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Wile E. Coyote, the corporate jobs maker

I saw this in a parking lot this morning, read the logo and thought: This can’t be a real company.

Evapco. Surely it is a cartoon company, a recent acquisition of ACME now in cahoots with the Wile E. Coyote. You never thought of Wile E. as a venture capitalist, a jobs creator or a serial entrepreneur. But he’s a big investor, a silent partner, if you will.

Or maybe this is a corporate front for a secret government operation. The neighbors are into something, their neighbors just knew it. And neighbors like nothing more than telling on one another. And this led to a phone call, which got the feds involved with the local government. Next thing you know the area has new zoning laws, a big commercial enterprise comes in and they need some conditioned air, so there’s a shell company made that makes industrial shell hiders that cramped members of a secret agency sit in, peering out through the slats at what is going on …

Or perhaps a movie set piece, destined to be exploded in the third act. I did not see any directors about, so this one seems unlikely.

I’m sticking with Wile E. Coyote.

Turns out Evapco has an incredible history that you’d have to read to believe:

On June 14, 1976, Evapco, Inc. was founded in Baltimore, MD under the visionary leadership of William E. Kahlert, Wilson E. Bradley and financial advisor John A. Luetkemeyer. Building on Mr. Kahlert and Mr. Bradley’s combined 46 years of industrial experience, Evapco began as a manufacturer of forced draft evaporative condensers for the growing industrial refrigeration industry. Evapco’s durable, innovative designs and ability to provide special attention to the different needs of its customers ensured immediate acceptance of Evapco’s products domestically and overseas. Within three years of founding, Evapco opened a new facility in California and established a licensing agreement with CCT in Italy, later becoming a wholly owned Evapco operation.

Building on the successful formula of commitment to research and development, quality products, competitive prices and customer satisfaction, Evapco continued to grow throughout the 1980’s.

It is a model of corporate speak, really. But they’re changing air in a half dozen countries, so something is working. They have several corporate videos that explain their success.

Evapco, builders of the ATWB, an induced draft, counterflow design closed circuit cooler with a capacity range of 85 to 46,667 MBH (24 to 13,664 kW). It includes the patented, high efficiency Thermal-Pak® Coil and G-235 galvanized steel casing and basin and is independently certified to withstand seismic and wind load forces.

If we get any last minute Halloween party invites I’m breaking out that tidbit.

I can only say that it was cold out in that parking lot, and cozy and warm while we were inside.

Things to read …

Sometime, in the life of people alive today, this is going to re-emerge as a considerable concern. Putting the Age of U.S. Farmers in Perspective:

As of the 2007, or latest, U.S. Census of Agriculture; U.S. farmers averaged 57.1 years (see Figure 1). Average age was first reported for the 1945 Census of Agriculture at 48.7 years. Thus, over this 62 year span, average age of U.S. farmers has increased 8.4 years, or 17%. Of particular note, the share of farmers age 65 and older has increased from 14% in 1945 to 30% in 2007. The only notable decline in average age occurred during the mid-to-late 1970s. It is reasonable to speculate that this decline in average age occurred as a result of the farm prosperity boom of the 1970s.

Two troubling stories. Exclusive: Feds confiscate investigative reporter’s confidential files during raid:

A veteran Washington D.C. investigative journalist says the Department of Homeland Security confiscated a stack of her confidential files during a raid of her home in August — leading her to fear that a number of her sources inside the federal government have now been exposed.

And this one, Alabama blogger jailed after violating prior restraint over articles that alleged high-profile affair:

Alabama blogger Roger Shuler was arrested Wednesday after allegedly violating a judge’s order that he not publish stories about a supposed affair involving the son of a former state governor, according to a news report and his wife Carol Shuler.

Police charged the blogger with contempt of court and resisting arrest, Carol Shuler said in an interview Friday. Roger Shuler has run “Legal Schnauzer,” a blog focused on exposing political corruption, since 2007. He is being held on a $1,000 bond on the resisting arrest charge, but bond was not set for the two contempt charges, his wife said. She also alleged that he was physically roughed up by police during his arrest.

I’d excerpt more of the RCFP story, but the son of a former governor isn’t in the mood to trifle, it would seem.

