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17
May 10

Of Kens and trees

Had lunch with Ken, my former boss. I met him more than six years ago — where did all of that time go? — in an almost two-hour interview. That was the day when I began stepping away from radio and into a future that focused more online.

Ken had been the online editor of a major newspaper and was the editor-in-chief of the state’s most trafficked newsite, al.com. He’d hold that job for more than a decade. I remember we talked about the job, of course, how the site worked, what sort of web work I’d done and so on.

I remember asking about the possibilities of doing new things. And in my four-and-a-half years working for Ken the site went from merely hosting the daily news for The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times and the Press-Register to becoming a full-fledged modern site. We ran blogs. I developed a regular podcast program. I added the first news videos to the site. We covered hurricanes, lots of them, developed political ad strategies and had big plans for the future.

My time there let me read some great thinkers about the evolving possibilities for news online. Many of them help influence my thought, teaching and research today.

So it was great to have a nice long lunch with Ken to talk about his latest projects. He’s a sharp, thoughtful man who puts ideas into practice, and you learn a lot by brainstorming and daydreaming with him.

Stopped by the bank, the friendly people. Now we’re up to introducing ourselves and shaking hands when customers walk in and when they leave. The security officer is holding the door with a smile. Ultimately what I needed can be taken care of over the phone. It will most likely be an automated process. I expect the recording to be painstakingly polite.

Made a few shopping errands in the late afternoon, most notably to the local bookstore. Books-A-Million is based here in Birmingham. It is the third largest bookstore in the country. Not bad for a company that started as a corner newsstand in sleepy little Florence in 1917. I wrote a few days ago about Trowbridge’s, which started in that same city just a year later.

Where that first corner newsstand — built from discarded piano crates and catering to out-of-towners constructing Wilson Dam (which, I’ve just learned, has the highest single lift lock east of the Rocky Mountains) — resided I don’t know. The store that came from it closed a few years ago. It is now Billy Reid, an overpriced clothing store. You can buy a t-shirt that you can order for $51 dollars. That’s on sale.

The sales in the bookstore weren’t much more impressive. And, Books-A-Million, the third largest book retailer in the country, seems a bit dead on a random Monday afternoon. I found a bird watching book I want. I copied the ISBN number and found it later online for half the price.

I’m not a bird watcher, but I know people who are. They take great joy in sharing their latest finds with others. I’m also reading about Theodore Roosevelt’s birding passions and I have this notion that dedicating a little time to bird watching could be restive and relaxing.

The problem is that I know only the most basic birds. Trees, fish, most livestock, dogs, sure I can break all of those down into different species and breeds. Birds? I’m pretty clueless. This book details the ones we see in this state. It has a map for winter and summer months. It organizes the birds by their physical characteristics in a simple and clever way. It has a CD which, I assume, is a study on the bird calls.

So it looks like I could be planting bird feeders in the fall.

Grilling

We grilled steak tonight. It was a big meal for a big night. This is the next-t0-last episode, ever, of 24. It starts with the entrails of the guy Jack killed last hour. It ends with a preview of the finale where Jack promises to finish what he started. And then he smiles.

In between he kidnapped the former president. Again. He squealed quicker than a former president who’s just been trapped, shot at, gassed and choked should. From there we learned that Russian diplomats and fireplace pokers don’t mix.

I’m really wondering about that smile. I’ve been offering predictions about the outcome of the show for the last several weeks, revising the plot as the show dictates. I think he’s smiling while taking aim at the guy at Fox that canceled the show.

Did you see the new picture across the top of the blog? That’s the field behind my great-grandparents place. It sits fallow after his passing, but that’s the place where my great-grandfather tilled the land and let me “play in the dirt.”

The last photograph of my great-grandfather.

I was in college and he’d still ask me when I was going to come play in the dirt. I told stories about that field in most every speech I ever gave in high school. The picture on the front page is the oak tree in their front yard. If there are no cars rounding the curve, or coming down the hill from the opposite way, you can hear every thought you’ve ever uttered all at once.

That’s the peace of the place. No matter where you are in your day — or your year or what have you — you can always use a reminder of what soothes you. Today you can share one of mine.

If you keep reading this site this place might snooze you, too!

Have a great Tuesday!

Samford / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
11
May 10

One final down …

One day to go.

Students gave their website presentations in one class at Samford this evening. We made them dress up and talk us through their site, describing their layout, thought process and explanation of why they added some features and omitted others.

The sites look good.

Dr. C., who’s been teaching for my entire lifetime, was impressed by their efforts. The students have only been working in Dreamweaver for three weeks, but many of them have created nice portfolio sites.

Now we just have to upload them.

At the end of the class I thanked them for the patience, bragged on them for struggling through the new software and encouraged them to keep at it.

They didn’t want to see mine. Something about getting home to see Lost.

Full day otherwise. Grading here, printing there, Emailing everyone. It was the this and that of putting the semester to bed. Somehow it ate up the day.

I did manage to scan a handful of things for Tumblr and the blog. These are all just ads from ancient editions of the campus newspaper. There are folders in a file cabinet by my desk and I’m leafing through them all. A lot of interesting things happened in the 1970s.

The Yankee and I spent the late night sitting on the sofa. No studying, no deadlines. It was a nice change of pace.

Tomorrow is the last final. The summer starts around 4 p.m.

Monday / photo / site — Comments Off
10
May 10

My grandmother could beat up Jack Bauer

I spent lunch with my mother and grandparents. Visited my great-grandmother before church and spent last night with my other grandmother.

Not too long after I arrived, though, my cousin brought her three boys over for a visit. They have three children, four and under. The youngest is only eight-months old, content to take it all in. The oldest are big fans of drag racing and toy cars were required to move at high speeds, and volume, across my grandmother’s coffee table.

She didn’t mind. She was holding the baby, and was content to ignore the chaos.

The deeper into the drag racing we went the louder the cars became. You’d think they’d get hoarse, but no.

Old cars I played with as a child are seeing use again.

I remembered details about a lot of the cars — there is a full case of them. The one on the left was the General Lee before I scrapped all the paint off of it. (The guy in Hazzard didn’t do a decent paint job, apparently. In one of my demolition derbies it began to flake away.) The jeep didn’t roll well. I liked that plastic Thunderbird because it always soared off ramps well. Also my grandfather had two sitting outside. The Mercedes was always handled with care for some reason. Even then the value of a brand was apparent, I suppose. The truck, there are two or three just like it, doesn’t haul very well. They were, however, quite successful in the demolition derby.

So that was last afternoon and into the evening. My grandmother and I visited for a while and then I found my way into one of her extra bedrooms. It has been one of those days where I could never get ahead of being tired, so it was an early night.

She made pancakes this morning. And then her sister-in-law came over to go to town with her. That woman is a whirlwind of chaos and compliments and walked in the door ready to fuss over this and that and do this and that. It is nice to see, and I understand the sentiment, but I also agree with my grandmother.

“It’s a wonder I ever got along before these people came to take care of me.”

My grandmother is one of the most completely giving, unassuming people I know. She’s fiercely independent and more than capable of doing her own dishes or getting her own umbrella or any of the other things we all try to do. We know it, too. We’re just trying to be helpful, of course. She just laughs at us.

So I drove back across the county for lunch with my mother and other grandparents. We went to Trowbridge’s.

Trowbridge's in downtown Florence, Ala., since 1918.

It seems that in 1917 Paul Trowbridge of Texas passed through on his way to a dairy farmer’s convention in North Carolina. The next year, after purchasing property, he started a creamery and ice cream shop. Somewhere along the way they started selling food. During World War II they added their famous chili. Breakfast was added to the menu some time later. There’s a painting on the back wall of Trowbridge’s a generation ago. It looks almost identical to what you see today.

The chilidog isn’t what it used to be, but the straws still float in the Coke bottles and the ice cream is still delicious. I haven’t been in years, but I snapped a few pictures. You can see them, along with a few shots from Mother’s Day, in the May photo gallery.

After lunch I pointed the car back toward home. There was some library time to be had, then a delicious spaghetti dinner with The Yankee. We watched 24, which might have given us the most crazy hour of television in that show’s history. We knew enough to eat early. Something about that upcoming interrogation just made us think torches applied to skin wouldn’t go over well alongside a nice meat sauce.

That was a good choice.

And that was a guy Jack Bauer didn’t even care about. This show may go and redeem itself altogether in the final few hours. I expect the write in revival campaign will begin accordingly.

Anyway. Check out the photo gallery. Speaking of pictures you might have noticed the new banner across the top of this page, neatly wrapping up the neon from Las Vegas. There’s a new picture on the main page, showing off a handsome view from my grandmother’s home. Tomorrow the Tumblr will return, alongside various random things on Twitter. One of my classes has their final tomorrow. I’ll wind down this and that as the semester comes to a close. We’re really in the home stretch now.

Oh. That headline? Entirely true.

Samford / site / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
5
May 10

Cinco de “Eh man!”

On campus today students were trying to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. A guy worked his way up a tree, wrapped a rope around a big limb and then lowered it down to his friends. They tied the rope to a pinata. There was difficulty getting it attached.

Finally, they were ready to hoist. The guy up in the tree pulled the rope, hoping to elevate the pinata to a good swinging height. Two tugs later the pinata came loose, crashing to the ground. One of the girls in the crowd rushed it and kicked the pinata down the hill. The candy was delivered unto the masses. No one had to take a swipe at any paper mache.

The rest of my day, a beautiful, warm, sunny day, was spent inside. I tinkered with this or that. Straightened up the office, prepared for class. I read the paper.

Ended up reading it twice.

I tinkered with websites. I added a few things to Tumblr and then spend 10 minutes trying to make that site and this one work together. There must be a way. I have a very clear idea of what it should do, but haven’t yet figured out how to do it. It should be easy, a strip of code, automatic.

Instead I’m loading things in here manually. For now.

Taught my first last class of the semester today. The students have been working, as I’ve mentioned here, for several weeks on building their first websites, using Dreamweaver. It is a good program; it is a frustrating program. The pages, the students are making, though, look very nice. They’ll present them as part of their final grade next week.

