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Auburn / Friday / iPhone / photo / Samford / video — Comments Off
4
Feb 11

Just another Friday

Woke up to the rain, and the rain may have it. The rain did have it, all day. All through hours of reading and countless Emails detailing the details of things which ought to be detailed and still more things lacking in detail. But, in the interregnum between Emails details will form.

My inbox is now sending me notices that I’m running out of space. This must not stand. Tomorrow I’m deleting the junk and the sent mail and the trash, first thing. I need the space so that I can receive further information about the details.

I’ve booked rooms for an upcoming conference. Finally just picked a place, now that I have a headcount. We’ll be staying two miles away, meaning we can put on the game faces on the drive over.

Even the hotel booking requires more details. I’m told I must procure a special form, call again and fax it to the hotel desk.

And since the hotel has accepted my AAA discount I had to call to inquire on the whereabouts of my new membership card. My AAA membership was given to me as a gift from my step-father last year and I’d thought of letting it lapse. But then the College Park Battery Debacle changed my mind. So I renewed the membership, but never received the card.

Turns out they have our old address in the system. Which is unfortunate, of course, because the post office, in cost cutting measures, has committed themselves to forwarding only some of our mail. It takes nine-to-12 business days to get the new card. That might be cutting it close. So they’re going to Email me a temporary card. That’s probably going to take eight business days.

We busted a camera in December. Apparently it was mounted on a tripod, but the tripod had no counter weight. A gust of wind knocked it over, and gravity did the rest. The LCD screen took the brunt of the blow.

These things will happen. These things, I’ve learned today, will be expensive.

It took two separate efforts and seven phone calls to find the right people to give me details, though. The guy in Illinois who does the work says he’s complained to Panasonic about the price. I’m sure he wasn’t the first. I know he won’t be the last. Finally we can get it fixed, though.

And the day went on like that, accomplishing the little things so they can be moved out of the way for bigger things. It seems backwards, somehow, but that’s the way of it some days.

I wrapped up my evening making more recruiting phone calls. That’s a fun thing, calling high school students looking to make their big college decision. Many of them are very excited that you’ve called. It is time-consuming, though. You think you’re making great progress and then you look over the spreadsheet to see just how far you have to go. But at least the young students are usually very interested in hearing from you.

After dinner we went to the gymnastics meet. Auburn didn’t have their best outing tonight, but it was enough to take a comeback victory over struggling Kentucky, 194.625-194.450. Here’s senior Rachel Inniss, striking a Heisman pose. I wonder if anyone has mentioned she’s doing it backward.

Inniss, according the university release, claimed her fifth individual title of the season and her third on floor, tying her career-best 9.900 for the fifth time. So maybe the backward Heisman is working out alright.

iPhone / photo / Samford / Thursday / video — Comments Off
3
Feb 11

Ice? Ice.

That was after lunch. There was a little bit of falling ice before barbecue with Brian. And it really picked up on my way back to campus. By the time I’d parked I was faced with having to walk through that.

Two hours later, the ground looked like this:

That’s just ice. The sidewalks were slippery and the roads were getting worse. The university canceled classes, including mine, to close early. That decision was just in time. After putting a note on the door, gathering up all of my things and stopping by the boss’ office I made it off campus with pretty much everybody else. It took me half an hour to go the 1.8 miles from the campus to the interstate. The roads got a little slippery and everyone in the city left work at precisely the same time.

After that, apparently, everything got worse. There were plenty of reports of bad roads, fender-benders, an accident with a fatality up north and lots of stories of no progress on the roads.

I found one slippery spot, on an overpass, and soon after outran the traffic and then the freezing rain.

So I spent the evening making recruiting phone calls for our department. One very nice lady asked how the weather was.

“Well, today isn’t the right day to ask that question … ”

She laughed. They were getting ready for it to land on them, she said.

So I worked through the evening on phone calls until it got to late to do that. We had dinner with our friends Shane and Brian. Shane’s father is in town, and he walked in with his Airborne veterans hat on. He cuts an imposing figure, but is a nice guy. Turns out his grandfather was close friends with a former president of Samford. Small world.

journalism / Samford / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
2
Feb 11

You did not see your shadow

Also, it was National Signing Day. I (re-)wrote this piece for The War Eagle Reader and received a few nice comments.

