

I don’t drink coffee, so I couldn’t say.

Worked on what will become a new section of the site. I’ll give you a hint:

Give up? That’s from an old 4th grade science book. It was published in 1940. It belonged to my grandfather. I have a few of his old books and I’m scanning the fun pictures for a small extra section of the site. Not in this book so much, but in one of his high school literature books, there are notes in the margins. I get the impression that he was a funny kid.

I’ll try and trot out part of that section next week.

errands / iPhone / movies / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
15
Mar 11

“Oh, you meant with the Chex”

(Someone overheard me say that today and was apparently offended (or surprised). That was the one sentence I uttered, so they were offended without context, which is always amusing.)

So today we had breakfast at Barbecue House, where we could not yesterday. The place was more than slow late this morning. There were more people behind the counter than dining. But that’s Spring Break. The food is not taking off. Delicious as always.

The cable people had to come back out today. Last night we discovered a lot of pixelated programming had been recorded. There was a Les Mis special on PBS that The Yankee wanted to see and that was mangled so badly it hurt to watch. Shame, too, because what you could hear sounded great. And, then, the straw that broke the camel’s back was a ruined episode of 19 Kids and Counting. And you just don’t mess with the Duggars or they will show up and make you babysit.

So I walked out of the room for a moment to put a dish away and when I came back she was on the phone with the cable people, who helpfully booked an appointment for this afternoon, lest the Duggars hear about it and come visit the cable office.

And they mean business. Two guys came out today. Charter has been here so much, though, that they’re having to recycle techs. One of them had been here before.

He plugged up his tricorder to the cable, pronounced the numbers flatlined and then went outside to jiggle the wires, call a friend and have a sandwich. Do you really know what they’re doing out there? A second guy is inside and I am insistent that he explain everything to me — but in analogies I can understand (“So it is like water in a pipe, then?”) — and have no idea what the first guy is doing outside.

He comes back in after a few minutes with a few pieces of hardware in his hand. He has replaced some splitters. We now have the industrial strength Cabletronic 4000s, which is a step up from the 3000 series Crash-A-Lot model. It seems that we have now exhausted all of the possibilities for diagnosis, repair and replacement inside the house (they’ve been here approaching a dozen times in the last several months) and if this continues a systems tech will be airlifted in to examine things at the hub.

It sounds so ominous, but really, we’re just keen on a signal that plays audio and video, displays the channels for which we’re overpaying and keep a consistent Internet connection. (Though, to be fair, that last one hasn’t lately been a problem.)

They’re nice guys, these guys. They tell jokes. They notice the cat. We comment on the larger company and they spin tales about some of their better calls. The first guy plugged his tricorder back into the cable stream and found everything to be much better. Now we shouldn’t have a problem.

But there’s all kinds of problems you can have. Today I learned that, in addition to signal load, competing tech demands of phone/cable/Internet, rainwater and what your neighbors are watching, another thing that contributes to data transmission rates is temperature. It seems that when it is cold the insulation on the cable shrinks. That means less cable can get in your home. When the weather turns warm the insulation expands, letting cable in. When July gets here we’ll suddenly get a rush of things that couldn’t make it through in December, I suppose.

Drove to the grocery store for a few items today. We walked last night for two, drove today for two bags worth and yet we must still make the HEAP BIG trip sometime later this week. We think, though, we have this down to a science: farmers market for produce, Sam’s for poultry, Meat Lab for beef, sausage, eggs and bacon and Publix for everything else.

We planned this. We’re planners.

Saw a new item I hadn’t noticed before. I gave it a “Where have you been all my life?” moment:

There is a coco version too, apparently, which just seems evil. Don’t ask why one is OK, but another is not. I enjoyed more than my share of kid’s cereal (and still do on occasion) but the chocolate ones always seemed a bit over the top. Except for Cookie Crisp. There’s nothing wrong with that cereal except for their odd character erasures.

Speaking of cereal being erased. I read recently that Cap’n Crunch was going to walk the plank. (And now, who knows? Sad as that is, they’re just pulling on your heartstrings with the old graphic treatments:

Went to the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art tonight to see the documentary Awake, My Soul, which is about the oldest surviving form of American music: Sacred Harp.

It is an intriguing thing, mostly southern and western — which makes a great deal of sense as spelled out in the documentary — but growing across the country and, in several other countries as well. Most everyone interviewed for the documentary lives in Alabama or Georgia, however. They’re all very passionate and it makes for a nice documentary.

Raymond Hamrick, the first gentleman you see in the trailer has a great story, and is a marvelous storyteller. Doesn’t hurt, then, that he has been a prolific composer in the genre. He’s still working, in his 90s, six days a week in a jewelry shop in Georgia.

The history, reaching back to pre-Revolutionary America, was nicely explained. It moves into the work and perception of those who brought it to this generation and then those who would be the prominent contemporary leaders. In the midst of all that are the lost bridge between the 19th Century and those very aged devotees. Somewhere in all of that nostalgia and hope and loss all mingle together, powered by this incredible, powerful sound.

Much of this documentary makes sense to me, or anyone that’s ever been to a primitive style church in the South. I’ve never been to a Sacred Harp singing and I don’t know these people, but I know these people. The documentary touched on the people in this singing community that had died before or during the recording. There was a shot or two that lingered on some old lady, and then a comment by an old gentleman who’d lost his wife and those just sat on the room for a while, until the next joke came along.

Matt Hinton, one of the filmmakers, was there for a Q&A. No one asked why he didn’t put a joke immediately after the most solemn moment of the film, but they should have. Instead, he fielded very intelligent questions for about half-an-hour. One of his central points is the participatory nature of this style, as compared to the performance-based styles of modern music. That becomes quickly evident in his film.

I came home to dinner, a baseball game (Auburn beat Alabama 2-1, in Montgomery’s Capitol City Classic) and two other anecdotes that I’m keeping for tomorrow. You have to come back now.

iPhone / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
14
Mar 11

The one problem of disappearing weeds

And the next day of your life starts with breakfast. Or it does if you’re the lucky sort, a group of whom I am most definitely included. After a long, long Sunday — eight hours or so in the car, getting back home just before 11 — we figured on sleeping in and then a hasty breakfast.

So with a baseball cap on my head we headed out just in time to get near the end of the traditional breakfast hour. We visited the Barbecue House, where I ate so much as an undergrad (thanks, Chuck) that they knew me by name. Don’t care for the barbecue (it is a preference of style) but the CoAg students know they have the best breakfast in town right across the street from all of their major buildings.

We took my in-laws there when they visited last fall. They enjoyed themselves so much the New Englanders came back for a second time during that brief trip.

But they couldn’t have visited today:

It is Spring Break in Auburn. You take the off days where you can. So we went down the street — where we learned that metered parking is free downtown this week — near the corner of College and Glenn, to try the new Waffle House at the site of the former Daylight Donuts. I eat at Waffle House once a year, Christmas, but we wanted breakfast and IHOP was the next choice, so we pulled in.

I sat facing the campus and telling stories of things I’d forgotten. Just down the street lived so and so. And right over there was where my car died that one time and I became so frustrated that I forgot my mother’s phone number while trying to call and tell her I wouldn’t be visiting that weekend. (In my defense: she’d just gotten her cell phone and I’m terrible with numbers.) Here was how she and I met. This is apparently how Daylight Donuts closed down.

So we drove home. The Yankee went to her office for a little work. I mowed the lawn. Well, the front yard. But with our lawn mower you have to hit everything six times, so really it is like everyone in the neighborhood got their grass cut.

“But now I won’t know where to spray for weeds,” she said when she got back home.

That’s the thing about weeds, though. They grow back.

We walked to the grocery store this evening. It is a mile-and-a-half from the house, with a nice, new, wide sidewalk the entire way. Bradford Pears line the first half of the walk, and they are in full bloom. We go by a golf course, a subdivision, some local businesses and a few houses. We did the walk just as the sun was going down for the night. Cars were depending on their headlights as we returned, with pasta and spaghetti.

Today I’ve just been reading. Tomorrow I’ll dive into more productive things. Later this week I have grading to do and a few phone calls to make. There’s a lot of scanning to wade through this week, too. Also, the joys of class prep.

Tomorrow I’m going to do a few of those things, and we’re going to have breakfast again, because we’re lucky enough to be able to do that. I’m going to a documentary showing tomorrow night and, who knows what else will come up. Stop by, though, to check it out. Follow along on Twitter, too.

family / memories / photo — Comments Off
11
Mar 11

One more of God’s singers went home

This picture was made in August of 2001. Tonice put his arm around Ocie’s shoulder, “She’s my baby,” he said.

Ocie pointed out that the next January would be their 62nd anniversary.

Sadly, they didn’t get to celebrate together. Tonice died that fall. This was the last picture of the two of them we have. We buried him on a gray, muddy day with a copy in his breast pocket. Ocie missed him terribly ever after.

He was the most humble, honorable man I’ve known. My great-grandmother was as sweet and gentle a lady as you could meet.

I hope they’re getting to celebrate together today.