Many viewpoints

‘Do we look too hot for this apocalypse or what?’

I’m having fun lately — not, Oh my God, that roller coaster was insane! fun — but some satisfied fun, the kind I can allow myself when I feel like things are rolling along and I’m not somehow lagging behind.

I hit a goal on the writing project I mentioned earlier and I started working on something with my brother that we hope to roll out in a little while. We’re going through some big system/software changes at work, but this time the stuff we’re being trained on seems to me like a pretty big improvement over some of the things we’ve gotten used to and in one big way, it’ll offer me a lot more flexibility with how and where I do my job, so that’s nice.

So, I’m not doing cartwheels or anything, but I’m pretty happy. OK, I did a cartwheel. One cartwheel. Just now, I’m sorry you missed it, it was a tiny cartwheel, you shouldn’t have blinked.

Part of the fun has been settling in to a rhythm with the Digital Savant columns and the newer Micro mini-features we introduced more recently.

This week’s column allowed me to flex my dormant TV critic muscle in talking about the new, ridiculous, kinda wobbly J.J. Abrams-branded pilot episode of Revolution. It turns out that I haven’t forgotten how to write about goofy, earnest fantasy sci-fi, and in this case my editor had the great idea of writing about the show’s plot of a mass blackout in terms of how we live with technology.

What I did not anticipate was how badly the show wants to be The Hunger Games.

I mean, look at this guy. Just LOOK:

Last week’s column was about Mike Daisey’s one-man play The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which he performed in Austin for three nights.

Photo by Kevin Berne, courtesy of UT-Texas Performing Arts

The phone interview we did was good, I thought. Daisey was generous was his time, thoughtful in his answers and only a little cagey and indirect when I asked him whether he regretted participating in “Retraction,” which is how the column ends.

What surprised me much more was seeing the actual show, more than a full week after I’d written the article. I didn’t have any obligation to review or follow up the column, so I was able to attend the show without a notebook in front of my face and to just see it as a theatergoer.

It was funnier than I was expecting. I was expecting a depressing, searing lecture on human rights abuses and that does come toward the end and sprinkled inside some pretty amusing thoughts on what it is to be a geek, an Apple Fanboy and someone suddenly thrust in the spotlight and suddenly interacting with people like Steve Wozniak.

It played to about half an audience; the night I went it had the bad luck of being scheduled at the same time as an away UT football game and the theater was on campus.

The play had some very recent updates, including mentions of a recent Chinese student labor scandal and some thoughts about the iPhone 5 launch. Daisey suggested at the end of the show (after accusing all of being complicit and not doing enough to stop Apple and Foxconn’s shoddy labor practices overseas) not that we stop buying Apple products, but that at least in the case of the iPhone 5 that maybe we should wait a few weeks. Big product launches tend to be where the worst of the working conditions take place and not rushing to be the first to own the new iPhone might relieve some of that pressure.

Judging from what pre-orders look like, it’s a message hardly anyone heard or heeded.

The Digital Savant Micros are starting to feel a little more substantial and newsy when we can make them so, like one we recently did explaining Reddit and tying it to an event that was in the news. This week, we did a Micro about how you can tell why a website’s not loading tied to last week’s GoDaddy outage. (Which actually did affect a website I own, but since that site gets single-digit traffic per day, I’m sure nobody noticed.)

Other recent stuff I wrote included a follow-up on Ken Starks, a man I wrote about two years ago, who has been having some health problems and got some much-needed support from the Linux community and, of course, a wrap-up of the iPhone 5 announcement. (And no, I’m not upgrading this time. Perfectly fine with my 4S and my wife, who is out of contract, has no interest in getting a new phone right now).

Every year I always lament the passing of summer because here in New Braunfels, that’s when all the fun stuff seems to happen (except Wurstfest. Oh, Wurstfest, you cannot get here soon enough).

This year, we went to the beach, I got to go tubing, we made plenty of trips to Schlitterbahn and it was a mild enough summer that we actually got to go outside and even got some rain, not like last year’s endless drought.

So instead of complaining that the cool weather got here too soon and that the season is behind us, I’ll just enjoy these pictures and be glad that as the girls are getting older, they’re getting to enjoy more of the summertime as they start transitioning into school every August.

Oh, one more thing. I have a story about my car that I’m going to save for next week. I would write it tonight, but something else just happened and I want to see how the story turns out tomorrow before I put it into words. But it involves a collision, a court appearance, a missing antenna and several other twists and turns.

You won’t be able to put it down! Or click off of it, or whatever.