This movie, Kick-Ass debuts tomorrow night at the South by Southwest Film Fest, so I'll have a much better idea about it after that, but for now, you can hear our semi-informed opinions on the preview in our latest Trailers Without Pity.

Oh, by the way, our apologies for the creepy animated Nicolas Cage. We had no idea it was going to turn out that way. But then we kinda liked it.

Hope you enjoy!

Busy, busy, busy week, so here's the short version.

The NPR All Tech Considered this week was about wireless broadband, the FCC and a few other things related to the future of high-speed Internet. Blog post with lots of links is here and the audio of the segment can be found in two parts: part one and part two. Based on how many comments we got, I'm sure it's a topic we'll return to.

My other big news this week was that I got a sorta-scoop on Google Maps bike routes. I say "sorta" because the news was embargoed and the moment the news went live, CNET, Wired and a few other news outlets had it, too. I was thrilled to have the info early since Austin is such a big biking town, but on the other hand it reaffirmed why I hate working under embargo, especially on national news. It's usually a lose-lose situation and I always end up getting roped in.

I worked very hard on this story -- it didn't go A1, but I'm not aware of any other regional or city papers of our size that had it that early. So... yay?

Lots of other stuff to post, so I'll be back in a bit. Gotta go get my credientials for SXSW Interactive first.

Episode 008 of Age of Lasers is up. It was posted a few days ago, but there were some Web site problems that Glark valiantly tackled and it wasn't updating to iTunes for a while. This came after we had a previous audio issue that meant re-recording almost the entire episode, so that explains a bit of the delay between 007 and 008.

We discuss Google Buzz, Steam/Valve games on the Mac and Windows Series 7 Phone OS Mobile Microsoft Platform Handset, or whatever the Hell they're calling it.

Enjoy!

For me over the next week, I'll be focused on SXSW Interactive. You can follow my reports over on Digital Savant. I've also got an NPR segment airing Monday about mobile broadband on All Things Considered. I'll post a link to it as soon as it's up.

A blog post I did for NPR about the video game Heavy Rain seems to have gotten quite a bit of attention. There were more than 200 comments about it on Facebook last I checked (about 35 percent of them completely misinformed.). Still! Not a bad problem to ahve.

My assignment for Monday's All Tech Considered was to try out Chatroulette, which I wrote about in this blog post and explained in an on-air segment.

Apart from the fact that I got to say "Male genitalia" on the public airwaves (sadly, "Dickensian" was vetoed), it was a normal segment that I thought went really well. My brother helped the day before use Chatroulette, which is much less scary when you're not doing it by yourself. As happens on this service, you see a lot of penis. A gaggle of them. A flock of cocks, if you will. It's always jarring (unless that's what you're specifically looking for), but after a while you get used to the flow of people coming into your computer from all over the world.

We had a good time, including having a talk with some guys in Tunisia who wanted us to send them some money so they could come to America. They were flashing Tunisian money (Tunips?), so I made it rain with some American money and told them that if they sent me $100, I would double their investment by sending them $200 right back. They did not fall for it.

We also talked to this cool dude in France. He didn't speak, but he was playing some house music and set up his laptop and mic to create these cool DJ feedback loops. He was wearing a bathrobe and tiny shorts and we said, "Oh no, he's gonna go Buffalo Bill on us!" We downloaded and played "Goodbye Horses" to try to put him in the mood, but it turns out he wasn't interested in dick dancing.

I've been writing entirely too much about penises this week.

Speaking of something long and hard, South by Southwest Interactive is always the most challenging part of the year for me. (Oh, also: speaking of stamina.) I did a story in the paper about South by Southwest parties in other cities and have been doing pretty much non-stop coverage with my work colleagues in advance of the fest. That's where I'll be March 12-16, and Tweeting about it, too.

Will be doing an NPR segment on Monday, too, and probably one the week after that on the festival.

This one was kind of a no-brainer -- how could we not do Iron Man 2?

But within that easy free-throw range, I think we did some fun stuff and Pablo's channeling of Terrence Howard whispering, "Oh, no, he flew away..." cracks me up every single time I hear it.

