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There are no free potatoes, either

Another free commercial on the basis of a photo, a story and nostalgia. I should get a free meal for this, I think.

The sign, it seems, is getting a makeover. The old neon has been stripped out. And pulling the gas-holding-gas has just shown the smear of age and wear and rain and paint. I love that sign. There’s just something about that pig face, blissfully unaware what is happening to his real life counterparts inside, grinning stupidly despite the messages often on display on the marquee just below. Hopefully they aren’t replacing the whole thing.

The Yankee and I had our first meal there — Friday was Pie Day, I said, and she said yes. I used to eat there frequently when I was still broadcasting. It wasn’t far from the station. I’ve dined there with a lot of friends. I ate there with my book tonight. I’d swam a mile and a big baked potato sounded right.

It was just the thing after only a brunch. The editorial staff at the Crimson dined with the media relations folks late this morning. I took some leftovers to have fruit for lunch, but I’d swam a mile, you see, and I can look at a body of water and get hungry. Real and hearty food was what was required tonight, and there was no Italian to be had with friends. So I had a baked potato with a book.

Things to read … becausing reading always brings around friends. Just get comfy with something great, and someone will come along to interrupt.

Learning How to Score a Job Using Social Media, for Beginners is a free email-based class, if you’re interested.

A friend sent this. I hated telling him he’s going to have to find someone else to see it with. A 15,000ft descent, sheer drops and 300 deaths a year: Welcome to Bolivia’s Death Road, the terrifying route tourists love to cycle

Ukraine: Russian forces in major rebel cities:

A Ukrainian official said Tuesday that Russian forces have been spotted in both of the major rebel-held cities in eastern Ukraine.

The claim by Col. Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s national security council, came as the country’s defense minister said Ukraine’s armed forces are expanding their strategy from just fighting separatist rebels to facing the Russian army in a war that could cost “tens of thousands” of lives.

Lost in America: Visa Program Struggles to Track Missing Foreign Students:

The Department of Homeland Security has lost track of more than 6,000 foreign nationals who entered the United States on student visas, overstayed their welcome, and essentially vanished — exploiting a security gap that was supposed to be fixed after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

“My greatest concern is that they could be doing anything,” said Peter Edge, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who oversees investigations into visa violators. “Some of them could be here to do us harm.”

Yet another of the core competencies that DHS was created for … and it is less than a sterling success.

3 free iOS apps for visual storytelling:

(J)ournalists do not necessarily need a big budget, banks of editing software or even a desktop computer to create appealing visual stories.

These three apps for iPhone and iPad all allow you to create beautiful visual stories on the move without any special gear.

Even better, each are easy to use – and free.

When you said free, you had my attention. Shame that meal wasn’t also free.

Auburn / football / memories / photo / video / weekend — Comments Off
31
Aug 14

Catching up

Did I mention the rain? It rained at the tailgate. The hot summer day turned into an impressively humid one. And then the sun came back out and we baked ourselves in the shade.

We loaded up on sunblock, went into the stadium and watched most of the game before the lightning came. Lightning means delays. And so they took everyone off the field. They asked the fans to go hide. Most of them did. The storm cells with the lightning passed.

And just before the teams came back on the field to resume play, the rain finally came. The stadium speakers blared rain-themed music, the hearty students that stuck around sang along:

That raindrop at the end of the video is pure art, no? Purely accidental art.

We’d talked to a guy earlier who recalled when he was in the student body during the great monsoon of 2009. He said that game, the West Virginia game, was the best day of his life.

I recall getting rained on once or twice when I sat in the student body. I did not have the same recollection of good cheer. But the football wasn’t quite as good at that moment, either.

Anyway, this was before the storm, the cheerleaders wave those giant flags after scores. They are quite cumbersome, even on a still day:

And this is the storm as it wrapped around the northern end of the stadium. It was an impressive site:

Auburn / football / photo / weekend — Comments Off
30
Aug 14

Arkansas at Auburn

Football is here. Friends are here. Triple-digit temperatures are … close. Triple-digit heat indexes … are close. We sat outside and in the sun and shade and it was 94 degrees. The company was good:

As we were walking up the ramps to the upper deck, we had a great view of fans coming in to the stadium:

We could also see the storm that delayed the game coming in:

Twitter’s new analytics tell me that almost 20,000 people saw that picture tonight. At least four different meteorologists retweeted it. But I didn’t get any lightning shots.

I did get a clear view of the rain shafts, though:

Auburn won 45-21. It was hot. The friends were lovely.

cycling / Friday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
29
Aug 14

And, now, a pet peeve

This, surely, happens to everyone. It can’t be that the only people in the western world that do this are wherever I happen to be. It must happen to you, too.

When one approaches the common dual door, one should always steer toward the one on the right. Not to the one that is open. That just impedes traffic, and is kind of lazy.

Also, it makes me wonder why I’m holding the door for you. I’m trying to get through it, after all, and this is my side.

Class today, where we discussed story types. We discussed this amazing story. More meetings, too, just wrapping up the first week. One or two more weeks of administrative and meeting minutiae and things can get down to normal.

And then phone calls, and then the drive home and the traffic therein.

I made it in just in time to push my bicycle around part of the town. I got in 15 fast miles before daytime turned to the latter part of twilight. My cycling app says I set three personal records on various segments. I also took the first place spot on an uphill course. (This defies all logic and previous performance. The reality is that not many people ride on that road.) Despite all of that, I need to be stronger and faster. I need to ride more.

I blame all of my door-holding.

links / photo / Samford / things to read / Thursday / video — Comments Off
28
Aug 14

It isn’t even mean tea

The beginning of every new school year brings about changes and good news. There have been a lot of positive ones at Samford. For instance, we saw this news just today: Samford creates $335M annual economic impact.

President Westmoreland got a little face time with the media, too:

There’s a new business building going up. There have been renovations in my building. And, of course, there are all those new faces buzzing about, too. The food service in the cafeteria is provided by a new company this year, as well. Food is important. I eat it every day. But feeding hundreds and hundreds of people each day can’t be easy, so I won’t say anything so far. Everyone is figuring out all of the new things, which might explain the weird, chaotic energy during lunch. And they might still be working through their menu as well.

But this … this …

There’s a cultural standard to be met here and it isn’t met with “plain tea.”

Who says “plain tea” anyway?

There’s a little sign that says Red Diamond is coming soon. Not soon enough.

Things to read … because this section always comes up soon enough.

Did you see the Star Trek selfie? Who is the guy in the background? There’s a story in that photobombing.

Here’s a great interactive infographic, Losing Ground:

In 50 years, most of southeastern Louisiana not protected by levees will be part of the Gulf of Mexico. The state is losing a football field of land every 48 minutes — 16 square miles a year …

What a great story, and adventures, brave young reporters. High school journalists cover Michael Brown’s funeral after addressing legal, safety concerns

“We did not, and do not, advocate our students attending the heavily protested areas,” Goble said. “However, we felt there was an immense journalistic opportunity for them, and they could capture these stories without being in the midst of a protest.”

[…]

But even with the concern for the students’ safety, Goble and his students still felt that this was an important story for them to cover given the proximity and importance of the events.

Student-Built Apps Teach Colleges a Thing or Two:

(S)tudents are showing up the universities that trained them by producing faster, easier-to-navigate, more informative and generally just better versions of the information systems at the heart of undergraduate life.

Students now arriving for fall semester may find course catalogs that they can instantly sort and re-sort according to every imaginable search criteria. Scheduling programs that allow someone to find the 47 different classes that meet Thursdays at 8:30 p.m., then narrow them down to those that have no prerequisites, then narrow again to those that count toward requirements in two majors. Or apps that allow you to see what courses your friends are considering, or figure out who has the same free periods that you do, or plot the quickest route between two far-flung classrooms.

But this culture of innovation has accelerated debates about the flow of information on campus, and forced colleges to reckon with some unexpected results of the programming skills they are imparting.

Seeing the initiative is great, terrific and wonderful. Watching them struggle with information access is rather understandable. The really sharp ones will work around it all. And some of them will probably get very, very rich.

Here’s a little PR piece that points out that paying attention to social media pays off. Just ask the airlines! Southwest Airlines’ new listening center making an immediate mark makes perfect sense. You’ll wonder why more shops aren’t doing the same thing.