Thursday

IU / photo / running / Thursday — Comments Off on If only you could blame cardboard for all your problems
3
Oct 19

If only you could blame cardboard for all your problems

We went for a run this morning. We went for a run this morning because the weather broke. We went for a run this morning because it was about 30 degrees cooler than it was when we could have gone for a run yesterday evening.

So I got in a slow and sluggish 5K, because it was a morning run. And while it isn’t that I’m not a morning person, I’m just not a morning runner. Or, perhaps, a morning exerciser in general. That part may have to do with the morning person thing. Anyway, we ran on that path, and when we did a few trips around this little manmade pond. That’s not my house:

We beat the sun (above the treeline)!

At the end of the day I chose to take an elevator. I looked at the little pedometer on my phone, to justify the luxury, and that, and my attendant aches and pains, were how I remembered that I had gone for a run this morning.

In between I fired off the requisite rounds of emails, had lunch with my bride, assisted in the purchase of equipment that needed to be purchased, had a few meetings and other office things like that. We were also in the television studio for sports shows, and we’ll be back in the TV studio for another show tomorrow morning.

Tonight, for dinner:

The chicken is pretty good. The waffles … I’m not sure how you even miss on waffles, but that one was something of a miss. I think they deserve a second try, sometime, though.

At home I caught up on a bit of reading, fought with the cat, who just haaaaas to be in the garage. And it doesn’t matter that I’m trying to do him a solid by bringing in some cardboard boxes he can play in. And Poseidon will play in the boxes. I don’t feel I can leave in there by himself long enough to change from my suit, so there I am in slacks on my hands and knees being thwarted by a cat who has somehow lost all motor function.

Eventually I got the push broom behind him and pulled him out from underneath the car. Cat curling is the nicest thing I wanted to do.

I was tired by 8 p.m. — I blame the shorter days — but I’ve just finished, at 11-something, looking for the other cat. The search went from casual to concerning after the second sweep of the entire house, including closets and garage. Phoebe was hiding in one of those boxes I brought in when I got to the house this evening. We tent it up so they can sit in and under it and she found the dark back corner, the one without a motion sensor light.

Cardboard. I am defeated by cardboard. And cats.

I think we should recycle sooner.

Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off on Idle browsing
26
Sep 19

Idle browsing

On Wednesday nights, you can have plenty of grand plans. Oh, this morning I was going to get up, get a workout in, go run two errands and then go to the office, because I have a late morning because of a late evening.

I woke up, saw that the sky was still gray and re-invested in the warming properties of the many covers on the bed.

At least I ironed every single wrinkle out of the day’s clothes and got to work on time.

I did receive 55 spam emails today. And I got one email about a package that is on its way, while I was tracking that same package via a previous email. That wasn’t spooky at all. It wasn’t spooky because the tracking page said, simply “Your package is on the way!” Anyone with that attention to detail to the finer points of supply delivery logistics isn’t terribly concerned with putting read receipt bugs in their email script.

But who knows what is in the actual package, right? Completely different ball game.

I returned some items to the same store a few weeks ago. I walked in, an impeccably dressed older gentleman said “Can I help you?” I told him I would like to return these two things and there was nothing wrong with them, no sir, they just didn’t fit through most of the parts they were meant to fit. About that same time his phone rang and he took the call and talked to whomever was on the other end through the entirety of the return and credit process. I signed a receipt and received a copy and, through the magic of technology the money was returned to my account via this piece of plastic in my pocket and then I walked out, the impeccably dressed man having not said another word to me, because of his phone call.

Now you might think this poor customer service, but you’d be mistaken. No time was wasted.

I’ve taken one other thing back to that company before. Similar problem. It was no muss, no fuss and just a little Oh, that’s what you bought from the website, judgement and a quick Won’t you see what’s on sale over on the clearance rack up-sell.

I glanced at it. And that was the moment I realized I’ve completely converted to online shopping. The brick and mortar operation has its uses, but none of those uses are idle browsing.

Words to live by:

More on Twitter and check me out on Instagram as well.

Instagram / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Wish I were here
19
Sep 19

Wish I were here

I’ve been playing with an app to make cinemagraphs. Moving pictures! Who would have thought it! And all right there from my phone! The one that’s a supercomputer! In my pocket! Who would have thought it!

The app is called Pixaloop and it was free. You can purchase upgrades, but all the basics that you receive do a nice job. I’m still learning from some of the finer points of those basics, and while it is basic, it does what you’d want it to do, once you get a sense of what will visually work.

I made that last one while I student was standing me up for a meeting. It’s apropos.

cycling / history / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Ancient Greek Wikipedia, not as accurate as today’s
12
Sep 19

Ancient Greek Wikipedia, not as accurate as today’s

I have a late-ish night in the studio, which means there was time for a bike ride this morning. So I set out on a casual 20-miler that featured my first dropped chain in quite some time.

It was no problem. Cruise to a safe stop, hop off, slip a finger inside the chain to move it off the drive train and then line it all back up on the gearing. It meant maybe 30 seconds to stop, a greasy finger or two and a nice little, funny embarrassment. How do you drop a chain going downhill, anyway?

Who cares? No one cares. I don’t either. It was a bike ride. You get quiet little moments like this:

And you get … not exactly the sunrise, but that moment after the inevitability of planetary rotation when the sun says “No, really, I mean it.” The part that’s more about the tree line than a primal miracle.

Some Hellenistic astronomer, Eratosthenes maybe, figured this stuff out 2,260 years ago. He calculated the planet’s circumference based on shadows. He figured out the earth’s axis and had some early Leap Day ideas. He created the first map of the known world. He was a mathematician, a geographer, a poet and music theorist. He was the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria and pretty much invented geography.

You wonder what he would have done if he had the Internet.

We have this simplistic image in our heads about people who didn’t know about the earth orbiting the sun and the rotation of the planet finding the sun chasing the moon across the sky, and the terror of each night: What if it doesn’t come back? And you can find out all about the Greeks and the scholars who followed them refining and revising the data. Today you just accept what your favorite weather app tells you will be the precise sun up and sun down moments. (Time is a construct.)

But spare a thought for those first regular people, after Erathosthenes and his math friends figured this stuff out. Imagine how they felt, what they must have thought, when they heard the “news.”

And that’s just the Greeks. There’s another 93 gods and goddesses related to the sun on Wikipedia alone.

We have this simplistic image in our heads about people who don’t know that Wikipedia is still incomplete and the terror of actual research: What if I have to go to a non-crowd sourced site? You wonder what Erathothenes would have done with Wikipedia. He died in his 80s. A common version of the story is that he’d gone blind, so he couldn’t read and see the world behind him and so he starved himself to death in his depression. But we don’t really know. Wikipedia is quite certain about it. So maybe its a good thing he didn’t have a dial up modem.

IU / photo / television / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Show – show – show, here we go!
5
Sep 19

Show – show – show, here we go!

Back to it tonight. The gang at IUSTV kicked off their 2019-2020 production schedule today, and up first was the award-winning IUSTV sports crew. Here’s the control room view:

Last year one of their on-air folks won a statewide anchor of the year honor. A different statewide contest saw the sports gang sweep a particular sports reporting category. And now they are back to improve on where they left off last spring.

The opportunities here are big ones, and they take advantage of them with great effect. Staying at work late is only fun because they get so much out of it.

Here’s one of the shows they produced tonight:

Looks like the other will be uploaded tomorrow.

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