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cycling / photo / site / Thursday — Comments Off on There’s math below; assume I got the (n) and (r) correct
1
Aug 19

There’s math below; assume I got the (n) and (r) correct

Another evening ride with my bride was the highlight of my day. We were out just long enough to get the heart rate up and the perspiration perspiring. No motorists were foolish, the sun was out, my legs were sluggish, some of the other cyclists actually waved back for a change. It was easily the highlight of the day.

On the way back to the house, two neighborhoods before ours, I tried an attack off the left side of the road. You can see just before it started here:

Farther away, maybe she won’t hear me or see me until it is too late. I think she heard my derailleur click, took two hard downstrokes on her right pedal and that was the end of my attack.

The other highlight of my day was giving a tour for someone. So, yes, let us talk more about the bike ride, shall we!?

Living near a creek bed, as we do, you’re always starting your ride going uphill. You must pedal up and out of the intersection. And then, depending where you are going, some actual hills may come into play. These aren’t mountains, by any means, but they may as well be to me. The one “big” hill we climbed today I had to spin up through my small crank today. Some days I go up that same hill in my smallest gear and continue accelerating over the top. Not today. But still, an average ride is better than no ride at all. And a poor ride, well, that might be the best of all, because maybe you stunk it up and really suffered out there, but you still got it in.

Do you know how many times I’ve told myself that, huffing and puffing over the headset of my bicycle. I’ve gotten that whole speech down to one sentence this year.

But, still, a nice ride.

Elsewhere, today, let’s see. I did some behind-the-scenes organizing of things on the website. You won’t care about any of those, but there were some pages section needed cleaning up. It was a today and tomorrow project.

Also today, I added seven new banners to the top and bottom of the blog. You see different ones each time you visit, or every time you refresh, of course. But I keep adding to them. Today there are 100 banners for the top of the page and 101 for the bottom. So with two randomized images per page and 201 possible choices, you have something like 20,301 different combinations of the different photographs you can see surrounding all of this brilliant text. I probably did that wrong. Later tonight someone will come along and point out the error which left an order of magnitude off base.

Anyway, to keep it neat, while adding seven new ones today I also removed seven other banners which were less relevant or otherwise irksome. That simple right-click-delete-I’m-sure-yes-I’m-sure-no-really-quite-postive-indeed-I-promise-is-me-not-you-just-delete-them-already action reduced the combinations by about 1,400 choices or so. You’re welcome, Citizen of the ‘Net.

There are a lot of things to clean up on the site, but they won’t all be done today. There are at least always about a half dozen things to do around here. And they’ll all keep so long as the weather does. I wouldn’t ordinarily bore you with the details – most of them for archival purposes anyway – but it just didn’t feel right having a stat like 20,301 and not sharing it.

Anyway, here’s one of the new header banners you will occasionally run across:

Even upon reflection that remains one of my favorite photos of our summer vacation.

Tomorrow, another bike ride! And the Adventure of the Five Shirts! (If, in fact, that is an adventure. It is tomorrow and hasn’t happened yet, so it is difficult to say.)

adventures / Roatan / SCUBA / site / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on More underwater stuff on the site
23
Jul 19

More underwater stuff on the site

Have you seen the home page of my site today? I updated it. Just go to W-W-W dot KennySmith dot Org to see some pretty new imagery on the front page. And then come back here, of course. We’ll wait.

(This’ll take about 30 seconds, but go at your own pace. I’m good.)

(Ready?)

Welcome back, then. And since you’re already here, you’ve likely already seen the good stuff from our dive trip, and if not, kindly click on that “Roatan” link above the post’s title. In addition to all of that wonderment, I had a lot of fun making these little social media promotional bits from the extra dive footage we shot.

This little number comes from an ill-timed photo burst. Sometimes it is challenging to figure out what the GoPro is doing underwater. We plugged the card into a computer later and saw a huge sequence of photographs of nothing in particular and this little thing was born:

When I say footage we shot it, I mean what my lovely wife shot. She was happy snapping away with the camera, and I was happy inhaling a tank of air much too quickly while watching the world go by. Probably 97 percent of the photos and videos we brought back are things she shot. Oh, I’d point out things not in her line of sight from time to time, and I edited all the things you’ve seen go on my site the last few weeks, but she captured almost all of it. She’s excellent at being talented.

Of course I had to get a few of her here and there. And I can’t take just one photograph. While she’s mugging for the camera, I’m firing off multiples, and that led to this fun little gif:

At least 20 people clicked through from those tweets, so it was worth it.

