Breaking news

There was a little bit of worry that the euphoria bump from some recent trips might go quickly away, that things would settle back into the pre-trip rut before too long, but that’s not what happened.

Instead, in a really nice way, that renewal held and, just as shit has a way of snowballing downhill, so do good things move the opposite way if you’re willing to get behind the boulder and push a little.

For me, pushing has meant going from, “I just don’t want to write anymore” to writing a lot and not feeling so drained by everything. I pitched an article idea to CNN for the first time in ages (more on that in a minute), started feeling more energized about Ye Olde Work Blog and had an annual evaluation with my editor that left me feeling really supported and appreciated through some tough work times.

All those good things led to other good things and suddenly, things feel normalized. Or stabilized. Something “lized,” for sure.

It’s hard enough to clear your head enough to let your mind wander around an idea for a while and to generate something, and nearly impossible when you feel low on energy and your head is buzzing with a bunch of other stuff. But the recent clarity (and some fortunate early holiday deadlines) allowed me to spend some real time working on this Digital Savant column about the echo-chamber effect of social media.

My editor and I had been talking a while about how we might approach a story about the 2012 election cycle without repeating the obvious stories about the campaigns using social media and What That All Means. So instead, over several weeks, we chatted about it in our meetings, brainstorming out loud about our social media habits and what we were/weren’t seeing and the column is a direct result of those conversations.

One post-note: the day after I wrote that column, but the day before I put it online, my Twitter stream suddenly was flooded with Tweets about the Republican National Convention, including posts from one person who I had to unfollowed when he (of course it was a he) dropped the C-word in reference to a female politician on TV. So, perhaps I wrote the column a tiny bit too soon, but I think what it has to say about how we silo ourselves within our social networks applies to a lot more than politics.

Paired with that column, which runs in print on Monday, is a Digital Savant Micro about the humble USB Flash Drive, which also goes by other names. There was also a video game review I did of “10000000,” an iPad game that I was completely hooked on while on the trip to NYC. Sorry to pass along this crippling addiction if you choose to download the the game.

Now, about that CNN story. Like a lot of people, I’m obsessed with Breaking Bad and at some point in mulling over a recent episode, I had the idea that Walter White’s empire building reminded me a lot of Apple and that his rise to the top was only going to make things more dangerous for him and his family.

I wrote up a few paragraphs of notes and pitched it in an email to my CNN editor, fully expecting that this was going to be too zany an idea and that I might need to consider pitching it elsewhere or publish it on my own here. Despite my editor not being a Breaking Bad fan, he greenlit the column and it ran on Friday after a few days where I nervously wondered if the piece would get sidelined before the half-season finale.

The comments were exactly what I expected this time: a few notes of support and many more decrying the ridiculousness of the piece and CNN’s silliness in running it. To one commenter, who said it was just more flotsam on an Internet full of junk, I ended up replying, “I stand by my flotsam.”

The thing is, I know the article is a stretch. I’m comparing the world’s most successful company to a homicidal meth kingpin. But that doesn’t mean the TV show doesn’t have some things to teach us about greed, about karma, about how bad decisions can doom even the best of intentions. Once I pitched the column and got to writing, I was terrified that I wouldn’t have enough material to pull it together. Instead I wrote about 300 words past my word count and had to stop myself from including more threads of comparison.

Right before I started writing this post, the piece was posted on the front page of Slashdot. It’s been fun watching the reaction from some of the smartest people on the Internet (it was also on some of the Apple news sites and on Hacker News), even the ones who think I’m an idiot for writing the column. Call me an idiot, call me wrong, call the entire premise absurd, just read it and talk about it and I’ll be over the moon for days.

Another reason I had a little thundercloud trailing overhead all summer was because I dreaded, absolutely dreaded, the idea that starting in August, I was going to have to get my ass up super early, which I may have mentioned last time.

Is has not been so bad! I mean, it’s not great, but my kids have been handling it well and on the nights I’ve been able to get to bed, it’s been pretty OK. 6:30 a.m. is still much lamer and darker than 8:30 a.m., but the advantage of dropping my kids off so early is that I get to go back home and either nap for an hour or hang around and make some eggs or check email and get a jump on work or do pretty much whatever I want until traffic dies down and I head to Austin.

I’m in a lot less of a rush and the day feels longer. So, perhaps the early risers kind of have a point. It’s not like it’s up for debate. This is the new reality for a very long time and in just a few days, my kids were already fully adjusted to the new rise time. I’m still not quite there, but it’s not the disaster I thought it might be. The kids are too tired at that hour to put up a fight about their clothes or breakfast preferences and Lilly has been enjoying kindergarten too much to make her dad miserable in the morning.

In fact, the only tears came on the first day of school. Not from her. She was beaming. Her dad, though, may have gotten misty over how grown-up a 5-year-old can already seem.