It’s a big week here in Fort Payne, Alabama as we once again host Fan Appreciation Weekend 2019!
I want to welcome all of the out-of-town guests to my hometown. We appreciate you visiting to celebrate our hometown boys, their music and the small southern community from which we are rooted.
There are lots of fun activities planned this week, including:
- Teddy Gentry’s Singing with the Stars is Thursday, June 20 at Northeast Alabama Community College.
- Jeff Cook’s Fan Daze is Friday, June 21 at the DeKalb Theatre in Fort Payne.
- The Fan Appreciation Weekend Show is Saturday, June 22, at the Alabama Band Fan Club.
- Randy’s Fandemonium at the Farm is Sunday, June 23.
I love photography books. Nothing against the books that are mostly text, but a book that exists entirely to serve as a picture gallery exploring specific themes is so delightful to me. I am proud to add Photographer John Dersham’s new photo book to my collection.
My Alabama: John Dersham Photographs a State – May 15, 2019 by John Dersham (Author), Bo Jackson (Foreword)
This beautiful hardcover book highlights the beauty of my home state at a time when it sorely needs some good publicity. John told me he spent four years putting the book together, and the effort certainly shows in this spellbinding collection of landscapes in all four seasons, reflecting the diversity of Alabama as it celebrates its 200th Anniversary of statehood.
Dec
19
One of my best images of 2018, with Red McCord.
I loved getting to spend more time than usual with my daughter.
Two-thousand and eighteen is nearly behind us. It was an extraordinary year in terms of our nation experiencing unprecedented things, primarily related to our president.
It was a period of painful adjustment for me personally, yet also a time of new triumphs. I adjusted to moving away from downtown Chattanooga while also taking on new roles in my career and acquiring new skills. I struggled to produce as much photography as I would have preferred and could have done under more favorable conditions; finding available collaborators among my previous models proved difficult and forced me to scout some fresh new faces.
I lost good friends to illness and tragedy. I found myself working to reconcile my own circumstances. It was a year of monster storms and wildfires as climate change reared its ugly head, even as Trump and his cronies acted in defiance of the inevitable catastrophes our planet faces. Justice reared its head as evidence and indictment accumulated as the voters called for accountability. We head into 2019 with breathless anticipation of gavels falling.
Today I’m sharing some of my secret weapons for productivity.
Feedly
This cloud-based news aggregator is the biggest, most important tool in my arsenal. Basically, it compiles news feeds from a variety of websites that I can easily put into topic silos, or “feeds”. It recommends major websites to pull from or you can paste in the URL from the ones you want (most websites have RSS feeds you can grab, but some do not) Feedly to pull from. I discovered Feedly in 2013 after Google ended its Reader application for some dumb reason.Read More
12