A few quick links to read:

How Dallas Reporters Used Twitter to Get Un-Banned From Public Meeting

A Deeper Dive Into Yahoo and Facebook’s Transparency Reports

Mozilla’s Lightbeam tool will expose who is looking over your shoulder on the web

State panel hears Medicaid drug distribution proposals, including one from Wal-Mart

Fatally shot Mobile bicyclist was an ‘upbeat’ church volunteer ‘involved in everything,’ pastor says

I had vegetable lasagna for dinner tonight. How was the start of your weekend?

cycling / family / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off
24
Oct 13

You’re going where again? Canada?

I managed to sneak out for a late day ride today. I probably won’t get another one for a few days, so it didn’t seem important to go far or ride hard. So I stopped and took two pictures, which I should do more. It isn’t like I’m setting any great records or chasing anyone anyway.

Above is a stretch of road on the local time trial circuit. I tried the race against the clock one time. I am no good at it. So I just ride it as part of most every other route. Today I did it on the bike half of my ride, a measly little 15 mile circuit. But I got all the good curves and some of the better hills in, at least.

This one is a bit closer to home:

You ride on down the road, turn into a subdivision and then out the other side. You go over a little roller and turn again there’s a little hilltop finish that I always imagine is a big race finish. Except I never really beat my best time. Tonight I was pedaling and it was apparent there was nothing in my legs and yet there I was, straining and trying and wheezing and there was a car waiting patiently behind me.

Which is fine, because he passed me, a few more turns were taken and I managed to pass several cars. Sometimes, now, I can do that. It usually involves a downhill tailwind and a distracted driver who is out for a Sunday stroll to admire the scenery. But still. I did it on a Thursday night, and that’s something.

Called my grandmother this evening, to check in after a recent doctor’s visit. She told me all about the football she watched this past weekend.

Also, she’s now planning a trip to Canada in the spring. It seems my mom and step-dad mentioned this scenic place they’d discovered. “I figure I deserved it by now,” she said. Now both my folks’ mothers are going on this trip.

Both ladies are in their 80s.

Things to read …

This is pretty tough to hear. Many middle-class Americans plan to work until they die:

A growing percentage of middle-class Americans say they have saved so little for retirement that they expect to work into their 80s or even until they either get too sick or die, according to a recent survey.

Nearly half of middle-class workers said they are not confident that they will be able to save enough to retire comfortably, according to a Wells Fargo survey of 1,000 workers between the ages of 25 and 75, with household incomes between $25,000 and $100,000.

As a result, 34% said they plan to work until they’re at least 80 — that’s up from 25% in 2011 and 30% last year. An even larger percentage, 37%, said they’ll never retire and plan to either work until they get too sick or die, the survey found

It seems like every survey similar to this finds some slightly different numbers — perhaps someone should do a meta-analysis — but there are some common themes emerging. The role of news on Facebook:

(A)bout half of adult Facebook users, 47%, “ever” get news there. That amounts to 30% of the population.

Most U.S. adults do not go to Facebook seeking news out, the nationally representative online survey of 5,173 adults finds. Instead, the vast majority of Facebook news consumers, 78%, get news when they are on Facebook for other reasons. And just 4% say it is the most important way they get news. As one respondent summed it up, “I believe Facebook is a good way to find out news without actually looking for it.”

However, the survey provides evidence that Facebook exposes some people to news who otherwise might not get it.

Here is some navel gazing about web design. Ignore the headline. WYSIWTFFTWOMG!:

Since we’ve been using computers to make websites we’ve tried to make them like print. Of course, early on, that was fair enough. It was familiar. We knew the rules and tried to make the web like it. Even now, with the realisation that the web has changed – or rather, we’re being honest to the way the web is. It never really changed, we just tried to make it something it wasn’t – we’re still enforcing a print-like mental model on it. Not necessarily us designers and developers, though. This is coming from people who write and manage content. Just like printing out an email before they send it, they will want to preview a website to see how it looks.

The problem is this: The question content people ask when finishing adding content to a CMS is ‘how does this look?’. And this is not a question a CMS can answer any more – even with a preview. How we use the web today has meant that the answer to that questions is, ‘in what?’.

