Wednesday

journalism / links / podcast / Wednesday — Comments Off on The week with bad titles, part three
2
Dec 20

The week with bad titles, part three

I forgot to include this here earlier this week. So, without prelude, give us the fancy old-fashioned banner.

I talked with Dr. Siering a week or so ago about pedagogy and remote learning and all these sorts of things that faculty and students are dealing with just now. It’s a good episode if you’re a faculty member or a student. (And you know they all stop through here.) It might be only for them. But, nevertheless, we’re covering all the bases.

And now I have to go out and find a few more people to interview. Should be fun! What topics should we cover?

We haven’t filled out this space with other stories recently, let’s do that now.

Birmingham woman raising 12 kids after sister, brother-in-law die from COVID

Already raising seven biological children ranging in age from 2 to 17 as a working, single mother, the 40-year-old Birmingham resident’s last conversation with her dying sister in UAB Hospital about the arrangements for their kids was no longer hypothetical.

[…]

And her sister’s children are not without anxieties of their own, she said. On top of the grief of losing both their parents, the children are reluctant to go outside out of fear of catching COVID-19, Francesca McCall said.

But all things considered, she said, “We’re doing OK. They have their [tough] moments at times, processing everything.”

The GoFundMe account has raised $40,000+ since that story was published.

These seem like charming people. Philly’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping dishes the dirt on the news conference heard ’round the world: ‘It was nothing we anticipated’:

The merchandise sales of Four Seasons Total Landscaping have taken on a life of their own. The conference room at their office has become a makeshift fulfillment center, as Siravo and the company’s 28 full-time employees take turns bagging orders and printing labels, starting at 6 a.m and racking up overtime hours working long into the night.

Partnering with half a dozen local vendors (all but one is located in the Philadelphia region), the company has sold over 35,000 orders for T-shirts, ugly Christmas sweaters, face masks — totaling $1.3 million in sales. (Much of the money will be used to pay back vendors, shipping costs, and more, Middleton said, making clear that Four Seasons won’t be putting $1.3 million in its bank account.)

[…]

In hopes of helping others during Four Season’s moment in the sun, Siravo said the company is participating in a Toys for Tots drive with St. Christopher’s Hospital. Through Dec. 11, visitors can drop off unwrapped toys at the office in exchange for a Four Seasons sticker. Separately, Siravo said the company is also collecting coats, hats, socks, and other cold-weather clothing to donate to local charity.

This looks like a nice place to visit. The Munich Atelier where stained glass comes to life:

The Mayers oversee the business from a series of sunny, art-filled rooms on the top two floors of the building. Dozens of warrenlike workshops and ateliers crowd the four floors beneath — here, workmen restore historic stained-glass windows and mosaics, while others make contemporary works. The labyrinthine basement archive houses an extensive collection of vintage stained-glass works.

The only problem is that he’s going to look like Carlton Banks for the rest of his life. The hardest-working man in show business:

Yet as much as the world equates Ribeiro to Carlton, the years following The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air may have revealed more about the man—his persistence, his versatility, and his undeniability. If you let him tell it, for a while the role Ribeiro played so well was the role that held him back. “Imagine for a second you do a role so well that they tell you you’re not allowed to do anything else ever again because they can’t believe that you’re not that guy,” he says. But the ceiling Ribeiro hit as an actor forced him to develop other skills, which helped him emerge as one of the most versatile—albeit underrated—performers in Hollywood.

I’ll never understand. You’d think casting agents and directors would be … imaginative.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well.

site / Wednesday — 1 Comment
25
Nov 20

A light Wednesday

My contribution to the cause today was cleaning up two inboxes, knocking a few episodes off the Netflix queue, a little house work and wiping out some leftovers.

Also, I reworked the front page of this website. And that’s why it was a light day. Would you like to hear about it? Oh, you’d rather just see it?

Click here to see the front page.

It has the same premise as the previous version — big on buttons driving you to social media or the key basics. The background moves, which is the point. The original iteration of this design had a video component, but I wanted to get away from from javascript. So I went to a still image. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but I liked the movement, and I love the variation. So I put in some keyframe animations.

And the delightful part is that the coding was only ridiculously frustrating for a day or so. (Also why it was a light day.) But, despite that frustration, it’ll be easy from here. I can quickly make changes to the art to keep it topical or fresh.

So I like this design. Be sure to check it out. (If it doesn’t feel like it works right, please let me know.) I need to add a few more buttons, but this is only a Wednesday, and that’s definitely a Monday kind of job

adventures / IU / photo / television / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on No calculator was harmed in the making of this post
18
Nov 20

No calculator was harmed in the making of this post

It’s a weird time. I have a normal work schedule on Wednesdays. My weeks during the semester are normally split. I’m done at a respectable hour on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Tuesdays and Thursdays are long, but these other days I feel like a normal person. Except I am now old enough to feel the effects of a split schedule in ways I didn’t when I was 23, and so it doesn’t feel especially normal.

I’m honestly not sure how Mondays work anymore, since I’ve largely been working from home on Mondays since March. But I’ve been going in four-days-a-week since July, and in August the students came back and in September we ramped up production and so it went like this. I would leave campus just after 8 p.m. on Tuesdays and then go work a 9-5 day on Wednesdays. And then I would leave the building on Thursdays closer to 9 p.m. and work another regular day on Fridays. Well, on Friday afternoon the weekend feelings kick in. So that is taken care of. But Wednesdays? And now that it’s dark by 5:30. That, of course, presupposes the midwestern cloud cover lets any natural direct light shine through.

Like today, for instance. High 44. It was partly cloudy. And then the sun set (I had no idea the sun came out. I was hiding under fluorescent light all day.) at 5:25. That’s about the time I got to the house. So no bike ride for me. What am I going to do with the evening?

“What did you do with the evening?”

Well, let me tell you, dear and gentle reader. We fact checked a story The Yankee was reading. It was about some lavish meal somewhere. How could all of these things — the story itemized many of the plates — only amount to a little over two grand?

It was, when you heard the many items, a fair question.

So I pulled up the menu for a restaurant 634 miles away and we analyzed the data.

While some specifics were left out of the story, to protect the carnivores, one presumes, we ultimately decided that the total bill was plausible and likely.

And I subsequently decided I needed something better to do.

And did I find it? No, I did not.

But I will.

TV shows, for those who like TV shows. These are the last episodes the news crew will produce in the studio this fall. I am urging them to do more stuff remotely between now and when we reconvene in person in February.

They even teased a winter series of stories in here, which was nice. Now they’re on the record! They have to follow through!

Saying publicly that you’ll do something is a great motivator.

They produced those shows last night, which is why it was just after 8 p.m. when I left our old historic building. It was gratifying to watch the seniors rally the underclassmen and congratulate them on the semester and say all of the things I would normally say. It’s fun to see them slip effortless into those roles.

I was curious how that would work this year because the interpersonal dynamics, by definition, are more restrained than normal. If anything, they’ve found ways to work around and beyond that and be better for it.

We build broadcast pros and leaders around here.

We had two productions running concurrently last night. The two above in Studio 7 and the late night show was being produced in Studio 5. It’ll be out later this week. And all of that means we’ll be shooting the last in-studio shows of the term tomorrow night. Watch this space for me bragging on them.

IU / television / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Not as much as you’d imagine
11
Nov 20

Not as much as you’d imagine

I interviewed an economist today. I think I only used one economic term incorrectly, which is about the right sort of pace for me. I took a lot of economics classes in college — micro, macro, ag, to name a few — but that was a fair while back and he’s the expert and I only have a minor in the stuff.

He’s part of a group that’s putting out an annual projection later this week and he was kind enough to let me interview him for the third time since this summer. But, what’s nice is that he’s an economist who overlooked my misused term and just answered the question he knew that I was trying to get to.

Anyway, I’ll publish that podcast next week. I just wanted you to know you have that to look forward to. In fact, I have another interview on Friday and so there are two programs you can look forward to next week.

But you don’t have to wait that long for quality content. Here’s some more work our students did this week. Here’s Tuesday’s news show:

Freshman news anchor right there. She did a nice job, and we’re excited to see what she does next.

And then, after the news show, there was the pop culture and current events show. They had a nice interview with the people from the dance marathon.

How do you run a weekend-long dance marathon during a pandemic?

It went virtual, like so many of the things in these students lives. They raised $4.2 million, I think it was, last year. And this year, amidst everything else, they still raised almost $3 million for Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis. It’s incredible what a bunch of motivated college students can do.

I was able to call it a day at a normal time and it was still (barely) daylight when I got in the car. It was all-but-dark when I got in. It’s a 4.5-mile drive. That’s the downside, the tradeoff, the other side of the coin and the yang to those long languid summer days they have here. You can stand in the yard in June and enjoy the miracle of daylight at 9:30 or so. But this time of year, if you have a schedule with just the right sort of quirk in it, you might not see the sunshine daylight all day. I saw maybe 45 minutes of it today.

Home at a reasonable time. Can’t go anywhere. So what did I do with all of this evening’s extra time?

Not as much as you’d imagine.

adventures / errands / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on We got a new range
4
Nov 20

We got a new range

Let us go back to September, when the oven died.

Actually, let’s go back farther. Probably to some point in my childhood, where I managed to permanently confuse the words for oven and stove. It’ll be better here, because I have a backspace button — and this time I’m going to use it! — but if we’re just having a conversation and I say one of those, it’s safe bet that I mean the other. This bothers no one more than me.

Anyway, in September, the oven died. (Yes, the oven, the part where you bake things.) The oven died because we were working on the stove top. We were working on the stove top because someone was using the command dials for mountain climbing exercises. While that work was happening the logic board that controlled the oven just gave up.

We know that’s what it was because it was getting power, but there was nothing in the displays, and it would not bake. We called the home warranty people and they sent a guy down from Indy and he looked at it and said, “Yep, that’s busted.” He contacted the warranty people who said, “Well, it’s busted.”

It was a 13-year-old range, though, probably original in the house. The model, of course, is discontinued. And the warrant people weren’t interested in having their repair vendor work on the thing. So they offered to swap it out. Or we could find our own range and there would be a rebate, compensation song and dance. Ultimately, we went with the one they offered. It was comparable on paper, and the oven — I had to correct this one — would be a smidge larger than the old one.

Problem: Again, this was late September. And the new range was on back order and wouldn’t be available until the first week of November.

So we assembled stove top and grill recipes. And we were ready to get take out a time or two. In the scheme of things, it’s the most minor of inconveniences, but you don’t really know how much you depend on your oven — I had to correct this one, too — until you contemplate how much you actually depend on your oven.

Well, good news! In the last week of October we got the call that they had our range, and when would we like it? We arranged to have it arrive last Friday. I was going to come back from the office to let them in and do their thing. They would call between 2 and 6 p.m. And somewhere in that appointed time I received a call. The delivery guy had a traffic accident and would not be delivering it on Friday.

After about an hour-and-a-half on the phone with both the delivery people and the appliance manufacturer’s people, it was unilaterally arranged to arrive today. By the way, if you think dealing with one group for a slightly exotic problem with your service is a chore, try it with two, and with people who each aren’t exactly sure what the other does. (The answers, of course, being manufacture/sale and deliver.)

So this morning, 8 a.m. to noon, this range is coming. Because they only come down this way two days a week. Never mind that we’re about six weeks into our descent into creative kitchen work. At noon, no range and no phone call. So when my three-hour webinar wound down for the day — this week, honestly … — I called them. The delivery guy, it turns out, was running a bit late. Safety first when driving! And we were next.

And so we were.

Did you know that they don’t install a range when the delivery people deliver it? That’s what we were told, by the warranty people, but the delivery guy isn’t interested in that.

And did you know you have to provide your own power supply? I’ve never bought a range before, this was a new thing to me. Who knew?! I did not!

So after work I went to the hardware store and bought a four prong heavy duty power supply. I watched two YouTube videos to make sure I only needed to watch the first one, and then I lay on the floor connected the power supply to the range and we set it into place:

And then we had dinner.

The other one looked better, if you ask me. It’s a difference of about 11 percent. We’ll see about the functionality, but the stove top dials were aesthetically nicer on the old unit, and they were shorter. And on this thing the buttons are stiff and unpleasing to punch.

But the eyes and the oven work. And we upgraded a 13-year-old range for a brand new one, thanks to the home warranty. And dinner, from the oven, was delicious.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →