Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
28
Aug 17

And now, I will vent

I’ve had views like this …

… for about seven years now. It is a nice view. You understand the topography differently. You learn to be patient with yourself. You see the world at a different pace than you do from behind the windshield. And you see some things, too. Turkeys and deer and people doing odd things and strange sites you just might overlook when you’re moving at car speeds. Why, just last Friday three separate people — all supposedly adult human beings — walked right in front of my bike’s path over the course of a five mile stretch of my life. (I’ll bet you a dollar that happens at least once again tomorrow, because why look both ways when crossing the street. EDIT: It did.) And then Friday ended with a big truck whose driver couldn’t hardly be troubled to demonstrate an appreciation for the dynamics of a four-way stop while I was in the middle of the intersection. He got a well practiced European reaction I learned from watching pros racing.

Granted, the four-way stop thing is problematical because the local K-Mart closed last year and, consequently, no one has any idea where they are supposed to get their driver’s license anymore. Plus, people aren’t always their best driving selves anyway. And I’ll grant you what is likely just a limitation of habit and the human brain and the internal filtering system: sometimes drivers just don’t see a cyclist because that 15-pound frame with a human on it isn’t a two-ton truck, which is what they are actually looking for. On a bike, then, you accept this, and you have to always be on guard for it, and aware of a lot of other road rage, silliness and stupidity, too.

Which brings us to yesterday. I was out and about, enjoying a nice slow day on the bike because some days have to be slow days and the weather was nice and you soak those in. I’m on a road that ends in a T-intersection. I take this route every day when I’m traveling to the house from the office no matter if I’m driving or riding. You go down a little roller and then up the other side and there’s the stop sign.

Yesterday, while I was on my bike, I reach that spot with three cars in front of me. One car goes and there are two cars in front of me. The second car goes and so it is just me and a Fiat. And this guy turns on his left blinker, so I go to the right, which is the direction I’m going to turn anyway. And then this guy turns right …

Almost flattened me. And for all of that I caught up to him at a red light a block later. If you know that guy, give him the what for for me.

Friday / video — Comments Off
25
Aug 17

Excelsior!

Sometimes you start a sentence and you don’t know where it is going to go. Sometimes you just leap off into the thing and you trust that the words will be there when your lips are ready to form the next set of letters. That happens to everyone, right? Can’t just be me.

Anyway, today I tried a new version of that. I just launched into a series of wholly original analogies and hoped they made sense at the end. The best one was explaining how a series of meetings — I had a note card full of people to sit and talk with today, which was delightful, really — managed to pile up. Once one goes long, that tends to impact the next one and so on.

So I said something like “You know how when the weather is bad over the airport and that can stack planes up over four states waiting to land? This New York-bound plane is waiting patiently over Ohio.”

Because my meetings kept running over, basically. But that’s OK. It’s a beautiful day, and more importantly it is Friday. Riding my bike from work into the weekend, I passed one of the local barns and thought There should be a slow motion video of this.

And now there is.

To the weekend!

IU / television / Thursday / video — Comments Off
24
Aug 17

First live show of the year

So here we are, on the fourth day of classes, presenting the first live broadcast of the year. It was an almost-four-hour broadcast. There were about 11 students running the production and, after the first few minutes, they really found a nice groove and made a neat little show covering various media topics du jour. Four locations, eight cameras, four hours. This was broadcast on my students’ campus cable station, syndicated on the campus radio station and one of their internet streams and pushed out to Facebook Live. Again, this was the fourth day of class.

You can watch it here:

Having been in the studios and the control room, I hope I managed to in no way sneak onto a camera.

photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Aug 17

Operation Splinter, part two

We were invited to a colleague’s welcome back party on Sunday. People brought their children, and they were all delightful and well-behaved kiddos with over-developed intelligence and the precise amount of rambunctiousness. The kids’ presence meant toys, which also meant bubbles:

And somewhere since then Allie The Black Cat ate the scraps off of my plate:

So things are going about as you’d imagine, which is to say wonderfully busy with nice dashes of color, just for the sake of variety.

And today, despite a busy day at the office I was able to spend the evening, the entirety of it, in fact, working on The Project. You might remember my previous notes on Operation Splinter from this space:

I also wrapped up the first stage of The Project. It needs a better name, but I’m not yet ready to name it, or even discuss it at length. What if it doesn’t work? What if I have to scrap the entire thing? What if it is just terrible? Do I really want to talk publicly about my time machine without knowing how it turns out?

I’ve said too much.

Anyway. The first stage is done. I suppose the true first step was material acquisition. This took place on Friday and Saturday. And then the first stage took place on Saturday and Sunday, and was more taxing than I’d imagined, even as I knew it would be time consuming. By Monday, though, I’d figured out how to to make the process move more quickly, and it did. Only to be slowed down, yesterday, by an equipment failure brought on by user error. So I fixed that issue today and completed the first stage.

Then I performed Operation Clean Up. The first stage took up a half of the garage, and so that ultimately led to reorganizing much of the shelf space in the garage and in bits and pieces these last few days and so even if the time machine it doesn’t work, the effort has been fruitful.

That was two weeks ago. Well, this evening I was able to do a considerable amount of the work involved in stage two of The Project. See, in order to build this rocket ship I figured the second stage would have three big steps. Tonight the first step — which some combination of common sense and necessity found should be doubled — and the second step were completed.

Now I will have to work on two separate series of precise calibrations — Werner von Braun, help me — so I can complete the third step of stage two. I might also revisit a bit of the second step of this stage. But that part should be easy. I’ll do both of those next Wednesday and then the second stage of The Project will be completed. After that there are only three stages remaining, and two of those will go quickly. This project will be wrapped up in two or three weeks. Huh. I thought it would take longer.

Did I say rocket ship? Ignore that. Just imagine I said something else like … hot air balloon or … post-modern remote controlled pterodactyl model. Yeah. That’s what I’m making. I’m about 12 to 14 hours into a remote controlled pterodactyl.

photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
22
Aug 17

And now, three turtles

With yesterday’s eclipse giving us so much material for the site I was able to save some of my weekend photos. Here are a few of them now.

On my Saturday morning jog I saw The Yankee’s turtle buddy. There’s a little pond near us and about 50 or so yards away there’s a nice, shade-covered creek. And so this guy is on the move a lot. This is the fourth time we’ve seen him, or his identical cousins, in the last few months:

He’d just made it across the little walking path and was about to crawl into the scrub grass and then the trees and go down the embankment to the creek. Meanwhile, not too much farther away on the same path I ran into this much more intense reptilian specimen.

He was pretty aggressive for a ponderously moving turtle.

So that was part of my weekend. Today, I got to hang out in the studio for a bit.

We have a big, big production coming up on Thursday, so there’s a lot to do. Part of it involves figuring out our camera shots, which is what we were doing today. The To Do list will only grow longer, I’m sure, until the show is done.