Did your fridge break? No problem if you have a Kelly … and if she is awesome, like ours.
She sent a box o’ noodles, so that’s lunch for the next week and a half. My Kelly is wonderful.
Took a test today.
This evening I cleaned the car. Not a blade of grass or speck of dirt can be found inside. And then I did laundry. Even blowing off a steam after an exam has changed; I must be getting older.
Received a landscaping flier in the mail today, suggesting that someone drove by, made a judgment and found me lacking. I could expound on that, but the lawn is mowed and the hedges aren’t yet out of control.
That test? Three questions. The answers turned into 10 pages and 3,300 words. That’s plenty for one day.
We have new test labs at Alabama. Today we were demonstrating how to use the equipment. Somehow, by virtue of sitting in the wrong chair I think, I became the guinea pig. One of my classmates snapped the picture as they attached my fingers and arms to sensor pads.
We have instrumentation to measure heart rate, skin conductance and other fancy things. There’s a big screen television where participants can see images and movies and commercials or whatever and the researcher can gather data on how they impact you. It is pretty cool stuff. When the labs are completed, the associate dean (seen vaguely in the background here) believes this will be a top-of-the-line research center.
And I will have graduated.
She’s wearing gloves because it “makes you look more official.”
And I used to think a clipboard and a confident wave were all you needed for credibility. Turns out it is just non-latex gloves.
Anyway, lots of studying and research today. Lots of reading. Lots of Emailing too.
I sent out scholarship letters to the last high school journalism teachers in America who had not already received them. The boss wanted saturation, so I found some 70 state and local high school press associations and then wrote to every individual teacher I know in the state. If you can carpet bomb any better your name might be Arthur Bomber Harris.
Now I’m working on another series of Emails for the next big push.
I have updated the photo gallery this evening. There are now 143 pictures online for September. And there’s still a week to go. If you’d like to look back at previous Septembers, or other months in amusing personal history, just go here.
And, in a few minutes, I’ll be along with the newest addition to the site as well. It will be simple and beautiful and I’m very excited to finally get around to it. So you simply must indulge me.
We had a record crowd on hand at the Samford High School Journalism Workshop. That’s our department chair, Bernie Ankney, delivering his opening remarks. Shaun Chavis, associate editor from Health magazine, provided the keynote address.
In the morning sessions we had rooms with professors and journalists discussing news writing, layout, sports writing, broadcasting and magazine journalism. One session discussed the best ledes ever written, one nominee: Bob Considine’s story on the 1938 Lewis-Schmeling bout:
Listen to this, buddy, for it comes from a guy whose palms are still wet, whose throat is still dry, and whose jaw is still agape from the utter shock of watching Joe Louis knock out Max Schmeling.
Carla Jean Whitney talked about the gratification of magazine publication and exciting industry changes. Meanwhile sportswriter Doug Segrest of The Birmingham News does a great session on sports reporting.
I had a lot of nice conversations with teachers before lunch and then in the afternoon got to spend time with the famous Ike Pigott.
Joining him were Tatiana Richards and one of our professors, Dr. Sheree Martin, on a panel about journalism online.
We had a Pulitzer winner, Sonia Nazario, presenting in our afternoon sessions. And I presented too!
Here’s the picture of the day, though:
That’s the newest McAlister. The Yankee spent the day with him today and I got to visit for a few hours this evening. Good kid. Sleeps all the time.
They won’t put him in one of those costumes I found last night, thankfully. He’s already got an Auburn blanket. To update last night’s horror of child rearing:
That landed on The War Eagle Reader this morning. They also used the capital THE in writing the credit.
I sat down next to the professor, who is a brilliant and talented man. He is also internationally renowned, our new dean and on my committee. I did pretty well in that choice. I opened that freshly packed binder and he said “Is all of that for this class?”
Those 100 pages of reading, it turns out, wasn’t even the entire assignment. Seems we were missing one chapter, which we discussed at length in my media effects class this morning.
I like that class. We talk about a great many interesting things and I usually feel as if I almost have it all figured out. I don’t, of course, but it is nice to dream.
Spent the rest of the day on the phone, fielding calls for next week’s high school journalism workshop. That’s not entirely true. When I wasn’t on the phone I was writing Emails about the workshop.
It never ceases to amaze me how much time goes into that workshop each year. it takes up about the first three weeks of the term for me, and I don’t even have all the heavy lifting assignments in bringing all of the parts together. We’ll have about 200 students, though, for the all day event. And they always enjoy themselves and learn a great deal.
Check outGoogle Instant yet? I wrote on Twitter yesterday that this is a search engine that has no time for your fingers, but rather searches your brain.
As “this changes everything” developments go, this on the surface seems to be a subtle one. Everyone’s web is now different. And now better. This only makes Search Engine Optimization even more important, because it is going to change SEO techniques. And that’s where the change here is anything but subtle.
Since you’ll see results now as you type — eliminating that tedious task of hitting “Enter” — you’ll react to the options in front of you. That stimulus is a feedback that will change your search. So SEO will necessarily have to improve, too, if there’s an analytics package on the back end of Instant that shows key strokes and improvements. Google will note what you are searching but, more importantly, what you are refining. That’s going into the great big Google brain and will impact the next person that searches along those same lines. Keystrokes are now key. When users adjust to that the organic experience will probably mutate out of control. Maybe this is how Skynet gets started …
Remember, too, Google also has a social circle feature in their traditional searches on that first page of returns. You can see what your friends and colleagues are saying about the topic you’re presently searching. When that gets tied into Instant you’ll really have something immensely powerful to enhance your personal experience.
Now, if only Google would dabble in providing cell phone signals. I’m driving through the middle of nowhere, trying to speak with a friend who is driving through a place called “50 miles out of Hattiesburg” which is the sort of place with which Nowhere is unfamiliar. Why we bothered, I’m not sure. Every three sentences there is a disconnection.
One day someone in the middle of nowhere might not drop calls. The next day that will become routine and taken for granted. The day after that people will think of us, today, as Lewis and Clark.
Big game tonight. Here’s a little Auburn to get us ready. What is important about The Auburn Creed is what it aspires to be, and what it inspires others to be.
Or, at least, that’s what I thought until I saw this version. When they get to the section on country and home, from Afghanistan, it holds an altogether more important meaning:
War Eagle, beat State. I’ll post the Twitter feed for posterity later.
The last few days have been … mildish. Given the recent weather the upper 80s were delightful. Over the weekend we actually enjoyed a day of weather that, in comparison, seemed almost cool. And, yes, Deep South, September. I understand. We have this conversation often, The Yankee and I. These are perfectly natural temperatures here, I remind her.
Doesn’t make you sweat less.
But, today, we returned to a heat index of 97 degrees at one point. I like summer, but there comes a point in September when it just begins to feel cruel. We’ll reach that point in a week or two, the point of Rubbing It In. The point of Oh, Really? The point of biology where the body says “You know, there’s no more sweat to be had.”
And suddenly a subarctic lifestyle doesn’t seem like a bad idea. That’s when you walk into a restaurant’s cooler and realize “A little more summer might not be so bad.”
Spent the morning researching media effects. Had a meeting with one of my committee members to start discussing my comprehensive exams. He’s such a cool guy. Very kind and energetic and incredibly intelligent.
So naturally we talked about NASCAR and iPhone applications.
At Samford I had a meeting with the new editor. She’s getting ready to run her first issue of the newspaper next week. The online editor joined us to hammer out a few policies for the new year.
We turned it into a teleconference, which turned into a site re-design project in the next few weeks. And from that conversation a lot of exciting things will happen. It was an enthusiastic afternoon full of a great deal of promise. We’re looking forward to new partnerships, bringing in more news outlets to the site, breaking more news on the web, adding more sports and more.
It’ll be a good year.
Traffic? Not so great. Eight miles of construction to get through, all of it behind this guy:
Soon after I passed the buses carrying the Florida Atlantic football team. (Later: FAU blocked a UAB field goal attempt on the final play to win, 32-31.)
I also saw this guy:
Temperatures or not, that’s the first sign of fall. Football is here!
In fact, there are five games on my television tonight, so if you’ll excuse me …
