I’ve decided that I have to stop reading news on the internet. I don’t want to find out anything about the new book before I read it. I’m getting my book at Octavia Books on Friday night and I’m reading all weekend. I’m a big nerd. But I’m a slow reader and I don’t want the book ruined by people mistakenly slipping information.

I never thought that I would have to write a follow up to my last post on WDSU, but they are so terrible. They did a story about Harry Potter leaked on the web, and then they all went on to talk about where you could go buy your book when it is released tomorrow at midnight. TOMORROW. Thursday. I actually had to go look up the date to make sure that I wasn’t crazy. Then Dan Milham started describing what the weather would be like tomorrow night when you are out buying your book. Ridiculous. I mean come on. They did a story on Harry Potter, you’d think they’d do just a little bit of research.

While I hardly ever watch TV news, tonight I was watching WDSU. It’s not the highest-brow news source to begin with, but tonight was terrible. They started with 3 separate reports on the same 5 minute speech by Vitter and his wife. While they could have just played the speech, they decided that they needed 3 different reports to try to introduce the ‘different’ parts of the speech. So, 6 minutes into the newscast, they stop everything and say “If you’re just joining us…” and proceed to summarize the entire newscast. Does that mean that most people shouldn’t switch on their newscast until 6 minutes into it? Did they notice that a lot of people suddenly started watching? Did they think that this material was difficult to understand?

Later in the show (yes, I kept watching while doing work) Dan Milham, the weather guy, was advertising the weather hotline. Almost condescendingly, he decided to explain after giving the number for the “Weather Hotline”, that you call the phone number to hear weather reports. Surprisingly, he didn’t offer any help on actually using a rotary telephone.

I don’t know what this means exactly. Maybe the station feels that the average intelligence level of our city is slowly falling. Perhaps that means that our city is growing again…

It’s impossible not to run into countless reviews of the iPhone online. So, I’m not going to do a review. I don’t have the time to remember everything I’ve done and I really don’t have that many gripes. Overall, I love my iPhone. It’s nice to have access to email and the web wherever I am. It’s come in handy at restaurants, meetings, and just walking around.

The service is a whole ‘nother issue. My reception at my house goes from 5 bars to none. I don’t know what the deal is. I don’t know how to complain to AT&T to get it fixed, nor if they’d do anything for me anyway. I’ve even thought about buying a repeater for my house, but I wonder how much that would help and I don’t want to actually do the proper installation.

I’ve come up a few tips for running.

• Running while hung-over is not fun
• Running when hungry and dehydrated is not good for you
• Attempting to do a hard run after taking a week off for blisters isn’t always the best idea
• Never start a run with a song like Phish’s Sparkle. It’s especially bad when you’ve had previous conversations about how you could never put that song on your workout playlist because its tempo gets too fast. How did it get on my playlist?

Clearly it’s best to avoid any of these things. If, by chance, all happen in the same workout, you will likely get light-headed and a little dizzy. If you are smart enough to recognize this, you will clock your shortest ever workout.

So perhaps you are wondering what’s up with my website design (who am I kidding… you’re not). The header image is a silhouette of the dock and gazebo at my parent’s house in Mississippi. The area was a major casualty of Hurricane Katrina. The dock and part of the gazebo actually faired pretty well, but the house was fairly destroyed. My parents sold the house a few months after the storm, so this is a sad but good memory.

I created a rough silhouette pretty much by hand. Looking back at the original image, I feel bad because it’s clearly not as good as the original. Maybe I should just crop the original image and use that.

This month has been incredibly busy. While I should have had at least one post for each of my events, right now I’m just happy to get this out.

For those who didn’t know, I started the month with a long weekend in Springfield, Missouri to see Brent get married. Just two weeks later, I journeyed to Dallas to see mostly the same people at Cary’s wedding. Both weddings were very nice and very different. Instead of traveling home, I flew directly to San Francisco (at 6am) to help my brother drive his cars to Nashville, TN. This week-long trip included an extended stay in Las Vegas and shorter visits to the Grand Canyon, a meteor crater, a cadillac farm, and other odd sites.

If there was one constant throughout this whole trip, it would probably be Bass Pro shops. We visited the original store in Springfield and the Dallas one. I then drove past one in Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, and Memphis. There’s even on in Nashville, but we didn’t go there. To be clear, I really don’t like this store. I love many outdoor things and it caters practically to none of these things.

I’m proud to say that I’ve updated my website design and switched from MovableType to WordPress. I’m hoping that it will be easier to maintain both now. I might add some of my previous pages back to the website, but I’m not entirely sure yet. A lot of my content was so old that it’s either wrong or useless.

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2007/03/29/PM200703294.html

I really should have posted this link a long time ago (like I really should have posted a blog entry a long time ago). It’s a really good story about what we deal with living in New Orleans right now. It’s great visualizing exactly where she is when she’s talking. When it was aired on the radio last month, I was actually driving home on Tchoupitoulas at the exact spot she was describing where the street turns into one-way.

The best part is when she tries to describe why we live here, even with these problems. I bet that doesn’t come across very well to most people. I’m also guessing that everyone who lives here completely understands. Perhaps it’s slightly different for everyone, but there’s a life and culture to this city that I could never describe… I just know it’s here.

I finally got some new running shoes. I went to Southern Runner because my old running coach works there on Saturdays. I received the best service, as I didn’t even look at the shoes that they had — he just brought me shoes that he thought would work well with my feet. In the end, I settled back with Nike, whom I haven’t worn since high school because their width seemed to be the best for my foot.

So now I have real Nike+ shoes. For those who don’t know, that means they are designed for Nike+iPod which keeps a history of your runs and lets you chart them out. This might be too much temptation. The problem is that for all the iPods that I own (sadly 3), none of them is the required nano. So I would have to buy a new iPod nano, a Nike+ kit, and an armband. The other thing keeping me a little bit away is the fact that I really love running with my tiny shuffle.

Who am I kidding? I’m definitely going to buy one eventually. It’s more of a question of when.

“Obviously, I would assume that we have some basis for coming up with these numbers, but I don’t have that information,” Nagin spokesman James Ross said late Thursday. “All I can tell you is that you’ll have to assume that there is some basis for the number.”

Very convincing.