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I complain about my job from time to time — the newspaper industry is not what it once was, even though it offers a “here and now” excitement these days with the continued growth of the Internet.
Journalism isn’t always what its best practitioners would hope for, either. There are bad apples among the good, as there are in any profession.
But each year as the summer slowly fades into the three-day weekend anchored by Labor Day, I stop to think about the generations of my family who didn’t have the benefit of an air-conditioned office, a retirement account and a day that didn’t end with dust-covered clothing.
My father was a construction man. He poured concrete at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Southern California.
My stepfather and many of his relatives worked in Southern Indiana coal mines.
My mother did restaurant work for more than a decade before doing assorted other jobs and then going back to school, eventually becoming a nurse.
They all worked hard to make sure a paycheck envelope showed up in their hands every other Friday. Their boots were dirty at the end of the day, or their clothes smelled like the grease from the deep-fryer.
All of them told me about the importance of education, no matter what I planned to do with my life. Though I think, deep down, they didn’t want me following in their footsteps.
Theirs are the stories of people who, like millions of others, continued to build on the American tradition of punching a time clock each day so that a family could get to a better place. Like so many others, they worked each day to try to push the family’s financial needle further up toward middle class, setting their gazes somewhere between the job at hand and what they wanted for tomorrow.
As we put another summer behind us, the unemployment rate hovers just over 9 percent nationally, and there’s not much optimism to be found. Many are struggling mightily.
So while I complain about my job from time to time, I am thankful always for the opportunity, and I am thankful for the hard work of my parents and grandparents and those even before that, who worked to improve their lots in life and, as a result, mine.
Like so many other summers in the Ohio Valley, this one has turned into a war of attrition, the locals gritting their teeth against the heat and humidity, hoping to hold out for the first chilly mornings of September.
On the other side is the fearsome trio of June, July and August, hammering away with blast after blast of sticky air.
I’d like to think that we’re within sight of the finish line for this year’s struggle, with the kids needing school supplies and the football teams rumbling through two-a-days. It’s only a matter of time before we can walk out the front door in the early morning hours and be greeted not by the leftover air of a sauna, but by a crisp, cool preview of fall.
(Or so I hope.)
A co-worker tells me I’ll miss the warmth come January, when I’m bundling up to survive the 30-foot walk to the mailbox in subzero temperatures.
I know he’s right because I remember one winter day in a recent year when I was putting gas in my car, all the while eyeballing a digital thermometer touting a brisk 2 degrees. I thought to myself: “That’s it. This summer, I won’t fuss about the heat.”
I think we all make these sorts of deals.
“Lord, I promise to go get more milk this afternoon. Just, please, let this be enough for the kiddo’s cereal so I don’t have to put on pants and go to the grocery store this early.”
“If you can just hold off this sinus infection until the weekend, I’d appreciate it. There’s too much work to do this week, and I don’t want to give up a sick day so early in the year. I promise I’ll get some rest on Saturday.”
And so on and so forth.
We always wake up the next morning having not bought the milk. Saturday ends up being a time to mow the grass or do the laundry. And no matter how bad the winter is, we always complain about the summer. (And vice versa.)
As time goes on, I’m convinced of only one thing when it comes to the weather, no matter the season: It’s the last common experience on the planet.
In age segmented information sources, hundreds of television channels and the proliferation of downloadable music, it’s hard to find something we can all talk about. Some people follow “American Idol” and some people prefer country music.
But we all know what it’s like when it’s hot and humid in Evansville, and we hate it, no matter what we say in January.
 National Geographic offers dozens of photograps for use as computer desktop wallpaper. I am a subscriber to National Geographic magazine, but I’d never been to its website until I saw a promo in the mag saying you could download pictures from the magazine to use as computer wallpaper.
It’s a wonderful idea, even though it’s a simple one. I figure I’ll be making a weekly trip back to the page to grab a different desktop photo.
If your newspaper does great photography, why not highlight it by offering it for people to use on their desktops, with a logo stamped on one corner and a credit with the photographer’s name? Simple little traffic builder.
I occasionally joke with my wife about our lives before we had children — sleeping until whenever on the weekends, truckloads of free time in the evening and absolutely no knowledge of “iCarly.”
But here we are now, cruising toward my younger son’s sixth birthday in January. He brought his first kindergarten report card home last week, all good marks except for the “good listening skills” category, which proves only that young Alex inherited something from his mother.
He tells me now and then that he feels like a big boy these days because he no longer attends half-day preschool. It’s all-day classes, five days a week, punctuated only by recess on the playground and the grown-up experience of lining up in the cafeteria for rectangular pizza.
There’s little to no homework outside a collection of “sight words” written in dark marker on small pieces of thick paper and attached to a little metal key chain. We flip through them and he knows “the” and “green” and a handful of other short words that are the building blocks to what someday will be thousands and thousands of pieces of the English language.
The obvious fun in all of this is the parenting itself, seeing him live new experiences on a daily basis and seeing which emotions explode to the surface with each one. But what I find myself enjoying most is remembering when I was in kindergarten, a chubby little 6-year-old in Mrs. Stuart’s class at Loge Elementary in Boonville, Ind. I compare what few pieces of those days I actually remember with how Alex sees the world now, and it’s a fascinating experience, day after day.
Every morning, Alex and his older brother Eric and I wait in the driveway for the school bus to turn the corner on our street. He’ll often yell out, “There it is!” and scurry across the street to the pick-up point, a too-large backpack bouncing off his back and the full spectrum of the world’s possibilities ahead of him.
Steven Davy over at MediaShift takes a look at whether Geo-Locations such as FourSquare will make the same two-year leap that Twitter and Facebook made between the 2008 and 2010 elections. 
Davy writes that a Chicago marketing firm has been unsuccessful, to this point, at attracting Rahm Emanuel and others to play along with a game using FourSquare to determine the next “virtual” mayor of the Windy City. For those who haven’t dipped their toes into the FourSquare pool, people can use the program to “check in” at different locations — businesses, schools, etc. — and become “mayor” of them through frequency.
As someone who’s used FourSquare (it didn’t stick with me) and now dabbles in Facebook’s “places” function, there are two big obstacles to overcome:
- Convincing the user that there’s something to reward them for doing constant geographic updates, and
- Making sure that people don’t freak out at the thought of someone potentially tracking their whereabouts.
Personally, I think the first obstacle’s the Grand Canyon for geo-social. There’s just no reward in it in most places, because businesses, schools and other organizations aren’t using it to offer a reward of some kind, no matter how small. What will push a geo-social tool over the top someday is the possibility that someone going to a concert, sporting event or even a campus party could be recognized in some way — a large flat screen TV showing who’s there, and who’s checked in at that location the most times, or even an “attendee of the moment” sort of recognition.
Even the political stars that have signed up for FourSquare haven’t become enamored with it, apparently. From the MediaShift article:
Despite the buzz around geo-social, there isn’t a lot of check-in activity on Crist, Perry and Ward’s pages. (Rick Perry currently has 68 Gowalla followers, Charlie Crist has 55 and Jim Ward has 38.) Andy Ellwood, director of business development at Gowalla, said in a phone interview that activity in 2010 might be low, but the potential value for candidates could be significant.
The privacy argument doesn’t hold much water. After all, people are plastering their personal lives all over Facebook and Twitter. If they’re talking about bra colors and drunkenness, why would they mind if someone knows they’re at a Dairy Queen?
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