Geography, Grad School, Knoxville, UTK

Rainy-ville on the Hill

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I love a good rain. Just not when I’m in it. (Isn’t that true for a lot of life? All good urban and economic geographers are aware of the powerful NIMBY: “Sure we need a new subway line, nuclear power plant, and shelter for the homeless, but Not In MY Back Yard!”)

I somehow managed to avoid the rain today while going from Burchfiel (my proper geographic home away from home on UTK’s campus) to South Stadium Hall (under part of Neyland Stadium) where I have my Anthropology of Genocide class. After class, I was even more fortunate: the sun came out and surprised me, given the bleakness that had previously filled the sky. The heavens opened up during my evening class tonight, and I peaked out the window from the fourth floor of my safe haven in the Burchfiel conference/seminar room and watched other less fortunate students without umbrellas get out of class only to find themselves immobilized by the rain. There were some who dared it, and others who were prepared to face the downpour with their umbrellas held high.

But for those who forgot, or ignored the prevalent warning signs swirling in the atmosphere above them today – they found their space suddenly limited, their comfortable space narrowed to the underside of a pedestrian bridge between our hallowed halls on the hill.

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I do appreciate those of you who slugged your way through my feeble attempt to write at the end of the day. Thursday are an inimitable pain. I can’t complain too loudly, as I brought this academic hardship upon myself and, indeed, I do enjoy all of my classes thus far, it just so happens that the lineup of Thursday classes pushes my brain to the boundaries on a day when I usually could use an extra nap.

I have had an excellent first few weeks here at UTK. That’s mostly an understatement, for it fails to do justice to the situation. Despite being constantly overwhelmed with my school workload (mostly reading for the Geographic Thought seminar), I am really enjoying the camaraderie of fellow grad students who are as enthusiastic about geography as I am and having a wide range of professors who don’t mind you picking their brains on occasion. This is no way a slight to my undergrad experience at UTM – the program does an excellent job with the resources it has, and I think undergrads get a much more personal education than they would here, simply because of the sheer number of students here compared to at UTM. Both are high quality programs, and both provide a service for their universities – there is just a difference of scale. At the graduate level, however, we are known. Professors know our names and our research interests, considering us colleagues in training.

Perhaps the best part, though, is simply interaction with fellow grad students. There is almost a sense of “finally!” that can be added after that sentence, because a person like myself longs, at times, for intellectual interaction on that level with peers who are as completely engrossed by the subject as well. My advice to any potential grad school applicant (whether any of my readers fit into that category, I do not know…) is to make sure that the schools you apply to are schools that have that interaction and camaraderie among grad students. Yes, it requires more work than simply surfing a departmental website, but it is worth it.

While I’m spitting out mostly unrelated items to blog about, a sad product of not blogging often enough, I’ll just briefly say that Karen and I are enjoying Knoxville apart from campus as well. We’ve gotten to know some of our neighbors recently, through a Labor Day/Boomsday get-together (yes, we call it Boomsday here, for the magnificent 20-minute fireworks show that the city spends millions on each year). We’ve also decided to join Church Street United Methodist Church, a very exciting church in the heart of Knoxville, perfectly situated between downtown and campus. And on an related note (however selfish it may sound), CSUMC has stone floors, a pipe organ, a choir that can tackle complicated classical choral music, and handbells. We’ve also auditioned and been accepted into both the Knoxville Choral Society and its smaller chamber ensemble, the Knoxville Chamber Chorale.

Well, it has been raining on and off as I’ve written this, and my brain, despite being frazzled to begin with, is starting to clear with the writing, so I’m saying goodnight before I wake up any more and miss my chance to fall asleep to drip drops on the window panes.

Geography, Knoxville

Church Hunting (and a small dose of Geography)

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If you need any proof that Knoxville is as much in the buckle of the Bible Belt as West or Middle Tennessee, the other day while returning the ladder we rented from Home Depot I was scanning through the FM radio stations from bottom to top (the 80-somethings through 100-somethings) and I found three Christian radio stations. Before I even got out of the 90’s. And those weren’t the only ones! Now I no longer have an excuse to switch to NPR or classic rock if I’m bored with hearing a song three times in a day (as happened often in Martin while listening to K-LOVE or AIR1). I can just rotate between Love 89.1, K-LOVE on 103.1, and a plethora of gospel stations.

And man, are there are a lot of churches.

Karen and I are starting the church search today at Fountain City UMC at 11. We decided we would see about the services on our first visit, then narrow it down, and then try out some Sunday Schools/Bible studies with the ones we really like. Of course, being musicians, we’ve narrowed the expansive list of churches down to those that are Methodist, Baptist (and one non-denominational church recommended by our pet groomer), have a choir and handbells. This, however, does rule out several churches that are only contemporary (for some reason, choral music and handbells aren’t found in contemporary churches…hmm…), but we’ll probably visit some contemporary churches as well.

So many to choose from, so little time! As we have been driving literally all over town the last several days, Karen and I have seen so many church buildings in so many shapes, sizes, and denominations. If there are any Christians out there in the world who need a place to try to find out what they personally like/need from a church, Knoxville is the place to do so. Within about a 10-15 mile radius from the center of town, that person could probably visit a different church every Sunday and not be done before new ones are started. Seriously.

All of this is very good, of course, and it reminds me of how similar things can be between places if you look for the similarities. Take for example, Martin and Knoxville. You wouldn’t think, on the surface, that the two cities (and I use that term loosely when referring to Martin!) would be all that alike, but you’d be wrong. Both are fairly typical Tennessee cities. Both, with four-year universities but also a strong (and large) conservative Christian demographic, are some of the most interesting places in the country to have intellectual political and moral debates. These isn’t your Boston or New York or LA, where it’s (naively) easy to assume that everyone is a liberal, Democrat, non-church-goer. These are interesting spaces!

Right here in Tennessee, who knew?

Busyness, Grad School

Vacationing and Moving

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Two things that don’t mix all that well.

Vacationing and moving. I don’t recommend going straight from one into the other, but in our case this month, going from our vacation with Karen’s family out to Wyoming just worked out flowing straight into moving to Knoxville. It can be a little bit of a whirlwind, which is why I now can say that I don’t recommend it. I’m still partially living out of a suitcase, and have been for three weeks now. That does get a tad bit old.

However, we are making progress on setting up our home. We have the kitchen pretty much completely done, and everything that is going into storage is already there. The bathroom and bedroom are partially done, but they (like everything else) are waiting for some Ikea furniture to be complete. We hope to go to Ikea in Atlanta soon, but the weather hasn’t cooperated this weekend. As in, we were planning to go yesterday (Friday) but then there was a big chance of rain, and sure enough, we got a pretty good pounding. Then today turned out beautiful. So of course we didn’t plan to go, since there was a chance of rain. Grr. Next week it’s suppose to rain some more, too. Oh joy.

The living room is in the worst shape. It resembles a hall way from the kitchen to the office in that there is basically a 3-foot-wide path from one assortment of boxes on one side to the other collection of boxes through which we can manage to walk around. It needs several things from Ikea to be finished, not to mention the boxes cleared away. The office is taking shape, though probably not in its final form. We’ve pieced together a rough corner of the living room with our two desks forming a square with two walls though Karen tells me this isn’t staying quite like this. At least I’ve found enough of my desk stuff to establish some sort of working area, because it’s surprising all the things that need to be done when one moves!

As for vacation, it was marvelous, despite the many, many hours of driving that were necessary to enjoy it. I think Karen and I will fly next time…More details will be shared in photos.

As I find time, I’ll get some photos up from vacation and the move in/final layout of the flat. I may get move in photos up sooner just so everyone can see how things are going here. Vacation photos have fallen in the queue behind photos from all of last year going back to our honeymoon…. Just too busy to Flickr lately!

Uncategorized

Change in Photography [Uploading] Philosophy

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Danke!, originally uploaded by archelenon.

I decided today to slightly shift the way I handle sharing my photography.

For years, Flickr has been my default dumping ground for my photos, as the site was one of the leading photography sites on the Web when I signed up for it, seemingly ages ago. (Yeah, OK, so it was only 2006…) Anyway, much has changed since then. For example, my photography has gotten a lot better. More and more photo sharing sites have popped up in the “Web 2.0” generation. Other sites, such as Facebook, have added photo sharing features that make it really easy to share photos to a mass audience.