Here is the only thing in America getting smaller. The Incredible Shrinking Plane SeatPeople have an idea in their head, given the cost and security and the herding indignities and now the shrinking seats, of how far they are willing to drive before they’ll resort to flying. You have to think those numbers are going to slide a bit more when people enjoy these … intimate … tiny experiences.

Well, tomorrow is Friday, and I hope yours is as big as possible. Do stop back by when you can. And, of course, there’s always Twitter.

books / friends / history / journalism / links / photo / Samford / things to read / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Oct 13

Darth Vader is bad and his assistant is a mouse

I wrote, on Monday, about my lunch book, Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light, the last installment of his trilogy on the European Theater of World War II. I discussed Atkinson’s descriptions as “filled with detail and insight and passages from three generations ago that feel like they are fresh today.” This passage is in his prologue which, again, is 41 delicious pages long:

One concise paragraph touches on a millennia of history and technological firsts. It offers a description, a quip and a
discarded plan on how to address the English Channel problem. The guy is good.

Who else is good? The staff at the Crimson. We held our weekly critique meeting today. We’re almost a third of the way through their production run and we’re down things like punctuation in quotes and synonyms. They are working hard and showing their talent. I’m quite proud for them.

This video showed up somehow today, in that delightful way that modern life gives you things from so many directions you’re never sure from which they came. It is, as the kids say, completely insane.

Turns out this guy only finished second in this ridiculous display of gravity, speed and a complete disregard for survival instinct.

This is an entirely different kind of ride than I’d ever want to do. The first time I ever heard people talking about mountain bikes they were celebrating the ways they got hurt, like that was the competition. That’s not for me. One of our friends is a big time, travel across the country, day-long race mountain bike types. I sent him this video and he carefully noted “We can’t all do that!”

Not sure that would have been my first response.

But what a great testimonial for the GoPro camera, no? Ours will not be pressed into such a service.

We fired up the grill at home this evening. The Yankee made a London broil. We kissed it with just enough flame and it was delicious enough for seconds. Adam came over to enjoy the flank steak and catch up on a bit of Game of Thrones.

We’ve been watching them all again. They actually get better on the second viewing. There’s a lot you didn’t catch the first time.

For example:

Things to read …
You wonder how Netflix will stay on top of their entertainment niche as others build their own platforms to compete with in-house productions. They have some plans. Five things Netflix is going to disrupt next

The company has big plans for next year, and its executives previewed some of them during Netflix’s Q3 earnings call earlier this week.

This is a topic that’s been going around a few days because of an essay at The Atlantic, which for about 48 hours tried to be something of a continental divide in journalism and education. USC’s Professor Robert Hernandez chimes in. Those required courses in journalism school are there for a reason:

A modern journalist needs to know how the web works, needs to be exposed to and respect all journalistic crafts (including code), and needs to know their role in working with others. And that role is an active role, not a passive one. They need to use these digital tools to produce relevant, quality journalism.

A digital journalist (or web journalist) focuses on producing journalism of the web, not just on the web. That can manifest itself in a diverse set of roles — being the homepage editor, becoming a multimedia storyteller, or developing a news app, alone or with a team. They can use the tools, but they can also build tools when needed.

If you’re a student, I’m not going to debate which path you should take. I’m not even going to debate what level of instruction in digital journalism or code you need to take. (It’s 2013 — are you really arguing against learning technology?)

But what I will say is that, like those other required parts of your education, you are better off for being exposed to it, whether in a journalism career or in life.

How Website Statistics Changed Our Programs

Good news we can all use. Alabama’s economic development prospects improving, officials say:

Birmingham and state economic development experts said plenty of new projects and expansions are looking to invest money and add jobs, but recent history has proven there is a big difference between getting looks and breaking ground.

A panel of economic development experts spoke to members of the Society for Marketing Professional Services Alabama at a luncheon in Vestavia Hills today.

And two items from the multimedia blog:

Twitter, Vine and people the world over make a film

Google media tools

Thanks for stopping by. Much more on Twitter. Hope you have a great day tomorrow.

