Just two pictures today. Mostly because I want to try an experiment.
There are bushes outside my building on campus. Inside those bushes live spiders. Maybe they are tiny. Perhaps they are itsy and or bitsy. I’ve never seen them, but I know their work.
We really see their work after it rains.
This one strikes me as particularly beautiful. And optimistic, stretching a web horizontally across two bushes. Doesn’t seem the most efficient use of your webby resources. But, still, lovely.
The slides that accompanied the headlines lecture can be found over here.
I love Slideshare. It is free. You can find presentations about most anything there. You can always learn something or get a few great ideas over there. It isn’t quite the same because the person delivering the talk isn’t always there. Slideshare does let you upload audio or YouTube, though, so you can follow along easily. I didn’t have the need for that for a classroom, so I wrote a lot of words on a lot of slides. Hopefully even the student that tuned me out bothered to jot down a few of the words.
Later the students working on this week’s paper have this great idea of a cool way to do a great thing. But they can’t do this great thing in this cool way because it would be against the Rules and those are just there to force you to re-create things and find a solution to this problem in an entirely new way.
It took them about 20 minutes. Smart people.
The nice thing was that the problem came about because we had too many ads. Or so they thought. We have a full paper of ads this week, which we haven’t been able to say in a long time. Maybe this problem will happen again.
Nola Media Group announced it will fund a half-million dollars worth of initiatives to increase public access to digital media in New Orleans. New Orleans has one of the lowest rates of broadband access in the country.
The technology works with conductive inks that enable capacative touch, but full details are sketchy.
Project participants also say the technology can be used to print interactive advertisements. Interactive Newsprint collects click counts and engagement time for publishers and marketers to analyse.
Dundee University product design researcher Jon Rogers says: ”For pretty much the first time, in a scaleable and manufacturable way, we’re going to connect the internet to paper. When you start to connect that to news, we’re in a goldmine zone.”
So many applications. I want three of them, special delivered today.
Today in class we discussed media literacy, and the value of reading about the world around us, as citizens and as journalists. Before that I gave the class the hardest current events quiz ever assembled. That got their attention.
This evening I went to Lowe’s, because I needed to examine door locks, but also find a few screws and nuts for tripods. This was an hour poorly spent.
I wrote about it on Twitter, and that got the Lowe’s staffer on OMG alert to ask me to write them an email. So I did:
I was in this evening trying to find some particularly sized nuts and bolts. A woman stocking shelves there did try to help me for a moment, beyond her normal role of putting boxes in particular places and kicking loose screws under the shelving.
I’m in those sliding drawers looking for the right metric sizes — hex screws I could find, the corresponding nuts were nowhere to be found. She looked with me for a moment, noting this section is hard to keep straight and organized. “People stealing,” she said. I found 106 trays for potential options of screws of varying dimensions and lengths. There were 13 trays for potential nuts, though none of the size my project needs.
This was a good half hour into the search. Not one red-vested person passed by, other than the shelf-stocking woman whom I approached.
I decided I’d buy what I need online, less aggravation, and skip the electronic door lock project I had all together. Who needs this much frustration in one trip?
I know you hear this stuff all the time, and whomever reads this can only do so much beyond empathize a little. I hope this next part you’ll keep close to heart and kick up stairs:
You’re kidding yourselves if you think this sort of experience is unique to that one store. You’re kidding yourselves if you think people don’t notice. You read these sorts of things all day, don’t you?
This was, perhaps, too on the nose, but they wrote back to say they needed my contact information to fix this. No they don’t. My mailing address won’t solve this problem. Though it would allow them to send me a little gift card, which is a thoughtful bribe, but I’d rather they try to address the problem.
I don’t know why you don’t have someone standing near the exit door, asking the people who leave empty handed why they couldn’t find what they needed. No one goes to Lowe’s or Home Depot to just look around.
They certainly wouldn’t do it more than once.
I had barbecue for dinner, though, and started a new book, so that was grand. Now I’m watching the student-journalists at The Crimson put their paper to bed. It is a fine night. It is 65 degrees outside and nice in here, but already some of them are bundling up. They don’t yet have an idea of how cold it can get in the newsroom.
One day I’ll have to tell them about the studio where I once worked that was so cold you could barely type. Or about standing outside on a cold, gray off day, trying to figure out why stomping my feet didn’t generate any warmth or feeling in my toes before watching a kid escape from a house where he was being held hostage. Or about being tear gassed on a frigid winter evening while covering a stupid protest (as in, not even a well-respected one) downtown. A coolish newsroom isn’t so bad.
I’d rather do all of those things than spend time in a big box hardware store, though.
