video « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

video

Friday / Samford / video — Comments Off
29
Oct 10

Kitteh tennis

She does this in front of us; who knows what she does when we’re gone.Today was a writing day. I wrote on an archival project I’d like to do. I dreamed up notes for a book I hope to write after my dissertation. I wrote some work stuff. I wrote emails.

I enjoyed this video:

The Yankee and I wrote a book chapter that was released this year where we touched on that subject. And, no, that book isn’t expensive at all.

Out for pizza tonight, but the place was too crowded. And the first waitress we saw was dressed as Gene Simmons in Kiss regalia. So we walked down the street to the burger shop where the waitress was dressed as apathy. Wrapped up the night sitting on the sofa, watching football and trying to figure out this new tennis game Allie plays.

Have you ever seen that? What does it mean?

Alabama / iPhone / Thursday / Tumblr / video — 1 Comment
28
Oct 10

Where I do another phone experiment

That’s my first ever attempt at time lapse photography. This was done on my iPhone using the free Gorillacam app. I learned two valuable lessons.

First, you need a stable mount. No, this didn’t interfere with the drive — promise — but wrapping the phone up in a Gorilla tripod isn’t the best solution. If anyone has an iPhone tripod idea, I’m listening.

The second lesson is shooting a drive isn’t the most dynamic choice. I didn’t expect it would be high art, but I got a lot of trees on a beautiful day. Somehow my time lapse managed to just miss every interesting thing — produce shacks, abandoned buildings, oncoming traffic, bridges with character — along the way.

But, I can now make a time lapse project. With the Gorillacam you can choose the number of pictures and the time increments. You get a bunch of pictures on your phone that you have to produce yourself. So, import, add to iMovie, edit the clips and add some music.

I went into Garageband and threw some beats together, made a few subtle edits and put it all together.

Once you get the workflow down this wouldn’t take long. The art, aside from the subject selection, is how long to make each image. And I’d guess that varies. Obviously, I don’t yet have the deft touch required for that.

Critiqued that study I mentioned yesterday. Here were my observations: the terms “young” and “old” were poorly conceived, the terms short and long (story length) were poorly defined and some of the hypotheses were more intuitive rather than conceptual. Essentially the study was about how story length and pacing impacted comparative recall in the case of young adults and older adults.

Young adults were defined as 18-22 — typical for an on-campus study where college age students are easy to draft as participants. Older adults were defined as 25-81. First of all, by this study’s definition I am old. And while I take playful exception to that, I argued that the idea of pacing and length in stories doesn’t vary that much between these simple measures. The median age in the older adults category was 44, but the remote control has been ubiquitous for most of those adults lives and their viewing habits have been conditioned to contemporary pacing, cuts, edits and story lengths just like the younger viewers. I’d buy the 81-year-old’s experience was difference, but not that the 25-year-old had that much of a marked change than a 22-year-old.

The idea of story length had some overlap. Stories were short if they were between 15 and 83 seconds. Long stories were defined between 40 and 185 seconds. Story length is an important consideration when you discuss cognition, recall and cognitive overload, so it is important to the study. But I can’t think of any good reason why a story that is 46 seconds could be called short, but a story that is 40 seconds could be called long.

And so on. It is a good paper and the results are compelling and practicable. It is one in a series by the Indiana scholars of which I’ve read several papers, so following the progression of their research is interesting.

The rest of the day was more reading, more writing. There was a trip to the grocery story, where I met a young man who was very excited about the football game this weekend. I looked for a business card I’ve hidden from myself. I’ve run out of places to search. Took a late evening nap — one of those drift away during the commercial break and wake up later in the same show affairs — which was wonderful until the 10 minutes after waking up where nothing made much sense.

Naps are funny that way. I seldom wake up disoriented in the morning, but a good nap leaves me confused. But it was refreshing, and now I’m wide awake. That’s always good.

And so I made the time lapse project. But that’s not all. I added a few more pictures to the Tumblr feed. That site is making a comeback and you can follow it there or see it on the right side of this page. The Glom covers will be added momentarily. And, of course, there will be something interesting tomorrow, too.

journalism / links / memories / Monday / Samford / video — Comments Off
25
Oct 10

I have 31 slides

Of the PowerPoint variety, that is. If only I had 31 real slides. There would be straight slides, fast slides, curly ones, one or two you could climb up. Our yard would be even more popular with the neighborhood kids.

They’d have to get in line.

Except for that slide that should be renamed The Stick. You run across them every now and then. The slide that burns, rather than exhilarates. And if the sun is out, there’s no saving the skin. The guy who’s in charge of sand blasting the slides must have taken a long lunch that day. That guy took a lot of long lunches.

I don’t know if there is a formally documented ratio of good slides to bad ones. Safe bet if I owned 31 of them I’d get a lemon somewhere in that mix.

No, instead I have 31 slides on graphic storytelling. Charts and graphs and maps and things. I’ll talk about those tomorrow, and hope that all of the graphics on my slides are accurate. A mistake in a pie chart would be embarrassing.

Warm. Sticky. Muggy. A little gross, actually. Somehow the part of the brain that keeps polite social constructs, like calendars, is communicating with the lesser senses and glands. What might be an acceptable bit of weather for early or late summer just feels wrong as October rounds third.

Everywhere, windows that had been wedged up for weeks were lowered today. The air must return because the soggy towel that was hanging in the air outside was coming into the more pleasant environments.

Weather being the most temporal of things we consider, we naturally keep records of a lot of it. Today broke a 70-year-old high temperature mark. Sunday marked a record as well. Tomorrow could, too. Eighty-five isn’t especially hot, just in the wrong place.

The rain is coming behind it. After that, the cooler temperatures. And then we’ll start dreaming for spring.

As is required I will now post my Walkman memories. Thirty years later, Sony has shut down the line. They’ve remained popular in Asia, even as they fell out of favor in the United States, which means the news doesn’t impact us much. After Walkman came Discmans, Minidiscs and then mp3 players, and they all had that same delicious promise of transportable, personal music.

And they were slimmer. The Walkman, even when it was new, always felt bulky. That came with the medium, but this was in a time when something bulky could mean Something Substantial.

They were expensive, too. And we were somewhere in the neighborhood of happily poor. So when I finally got one, probably four or five years into the American version of the Walkman’s popularity before I got my first knockoff. It was blocky. The headphones had bright orange mufflers. The adjustment bar didn’t work the same way as the Walkman’s, but ultimately I thought it worked better.

I loved the clip on the back of the thing, but disliked it’s inability to keep the player on my belt. Those bright orange foam mufflers wore out in a hurry and the plastic edges of the headphones themselves weren’t exactly pleasant. I probably went through more headphones than I did players.

I’ve done that in every medium since, come to think of it.

I believe I might have received that first Walkman knockoff at my great-grandmother’s for a Christmas session I only vaguely remember. I remember playing it a lot, mostly at my grandparents’. I liked to be outside all the time and there were often no children around my age, so I listened to a lot of the dreadful music we all listened to when were young and impressionable.

I remember borrowing a neighborhood kid’s tape and I thought I broke it. It slowed waaay down, and I thought I was going to have to buy the guy a replacement copy. So I asked my uncle, because he’s a very savy man, what the problem might be.

“Let me hear it,” he said.

So I described it to him, out of fear that the pop-rock ‘n’ roll that was on the tape might not meet with his approval. The drums seemed to work right, but the guitars were dragging. My uncle suspected I did not ruin the tape — I was playing it constantly — but had worn out the batteries instead. He was right, I was relieved. Apparently I’d never had a bad battery experience before that.

Told you, we were happily poor.

I think I owned two tapes at the time, Beat It and a Beach Boy’s greatest hits. Not a bad start to an overly indulgent collection.

Eventually we’ll decide we don’t need to own things like music or books in a tangible form. I especially like my books, enjoy my liner notes and the stacking and ordering of things. I might be one of the last people to accept that day. I think it’ll come when I can have access to every book or every song just floating up in the ether. Everything at your fingertips, everything of superior quality, for free at my every whim. Maybe without even having to even type a series of keywords.

Then we can all get Billy Idol or Symphony 41 whenever the mood strikes us. And, if you think about it, we’re getting really close.

Check out this video:

The Power of Music from Life File Videos on Vimeo.

Leslie-Jean Thornton, a journalism professor from Arizona State found that today. I love documentaries like this, the ones that try to say as much with the edits and production choices as the raw content itself. There’s plenty of character in 90-year-old Jack Leroy Tueller’s hands and face and that powerful two-minute story, just one of a life full of memories could be told in a lot of different ways.

I’d like to think I’ll have the chance to shoot some more of those (I got to take part in one WW2 oral history last December), even if they are brief anecdotes like this. (Maybe when I get my dissertation under control next year … ) Tueller has more. And more still.