So, here ya go. New episode of Trailers Without Pity. Next up, we're doing Kick-Ass and Sex and the City 2.

It'll be 13 years this summer that I've worked professionally in the newsroom where I'm now employed, and I still don't know whether I love or dread the buzz that happens when news, real news, happens in our city.

On Thursday around 10 a.m., just as I was sitting down at my desk, we started seeing the first Tweets from people who said they saw a plane fly into a northwest Austin building and then we were hearing about smoke and fire.

Years ago, when I worked in Technopolis or the business section, I wouldn't have been directly involved, but now with Twitter and Facebook, a lot of the people I connect with were potential eyewitnesses. Now part of my job is to filter through these Tweets (along with our social media editor and others on the online and news staffs), knowing that there will probably be a story for me to write about the online reaction to a major event.

My story from Friday's paper was about the way that social media helped gather news, spread rumors and verify information (for us and for other local and national media). Then, the next day, we saw several Web sites related to the plane crash that seemed to be profiting from the tragedy by embedding ads in a copy of the Joe Stack manifesto. My story from Saturday's paper was about that and a video game that popped up the same day as the crash, a simple, but morally queasy Flash-based Web game.

Somewhere alone the line I got on the radar of the Alex Jones Web site Infowars and they wrote a blog entry about my story. The comments make for some incredibly entertaining reading.

Then, Alex Jones himself mentioned me (and mangled my last name; I thought he was a radio guy) on his Friday broadcast. My inbox has been hit with several incredibly enlightening messages that are TOTALLY NOT CONSPIRACY THEORIES! NOT AT ALL!

I mean, check this one out:

"How about this as a theory; The guy was murdered, his house set ablaze, his body placed in that plane, and the plane was remote controlled into the IRS building."

Dude, that makes complete sense. I wouldn't even feel right investigating it because it's so obvious.

But "Conspiracy theory?" I'm ashamed I ever even used those words. Clearly, you guys have thought this through.

Google is not really a company I used to cover on my beat so much, but just by the nature of what they're doing, how they're expanding and how pervasive they are in our lives, I've turned into a reporter who has to follow the company's moves.

I did so yesterday on NPR in a segment about Google Buzz, what's going on with Google in China and their recent announcement of an ultra-high-speed broadband service. I posted an entry on the All Tech Considered blog with lots of links to updates.

It was the first segment I've done in a few weeks. I've been keeping busy working on a video project with my former LCP castmate Mical Trejo and Bobby Bones. We shot some video over the weekend and are finalizing a script to send out. It's been a busy few weeks, but I'm kind of amazed at how much we did in such a short time.

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My wife is going back to work in a few weeks and Carolina is growing quickly. She'll have to go to daycare soon and we're a little worried about how that's going to play out. But worried in a very minor way because she and Lilly are both healthy and everything's going great. We're very lucky and we know it.

A woman who works at Lilly's daycare gave birth last week and the baby passed away. We've gotten updates via notes sent to all the parents and over the weekend we knew the situation was dire.

This wasn't a premature birth or anything like that. By all measures, everything should have gone perfectly, except that it didn't.

Before Carolina was born, we stressed that something might go wrong. The pregnancy went so smoothly that we thought surely our luck couldn't hold out to have a birth that was so complication-free.

I worry a lot that our luck will someday run out. I know that's not a healthy or even sane way of looking at things, but to know parents who've lost children and to see the horrible things that happen in the news (particularly in San Antonio) to infants and toddlers, I sometimes just get overwhelmed by all the trouble that's passed us by.

We don't talk about it much, but when we do, we come to the conclusion that if anything happened to Lilly, it could easily destroy us. It could destroy me. I don't know what I would do, honestly. I've always believed myself to be a strong person, but the kind of strength I see in other parents who have survived such things astonishes me. It's otherworldly.

I'm not sure how to deal with even the thought of something like that other than to do what most parents have to do: keep on moving, watching your kids grow, and protect them any way you know how.