Rusty’s Blog

After I started research about my grandfather’s playing career at Tech High and Georgia Tech last year, I had the idea that I might want to write an Atlanta history blog since I don’t know of anyone writing one. Speaking with my Great Aunt Jane recently has made me even more interested in the idea.

If you want to know how a lot of the posts would read, surf over to this Pecanne Log entry about Atlanta’s seedy past culled from various sources. That post even gave me an idea for what I’d name the blog: Snake Nation. Snake Nation was one of two sections of Atlanta “inhabited by the criminal element,” a “wicked suburb” which was “a great annoyance to the good citizens of Atlanta.” Perfect.

I have a lot of ideas for posts. I’d probably start out combining tidbits I found in books and old newspapers with some of my own family’s history. There likely would never be a shortage of material for “this day in Atlanta history” posts since Atlanta history is well-represented in books, but I’m betting there’s a lot of anecdotal history like Jane’s floating around that hasn’t been published many places, if at all. Ultimately, that’s what I’d like to find and write about.

Jane has been writing down her memories, which span about 35 single-spaced pages at the moment. To give but one small example of the stories I’d like to find and publish on this hypothetical blog, here is some of what she wrote about “Grandpa Tarrant” (my great great great grandfather William T. Tarrant). Emphasis mine:

Grandpa Tarrant was born in 1858 in Atlanta, on Whitehall Street, which was one of the main streets at the time. Atlanta was first called Terminus because it was where the first railroad into the town terminated. It was later named Marthasville after the daughter of an Ex-Governor, Wilson Lumpkin, who had been most active in getting plans for expanding the railroad systems. By 1845 Marthasville had three railroads that opened up transportation in all directions. This was the beginning of making our city into the “Gateway of the South.” In 1848, just ten years before Grandpa was born, the legislature incorporated the town and named it City of Atlanta. At the time it had twenty-one citizens, and its city limits were set a mile in all directions from the depot. Grandpa told us at the age of nine he remembered waving good-by to his daddy as he got on the train to go fight in the Civil War. His father had moved the family down to Stockbridge near some of his relatives when the “March to Atlanta” started in Tennesseee.

I never felt a sense of place growing up in Marietta or living in Knoxville when I went to school there. Much of my mother’s side of the family lived in Atlanta proper for about 100 years before moving to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. There is something comforting about living and working here that comes from this connection to the city’s history. Technically I live a few hundred feet outside the city border, but I still feel an obligation to be a caretaker of that lineage since I’m close enough.

The part that deflates me about the blog idea is the time commitment necessary to do it right would be too much for me right now. I’d want to, and have to, enlist the help of some co-conspirators. Having been on the other end of the “do you want to do a bunch of work for no pay?” question more times than I’d like to recall, I understand that the grocery store doesn’t accept good will and exposure. So I’m not optimistic that will work out.

I should note, for example, that I haven’t fact-checked the passage I quoted from Jane. That’s something I’d have to at least make an effort to do if I were writing a dedicated history blog, which could get very time-consuming very quickly.

So it may be a while. It may never happen. Maybe someone like the Atlanta History Center will start writing a really awesome blog with factoids like Peccane Log put together, and I can just be content to read it and continue research about my own family.

And it may be that something like this exists right under my nose and I just haven’t stumbled across it yet. Please tell me if that’s the case in the comments.

Both of these videos with my Great Aunt Jane were shot a little over a month ago and I just now got time to go through the footage and edit it. For now, I’m only posting videos from her which contain information that I think is interesting to a broader audience outside my family, but I might post more later.

Great Aunt Jane reacts to photos from Grady taken the night of the Winecoff Hotel fire

Allen Goodwin, who runs winecoff.org and co-authored The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America’s Deadliest Hotel Fire, contacted me after watching my first video interview with Jane. He asked me a few follow-up questions about the interview, and also asked me to show Jane a couple of photos he had to see if she recognized any of the subjects. She didn’t unfortunately, but she still offered a few interesting tidbits, which are included in this video:

Great Aunt Jane remembers The Skullbusters

I’d always heard about a group called The Skullbusters from my mom growing up, as her dad (Jane’s older brother) was a member. I never had a grasp on exactly what it was or what they did, but I did know a lot of people who were in it went on to become influential figures in politics, sports and business in Atlanta. Jane answers some of my questions in this video:

I am not a fan of overpowering marinades which mask the flavor of a good steak or even a burger. If I paid for a good piece of meat, I’d like to be able to taste it. So I was skeptical of this steak marinade recipe which seemed like it would have too strong a flavor (and because of its ridiculously hyperbolic name). But this past weekend I made it with only minor modifications, soaked my burgers in it for about five hours before grilling, and was pleased with the resulting flavor.

Here’s my only-slightly modified version of the recipe, with stars where I made changes and an explanation below:

Ingredients

1/3 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 1/2 tablespoons garlic powder
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped ^*
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped ^*
1 teaspoon ground white pepper
1/4 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
1 teaspoon fresh garlic, minced ^*

^* – substitution of a fresh ingredient where the recipe called for dried. Used half the recommended amount of basil since fresh basil is much stronger than dried basil.

Directions

Mix all ingredients in a blender for 30 seconds, pour mixture over meat, soak for several hours (up to 8 ) in the refrigerator before cooking.

More notes

After I threw the burgers on the grill, I boiled the remains of the marinade with the idea I might soak the burgers in it for a minute or two after grilling them. However, it has a very strong odor and flavor prior to grilling, so I decided against that plan. The burgers were grilled medium-rare and remained juicy without any need to apply more marinade after throwing them on the grill. The flavor which remained after grilling left a hint of the marinade’s original flavor, which complimented the meat without overpowering its natural flavor.

I don’t buy everything Kimberly wrote about on this list of how social media is ruining your life, but there is some truth to some of it, like any good piece of link bait.

I’m not really interested in fisking it, I just want to focus on one part. For a while I was becoming one of those obnoxious people she mentions who constantly texts/reads and takes photos during times when I should have just been enjoying other people’s company. I’ve been working on not doing that as much, with varying degrees of success.

I think it was around the first Sex 2.0 that I realized I was spending too much time documenting my life and not enough time living it. I guess it was ironic to learn I was abusing social media at a social media conference. The event was a lot more fun than other events I’d been to because people didn’t sit around and live blog and post their photos to Flickr in real time much. They, and I, were too engaged in conversation to bother with any of that, and the experience was richer for it.

A lot has happened in my life I haven’t been writing about here. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to come back and read this years from now and wish I’d written more about one thing or another. And I very well might.

I didn’t write much about our house-hunting process. I didn’t write about our house warming party at all. I didn’t write about going to Six Flags last Saturday with some friends, other than a brief Twitter message or two.

At one point in high school when I was going to a lot of concerts I realized I was fixated on getting concert t-shirts so people would know, by golly, that I was at Nine Inch Nails or Aerosmith or whatever other band I was seeing that week that seems a little lame now. Then I realized I would have more money to go to more concerts if I didn’t spend money on souvenir t-shirts. So I left subsequent concerts with nothing but my memories to show for it, and the funny thing is I think I enjoyed the concerts more knowing ahead of time that’s all I would leave with.

Blogging about all the positive things in my life feels like that sometimes; like I’m fixated on taking a souvenir away from my good memories instead of just enjoying them as they happen and then leaving them in the past when I’m done.

I also am realizing my life probably won’t take the sweeping arch that a lot of people’s lives take, and I am at peace with this. That knowledge has caused me to focus on simple pleasures like hearing the birds chirp on my back deck, the smells of food cooked on my grill, or mowing the grass with a slight beer buzz on a Saturday afternoon. I spent four hours the other night making five tablespoons of tomato paste from scratch. None of this would make for exciting blog fodder, but it’s what I’ve come to enjoy lately.

My complaints feel trivial compared to other people’s and to my own from a few years ago, so I don’t want to weigh myself down focusing on those either.

If you’re not hearing as much from me about my life on here, that’s probably why. And I may need to point my future self back to this post if I find myself wondering why I didn’t write more.

Lots of people are remaking their avatars for various social networks with a green tint to show their support for the Iranian election protests. This is awesome, but it also causes people’s icons to be visually difficult to distinguish. I get that some people may feel like that’s the point (we’re all together, one voice, etc.), but I find it distracting in practice. So I decided to make my avatar with a green border instead:

If you like this approach, it’s easy to use Flickr’s photo editing tools to make a similar avatar. Here are the steps:

1. Upload an avatar to Flickr and navigate to its page. Take note of the image’s original width and height.
2. Click the ‘Edit Photo’ link
3. When Picnik opens, click the ‘Create’ tab
4. Click the ‘Frames’ option on the row of links immediately below the ‘Create’ tab
5. Click the ‘Border’ option on the left hand row of options
6. Click the box next to ‘Outer Color’ and paste in ‘00C100′ without quotes where ‘000000′ is
7. Adjust the ‘Outer Thickness’ slider to whatever thickness you prefer (for my 80×80 icon, I set it to 8 )
8. Adjust the ‘Inner Thickness’ slider to 0
9. Click ‘Apply’
10. Click the ‘Edit’ tab near the top of the page
11. Click the ‘Resize’ button under the ‘Edit’ tab
12. Enter the image’s original dimensions, then click ‘OK’
13. In the upper righthand corner of the screen, click Save.
14. In the ‘Save this photo’ pop-up window, click ‘Save’ again.
15. From the photo’s page, click ‘All Sizes’
16. If it is not displaying the ‘Original’ size, click the ‘Original’ link.
17. Right click on the image and save it to your hard drive.

If you don’t like my approach and would prefer to do it the way everyone else is, that’s ok too. You can visit helpiranelection.com and add a green tint to your avatar. In one or two steps.

If you read part 1 of my tutorial, you’d hopefully know how to port a simple display widget from the Wordpress 2.7 procedural widget API to the new Wordpress 2.8 object-oriented widget API. You’d also know a little about why coding widgets are better than slapping a bunch of code in your sidebar. You did read it, right? No? I’ll wait, I’ve got time.

Okay, good. The part we didn’t cover because it would have made the tutorial ridiculously long was porting configurable forms for the widget admin area. So that’s what this part is about.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wordpress 2.8 introduces a new object-oriented Widget API (based on Alex Tingle’s MultiWidget class) which is an improvement over the procedural API for Wordpress 2.7 and before. It’s not a revolutionary leap, but it does make coding widgets which need to appear multiple times on a page easier, automates some administrative form handling, and makes code better-organized and easier to follow.

The bad news is the new API isn’t backwards compatible without a little work. So here is the first part of a multi-part guide for porting a Wordpress 2.7 widget over to the new Wordpress 2.8 API.

Read the rest of this entry »

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.8 which mostly went fine except that it blew up about half the widgets in my sidebar due to a completely new widget API. I eventually will get around to updating these, which will give me an excuse to write a technical post.

This was the first time I used the Automatic Upgrade in the admin instead of doing the upgrade through SSH, and it seemed to have gone off without a hitch. So yay for that.

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

So, 13,000 words and 28 single-spaced at Times News Roman 12pt pages later, that’s every job I’ve had before my current job. Well, almost. There were a few that didn’t get their own posts:

Working for my mom’s office

Most everything there is to say about this experience I already wrote in my history of my time on the Internet post.

Internship with Kinetic Design

Same for this one.

Web developer for The Volunteer Channel, the University of Tennessee’s student television station

1) This wasn’t a “job” in the sense of getting paid, and 2) there isn’t a whole lot to say about it. I was in the communications school at UT, and The Volunteer Channel was looking for, um, volunteers to do things. I signed up, and it ended up they needed someone to make a website. So I did, and that’s about all there is to the story. The site you see there now is not the one I made, but the logo is the same as it was, and the content and basic structure of the site isn’t much different. They have some videos there, which they didn’t have when I was there.

News writer and columnist for The Daily Beacon, the University of Tennessee’s student newspaper

Like The Volunteer Channel, writing for The Daily Beacon wasn’t a paid job. Spring semester of my second senior year, I started out there and wrote two news stories which were not very good. Then I wrote a weekly column during my last summer in Knoxville and was on the “editorial board.”

We got to meet John Shumaker, who was president of the university at the time, after we wrote something critical of what he did. I don’t remember much from the meeting, but I remember thinking even then he must be a pretty insecure dude if he cares what a student newspaper says during the summer when no one is reading. Not long after I graduated, he was caught in a shitstorm with more charges than are worth recounting here and resigned.

Some of my columns were okay, some of them were awful. I made no effort to write about UT events, instead just choosing random national topics. I learned writing a column is hard, and you have to practice to get better at it. The first two or three I wrote, I sat around staring at my monitor for hours before I thought of a topic and got much of anything down.

My favorite column I wrote was about decriminalizing marijuana. A copy editor who also happened to be a stoner was very happy when it came across his desk and practically hugged me when I came in for an editorial board meeting.

If there are any jobs I forgot about, I’ll just tack them onto this post later rather than writing a whole new one.

Enough people have hopped on board the meme train since my last post that they’re going to get an unordered list instead of Oxford commas:

• Alyssa was a birthday party lackey-slash-clerk
• Emily was an information architect
• Sara was a clerk for an attorney at LAW
• Nikki temped for a mortgage office
• Thomas was a waiter at Pizza Hut, and was almost a corpse in the trunk of someone’s car

This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

While there is no shame in working at Best Buy or for a temp agency or as a seasonal driver helper for UPS, after a few years of jobs like that it did start to feel like I was piddlefarting around. Because I was.

Fortunately a blogger friend of mine knew of an opening for some part time work as a community organizer. It paid double what Best Buy was paying, so I could make the same money in half the time and spend the rest of the time looking for more permanent work.

I’m calling this “community organizer” because “project manager of a community planning project” is not a very catchy title, even though it’s a little more accurate. Really, both are vague and could mean pretty much anything. In my case, it meant I was an assistant to a consultant who had planned out a series of “visioning” meetings with citizens in an exurban Georgia county along with the Chamber of Commerce there.

My job was writing press releases, maintaining the website, helping set up community meetings, transcribing, giving input at planning meetings and on conference calls, and nagging people to do things when necessary. I didn’t have to nag much because the people in said exurban county were well-organized and always followed through with what they said they were going to do.

Visioning is a process where you get maybe 100 people in a room, break them into smaller groups, and ask them to answer a few open-ended questions as a group. They talked, scribbled furiously with markers on giant notepads for an hour or two, and then we took the pads back with us, transcribed them, and tried to make sense of them. In this case, we were trying to formulate a strategic plan for the county’s future, so we asked citizens questions about what they liked and disliked about their communities, and what they’d like to see in the future.

It’s a neat process to be involved in, very little-d democratic. The only real downside to it is it requires a lot of sustained energy spanning multiple future generations of leadership for a community to stick to one of these plans, as they don’t have the weight of law behind them. It works better in some places than it does in others. It will be a decade or more before we’ll find out if the work we did will pay off or not.

A lot of my Democratic friends will bristle when someone says “Chamber of Commerce.” My experience working with this group made me see what a disservice they’re doing themselves. The group I worked with were not free market zealots like Democrats seem to believe all Chambers of Commerce are, but rather goal-oriented people who are pro-business, but also interested in all other facets of community improvement. They didn’t much care how something got done — whether through public or private means — so long as it got done somehow.

It was also eye-opening to see significant demand for transit, walkable communities and other things that I think of as liberal, urban ideas that far outside Atlanta. There’s more demand out there for these things than our current leadership would have you believe.

Not too long after I started this job, Amber helped me find more part-time work with the company I still work for now. I worked two full days at each during the week, and split my time on Fridays. The offices were only a few blocks apart, so it was easy for me to walk to the second job after lunch.

This was a good period of time. Neither job ever felt much like work then, and I was rebuilding self esteem that had gone AWOL years earlier. I owe Amber and Joe thanks for helping me land these jobs and getting me into a better head space. So, thanks.

Eventually this job ended when the project ended, and I went to work full time for my current company. Since this is a jobs I had series, and not a jobs I have series, it will hopefully be a very long time before I have a chance to write about it.

I’m going to write one more entry with outtakes from the jobs and other things I did that didn’t get their own posts, and that will conclude this series.

See also: Amber’s time at the Baxter Street Bookstore