Wednesday

I do not know what is happening. / maps / photo / running / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off on Don’t trust the map
4
Feb 15

Don’t trust the map

Here is a map my phone recorded:

map

That’s off of a fitness app. A company has a run app and a walk app and a walk-your-dog app (no kidding) and a cycling app. Naturally, that’s the one I got first. Why they don’t simply integrate these into one utility escapes me, but we do know that dog lobby is a powerful one. Anyway, I share that map with you because, on Monday, I tried out one of the gyms on campus I’d never been in before. It was built in the 1960s and has a track running around the outer ring.

Something about the building, though, interferes with the signal getting to the phone and the app. That’s two laps around a circular track floating above a standard gymnasium. The website tells you the distance, but the app was very much in disagreement. So I just turned it off and thought about downloading the walk-your-dog app.

Which probably would have been better than the run, or the way I’ve felt for the past two days. I still have grapefruits in my calves from the exertion, an easy five-mile run. (I knew the lap count and my general time.) Apparently I didn’t stretch enough and I’m reminded of this every time I walk down stairs right now.

Also, we have interesting little maintenance vehicles on campus. They are probably nicer than the older golf carts with plastic screens. And they have racing stripes:

stripes

I just thought you’d like to know that.

links / photo / Samford / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on No boisterous frivolity
28
Jan 15

No boisterous frivolity

At this pool, we prefer calm and restrained play:

sign

And, ladies, wear your swim caps. I love the coloring on that sign, which probably was installed and hasn’t been reconsidered in years. I love the way the light falls across it and the tile behind it. The building was built in 1961, so the sign went in sometime since then.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on campus, Samford completes purchase of Southern Progress property:

There are going to be some thorny ethical issues here. I refer you to item five under the “Rights” section of Instagram’s terms of service, “You will not remove, alter or conceal any copyright, trademark, service mark or other proprietary rights notices incorporated in or accompanying the Instagram Content and you will not reproduce, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works based on, perform, display, publish, distribute, transmit, broadcast, sell, license or otherwise exploit the Instagram Content.” There’s also a “We will not rent or sell your information to third parties outside Instagram” passage elsewhere in their terms.

Here, then, is a recent eyetracking study that says “Study participants were able to tell whether a photograph was made by a professional or an amateur 90 percent of the time.” The findings there also suggest professional photographs were twice as likely as user-generated photographs to be shared, that more time was spent with professionally generated photographs than with user-generated images and respondents rated shots for their memorability, the top 20 were done by pros.

So go on with Instagram, newsrooms.

I’m a fan of user generated content. I have a presentation on just this topic in a few weeks at the Alabama Press Association. UGC now has a valuable and, at times, vital role in the work of a news outlet. There are caveats and concerns: quality, accessibility, accuracy and, as above, issues of legality. Once you get beyond all of that — and that will take some doing — you get down to today’s example. Used in bulk like the Times did above it comes across as either a novelty (“We’re hip”) or a concession (“We couldn’t get our light painters outside to shoot the snow”).

Plus the joy of filters.

This story, which defies excerpting, just keeps on giving: Alabama police officer handcuffed, Maced fellow officer in front of confused mayor.

If you were waiting for the rest of the equation on relations with Cuba, that’s starting: Raul Castro: US must return Guantánamo for normal relations.

On Hitler’s Very Stationery is something we should all read. It’ll take you just a moment, and it is too good to excerpt. Read it.

adventures / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on My good, delayed, fortune
21
Jan 15

My good, delayed, fortune

We don’t eat Chinese terribly often, but the nice lady that runs our favorite restaurant knows us. She knows where we work and our names and, on the phone, when we tell her our orders, she says “Oh hi, Mr. Smith.” Because we are predictable. Also because she has an amazing capacity for knowing her clientele.

I noticed that we developed another little habit, one I doubt she knows. The last two times we’ve ordered takeout from there we did not eat our fortune cookies. We have four on a countertop, 2014 fortune cookies. I tried two tonight, thinking they might have gone stale, but was pleased to learn the manufacturer is using industrial grade cellophane.

This brings up a question. We all agree that the fortunes don’t apply to the person that puts them in the cookie, or just on the day they are placed there. (What? Your fortunes aren’t handwritten? One of us is doing this wrong.) Do they apply only on the day that they are given and purchased? What if I wait several days, or weeks, before I enjoy them?

I ask because of the four I could choose from tonight, these are the two fortunes I got, in sequence.

That has to mean something, right?

I choose to view this as a good thing.

adventures / Caribbean / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Seeing St. Kitts
14
Jan 15

Seeing St. Kitts

Late last night our St. Kitts plans fell through. We couldn’t find anything else we were interested in near midnight — some other things had shut down, too. Hey, not every stop can be your best stop.

We did get a magnet for the refrigerator, however.

St. Kitts has Basseterre Circus, a smaller, Caribbean version of Picadilly. They also have a Big Ben, a four-sided, cast iron clock in the center square:

Big Ben

My best girl, at dinner:

The Yankee

adventures / Caribbean / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Touring Aruba
7
Jan 15

Touring Aruba

We got off the Eclipse and took a bus out to the famed California lighthouse on the far Aruban shore. It was built between 1914-1916. Topping out at 100 feet, the stone was quarried on the island. The lighthouse is named after this part of the island, which was named after a 1910 shipwreck. The SS California was traveling from Liverpool to Central America and people on board were having a party when the ship ran aground at midnight. The next day the locals saw the damage and waded out to pick up the vessel’s cargo: merchandise, furniture, clothes and other provisions. They took it all down to Oranjestad to sell it. And now there’s the famous lighthouse:

California Lighthouse

Anybody can show you the sharp, focused picture. It seems more daring to take a fuzzy shot as iconography.

The bus didn’t come back to pick us up. A different, entirely random bus, with the business model of picking up stranded tourists, did the job.

We got back to the cruise ship, hired Lisette, a wonderful and sweet taxi driver:

Lisette

And she gave us a great tour with views of the island we otherwise would have never, ever seen. Lisette told us all about the demographics and much of the history and the current government and even the natural remedies that Arubans use. She took us to her brother’s house so we could see iguanas. Our 90-minute tour turned into an almost three-hour experience. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who loves their home more than she does. It was a treat to see it with her.

She showed us all the good spots, like this inlet:

shoreline

That’s between the Bushiribana ruins — once a gold smelter used to extract gold from the nearby hills — and what was formerly the premiere tourist attraction, the now-fallen Natural Bridge, which collapsed in 2005.

Just down from there was a rock beach where people build miniature rock cairns. It is a long, wide stretch of shoreline filled with the hopes and dreams and whimsy of a great many people. I built one, the first one I’ve ever made.

rocks

Most peaceful, at ease moment you could imagine.

Our day in Aruba:

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