“Veterans should not retire. They should tell everyone who listens or reads what a wonderful life this is, and what a wonderful country this is.”

That’s a guy who’s mother was essentially killed by his drunken father. And then he turned six. He discovered the trumpet a few years later, worked as a janitor through school. Then he had his trumpet stolen, so he spent his tuition money on a new one. Then the war came. And that’s the start of a wonderful life.

He’s right, you know.

He got married, went off to Europe. Flew one plane, one single plane, through 140 missions. He flew in Korea, retired a colonel, has been married almost 70 years. Oh, and there’s this:

While visiting China, he participated in a test of the repaired aircraft by flying a MiG-21 in a mock dogfight. He was 78 years old and hadn’t piloted an airplane in years when he went up against skilled young pilots that day. The young pilots performed various evasive maneuvers thinking Tueller would try to stay on their tails. In a concession to age, he didn’t take the bait. He waited until they were done with their acrobatics and then came out of the sun and beat them.

The world might be full of men and women like that, but you’d always take a few more.

Auburn / football / iPhone / photo / Twitter / video / weekend — 1 Comment
23
Oct 10

Eight and oh!

Strike a pose, Cameron Newton. 24-17 and Auburn is the lone SEC team still undefeated.

This is the Twitter feed during the LSU-Auburn game. Because Twitter will drop these comments eventually, and brilliant play and wry observations should be remembered forever. Pictures are included, as are after-the-fact thoughts included in bold.

One tailgating party has a musician playing the Van Helsing song from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It is really good.

At the RBD library they are playing Brickhouse. If you walk up those steps on the side of the parking deck and just as you reach the landing you here the baseline kick in you may count yourself as having a good day. You might then knock over a Direct TV dish, as I did. And then apologize to the people who’s tailgate you’ve just disturbed. They were nice people.

Another day, another blimp. I also counted a light wing plane, a helicopter, two small hawks and a yellow butterfly. And also Nova, who flew right overhead. I’ve got great pictures in the photo gallery.

I smell corndog people!

Fighter planes overhead, a tank under center. Let’s play!

No better place than Jordan-Hare Stadium today!

@Z_Etheridge4‘s third down interception return to midfield sets the tone.

@cameronnewton laughs at your idea of broken plays.

Let’s review: Terrell Zachery, Mike Dyer, Cam Newton. TOUCHDOWN AUBURN 7-0.

What do Cam Newton and Heisman trophy winner Pat Sullivan have in common? They’ve scored the same amount of TDs in one season. And of course Newton would have that bit of poetry later in the game, and still four more games. Sullivan’s record stood for four decades. How old will we be when someone breaks Newton’s eventual number?

Lucky there wasn’t an unfair decapitation of the quarterback penalty there. How did he get up from that? Lucky, too, there was no roughing the quarterback penalty on that deadball dead lift and body slam. I suppose you could argue no one heard the whistle, but everyone else on the field stopped and I heard the referee blow it dead from the stands. Dodged a bullet there.

RT @wennybrown: Announcer: “Clock. Management. Problems. Where have we heard that before??”

Auburn’s defense holds, LSU settles for a figgie. 7-3.

Just so you know, there are a couple of Superman shirts in the north end zone, to which Auburn is now driving.

@wesbyrum boots a field goal. He is now Auburn’s all time leading scorer. 10-7.

Or 10-3. Accurate and it sounds better. Pardon me, we’re in the section of the stadium that goes delirious for field goals.

Finally get a kickoff out of the back of the end zone … and have to re-kick. Penalties still must be a concern, this just being one more example of something that a championship caliber team needs to cure. This resulted in a net of 16-yard gain for the Bengal Tigers. They’d drive to midfield and then punt, starting that sequence of drives Auburn began at the goalline. A competent offense takes advantage of this 16 yard gift.

Nick Fairley does not like Cajun food. He does like bayou quarterbacks.

@CameronNewton would run for class president, but he is too busy running through LSU.

@supurmario27 also makes it look easy.

Auburn, from their own 1, slices through a generous LSU defense, but the field goal try is missed left.

Do not make Nick Fairley mad. He will only haunt your daydreams, too.

“Hi. There’s no one within 10 yards of me, I don’t need this football.” How many of these gifts will the Auburn team (generally) and the secondary (specifically) get this year? How deep does this karma cache go?

