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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:

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movies / photo / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on I’ve seen this one! (Star Trek edition)
17
Sep 19

I’ve seen this one! (Star Trek edition)

I went to the movies this weekend:

And I wrote about it here. Some excerpts:

I know I saw Wrath of Khan in theaters, but unless I saw it in a re-release I was six-years-old. And while I saw all the subsequent movies, even the lesser ones, in the theater, and I’ve seen The Motion Picture several times, I’d never seen this on the big screen:

While The Motion Picture is still a slogging sort of rough cut of a film, it has its place and it was worth seeing. There’s a group, Fathom Events putting nostalgic movies in the big theaters on slow days. So there’s often a throwback on Tuesdays and Sundays. This was the first I’ve heard of it, but I’ll be back for other select other films in the future. There was even a little mini-documentary before the movie — probably something produced to run before a DVD or some banquet event. Though this is a problem:

cycling / football / IU / Monday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Just some videos to fill the day
9
Sep 19

Just some videos to fill the day

It is the rare day indeed, this year, that I get out in front of The Yankee. The closer I got to the end of yesterday’s ride, the more I felt like this:

I just knew she would pip me before the end, and so I pushed and pushed as hard as I could, and somehow I managed to stay away, but only just.

And if you’re here for a different sort of video, this is the funniest one of the weekend:

And this is a cool little bit of something cool the Indiana athletic department cooked up:

But there’s something important in there:

George Taliaferro’s story defies excerpting, but let’s try:

As the first day of school approached, Taliaferro asked the football coaches when he was going to be moved on campus. He was told black students didn’t live in dorms.

“I called my father and told him I didn’t want to be in a place where I couldn’t live on campus, where I couldn’t swim in the pool and where I couldn’t sit in the bottom section of the movie theater,” Taliaferro said. “My father told me there were other reasons I was there, and then he hung up the phone on me. I was never so hurt because I thought the one person who could understand being discriminated against was him.”

That tough love stemmed from two things his parents, neither of whom went past sixth grade, told him every day as he grew up. “They’d say, ‘We love you,'” he recalled. “And, ‘You must be educated.'”

And then:

He played seven seasons of pro football, six in the NFL with New York, Dallas, Baltimore and Philadelphia, three times making the Pro Bowl. He became a volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Baltimore, advised prisoners adjusting to society upon their release, got his master’s in social work at Howard University, taught at Maryland, was dean of students at Morgan State, returned to Indiana as a professor and special assistant to IU president John Ryan, and helped start Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Central Indiana in Bloomington.

You can’t put that in a gif or a football video, but you certainly oughta try.

football / Friday / IU / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Sports in spite of ourselves
6
Sep 19

Sports in spite of ourselves

Here’s the other show the sports guys produced last night. It’s a talk show, and this episode follows the traditional format, but I hear things may be getting changed as we progress through the year. There’s a new host and new producers eager to stretch their legs.

The guy that hosted that show for the better part of the last two years graduated this spring and just started working as a sports reporter for a television station down on the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone that comes through our little station gets hired. For good reason, too. If you stick around these parts for too long, this is bound to happen:

For the last several years, I’ve been trying to find ways to pay less attention to football. It’s grown less important, the older I get. And yet, where I’m from, there are heavy duty cultural implications. Of course, I’m not there anymore, sadly, so that helps. But there’s plenty on television. And it’s good television.

There’s also the safety aspect. It’s become more difficult to enjoy watching people do these things that could potentially be so self-detrimental. But, I’ll watch. Because it is fun. And it isn’t all bad. Way up and way out and all that. Tribal joys

Plus, the ethos. Look at the guys from this school in Indianapolis doing all the right things:

How can you not be romantic about football? How could you not want to be a Marian Knight?

IU / journalism / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on Why I brag about our students
14
Aug 19

Why I brag about our students

I frequently tell students that empirical data points are important on the resume. A professor I had in undergrad taught me that. He’s teaching at a university in Texas now. Nice guy, questionable reviews on ratemyprofessor.com. Here’s one of them now: He marks every tiny mistake and your grade suffers.

The nerve of that guy! And a journalism instructor! Taking off points like that! He was a copy editor in a previous life, so I am sure that’s a big part of it. Also, there’s the issue of getting things right versus getting things wrong.

Anyway, it’s been almost 20 years, but I remember him as a kind man. Always had a big smile. Like a lot of teachers, once you decoded what he was after you could make some nice progress. He was big on feedback since so much of what he taught was grounded in subjectivity. And getting that feedback could often times be the most useful best part of his class. Some of those lessons still ring in my ears. He was also very patient during office hours. I hope some of that part rubbed off on me, by accident.

Back then there weren’t as many administrative support positions as students enjoy today and the few that were around were somewhat overwhelmed. Plus, I reasoned, the people who’d been in my field would be more helpful in drafting the right kind of resume for my field. So I went to the faculty and this one man was generous with his time, working through several drafts of the brutal document with me, marking every tiny mistake, like the copy editor he was. And he liked empirical data points.

So I’ve always had them in my resume. There’s not a job description that doesn’t include a mention of ratings boosts, enrollment increase or social media gains and some data points or percentages.

Which is a long way to say — because I’m vamping, clearly — that another kind of data is peer acceptance. The media industry, you might have heard, is big on awards and honors. It’s a marker of professional peerage. A plaque! Maybe a trophy, or even a certificate! Ultimately they mean you get to mention them from time to time, say you are award-winning and so on. Plus, and perhaps most critically, some of these things give you additional feedback and you get to see where you are next to others plying the same trade. They don’t wow many people at parties, but they do look nice on a resume. For all of these reasons I encourage students to take the necessary steps to get over the requisite hurdles that allow them to jump through the hoops of getting their media efforts nominated.

If nothing else, I get to brag about them:

This is where I trot out my old saw about how student media members do this stuff in addition to their class work, their real jobs and in dealing with whatever is going on with their lives. These particular sports guys in particular always seem to be working when there is a significant game that they, as fans, would enjoy watching. But they’re working. They do it late at night and late in the week, even on those weeks when the campus is a ghost town because everyone else has left for a long holiday. It takes dedication to be a high functioning college student anyway, but it takes another round of that same spirit to do something as demanding as media work. And then, of course, they have to deal with me. All of this is a kind of first step into the media’s dues-paying process. It can be a thankless task, sometimes, which is why I try to thank them and show them off as much as possible. Oh, look, here’s another group to brag on:

One really nice thing that the ACM contests do is they share the submissions of each category’s finalists, so you can see the work of some of the best people in the country. I can say the students I work with are doing work that gets nominated for big national awards, sure. I can also say they are being mentioned with students in other great programs like Syracuse, Kent State, Quinnipiac and more. And we can see the great work the people in those programs are doing, too.

But mostly, being a finalist for a Pinnacle Award, that’s not a bad bullet point on a sophomore or junior’s resume.

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