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22
Oct 13

There is a great rhyme below

I rotate things onto one of my office walls, just like everyone who has large, blank walls. Recently I decided to make a World War II theme. I have two V-E and V-J editions of Stars and Stripes, dusty, yellowed pieces of newsprint from France and Italy. Sometimes they allow me to talk about the appropriate time to use the 72-point font. Sometimes they allow the opportunity to demonstrate how language we use today might be frowned upon in the future. Also, they are just terrific relics.

Some time back our friend Adam gave me a lithograph of his cousin’s World War II plane. And since I decided to make a themed display, this seemed like a great place to put it. You may recall that I met Adam while asking him about his cousin, Dean Hallmark. I wrote a piece about Dean for TWER. Adam is a military man himself, a historian and we became fast friends. So I learned more about the Doolittle Raid of which Dean was a part, and then this poster tube arrived with a sharp print of The Green Hornet.

People should give each other more framable works, I say.

So I wanted to take a picture to send to Adam, since I have a series to show off. This meant moving a piece of furniture. This meant stowing that table elsewhere. This led to me destroying the wire archiving system we use for newspapers. This allowed me to recycle some old stuff I didn’t need to keep anymore. And that brought me back to rebuilding the wire crate structure which grows more precarious by the year.

That led to me cleaning a corner of the newsroom, looking under the sofa for runaway joiners for the wire-crate-frame-finger pincher device that had to have been developed in Eastern Europe.

And, finally, the picture I’d wanted to take.

That’s Dean on his way to deliver — and in this configuration on the wall, the Japanese are ready to accept — his payload. I think about Dean now and again, and what he and some of his compatriots went through:

It was a choppy day at sea and the deck was wet when Dean flew to Tokyo with the rest of the Raiders, dropped his bombs, made a second pass to drop more bombs, and finally made his way to China.

He ran out of fuel though, a by-product of being forced to launch early, and had to put his plane into the sea just off the coast. Dean was catapulted through the windshield in the crash, the pilot’s seat still strapped to his body. He was hurt, but he and his fellow officers survived. The two enlisted crewmembers on board drowned.

Once ashore the officers evaded the Japanese for eight days before being captured.

They were tortured and malnourished. Dean’s navigator, Capt. C. Jay Nielsen, grimly wrote of his time as a POW at war’s end.

“They had put straps on (Dean’s) legs and arms and pulled them until he thought his joints were coming apart.”

Nielsen would also tell of having bamboo shoved under their fingernails. Their captors would light the bamboo on fire, demanding to know how they’d gotten to occupied China. Another captive would later write of being water boarded shortly after their capture.

They were about to be executed, Nielsen said, but the Japanese soldiers’ orders suddenly changed. That meant more torture.

Dean came down with beriberi and dysentery. The Japanese military tried Dean, his surviving crew and five crewmembers from another bomber on trumped up charges. Nielsen said Dean dropped 50 pounds and was on a stretcher, because of his illness, during the farcical court martial.

We met Lt. Col. Richard Cole, who was Doolittle’s copilot on the Tokyo Raid, at Adam’s wedding a few weeks ago. We saw Dean’s marker at Arlington this summer:

He was 28 years old at the time. He would have been 100 next January.

I guess I’m thinking about that as I’ve wrapped up the big family project I’ve been working on. I found the last details I’ll likely ever be able to find on my great-grandfather’s time in the ETO. Now I just have to copyedit the text and finish assembling the presentation. I’m disproportionately excited to show this off in a few weeks. Between that and the new book I’m reading I just have the period on my mind.

Had a nice run this evening. I said on Facebook that it was a 5K that didn’t feel like a 5K and, thus, I did not know what was happening. I said that after my run, before dinner and before I had the opportunity to go down a set of stairs.

And then it felt like a run. Now I have the impression it is going to feel like one tomorrow, too.

I did this on a treadmill this evening, because it was already dark and threatening to be coolish, and I’m just not ready for that. On the treadmill there was a television. And on the television I watched a closed caption longform feature of a young baseball player doing something special, saving a life halfway around the world. You’ve got an All American kid, leading his college on the football field and on the baseball diamond. Then, with scouts watching, he gets a call that his bone marrow is a match for a girl in Ukraine. And then you met this beautiful little girl and you spend the next few seconds trying to keep it together on a treadmill in public.