Also, my Photoshop and video editing software are presently loaded up with other spare and recycled clips that I’ll use for … something or another.

Friday / memories / site / Twitter — Comments Off on There’s a new mobile version of the site
22
Feb 19

There’s a new mobile version of the site

Everything worked out pretty well with the mobile site. Click this image and you can go see it for yourself.

So that’s now live. For some time I’ve been tinkering with a mobile version as a Monday project. But then I hit some snags with my ideas and life gets busy and you start making concessions to that or just going to sleep on time and you place on the back burner the mobile version of your website that everyone is just dying to see on their phones and tablets and what not.

You know how it goes.

But I started tinkering with it again yesterday, because in doing a few quick things elsewhere on the site I remembered ‘This was a project you’ve forgotten about.‘ Much to my chagrin.

This is all just a coding exercise, of course. An in-expensive hobby. And if there’s some utility to it for you or me, then even better.

It started in college. The summer between my freshman and sophomore year I was hanging out with a friend who had graduated, gone into the world and come back for grad school. He told me that if I learned to code I’d add $10,000 a year to my paycheck. So I had another friend, who was legitimately one of the smartest people any of us knew, help get me started while he was working as a student staffer in a computer lab. And, because I was cool I spent that summer learning things by trial and error.

This was, of course, back in the days when we used to code by hand, in Notepad. And I found a rhythm for making a few changes, saving the file, uploading it and refreshing pages that I liked. The trial-and-error of it was usually relaxing. The first guy in that anecdote is now a big shot economist and university lecturer. The second one, last I checked, was a successful salesman. And here I am. Coding was a part of my internship during college and an important part of my professional career for more than a dozen years. I am still waiting on those coding bonuses to show up in my checks.

Indeed, for more than four years it was a primary function of my work, back when al.com was a growing-out-of-being-a-secondary consideration. I was coding something everyday. And I was a journalist, what’s more. Probably there were a dozen or so people in the state who could do both back then. In my first interview there I made this tortured analogy about how I was a driver, more than a mechanic. I can take care of your car while you are abroad for a year or two, but you wouldn’t ask me to build you a race car from the ground up.

They hired me anyway.

Anyway, there’s a new mobile version. It’s responsive to size and which angle you are holding your phone in. And the secondary picture accidentally matches the primary photo, so now there’s a color scheme. Wish me luck keeping that consistent.

Elsewhere …


And your weekend plans? I’ll probably running. But what about you?

books / family / site — Comments Off on It’s a site day
21
Feb 19

It’s a site day

We’re once more spending today with my grandfather’s books. Specifically his old magazines. We Reader’s Digest, and today we’re continuing our gander at a few of the ads from this third issue of Reader’s Digest, the October 1966 issue. There are five images to check out today. And if you click on this one we’ve already seen, you’ll get the updated joke, and can skip forward from there to today’s additions.

If you’d like to check out all of the stuff I’ve posted from my grandfather’s books so far, start here.

And that link makes me realize I need to update the page so if you’ll pardon me for one second … (which turned into six minutes of fun with CSS) … there!

Well … you know how it goes. You start playing with one bit of code then you realize how fun that can be, so you roll up your sleeves and start back working on some other page you’ve put on the back burner.

And so, tomorrow, if everything works out, I’m going to roll out the new mobile version of the website. So it’s a site day. What’s in your sites?

IU / photo / site / television / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on You, too, can be a dance hall DJ
19
Feb 19

You, too, can be a dance hall DJ

I promised you Presidents Hall yesterday. Here is Presidents Hall:

And the view from the front of the room:

Eighteen presidential portraits are on the walls. There’s enough room for a few more presidents. I wonder what they’ll do in 20 or 40 years when they run out of wall space. Anyway, all manner of events — learned expert presentations, luncheons, weddings and, this spring, the nursing school will have graduation ceremonies in there.

Some videos our students are making. This is a late night show. Dry, college humor, unaware central player. It’s a classic formula:

And when you are finished with the season premiere of Not Too Late, there’s also the most recent episode of the Bloomington Breakfast Club. You, too, can learn how to be a DJ:

The setup seemed the hardest part. It was a substantial load-in. And, she said, she spends almost all of her time and money in record stores. Right after tearing her gear down after this interview the DJ, who is a local, was leaving town for a cruise with Kesha. No big deal.

I wish I was going on a cruise. Tampa to the Bahamas in February? That’s not the worst choice one could make.

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