I must be doing something right, even the spam comments that come into this site are complimentary. I guess the plan of attack has changed: kill ’em with kindness. Better than ads for pills and bank notices. Not as good as the fake Rolex ones, though.

Lots of meetings today. Had a long sit-down about our website. I wrote a two page memo on all of the changes we’re about to make. And then there was a newspaper meeting, where we marked up pages of newsprint. This is the first paper of the new semester, which is always a difficult thing. How does one write about things that happened days or even weeks ago with a new angle?

The next two weeks of the paper will surround Step Sing, the song and dance revue that features about 20 percent of the student population. At least they know what they’ll be writing about.

Met with the boss, did a little reading and a little writing. A lot of grading.

The students in the class I’m teaching refine their resume over the course of the semester and I’ve been compiling notes to help with the task. Resumes are both tedious and important, of course. I talk about clarity, brevity, accuracy, consistency.

Many of the resumes I looked through tonight were quite good. Now the drum beat will grow louder. “Get involved. Work at the campus paper, the campus television station, or the magazines or radio.”

This is an introductory class in our curriculum, of course, but it is fun watching students realize the importance of that idea. Journalism and public relations and broadcasting are careers built on examples of quality, so we encourage students to get involved early and keep working on campus until they graduate and move into the professional realm.

Which is why I graded resumes until almost midnight.

The groundhog says there are 13 more weeks of that.

iPhone / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
1
Feb 11

February 2011

What happened to January?

history / journalism / links / Monday / video — Comments Off
31
Jan 11

Link filler

Mondays, apparently, have become my least interesting day. You’re naturally riveted six days ago. OK, maybe five. (Four? Two? Any?) That being the case, we can all forgive a Monday that is spent buried in a computer screen or a book. So I’m just falling back on Twitter, here, which is something I haven’t in a long while.

And since it is Monday, and since Monday is history day around here, the On This Day section rides again!

In 1990 McDonald’s opened their first restaurant in Moscow. That means most of the college students have been able to eat a Big Mac in Russia their entire life, had they visited Pushkin Square. Here’s the scene. They serve an estimated 30,000 people a day.

In 1971 Apollo 14 launched.

They were the third mission on the moon. They almost had to try the landing without radar because of a software glitch, but an in the nick of time fix put them down closer to their original target than any of their fellow astronauts.

This was also the trip with the famous moon trees. Five of them are planted in Alabama. I’ve been near four and didn’t even realize it. Need to fix that.

Fifty-three years ago Explorer 1, the first satellite from the United States made orbit. Sure, Sputnik got there first by three months, but the value was largely propaganda. Otherwise the thing was not quite useless. It helped with some atmosphere detection and then tumbled out of the sky in three months. Explorer, on the other hand, transmitted data for almost four months and stayed in orbit for 12 years. It achieved more than 58,000 orbits, says Wikipedia, and began a series of 90 Explorer satellites.

Sputnik moment? Let’s try another Explorer moment.

And way back when, in 1930, 3M starting marketing scotch tape. Did you know? The Scotch Tape Test measures the adhesion strength of conducting polymers adhered to indium tin oxide glass slides? Neither did anyone else. Also, it can make X-rays.

Other links: Sometimes I like to find the outrage of the day and consider it’s relative merits to the big scheme of things. When you do that, you realize modern life could be a lot worse.

Dan Cathy Statement from Chick-fil-A on Vimeo.

Who else wants waffle fries?

This is a bad idea.

Pay walls! More pay walls! Also, and still, a bad idea. The problem for the industry being that there aren’t a lot of other prominent and viable ideas at the moment.

Finally I watched American Pickers tonight. (They aren’t letting you embed the episode for some strange reason.) Love that show. Love the premise, love the show, love the thing the guys do. Everything about it is fun. \

They subtitled a Kentucky man, suggesting he was unintelligible. I found this to be unnecessary. But, before I became my own outrage of the day, I called my Connecticut bride into the room and played clips of the man for her. “Don’t look, just listen.” She couldn’t make him out. So what do I know?