Some of the students, working hard, stayed 30 minutes after class wrapping up their projects. They’re quite ambitious.

And then I recycled newspapers. It is a thankless job, but I saved a tree this afternoon. Possibly two.

It is odd. I studied forestry in high school, considered it for about two weeks in college and know a fair amount about what we get from each tree, and the parts that aren’t of much use. I know how the newspaper process works. I’ve no idea how many trees this is. So it could be that I saved a quarter of a tree today, or 40.

Straightened up at home and then The Yankee and I ordered out for Chinese. I have leftovers. My fortune cookie promised me an opportunity tomorrow. There was a statement of opportunity making a fist and knocking on my door. The fortune cookie then suggested I open the door.

It was unclear what I should do next. Should I be accepting? Frightened? Relieved? Time will tell, one supposes.

Oh. The title? This was on when I started writing:

(Sponji Reggae, by Black Uhuru.) Love that living room scene.

Extra. This is freaky:

Yeah, sweet dreams.

And have a great Thursday. Follow along on Twitter and Tumblr and here.

Samford / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
4
May 10

Last paper of the spring

Learned a few things this morning. It is terribly difficult to get out of the house when there’s a Star Trek Next Generation marathon running on SciFi. I have forgotten a great many episodes from this show, it seems. I’m OK with that.

There’s a certain moral philosophy going on in the dialog. I suppose it has always been that way. Perhaps at 13 I was took young to appreciate some of it. Perhaps that means it did not rub off. You’d hate to think the great philosophies of as yet unborn fictional characters did not take hold because you were so easily distracted. On the other hand it is something of a relief to think that I don’t recall episodes and scenes and scripts from 20 years ago.

I remember, about that same time, watching an episode of the original series with people who grew up with it. The syndicated episode ended abruptly — we needed more commercials, I guess — and the last scenes were left unfinished:

Not to worry, someone in the room remembered and recounted it from their childhood. That’s just the tiniest bit depressing. What an odd thing to remember with clarity. But, then, I remember that he’d remembered it. That’s little better.

Anyway. Another day, another class. I have two sections doing lab work on Dreamweaver and learning a bit of HTML and design. They are down to their final hours of classwork now. Next week they present the finished product. For the rest of this week they have to concentrate on making sure their product is finished. Some of the sites are incredibly thoughtful, I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s reaction when they share them with the class.

Meanwhile watching them design makes me think of my own site.

In this new version of the blog there are all of four or five design elements. Those have been with us for some time now — longtime friends might recall when things changed here constantly — I suppose this means I’ve settled into my style. The picture at the top changed again this week. We’ve been on a recent trend of things I photographed in Las Vegas last month. First there was the Flamingo, then the top of a slot machine. This one is fairly straightforward, and also from Vegas. There’s one more from Vegas for next week.

This page, altogether, is as aesthetically as basic as I care to make it. The bulk of the pages throughout my site are pretty basic with respect to their coding. I went through a phase of trying to strip everything down to as little as possible. After that life got busy with work and still more school. This prompted the still current phase of less change, using the old as templates and copying and pasting in new material. It works. What’s important, as I tell the students, is the content. Is it clear? Organized? Readily obvious what is going on?

I’d give myself a B if I were grading my site.

Please don’t grade my site. Oh why not, it is a Tuesday. Alexa and Grader say this site is in the top 6.296 percent of all websites. This makes me think Alexa is broken.

Picked up dinner for the student-journalists tonight. This is their last paper of the term and they deserve a little Roly Poly reward. One platter gave us leftovers. They wrote and edited and designed. I cleaned up my office. I started recycling leftover papers.

And then I created a Tumblr because, it was a Tuesday, why not?

So now I have the blog here for the long form material, Twitter for the stuff you must know right now and Tumblr for, I guess, things that don’t go anywhere else. We’ll see what becomes of it. I have the feeling that I’ll be doing a lot of scanning this summer, so much of that may get filtered through Tumblr.

At some point all of these things just become competition for one another. I realize that. I’m a big holdout against it — which is why I’m three years behind on the Tumblr party line. I don’t feel one has to be everywhere. The online brand should be a.) findable (and thanks to search engines and the tiniest bit of SEO, that’s no problem) and b.) where the masses are (achieved via social media). After that, we’re all just competing to see who will be the next post-2008 version of MySpace.

The question is, to import or not import the Tumblr here?

Oh, and yes, what to put on the thing.

And what to put here. Long abandoned projects will soon return to see the light of day. I’ve probably said that 45 times since last fall or so, but next week they’ll become reality. The Glomeratas will return, hopefully with a rapid end to that project. The black and whites will soon make their triumphant comeback. There are a few other things on the drawing board.

All of this really is a fine hobby, and I’m proud you’re willing to take part in a bit of it with me. We’ll get to all of that soon.

In the meantime, tomorrow, there’s the final paper of the school year, a class, cleaning and Twitter and Tumblr and who knows what else.

Have a great Wednesday!