Following Jamie and the whole Cole family

THIS couldn’t have gone any better…

Sunday, August 30th, 2009 | Football, Home Life, Sullivan | No Comments

You have to see what happens when you introduce a 21-month old baby boy to a six-and-a-half foot plush elephant.

Bama Family Fun Day 09

Sully meets Big Al and the Bama cheerleaders. Click to see the facebook gallery

Pocket Savior

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 | Work Life | No Comments

AdAge is asking: Can the netbook save media? And they’re asking like it’s a new idea.

I’m not crazy about offering hardware incentives to tie customers down to a content contract. But that’s probably because I just got burned by it. AT&T’s new Uverse service just made it to my neighborhood, and I’ve been wanting to try it. Thing is, I got HD-crazy before football season last year and got some new equipment from DirecTV that—unbeknownst to or at least unnoticed by me—re-upped me for two more years of service. Cancellation means I owe DirecTV, and there’s no getting out of it.

So could media properties lock down subscribers by offering free or deeply discounted “netbooks”? New York Times and Amazon are trying something similar with Kindle. And cell phone companies have done it for years, tying new phones to new contract terms.

So it’s nothing new, but any refuge in a storm…

How the $0 Netbook Might Just Help Save the Media Industry

Information Wants to Be Free; Now Hardware Does, Too. And That Could Be a Very Good Thing Indeed Click to see it

I’m Back, Baby!

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | Home Life, Work Life | No Comments

Well, it has been a while (since Feb. 26, I believe)…

So much has happened, it’s hard to relate. I’ve been in a PHP and SQL nightmare with this blog, trying to figure out how to restore it without wiping out almost 4 years of posts. Now that it’s over, I’m struggling to figure out what to say.

Here goes:

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend of mine about life changes. He listed about ten that I’ve experienced over the last two years. “Any one of those,” he told me, “could have been the one that clipped you.” I asked what he meant. “Check out a list of life changes that are most stressful,” he said. “All of these are on there.”

It was true. And one of the biggest ones happened about a month ago, when I left The Progressive Farmer, the only job I’ve ever had. Now, I held a lot of positions while I worked there (in order: intern, design assistant, designer, editorial coordinator, web editor, creative editor, senior editor and ultimately managing editor), but the bottom line is that I never worked anywhere else. I graduated on a Saturday and walked into the job the next Monday, and had been there until May 15, 2009.

It’s just a rule: you NEVER blog about leaving a job—or at least the “why” part. So I won’t. But I’m excited to say I’m doing new work with a start-up called Red Barn Publishing. We’re so new we don’t even have a web site yet. I’ll be fixing that soon.

The next few years hold a lot of promise—both for the business and for me personally. I’m hoping to take a step towards completing a formal education (you never finish being educated, if you know what’s good for you) by hitting the University of Alabama next spring for a master’s degree, and maybe even a PhD. Teaching —maybe even there—is an ultimate goal… at least I would like to wrap up my career doing that one day.

Meantime, I’m excited about the new opportunity, and the future looks bright. There will be more about it later.

Here’s a great article from last month’s Wired that sounds really good to me, given my recent change.

And here’s to new adventures. It’s about time.

The New New Economy

More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity Click to see it