Bloggystyle -- The Latest

Truly we live in an Age of Lasers

I'm not on NPR today (long story and it's a good thing; I'm so stuffy from allergies that I sound awful and nasally [more nasally than usual]).

But if you really want to hear me talk, at length, I have something even better for you: Glark and I have started a podcast called Age of Lasers.

We've been talking about it for a few months and the first episode just went up this morning. We've had to hurdle over a few technical/audio issues and the first episode is a bit rough around the edges, but I'm really glad it's finally available and that I can tell you about it because I've been really excited about it for a while.

And of course, because Glark is involved, it's got a theme song, a very cool Web site and we're even on Twitter. You can hear the audio on the site or you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

As to what it's about -- we'll be talking about tech stuff, but in a way that is accessible to everyone, not just raging technonerds like us. We will be, as the kids call it (20 years ago when they were still kids) breaking it down.

We hope it's also sufficiently Omar-Glarkian in that we'll probably be doing little funny bits and going on some dangerous tangents. It will be much more fun than most tech podcasts; I can definitely promise you that. It's the kind of stuff that Glark and I talk about over IM all the time, but now we are sharing it with you. You're an accomplice now, practically. You'd better be loyal, bub.

Hope you like it!

posted by Omar G. at 2:28 PM

Triple story time

We celebrated Halloween this weekend with Lilly for what seemed like the first time (last year, she didn't really know what was going on). She didn't really want to go out after dark (in fact, strangely, she insisted we put her straight to bed, which never happens). But we got in some costume time at least, and she discovered she really likes candy. Fun!

We missed the Texas Book Festival, where two people I really wanted to see were speaking. We've been laid out, completely run down by allergies and a trip to Austin just wasn't in the card for us, it turned out.

We did make it over to Wurstfest (since it's only five minutes away) and ate and drank and watched our daughter get really, really into the Chicken Dance and dancing to other polka. I'll post more about that soon since we're probably going several more times during the 10-Day Salute to Sausage.

I had a several stories in the paper over the weekend. The first one was the 10 Scariest People on Social Networking Sites. This story was originally supposed to be about social media horror stories, but after several tries to get people to tell us their tales, we had to scrap it for lack of interest. Everyone seems to have a social media story of awkwardness or weird stalking, but very few people wanted to share their stories with us. Instead, I wrote up a list of 10 scary types (tied to kinds of monsters) and our brilliant illustrator Don Tate II took the ball and ran with it with his amazing gallery of monsters. I'm so blown away with the artwork, I can't even tell you. It looked great in full color in the paper. (The image at the top of this entry was the lead illustration.)

On Sunday, a story about Jan Bozarth's Fairy Godmother Academy books ran and I did a sidebar to Sharyn Vane's story about the technical/Web/interactive side of this very ambitious project for girls. It's a very impressive creative team and it was great to meet them all.

And on Monday (which hasn't even happened yet!) I did a Tech Monday column about Slacker.com's recent business moves and how it's indicative of where proprietary gadgets might be going in the age of smartphones. Yes, I truly believe stand-alone GPS devices might be an endangered species.

One more thing: Sarah Bunting continues to amaze with $314k+ take that her Tomato Nation '09 Contest raised for kids and schools. Did I say amazed? I meant stunned and humbled and in awe. It's hard to be cynical in the face of such amazing feats.

posted by Omar G. at 11:06 PM

Continually updated...