The Miles Quatum Singularity: four minute drives last three days, and refs stop the game clock for reasons they can’t explain.

10-10 at the half. This game should be SO much different. Corollary: it will be in the second half.

Mike Dyer is a cannonball. Darvin Adams is, in fact, smooth.

@cameronnewton is coming to Baton Rouge to walk old ladies across the street. He will score many touchdowns in the process.

@cameronnewton runs 50 yards for a score, runs upstairs to review the play and back to the field to call it a touchdown. Should have sent a poet.

Little known ref fact: side judges are Bama fans. Not a conspiracy theory, but fact. He waved and we saw the colors peep through his uniform.

Best not to talk about the fumble. The only team that can beat Auburn’s offense is Auburn’s offense.

Fear the LSU kick team. Everything else appears manageable.

Aubie had a Trojan horse contraption. Mike the Tiger tore the head off. Ahh, the pageantry of football.

Worst spot of the game. The ref’s stripes are purple and gold. This being the Kodi Burns forward progress abomination. The fair reaction: this is the an unintended consequence of better camera angles and, ultimately, the huge network deals the SEC has signed. Everyone sees the officiating. Officiating has always been hit or miss, of course, but it isn’t improving as the game gets faster. There have always been calls made and others missed. Now every play can be closely scrutinized, even as unfair as that criticism of officials may (or may not) be. The unfair reaction: is that guy from Louisiana?

The fans are wishing the officials a booooootiful Halloween.

Someone text the Auburn coaches and tell them Lee can’t throw on the run.

A hasty tilt-shift shot of the crowd at Jordan-Hare.

What is this? Every year of SEC football before Gus Malzahn showed up? #fieldpositionfootball

@cameronnewton is not an Ent, but he did inspire Tolkien.

Mike Dyer also plays rugby.

And we start the fourth quarter feeling in control, but Les Miles is eating chlorox pellets. There is no control.

Auburn has 364 total yards through three quarters. 278 of them on the ground. LSU has 192 total yards.

Les Miles strikes with his first bout of successful irrationality. Let us hope it is not diarrheal. 17-17.

Third and long? Run a draw!

This game now enters Bizzaroland, population: the SEC. Les Miles, mayor.

@wisematize, a Texas Tech man, asks “When did you re-hire Tuberville?”

@wisematize In a moment I’ll tell you we were just doing what we do. Whatever that is this week.

Nick Fairley dislikes the color yellow. He thinks you look stupid in purple, too.

TOUCHDOWN AUBURN! Onterio McCalebb! 70 yards! 24-17!

Auburn over 500 yards of offense tonight so far, the fourth SEC game in a row the Tigers have done that. Never before. Savor it, because it can’t last forever. A few more years isn’t too much to ask, is it Gus?

6:10 left on the clock. Just to counteract Les Miles Auburn needs a 6:35 drive.

This place is the thunder dome.

This is a fourth quarter defense, designed to wear you down early and tear out your heart late.

If @cameronnewton doesn’t win the Heisman the Eufaula Tribune will give him the inaugural Camsman Trophy.

Eight and OH! Auburn sits all alone atop the SEC the Tigers get ready for Ole Miss. 24-17.

On to vict’ry! I believe in Auburn (and it has nothing to do with football).

Gene Chizik just leaped the rail to get to the student body. And the Heisman chants are echoing to the Downtown Athletic Club.

It is remarkable how many people are lingering in Jordan-Hare Stadium.

This post-game video on @AUHD is great.

Like that.

Auburn / Friday / Pie Day / video — Comments Off
22
Oct 10

A little news

The best part of the day was a wildfire. So we’ll just start and end there. I “committed journalism” via cell phone.

The video made it on the front page of al.com and on their new Montgomery section’s front page. I’m told it beat local television, which was useful considering the seven or eight miles of traffic that backed up behind the smoke and emergency trucks. Remember what we say: we’re all reporters now. Links are here and here.

If I knew they’d want the video I would have narrated the scene. (Note to self …) Anyway, it seems, though, that a truck hauling a trailer threw some sparks into the crisp and tender grass (we’re in a significant drought) and started a couple of blazes. It took more than three hours to get it all under control, which appeared to be just happening as we passed through.

The Yankee and I are going to a home run derby tonight. Present and former Auburn baseball stars are swinging for the fences for charity. We’ll hear the wonderful ping of college ball and then come home for dinner and pie at home. That will be a delightful evening.

I hope your weekend is just as grand. But without the fire.