I taught a class on Associated Press style and on visual journalism this afternoon. I showed the students this video:
I use it a lot. It is very touching and incredibly moving. It is relatable. It has a lot of great production elements, video and photographs. Color and black and white. It tells a story from beginning to end. There is music, which I see as a mileage may vary kind of thing. I don’t think it is really necessary, but it is clear where they are going with it.
The best parts are where the producers interject in the story and where they are smart enough to stay out of the way. There’s an art to that.
We watched this unembeddable slideshow from NPR, too. In it we meet Steve Campbell and his Iraqi bride as they negotiate the day to day struggle to make a life for themselves in Missouri. Natural sound, coordination of the audio and the visual, and the everydayness just make an interesting story.
We tend to overlook those sometimes.
Therapy this evening, pushing small weights up and down, or left and right as the circumstance required. Rode a bit on a bike. Cleaned up, had dinner, went back into the office.
Tonight the student-journalists at the Crimson are putting their first paper of the year to bed. We start the school year a bit later than most, and we’re a weekly, so it feels like a late beginning, but we’ve used most of the time well.
There is a lot to learn, we have a young staff this year, but they are all eager to do good work, and that’s the key. Also, having fun. They introduced me to mershed perderders which, approaching midnight, was funnier than it should have been. I did not know turtles have such poor diction.
Tomorrow the students get to see the fruits of their labors. Just as exciting as the first night of layout is the unheralded first critique of the year.
Class, I taught it. Twenty more topics on Associated Press Style and things we think your English brainwashed you into thinking.
They take it very well. Every time I teach this class I expect someone to stand up and hurl a book across the room. “I am PRO Oxford comma!”
But it never happens. They are good little note takers. I point out the different styles is all, and I’ll leave it to you to decide what you really feel about the great comma debate. And then I tell the story of an English major friend of mine who I managed to get so worked up he was willing to fight. Over a comma. (But not sentence fragments, as it turned out.)
One of my students seized on the question about three slides before I was ready today. “What about that comma?” I was so proud.
I gave a quiz, which everyone took with that second week of class spirit. Let’s see how they feel about that in November!
Met with the online editor. Met with the editor-in-chief. Did a little extra work on class stuff and on a paper. I finished all of the early-semester administrative stuff that I can think of.
I called again about getting my new phone. Did I mention this? We received new phones over a period of the summer when I wasn’t here. So they installed it in a copy room that belongs to another department. Someone passed this information along. I retrieved my phone. The old 1973 model in my office no longer worked. It was as if a storm had cut the line, or perhaps a bad person.
So I plugged the new one in sometime last week. Nothing. A different bad person had come along and severed this connection to the outside world. Dramatic music plays.
Finally got in touch with someone that had an answer. Turns out you can’t just plug these in and go. This phone, dig this, needs the Internet. And it seems the outlet in my office wall was installed in some bygone pre-Internet era. A guy will come by.
I never saw this person — but to be fair, I move around on campus a lot. So I called today, to hear that someone had been assigned the chore of plugging in my phone and souping up the phone jack. The person I talked to today said that guy had left me a message.
On my phone.
Which does not work.
Other technology news: I discovered a missing keyboard. But that’s getting ahead of the story. I discovered our newsroom had a missing keyboard. Naturally I asked around. Someone had stuffed it into a desk drawer. Let’s not even ask why.
Meanwhile, I managed to discover that a second keyboard was possessed. Remember the scene in Ghost — of course you do — where Sam types his name on the bad person’s keyboard and Jerry Zucker wants to evoke Shakespeare and Poe, but not have you realize how those guys did it so much better? Just the word Sam, over and over in that green monochrome?
I have an Apple keyboard doing that. Only my ghost thinks his name is either 9999999 or ———. Perhaps there are two of them.
The other keyboard, the one that was in a desk drawer, is just dead. Maybe that is why it was stored away. I plug both of these keyboards into other machines and I get the same response. 9999999 or nothing at all. So, tomorrow, I get to visit with the nice Tech Services people again.
In a shocking bit of news I visited Walmart. And it was not an unpleasant experience at all. I do not know what to make of this. They have a little fruit package, red apples, green apples, grapes and cheddar cheese, that I enjoy. Pre-cut, cheaper than anything else and a nice snack.
How should I interpret this? Walmart as a quick and painless shopping destination?
A cashier was wearing feathers as earrings, like the synthetics of the 1980s, so someone was making a statement. But you don’t disqualify for that. These are the reasons you go the big box stores, right?
Finally, videos: Cee lo Green played with Prince. One of them still brags about that to everyone they know:
And this is a strong contender for the title of Why I Love the Internet This Week. I believe it might be the video the Internet created itself for:
