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Auburn / IU / photo / television / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Happy February
1
Feb 22

Happy February

Welcome to the pivotal month. It’s starting out cold, it’ll be cold throughout, and it’ll end that way. But the length of it is perfect, reminding us that all of this will end, eventually. (And in just 10 or 12 more weeks the earth will have shifted enough to feel a little warmth from the sun.) Halfway through the month, we’ll be halfway through it all.

I don’t believe in groundhogs, because they didn’t go to meteorology school. Besides, historical observation and the most rudimentary understanding of planetary science, atmospheric science, oceanography and hydrology, tells me all I need to know. It’s a long way off, spring, but it seems important to stay positive on the first day of the month.

It’s also an honest month, but that’s someone else’s line.

It’s even in the skies! Positivity!

Which means a lot after the Friday snows, and this week’s forecast. There will be snow. And also ice. Since Sunday the weather forecasts have been saying “We’re not saying how bad it’s going to be, but it’s going to be bad. We’ll tell you later, sure, but go ahead and buy a bunch of batteries and bunch of french toast supplies.”

They were talking about up to 10 inches of snow, and a few inches of ice. We’ll see what becomes of it, Wednesday night and Thursday morning, but they’re refining those projections down a bit.

I need to catch you up on television. I remembered that tonight while we were in the television studio.

Here’s a sports show all about swimming and diving.

Here’s a morning show!

And here’s a show dissecting a short film. (It’s also a show about prepositions.)

It was news tonight.

Those shows will be online tomorrow and, well, you know the drill by now.

The daily duds: This feature wraps up tomorrow, because it hasn’t proved useful or entertaining in any way. But, hey, tonight it was top-ranked Auburn hosting rival Alabama, so I had to break out the orange and blue.

Auburn won, by quite a bit. Must be the neckwear. And, for those guys, it’s one game closer to the really critical month.

Friday / iPhone / video — Comments Off on Everybody’s snowy for the weekend
28
Jan 22

Everybody’s snowy for the weekend

Snowed today. I managed to step outside and see this many seconds of it.

After which my phone returned to the repair shop. Because taking it in last weekend just wasn’t enough! I had the battery replaced, the most cost-effective upgrade you can perform on an iPhone. This is the third battery in this phone, which has served me well for five years or so.

Last weekend I asked the repair folks to clean the charging port because, in addition to the old battery not holding a charge, I could barely get the phone to receive a charge. No matter how patient you are, this eventually becomes frustrating. It has had almost-deletirious effects on a few work days. If the phone dies in the middle of the night because it won’t charge, you see, I have no alarm.

Which is a strategic problem, I know. I should use more than one alarm! But let me ask you, early risers, how many alarms should I use? I run three on my phone.

A further strategic problem, sure. Three alarms are great. Putting them all on one platform is a shortcoming.

After I struggled through how to do many of the various things required of the day that sometimes require a phone — messaging, dual authentication, taking photographs, whatever — my phone went back to the phonecanic. Clean the charing port, please. I’m sure they prefer the term “technician,” but you don’t get the honorific until you complete the job. My lovely bride dropped it off in the afternoon, while I was in the middle of a Zoom meeting. They said it’d be ready after 4 p.m., which seems to be the rote answer. She picked it up just after 5 p.m., and the phone was charged to 100 percent. And it’s holding a charge, so maybe the second time was the charm.

Which, again, if that’s as inconvenient as your day gets, it’s a pretty great day. And we insist on great days on Fridays.

I left the office at 5 p.m. for a change. The snow had stopped and the sun was almost threatening to break through the overcast sky. That it had stopped was great because there was no evidence of any winter weather road treatment taking place. And my car slipped and slid and arrived slowly and safely in my garage.

At the house I experienced the Friday burst of energy. I shoveled the driveway, the sidewalks and part of the walking trail. (People need to see the entrance, which runs right by our yard.) In doing all of that I learned that the hat I got this Christmas is indulgently effective. If it is cold where you are, and you have to be outside, get that hat.

(I’m leaving it in my car. It’s going everywhere with me.)

I emptied the dishwasher. I put together a new little ottoman that arrived today.

The ottoman will sit at the foot of the bed. It’ll hold sheets and blankets. Between that and the new mattress — after two nights of sleep I can report it feels like a cloud, mostly because you’re sleeping on the mattress, rather than in it — the bedroom feels almost entirely new.

It’s enough to make me want to go to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.

(Update: I did not.)

food / IU / photo / television / Thursday / video — Comments Off on How’d you sleep?
27
Jan 22

How’d you sleep?

We purchased a new mattress, and it arrived yesterday. My lovely bride got the thing upstairs without me. She took the old mattress off the box spring, put the new one on last night. A mattress, you would think, is one of those things you want to go down to the showroom. Kick the tires, lay on it for 36 seconds, and all of that. Well, where has that ever gotten you? A mattress that works for a few years before you buy a foam topper, which works for a few years. Eventually your sleep patterns leave impressions in all of that, so the foam topper comes off, and the now old mattress isn’t much better. And how many times have you done all of that?

So she found an online service. Good reviews. Excellent return policy, and time will tell about their guarantee language — and whether the company has any longevity under this business model. She did this unilaterally, because the old one has been bothering her the most, she’s a bit more particular, and that’s how it works. Whatever makes you, quite literally, more comfortable, dear.

The new mattress, I learned last night, is a little taller. You need a running start. And as we discussed this afternoon, the biggest and most immediately noticeable thing is that you can just, sorta, roll over. Not every muscle group needs to be activated to make a common turn from back to side.

If the new mattress does that alone it’d be a win for internet merchants everywhere.

As for the first night’s sleep part, it seemed unremarkable. Pretty much the ideal, right?

All that sunshine from the last few days has regressed to the mean. And that’s just … mean.

The day, being a Thursday, slowed down a bit compared to the earlier part of the week, and I managed to put in just eight hours, so it the net perception was: null. Many people worked from home because of close contacts to Covid-positive people, and I have to figure out how to do that, without invoking karmic problems.

I spent part of the morning working on a podcast. Today we enjoyed our usual once-a-week Chick-fil-A takeout lunch. The afternoon’s highlight was probably cleaning up some Google Docs and preparing for a Friday morning meeting.

After a few days of doing everything rapidly it is nice to luxuriate in spending too much time on one thing at a time, is the point.

The television folks have uploaded two of their most recent sports shows for you. Here are all the latest highlights on all the coolest sports around here.

And here’s another sports show, featuring different perspectives and probably more fun than you should have outdoors in Indiana in January.

There will be another studio talk show online tomorrow. And another simulcast TV-radio project after that. There are also all of the online chats they do. The sports media students simply don’t stop anymore. It’s impressive when you consider the rest of the demands on their time.

The daily duds: This feature is going away because I realized that the goal was pointless. I was trying to document looks so I wouldn’t reproduce them too quickly, but that’s impossible without a proper indexing system. So today I’m just showing off this lovely pocket square my in-laws got me for Christmas.

Also, that’s one of my favorite sports coats. It has character and comfort, which is to say that, once you get past the print, it’s super soft.

And tonight’s dinner, because it looks healthy enough to brag about.

That’s three nights in a row of healthy things. We’ll have to blow this up tomorrow.

IU / journalism / photo / site / television / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on We return to television
26
Jan 22

We return to television

This was the view the first thing this morning, as I walked into the building thinking of the to do list of seven big items that needed attention today. These were the seven things that needed to be done, around all of the small things that sneak into your day and chip away at your time and attention. Somehow, those seven things became a list of 10 things.

I managed to get eight of those things done over the course of the day, and pronounced that a win as I headed into the studio this evening.

That’s a sports show, because it’s Wednesday. All of their shows will be uploaded later this week. I’ll be sure to share them here.

Meanwhile, here’s a show the news division shot last night. They got everything in they’d planned, and they ended on time. Now we’ll start adding extra things back in.

I’ve learned a few things working with student media over the last 14 years. One of them is this. Resets are fun — they haven’t been in the studio since December, and they’ve changed directors, too — but building on momentum is an encouraging sign of the program’s health. I’m proud of them for that.

Patron saint of IU journalism, Ernie Pyle, would be proud of them too. He told me tonight that I can’t complain about the long hours — a 10-hour day, today, after yesterday’s 11-hour day — because he’s on deadline and, as you can see, Ernie is still banging keys on his Corona.

He’ll be there when I go in gray and early tomorrow, too. Because he’s a statue.

The daily duds: Pictures of clothes I put here to, hopefully, help avoid embarrassing scheme repeats.

It is difficult to make this suit work.

But I occasionally do enjoy trying.

I’ve lately realized this is a silly feature, and it’s going away, but not today. I’m going to end on a strong one.

cycling / Monday / movies / photo / video — Comments Off on ‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’
10
Jan 22

‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’

Two years ago, plague.

Last year, plague. And locusts.

This year, plague. And also …

The birds, the noisy noisy birds. The messy, messy birds.

You should see the sidewalks. But it’s better if you don’t have to. And if it rained. Or someone rolled a high pressure washer outside.

Anyway, pretty day out there. But quite cold. This is a tradeoff I’m willing to accept.

Oh, and hey look! My new desk chair showed up Saturday. I put it together Saturday. The cats helped. And, right now, they’re taking turns checking out my stuff.

I’m assuming that it will prove comfortable, once the animals let me sit in the chair that I … just bought … for myself.

Which must mean it is time for cat pictures. Here’s Phoebe at rest.

And here she is, taking a nap. Yesterday, you see, was a serious sleep day.

And here’s Poseidon, wondering what I’ve done with his new chair.

He sat in it right there most of the day. After, that is, I assembled the chair, let him sit in it downstairs, spun him around a bunch, then carried the chair, and cat, upstairs. As soon as he got down, hours later, I put it in the office, and shut the door. He is very confused.

This weekend he has also discovered the joys of the space heater.

This is going to become a thing. We’re creating monsters.

As I typed this, Phoebe returned to the same position for another nap. Clearly I should be doing this at my desk and not in a recliner.

Monsters are what we are creating.

I had a nice punchy little ride yesterday, this is a part of Watopia, Zwift’s fictionalized world.

Which explains how I’m underwater there. Some of their environments are simulacrums of the real world. You can ride in a few villages of France. There’s a former world championship site in Virginia. You can ride in Central Park. You can also ride through the futuristic sky bridges of New York.

Or you ride around and up, and through, a volcano. Here’s my avatar coming down from the top of the volcano.

Of course there’d be a full moon and lava spewing. I often wonder, when I’m on this course, what it would be like if you had a different lunar phase as part of the reward. And how difficult to ride through the overwhelming presence of sulfur.

Your avatar rides, literally, on a road that goes through a volcano.

Which is a good metaphor for some people’s Mondays. Not mine. But Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Friday mornings? More meetings then you’d normally find on a volcano, though. Sometimes there is a sulfur smell, though, but, thankfully, minimal ash.

At least the birds stay in the trees.

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