Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Tuesday

Auburn / baseball / hobby / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
20
Mar 12

These pictures look perfectly composed to me

I think squirrels need Instagram treatments too:

For the record: I do Instagram the old-fashioned way. I shoot through a window screen and lower the shutter speed on the camera to kill the exposure. I’m an old school member of pointless photographs.

I was about to step outside and take this picture in the last of the high evening’s dying light, but the cat snuck out behind me. She sits and watches squirrels and birds all day. Sometimes she gets agitated by this and meeps and peeps at them. We think this is cute. And then we read it is frustration.

I felt bad about that once, for about 25 minutes, and then I remembered how often she wakes me up in the middle of the night, just to show off how good of a “hunter” she is that she found and retrieved one of her toys. I stopped feeling bad about it after that.

Anyway, I was stepping outside, Allie sneaked out around me. You’d think with that much time staring at the wildlife she’d consider going out to play with them. “Pickup hoops, anyone?” Or at least chase them. But no. This cat just goes outside and rolls around in the dirt.

Our cat thinks she’s a dog.

Baseball night. Auburn, fresh off winning a road series against 12th ranked Mississippi, was hosting South Alabama for the Tuesday contest. Determined not to look ahead to this weekend’s homestand against 12th ranked LSU, the Tigers put John Luke Jacobs on the mound.

He pitched shutout baseball for eight innings, allowing only three hits and two walks. He struck out 11:

A five run fifth inning cracked it open for Auburn and the Tigers rolled to a 7-0 victory. (Jacobs, as the Tuesday starter, leads the team in strikeouts, and leads Auburn’s starters in hits, runs and home runs allowed, opponent batting average, ERA.)

By this point, unfortunately, I’ve noticed a suddenly less-than-good feeling for the evening. So this is abbreviated, but I’m going to go try and sleep off this general feeling of mild blah.

iPhone / photo / Samford / Tuesday — 1 Comment
13
Mar 12

Among the reasons to love Samford

President Andy Westmoreland sends out a weekly message to students and faculty. In this week’s installment he wrote of a senior who’s father was struggling with terminal cancer. This is part of the note, from the student’s mother, that Westmoreland shared in his email:

“On January 10 of this year, we were told that it did not appear that my husband would survive until May for the graduation ceremony. He had been asking prayer for his situation in his Sunday School class. On Tuesday, January 17, his Sunday School teacher contacted Samford University and asked for help in arranging a surprise ceremony at our church so that my husband could see Taylor graduate college.

“Three days later, on January 20, Dean Finch and Professor Carson from the Brock School of Business were in our church with a certificate attesting to Taylor’s planned graduation, and a cap and gown. This was a complete surprise to my husband. Professor Carson spoke very personalized words of high praise for my daughter and Dean Finch addressed my husband personally with uplifting words of encouragement with regard to how my husband had prepared and equipped Taylor to succeed in life. Many of our family, friends and church family were able to attend. Several of Taylor’s friends from Samford were also there. This was the last time my husband left the house and he passed away eight days later on January 28. If the ceremony had been put off even until the next Monday, he would not have been able to attend. The sensitivity and sense of urgency that was given to this request could not have been more appropriate.

“My family received a precious gift that day that can never be measured. Even if the Lord had allowed my husband to live until May, he would never have heard such specific personalized words at a traditional ceremony. The decision to send our daughter to Samford was a costly one that met with most of our friends and family questioning the wisdom of such a decision with regard to the costs and our personal financial circumstances. Over the years, this decision has been reaffirmed several times but never more than on January 20. Yes it was a costly decision to send our daughter to Samford University, but that day, it became a ‘priceless’ one.”

Westmoreland ends his notes with a message like this, “The world is better because our people live out the core value of “service to God, to family, to one another, and to the community.”

Also, today was omelet day:

journalism / links / memories / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off
6
Mar 12

There is a bad pun at the end of this post

Now this was a beautiful day. High of 67, clear, sunny. This is the kind of pre-spring that would make the rest of the country jealous. Sure, our autumn is fairly well abbreviated. And you may keep your winter if you operate under the idea that you need snow to feel complete. But everyone that loves snow is tired of it by March. Everyone that has a fondness for sweaters and layers would love to have a day like this to enjoy just now.

Pretty much everyone below the 38th parallel is enjoying it. Sorry Midwest and New England.

This is an office day, and an office night, so I have no anecdotes. But I have links.

Things to read: The “Dangerous” Veteran: An Inaccurate Media Narrative Takes Hold:

If you’ve read the news lately, you may have seen one of several stories describing recent Veterans as “ticking time bombs” or as “dangerous” on account of post-traumatic stress. It’s a narrative that has persisted for decades, but a handful of recent high-profile incidents have resulted in headlines like these:

Police get help with vets who are ticking bombs (USA TODAY)

Experts: Vets’ PTSD, violence a growing problem (CNN)

Veteran charged with homeless murders: Hint of larger problem for US military? (Christian Science Monitor)

While these stories highlight horrific killings, the connection between disturbed murderers like Benjamin Barnes and Itzcoatl Ocampo and their service in combat is weak—despite what media reports and popular culture would have many believe. And such rhetoric, when solidified in the public consciousness, can have negative consequences for both Veterans and society—like causing Veterans to avoid seeking help or employers to avoid hiring them.

“This is a huge misrepresentation of Veterans,” said Rich Blake, an Iraq War Veteran and psychology doctoral student at Loyola University Maryland. “Crazed? That’s even more extreme.”

That’s a great perspective. A few years ago I did some consulting for a PTSD organization, met a lot of great people from all walks of life — the Vietnam veteran who walked across an entire state every year as a personal awareness campaign, the woman who’d been abused as a child who had to tell everyone she met that PTSD isn’t exclusive to members of the military — and ultimately found the misperceptions easy to understand. But they’re almost always misperceptions. There’s a quote in this piece that makes a great shark attack analogy, for example.

Facebook’s US User Growth Slows but Twitter Sees Double-Digit Gains:

As recently as 2010, growth in US Facebook usage was well into the double digits, at 38.6%, eMarketer estimates. But with 116.8 million US internet users already logging on to the site at least once monthly that year, growth rates were bound to plateau.

By 2011 Facebook user growth rose a comparatively small 13.4%, and this year will be the first when growth rates drop to the single digits. Rates of change in the US will continue to decline throughout eMarketer’s forecast period.

On Twitter, by contrast, growth is stronger. Last year’s 31.9% increase in users outpaced that of 2010, when growth was at 23.5%. Similar to Facebook’s trajectory, Twitter’s growth rate will also fall in the coming years, but still remain nearly four times higher than Facebook’s growth rate in 2014.

Twitter is smaller, so there’s the issue of scale, but what I’d like to see is abandonment rates and existing customer use rates.

Some papers see Q1 sales rise – first since 2006:

In a series of informal conversations, some publishers counted it as a victory that their numbers in the first two months of 2012 were equal to those of the prior year. Others reported that their sales met or surpassed conservative budgets that forecast single-digit declines between this year and last.

“It looks like the cycle finally has turned,” said an executive who could not discuss specifics of his company’s sales because it is publicly traded. “People counting out newspapers have not taken into account the effect of the weak economy. It won’t take much of an improvement [in the economy] for us to see real increases in profitability after the cost-cutting we have be doing for the last several years.”

While a turn in the economy is bound to be helpful, it must be noted that every other medium has long since rebounded from the Great Recession, which technically ended by mid-2010 (though it is of little consolation to those continuing to suffer from foreclosure, unemployment and financially challenged retirement).

The comments paint a different picture, and the most recent Pew research paints a different picture, but any good news for the newspaper business would be welcome. Hopefully such good news wouldn’t be a signal to publishers that they’ve weathered some sort of storm and return to their traditional business-as-usual models. Inertia is a problem.

And is often the case, I’ll leave you with a little something to make you smile.

What do you call the sum of the diagonal elements of the tensor of inertia?

The spur of the moment.

And they say physicists have no fun.

Alabama / Auburn / cycling / memories / overwriting / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
28
Feb 12

Bo Bikes Bama

Bo Jackson, that Bo Jackson, will ride across Alabama in April, east to west, as a fund raiser for tornado relief.

The man is intense even in promotional videos. I want to ride along. At least for a little bit, if not an entire leg. (I’d prefer the Bessemer to Tuscaloosa day obviously, since we both grew up there.)

You can ride with him.

If I were able to ride with him the only problem would be figuring out to get ahead of him several times so he can pass me and I can describe the sound. So I can write things like this:

Bo riding a bike is an angry mashing of steel gears. Gritting carbon fiber against melting alumnium. He flings acidic drops of sweat behind him, furious that he has to stop and replace his pedals every 45 minutes or so. He’s riding a Trek because it is built like a tank, but he still grinds them into dust. I bet he could ride the 300 miles in the better part of an afternoon if he catches the red lights right. But since he has to wait so often for wheel rebuilds it stretches this thing out over a week. I bet the turbulence behind him helps clean up the tornado debris on some of those central Alabama roadsides.

And not one man will sneer at him when he coasts into Tuscaloosa, because they know.

I told a friend that I was trying to explain Bo to my lovely bride, who was busy being a little girl in another part of the country during Bo’s prime while we were busy agog at what the man could do. A few years later and superlatives can ring hollow. He suggested the uninitiated watch this:

If I rode with Bo I would not act like a fanboy, but I would ask him about coming home to raise money. And I would ask him about his VOX2 Max. And I’d playfully suggest we sprint to the next road sign, just so I could say I’ve been beaten by the best.

iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Tuesday — Comments Off
21
Feb 12

A random assortment of small things

The BIC, Gillette, Shick razor marketing war reaches its logical conclusion:

This, the restaurant manager, pictured here, tells me, is not an escalation in the face trimming arms race. It is instead a sign for the ski slopes. You need to know the condition of the terrain you’re about to fall down, he said. You need to know where this a good route or a bumpy one. He had to explain this to me because he’s hanging Colorado skiing paraphernalia in a barbecue house in central Alabama.

But it makes sense. The Zamboni of the skiing world, as I called it, except it is in no way like a Zamboni. But otherwise, exactly like one.

This is at Moe’s, in Lakeview, where I met Brian for lunch today. It is a central location between our offices the barbecue is pretty good. It is a Colorado-based riff on Alabama and Memphis style meat.

The manager says he’s still trying to find the ideal place to hang this inside.

They don’t understand seven-blade razor jokes there, but that’s OK, because I had no idea about this impressive piece of machinery either. The chicken was delicious. They’ve made a mockery out of black eyed peas. All things in life are a tradeoff.

Things to read: Why organizing beats is just as important as large investigations, ” good reporting happens more regularly and more quickly when information is organized from the start and a beat is built around a clear organizing principle.”

The value of Quora, I think, is jumping in toward the end of a good conversation. There is a great curation of links on this page.

Up in the air! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a zipline!

What is believed to be the nation’s first universal-access zip line and canopy tour is scheduled to open in April at Red Mountain Park in Birmingham.

Consisting of 10 platforms and seven zip runs ranging from 100 to nearly 350 feet long, the course will allow visitors to fly between elevated platforms built in the trees while descending a portion of the slope, tacking back and forth over a draw in the mountain.

At points in the course, a rider will be 50 feet off the ground and moving 25 to 30 mph.

The first comment, before things turned to that delightful level of vitriol and anonymous recrimination that makes most general comment streams, was wonderful: “I have a 17 year old in a wheel chair, I love that he will be able to do this!”

Maybe I’ll get to see him out there. Yes, I’ll be in the ziplines.