Now that I’ve whetted your appetite, the change in thinking is thus: Flickr is for better and more artistic photography, and as such, will no longer be the dumping ground for all my photos. That doesn’t mean that I won’t upload multiple photos from locations or events that I shoot; I just won’t be uploading, for example, 200+ photos from Germany that I never even get around to naming or describing. The best of my work deserves to be on Flickr where plenty of other amazing photographers display their work. Throwing up 200 photos from every single location and event just waters down what could otherwise be a great collection of photography. Now, along with this change in mindset, I have tried to go through and at least name every photo in my Flickr photostream, and I have cleaned out several boring or mundane or just technically bad shots that weren’t meaningful. More of this will probably be happening over the summer as I have time to get rid of some of the junk. This will make it easier to find the “good stuff.”

The second part of the shift was a difficult decision. It has long been my policy that uploading photos to Facebook was a two-edged sword that I did not want to deal with. For one, you have no idea what Facebook will do with your photos, and in fact for a long time in the past (haven’t checked here lately) Facebook had in their user agreement that they could use your photos for whatever they wanted. I don’t exactly trust Zuckerberg with my photos, and given Facebook’s recent privacy snafus, they’re becoming less trustworthy for just about anything. But I digress. Even given these potential privacy/usage issues, I have come to believe that Facebook is not the location for my best work (those are for Flickr) but for photos for the community’s consumption.

For example, I shot over 200 photos for the BCM Spring 2010 Banquet recently, and uploaded 180 of them of Facebook. The feedback was overwhelming. Tagging people in the photos, to let them know which specific photos are of them, is a great way to get the photo noticed, and works especially well for large group events. Now, for those of you who might be active on Flickr, you are probably saying that Flickr has added the ability to tag other people in your photos. But this feature is limited by the very nature of Flickr itself – that it is primarily geared to photographers and not the general population. Thus, very few of my friends and people that I would be photographing are ON Flickr to see the work.

So, with all those factors weighed in, I think it best for Facebook to become the “dumping ground” for lack of a better term.

Grad School, UTK

Excitement and Sadness

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Today was an amazing day.

For starters, I taught Sunday School at FBC Martin for the last time. Ever, I suppose, unless by some miracle Karen ever agrees to move back here! But I’ve learned some important things along the way. This isn’t a “Bible Blog” (so to speak) so I won’t go into detail about the spiritual lessons I’ve learned over the course of the year, but suffice it to say that they have been numerous!

I’ve also learned some valuable lessons applicable to life as a teacher and professor along the way this year. For example, I’m learning just how much time needs to be devoted to prepare for lessons, and Sunday School lessons are usually delivered in about half the time it takes for a normal college lecture (25-30 minutes as opposed to 50-75 minutes). It can be pretty time consuming if you want to be prepared and deliver the message in a coherent way. The time that I personally thought was the “worst” time I taught, I had a busy week and didn’t put in the full time that I should have to prepare. Lesson learned, trust me. Of course there were other lessons along the way as well.

So in a lot of ways, today was bittersweet. For the first time in the whole process of getting ready to start grad school I really stopped to think about what I would miss here. Maybe it was because I’ve been very focused on making sure that I accepted at the absolutely RIGHT school for me, or maybe it’s just because it only recently started to sink in that I’ll be in Knoxville beginning this summer, but I just never stopped to think about what I give up by going. There’s the fact that I’ve lived in Martin for 21 years of my life. I’m not by any means sheltered, of course, and there have been times when I traveled about as far away from home as I could be throughout those 21 years, but I’ve still always considered Martin to be that place in my life. A huge part of me is ready to move on, and I am eagerly anticipating moving on with my education at UTK. But there’s still a little tug of sadness leaving home.

I’m reminded of the Michael Bublé song “Home,” in which Bublé longs to be home with his love while out on the road (presumably touring in his case). In my own version of Home, the ones I will miss are numerous. Fortunately, Karen is ready to undertake this adventure and life experience with me, so that’s not a concern! Yet there are still family, and friends, and coworkers, and professors, and church families… You will all be missed, but it’s not goodbye forever! (And I promise I’ll do a better job of blogging about the adventures so you, my loyal readership, can keep track of us.)

That’s all there is to say about that.

However, the overwhelming feeling that I have had today, and for the last few weeks, is excitement! Yes, grad school will be hard, but I plan to make it as challenging as I can to get the most out of it that I can. Let’s face it, I need a good challenge after a year off from school (at least one that doesn’t involve puppy training or Crohn’s Disease!)

Grad School, UTK

Off to Knoxville

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It has certainly been an interesting few weeks. I’ve gone from not knowing anything about where I was going to grad school (other than having been accepted at University of Kentucky, Virginia Tech, and UT Knoxville) to now having a much clearer picture of where I will be for the next two years.

The first detail that fell into place was that I was offered a Teaching Assistantship at Knoxville that carries full tuition remission, a stipend for the 20-hour work week I’ll be putting in, an insurance package and a separate scholarship awarded by the Athletic Department. Yeah, I know. Me? Athletic? What?! My thoughts exactly. But it turns out that I don’t have to tutor athletes, and they’re not that desperate for new track team members. The athletic programs just make so much money from televised games and other things that they award small graduate fellowships across campus to support the academics. Now that’s an athletic program that I can get behind. So, in essence, Go Vols!

But anyway, I was still in the middle of the process of deciding on a school, waiting to hear from Virginia Tech and UK. Virginia Tech ended up offering me a loans package and would have offered me a 10-hour a week TA position but I went ahead and turned them down. I was down to UTK vs. UK. So I waited. And waited. And the week of my deadline to let Knoxville know if I was coming, I finally started emailing UK’s graduate director. But by this point it was mostly an effort in futility because I knew that I was supposed to go to Knoxville. It was obviously the right choice. So on Wednesday of that week when I heard from UK’s graduate director that they wouldn’t be able to let me know until Friday (the deadline day at UTK) I knew that it was the final sign.

So what did I do? I waited some more. Probably didn’t need to, but I thought seriously about holding out until Friday morning to see what UK’s offer would be. On Thursday afternoon, though, out of the blue this thought came to my mind: “You need to accept at Knoxville now.” So after I printed some pages out, signed, emailed, etc., I was officially a Master’s Degree student at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

At some point in the next few weeks, either at the end of May or first week of June, Karen and I will be trekking to K-ville to get an apartment and to get to know our way around. Should be fun! I’m already learning plenty of things about Knoxville’s site characteristics/geography from looking for apartments. Google maps and I have become quite good friends. We’ll be moving in July, so we’re in the process of getting plans set in stone.

In the mean time, look for (hopefully) more blogging on my part to accompany my unabating Twittering. I’m also still working on uploading photos from 2009 to Flickr…so stay with me!

Blogging

Switching to WordPress

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(To those who might be expecting a somewhat useful or insightful post, come back soon for a post about my acceptance at UT Knoxville.)

As you can see, I finally switched over to WordPress from Blogger by Google. It’s been a long time a-coming, so to speak. It started out as an idea to purchase my own hosting and run WordPress as a blog/CMS after I started using the platform to develop a couple other Web sites websites (Gah! Darn AP style changed to “website” instead of Web site. Takes some getting used to.) The FBC Martin redesign was done using WordPress and a simple theme. The ByGrace website is also run using WordPress and a little more complicated theme. So after those set ups, I was sold on WordPress. And why not, because it is simple to use the most basic functions!

However, my set up was a little more complicated, so my apologies for those who are technically “uninclined” who are about to read how this process worked. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, let me summarize by saying that I am a “web guy,” but even I had to chat twice with tech support, make a tech support call and read a few tutorials.

It started by wanting to switch from Blogger to WordPress. My old blog was pretty good (you can still see it here) but it was limited compared to the power of WordPress. Those of you who use WordPress will understand.

But it would be easiest to move (or so I thought) after my domain name, matt-cook.com, expired. WRONG! I let the domain name purchased through GoDaddy expire on or around April 14 only to find out that I needed to access it through GoDaddy’s control panel to start a domain transfer process, so I could migrate the name to Fat Cow (my favorite hosting site). That was tech support chat number one. I couldn’t figure out how to start the domain transfer since I couldn’t access the old domain. It turns out that either you can wait about 60 days for the domain to be COMPLETELY released (GoDaddy and other domain sites hold on to expire domain names for a while after they expire in case the owner decides to renew after the expiration) or I would have to renew the domain name with GoDaddy for another year to migrate it over. So this is when I called GoDaddy tech support to buy a one year renewal.

Then I went back over to Fat Cow and started the domain transfer, and then waited for about 5 days. On Monday I received the email saying that the transfer was done, but for some reason the old domain still pointed to Blogger and worse, the simplified domain I plan to use with WordPress, http://matt-cook.com (without the www. subdomain), still pointed to a parked GoDaddy page. I figured out that Blogger still had ties to  http://www.matt-cook.com and once those were removed I was very pleased to see a 404 (page not found error) for perhaps the first time in my life! Then came tech support chat numero dos. I had forgotten during the five day wait that I had to switch the name servers from GoDaddy to Fat Cow’s name servers. I’ll spare you the details of what name servers are, but suffice it to say that a couple hours later, the parked domain page was gone and my blank WordPress page was there instead!

So that was the first half of the battle. I then had to find out how to roll over all my Blogger posts and comments (Tutorial #1). Then I took the time to update the categories and tags on my posts because the import caused all of the tags from Blogger to become categories in WordPress instead of TAGS. That may sound a tad bit asinine to those of you who could care less about organization, but to my OCD self it was first priority. Now I have a nice, neat list of categories, as you can see on the right of each page.

After the import, I had to choose a WordPress theme, which is in-and-of-itself a challenge, given how many good themes there are out there. This particular theme, eDegree, looked both fun and challenging, and I liked the graphics and layout as well. Win/Win. Here’s where a couple more tutorials came in handy, because setting up the slide show on the first page took a little finagling to get right. (And by finagling, I mean installing a plugin, modifying a JavaScript that the writer made a mistake in, figuring out the correct dimensions for the page, figuring out how to specify which posts show up, etc.) And then voila! it was done. I think it’s pretty awesome that the slide show even works on the iPhone. Go. Check it out.

Then lastly I worked some magic to make the About Me section look right and added an RSS feed to my tweets over to the right.

Whew.

Well that’s all for now. With any luck, I’ll find enough writing prowess to pump out a more interesting post later today about heading off to UT Knoxville for grad school.

Blogging

Blog Changes

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Just a quick note – I’m switching my domain name (matt-cook.com) from one web service to another, and I’ll also be switching from Blogger to WordPress with all the fun that entails. Just so everybody knows, the site may be down or messed up in the next week or so.

Cheers!

Geography

Business as Usual

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I had a bit more to say than could be said in a tweet or status update, so here you go!

Yesterday, we had a lovely half day at UTM due to impending doom (AKA snow), so Karen and I went to check out the semi-new restaurant in town, Parnell’s Grill. It’s a small place, as the building used to be a donut shop, but the food was great. I’ve heard they are doing well enough to be looking to expand the building or something along those lines, which isn’t usually the case for new places in Martin.

However, a more typical scene for Martin’s economy taking place at our last stop, Movie Gallery, was a going-out-of-business sale. I know that the chain is probably downsizing because they just filed for bankruptcy (again), but I don’t know if our local store was doing a good job of competing with the well-established (and cheaper) Movies to Go. Regardless, they are selling a good majority of their wares. Karen and I picked up two Wii games and Ironman on DVD just in time for the snow day. Guess we won’t be getting anything productive done…

To complete the (sadly ironic) picture of the Martin economy, there is a new store being built just down from Movie Gallery in the University Shopping Plaza. (Can anybody tell me what that is going to be?) It’s being built where the old KFC sat empty for five or so years as an wonderful eyesore. So the big net gain on new stores in Martin this season? (Or year, for all we know…) A big fat zero.

Something closes just as something new is about to open, and though we citizens of Martin might be happy or maybe even proud for a few months when this new store opens, we still have virtually no new growth.

I’m not really complaining, because I like Martin, unlike a lot of people my age. Plus, Martin’s economic/business situation doesn’t impact me that much because I’ll be off to grad school soon. But for those still here, and for those students coming here in the near future, I wish Martin could successfully add and KEEP a few more businesses (stores and restaurants in particular) thriving.

What are your thoughts?

Geographic Musings