What a good story.

Things to read, which I found interesting today … First a chunk of stories, if any of these headlines intrigue you:

Mobile is the ‘first screen’ for half of 18-34s

Twitter Overtakes Facebook as Teens’ Most Important Social Network

Louisiana police department will post photos of people who exploited food stamp glitch

Down and out: the French flee a nation in despair

From the multimedia blog: What is important is the money

Perhaps you heard about the student in north Alabama that recently killed himself. It has been in the news a bit because of some indirectly related things. Now his father has come forward, telling an incredibly moving tale:

Adamek said blaming Christian’s suicide on one event is “terribly over-simplistic” and called the national publicity over Christian’s streaking and subsequent death a distraction from the more important story. He explained that his family had been struggling in vain for months to find Christian the help he needed for depression.

“Nobody should have to make more than one phone call to get that kind of help, because there’s just not that much time,” Adamek said.

Adamek declined to go into specifics about Christian’s problems, saying “it doesn’t matter anymore,” but said that the family had tried for months to find the right mental health professionals for his son. They were met with obstacles like insurance issues and a lack of the right doctors.

“We followed every avenue apparently available to us, through the medical community, through the hospital system, but still couldn’t get the necessary diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring that he so desperately needed,” Adamek said.

“We needed to know what he needed. That’s the help we were looking for.”

How heartbreaking that must be. And if the text didn’t get you, the video at the link, will.

And now for something funnier, healthcare and the highly efficient rollout! Jon Stewart:

Surprised he didn’t make a “Glitches don’t get you stitches” joke.

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20
Oct 13

Catching up

For whatever it means, and whatever it is worth, everything about today has been like this picture:

I woke up eight minutes before the alarm. The donut shop had all of the donuts I wanted. And when I ate them I wished I had one less. We had an Internet connection problem but that was going to require a tech. And the tech couldn’t come for several days. So what are you gonna do? And then they called back and said, yes, they could come out today. I had this nice ride, getting home just as it got dark. We had a delicious dinner and I’ve enjoyed terrific snacks today. I had to make a trip to Walmart, but they had everything I needed. The only problem was in waiting in line to check out. And when that’s the worst part of your day, well, everything has been like that photo.

Anyway, this is the weekly post of extra photos and videos from the week that was. They didn’t find a home, I need content for the day, it all works out well.

More of the art I discovered last week. This is called The Mediator, by Bill Brown, who was working in steel. There is a QR code on the nearby sign, it will take you to this page which discusses more about the artist than the work. So we’ll never know what this is mediating. There is an audio recording, too. Brown says the arch, as a strong architectural piece, is symbolic of addressing a modern lack of communication. So there you go. It earned second place in this juried show.

In the background there’s a solar panel and one of the campus emergency call posts. Those aren’t art. In the foreground there’s a phone booth. Only it isn’t a phone booth. If you saw just the side panel, as I did at first glance, you might think it was a hand washing station, which would be both odd and random on a sidewalk. Then you read that sign.

And then you read this sign. The fine print of which discusses facilitating and controlling prayer, which is an odd formulation. Anyway, you flip down the bench and pray fast. Because the bench isn’t that comfortable on the knees:

Ahh. “There is no literal affiliation with any particular faith per se, rather the piece aims to question the idea of prayer in the public domain. The piece fuses humor, sarcasm and sincerity, and aims to highlight and spark further discussion about the contemporary expression of religion within the public community.”

Seems the artist has been trying to sell this for a few years. Maybe if the bench was more comfortable.

It is a house. A framework of a house. A set piece from the Beetlejuice movie. Who knows.

It was inspired, I’m guessing, by episodes of Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner. Walk inside and you can feel the world closing in on you. And good luck getting out the other side.

Says the artist: “With my Bridge sculpture I created a tunnel where viewers experience the shotgun house at a human scale that then expands to the outer limits of the building, activating space outside the structure. I want the viewer to be part of an intimate space defined by walls and of another type of space defined by implied limits and exterior devices.”

Looking at this photo of a previous installation, I’m sticking with the Roadrunner explanation.

One of the bluegrass bands that played at Syrup Sopping yesterday: