Terribly Happy | Bloggystyle

hipDisk, from the CHI 2012 conference.

There are all kinds of non-profits in Austin doing cool things with technology, but the nature of my beat is that there’s never enough time to write about them all. But it’s really nice when the opportunity does present itself as it did this week when we focused on the keynote speaker for an event involving Knowbility. Knowbility is known for putting on events to train developers (and allow them to compete in competitions) related to making the web more accessible to those with disabilities (and that includes many more people than you might imagine).

I spoke with Kel Smith for the column to help explain the concept of accessibility and how it’s changing. It was a great conversation and I hope the column got across some of the main points. It’s far too large an issue for one column, but we did our best to start a conversation.

The column dovetailed with a strange and wonderful conference I got to attend last week called CHI 2012. I’d never heard of it and it won’t even be back in Austin next year (it’ll be in Paris, I believe; I need to start lobbying now for work to send me over). Focused on computer-human interfaces, it actually is a research-heavy event where super-smart people present the mind-blowing stuff they’re working on that could change our lives. It was fun, eye-opening and inspiring. I wrote a wrap-up of some of the highlights, but I missed so much that I only hit the very tip of what was there.

Also a little eye-popping was a new technology used in last weekend’s Austin mayoral campaign. An augmented reality campaign flyer. A different version of the piece also ran in the paper.

And lastly, I wrote in the blog about a video game based on a horrific (but ultimately not so bad) bus accident that happened at UT and went viral as a web video.

That’s about it for this week. I have a CNN article running later this week that I’ll post about soon, but it’s not live yet.

A weird and completely random thing did happen this week. For a few years, I ran a site called People Dancing at Concerts that I probably mentioned here before.

About a year ago, I just stopped updating it. I just didn’t have time to hunt for the videos and do posts anymore. But apparently it lives on in some form because I got an email from WNYC’s “Soundcheck” program about it and ended up talking about the site on the air today. (I come in about 10-15 minutes into the segment after they start taking callers.) It gave me a reason to update the site a bit. The last few weeks, I’ve been repurposing old entries and posting them on Pinterest as well. No idea if I’ll keep it going, but it was nice to get a little traffic surge on a site I’d pretty much given up.

Fun week!

He's just not that into (seeing) you

Every now and then we hit on something in the column that I don’t think is being written about much elsewhere and which I fight as hard as I can to get right. This week, the Digital Savant column was about the false intimacy we have with texting (which is as popular as ever and actually still growing in the U.S.).

It’s couched in a column that seems like it starts out saying, “Yay for texting, here’s why it’s not going away) but then takes a bit of a left turn to talk about cheating, the way we communicate with loved ones, why voice calls still matter (even as we make less of them) and then, in a sort of coda, a short bit about our wedding anniversary last week. (Which, per my wife’s request to be mentioned as little as possible online, I didn’t really talk about. Aha, but she didn’t say I couldn’t mention her in a column for the newspaper. Loophole!)

I mentioned that I was writing something along these lines last week on Twitter and Facebook and I got some really helpful, thoughtful responses that did help shape what I ended up writing. It’s one of those topics that everyone has an opinion about as I learned today when a reader emailed me:

“It’s just cool to become a gibbering idiot who is no longer obligated to spell correctly and string together coherent thoughts.”

Indeed, sir. Thx 4 the msg.

Slightly longer versions of my reviews of the Nike+ FuelBand (beautiful, baffling), the Xbox Live game “Fez” (indie, retro, cool) and the Swivl for camera phones (rotatin’ follow-you action).

Last week was pretty busy at work. I broke the news about the follow up to Wizard101, Pirate101 from the Austin developers at KingsIsle Entertainment. (The version that ran in print is a little different.)

And I did a mostly-photos preview of the new Austin Microsoft Store in the blog.

Things got even busier later in the week with the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Festival, a new thing in Austin that we covered. I ended up writing up The Divorce Show, Aziz Ansari’s fantastic headlining performance, the Theme Park improv show featuring Laraine Newman, Oscar Nuñez from “The Office” and performers I’d seen years and years ago in the sketch troupe “Totally False People.” Saturday night, my coverage ended with Wanda Sykes, which was also great. Aziz Ansari ended up Tweeting a link to the review of his show, which brought us a nice little surge of traffic.

Still doing reviews over at Kirkus every week or two of children’s apps. In fact, apps were part of a discussion I had with Patrick Jordan, who does a weekly blog feature called “What’s On Your iPad.” I told him what’s on mine for a feature he ran last week.

And I saved probably the biggest news for last. Because I work for a large company that owns several large papers and is in the process of consolidating lots of things across them, my Digital Savant column will be appearing in the other ones as well. That means the column will run more regularly in Atlanta, Dayton and Palm Beach.

In Palm Beach, it started two weeks ago with a flourish. They interviewed me for a very nice introduction piece and ran a past column of mine that I suggested would be a good intro to the Digital Savant column. The first column brought me some very nice emails from South Florida from people either needing tech help or offering their own opinions about everything from LINUX to what devices are best for people suffering from disabilities like multiple sclerosis.

All that recent activity made me exhausted enough for a bad crash early this week. I got several pieces of bad or weird news on the same day, including one about a writing project that I was rapidly losing confidence about (one thing about that; when a writer loses confidence in one piece of writing it can often trigger a chain reaction that leads to thinking you can’t write ANYTHING, EVER AGAIN. That can be dangerous.). It took pep talks from several wonderful people in my life including my writing partner, my wife and my two daughters, who each suddenly became angelic and nice to their dad for once and then things were fine again. I got a good night’s sleep and then today, the day of my 8th wedding anniversary, everything seemed fine again.

It’s been a weird combination lately of big changes at work (not for me specifically but for the paper and the company in general), always feeling pressed for time at home and having gone on a jag of writing so much in a short period of time that the words began to ran together and I stopped processing. Add lack of sleep to that and things get worse really quick.

Now my priority is resting up, getting back into the exercise routine and getting recharged because it’s almost summer, I have a few big tasks ahead of me and I’m gonna need every ounce of energy I’ve can generate. (Just not Nike Fuel points because I’m starting to think those are just useless.)

Aziz Ansari. Image courtesy NBC.

It seems like the subject of comedy has been coming up a lot lately in my life, reminding me of how much I miss writing and performing for the stage (or for live-action video).

On Monday, my Digital Savant column was about how stand-up comics are using social media and other technology to attract fans, sell their own productions or even generate material. I spoke to several local comics who will be performing at the new Moontower Comedy and Oddity Fest as well as Aziz Ansari, who was nice enough to do a short phone interview with me for the piece to talk about his online special, “Dangerously Delicious.”

I’ll be covering some of the Moontower shows this week for the paper. My colleague Dale Roe did a piece in the paper advancing the festival that looked back at the Austin comedy scene, including some previous festivals like the Big Stinkin’ fest, which was the first big gig we ever had in the Latino Comedy Project.

The LCP, incidentally, is about to put on a brand new show in May called “Los Abengers.”

My understanding is that some of my other comedy friends are also doing a different comedy show that’s being put together and it just got me thinking how fun it was to write together and to go through the process of editing and revising sketches. (Sometimes it was frustrating and tough, but the parts I remember best are just laughing and laughing, all around the table.) I’ve offered to write stuff from afar, but of course, it’s not the same as being at writing meetings and rehearsals and doing the work to get stuff on its feet. With the way my life is right now (kids, commute, other writing commitments), it’s just not possible to do that. But I do miss it.

I still have sketches that were written and never produced and a few ideas for new sketches, but the whole point of a sketch troupe is the collaboration, the whole being more than the individual parts, and doing something like that remotely, shooting in scripts by email or Google Docs and not being able to participate beyond that seems weird and maybe wrong. But we’ll see.

Other stuff going on recently: I did an interview with Dennis Tardan for his BlogTalkRadio show. We just talked about writing, inspiration, trying to be creative, all that. It was nice to talk about writing and not have it just be about stuff related to technology. He asked some great questions and the interview took place on a day off when I was able to lie on the couch and relax and really focus on the conversation.

I covered the International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT over the weekend and blogged about it for Digital Savant. It’s always an inspiring conference with lots of great idea.

Soon I’ll be posting the last Trailers Without Pity video of the season (and if I’m being honest, perhaps ever). But more on that in the next post.

I’m always amazed that something as popular as Facebook has so much wrong with it. It works, sure, in ways that Twitter didn’t for a very long time (like just being available most of the time) and that MySpace never did (still and always ugly, forever and ever). But so much stuff is impossible to figure out or changes at a moment’s notice or simply doesn’t work across all platforms.

Anyway, you get what I’m saying if you’ve ever been a heavy user (or a slightly-more-than-casual one) over in Zuckerbergville. This week’s Digital Savant column was an attempt to answer some of those nagging, weird questions about how to do things that should be a lot more intuitive on a site that serves so many. I didn’t have answers for all the questions that friends were kind enough to contribute, but I did learn a lot while writing it.

I also did a blog post this week about PC gaming optimization tips (more interesting than it sounds!) based on the habits of those on the pro gaming circuit. It made me pine for the days when I used to crack open PC cases and install my own mother-ba-boards and Riz-NAMs, but not enough to give up my Apple laptop and go back to those endless tinkering hours.

Yay, after a very busy few weeks I’m finally caught up!

This week’s Digital Savant column, which ran in today’s American-Statesman, was a roundup of what some of the newer apps I’ve been using on the iPad are that best encapsulate where we are in the life of Apple’s two-year-old tablet. Slightly longer version ran as two blog entries last week.

On Sunday, a travel gadget guide ran in the paper. It covers a range of different things you’d want on a plane or road trip as well as a few useful apps. The iPad also made this roundup, which says a lot about how quickly and indispensable the device has become, at least in my family.

We now have two iPads in the house which seems ridiculous at first, but we really have no plans to buy any new laptops or desktop computers anytime soon and we find that our computers are being used less and less as we rely on our phones and the tablets more and more.

A Tweet of mine that got posted on a sign during the SXSW Interactive craziness. Photo by Rob Quigley

I’ve been approaching this blog post with a weird trepidation that’s gotten worse the longer I’ve put it off. Typically when I have a column run in the paper or something significant I had published to share, I post it here right away. But for what feels like two months straight, almost everything I wrote about was related to South by Southwest Interactive and it got to be so exhausting posting and posting and posting about that elsewhere that I just had no gas left to come over here and repeat myself. So a month and a half of columns, two big pieces I wrote for CNN, literally dozens of SXSW-related blog posts, a major profile I did for the Statesman and more has just fallen through the WordPress cracks of non-updates around here.

How badly have I been procrastinating on this? I DID A MANUAL UPDATE TO WORDPRESS that had been nagging me for months just so I’d have an excuse to do something else before starting this post. I FTP’d my ass off just to delay the inevitable. “I can’t write the SXSW post,” I thought to myself, “not with an old version of WordPress! That would be disgusting!”

Don’t get into a procrastination contest with me. You will lose. Eventually. Years from now.

So in order to make this as painless as possible, I’ll just run through all the content. Please bear with me. I don’t expect anyone to go through and click and read through all of this material. It’s a giant mountain of writing and some of it is by now out of date and of no real use to anyone but me for the purposes of having it all in one place.

But despite all my grumbling about how much work it was and how exhausting I feel after it’s over, SXSW Interactive really was pretty great and magical and worthy of note, or we would never put the kind of effort we do into covering it the way we do. I have to keep reminding myself of that and remembering that I actually thought we did a better job this year and I had more fun and less frustration than in 2011 covering the event.

So here we go. Strap in!

Columns

On March 3rd, I profiled the opening keynote speaker of the festival, Baratunde Thurston, who recently published a very funny book called How To Be Black.  He was a great phone interview and I got to see his keynote and a much smaller party event where he was just as charming, super-smart and insightful.  So glad I got to meet him this year.

I wrote a column for CNN that got a lot of attention at the fest called “The Changing Culture of SXSW.”  I wrote a similar piece for the Statesman last year, but I got the feeling that a lot of newcomers to the fest (and perhaps CNN readers) weren’t as familiar with the fest’s origins and how it’s evolving.

I also got to write a lighter piece specifically for newcomers at CNN with tips for first-timers to the fest.  Coolest part of that one was that the story made it to the top-of-the-page center spot on cnn.com for a little while. (Screen shot above).

On March 11th, we did an interview with Jennifer Pahlka that ran as a Digital Savant column.  She founded Code for America, a group that’s doing some amazing stuff nationwide with city data and an army (or brigade) of volunteers and fellows. She also delivered a keynote at SXSW Interactive.

I didn’t have a column in the paper on March 19th due to SXSW Music coverage, but the day before, I had a pretty large wrap-up of the festival in the Sunday paper detailing some changes this year and some of the hype and money pouring into the fest.

That set the stage for the next week’s column, in which I more overtly ask the question, “Are we in a social media and apps bubble that’s about to burst?”  I get to use the column as an outlet for my anxiety sometimes.

And this week’s column was about a big trend we saw at the fest, a bunch of financial services and mobile payment add-ons that count point to where we’re going as far as paying for stuff with our phones instead of with traditional cash or credit.

News and other articles

SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest. Photo by Julia Robinson, for the American-Statesman

Had a bit of an early scoop when I found out from Apple that they weren’t planning to do another pop-up store at this year’s SXSW.

My favorite thing I wrote leading up to the fest was a profile of SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest that ran on the Saturday of the fest.  It was a story I was surprised we’d never written before in all our years of covering the fest.

A few days into the fest, the story broke about “Homeless Hotspots.”  We ended up running a piece in the next day’s paper about the topic, which ended up being one of the most talked-about things at Interactive (especially by people who weren’t at the fest).

We ran daily stories in the metro section wrapping up what was going on, like this one.

In the weird lead-up to the fest, Apple announced the new iPad and I ended up being mentioned in a CNN story about it because of a Tweet I wrote while it was being announced.

I did a preview of this year’s Screenburn Arcade event for the Austin360 print section, which had a very cool cover on it (you can see it below: from Street Fighter x Tekken.)

Austin360 cover by Adrian Zamarron.

And then there were perhaps 100 or so blog entries that our staff wrote.  It was a great team this year and I was thrilled to have a great mix of staffers, freelancers and editors working with us and contributing so much writing, photos, videos and more to the Digital Savant blog.

I don’t even know where to begin as far as the daily stuff goes because it’s all just a blur, but I interviewed Segway inventor Dean Kamen, got a nice swag bag, took some pics at ScreenBurn, caught an important mom blogging panel, met Tobey Maguire and saw Leonardo DiCaprio at a party (weird story), watched Kevin Smith go way over his allotted time, got terrified by Ray Kurzweil, saw Al Gore interview Sean Parker, caught Jay-Z, Sleigh Bells and Major Lazer all on the same night (crazy!), and got the scoop on this year’s 27 percent jump in attendance before anybody else.

I also received one of the weirdest voicemails of my life right after the fest ended.

That’s far from all that I wrote and just a fraction of what the whole staff produced in the five days of Interactive.  Looking back on it nearly a month later, I’m kind of amazed.

Photo by Vivien Killilea, via Getty Images Entertainment, provided by Mobli.

Personally

I only told a few people this last year and one of them, eventually, was my editor, but I think a week or two after 2011′s festival I swore to myself that this was the last year I was going to put myself through this, that somehow I was going to get out of covering the festival in 2012, no matter what.

As with having a second kid when you start to forget what having the first one entailed, I stopped thinking like that by the time March 2012 arrived and I’m glad.  This year’s fest was busier, larger and crazier than the year before, but I think I did a much better job balancing work and fun. In 2011, the ratio was completely out of whack and I went home feeling like I’d burned myself out and missed it all with my head stuck in a laptop.  This year, I made sure to devote lots of evening time to friends I never get to see, to be more open to ditching things on my schedule that weren’t absolutely necessary and, as always, resisted trying to set too many appointments and driving myself crazy trying to get from place to place.

On the Sunday of the festival, I forced myself to miss a panel and instead go see a band I’d been wanting to check out live, Wild Child, at a tiny, practically empty live show.  That turned out to be one of the biggest highlights of the entire fest and it was a completely private moment away from from the throngs.

One of the nights of the fest I got to see Eugene Mirman, Kristen Schaal and other comedians do stand-up for a Bob’s Burgers event.

I took my bike to the fest this year.  First of all, I forgot I had a bike.  I had to pump the tires and wipe off the dust and ride it to make sure the damn thing still worked.  Work it did.  I even bought a fancy bike lock, transported the bike to Austin and rode it around.  The first two days of the fest, it rained, so that was useless, but the rest of the festival it got me where I needed to go much faster, and was a nice way to end each night, crossing the Lady Bird Lake bridge to the newspaper parking lot when I’d usually be trudging back on foot.

I took care of myself more.  On two nights of the fest, I stayed at my brother’s new apartment in Austin instead of commuting back to New Braunfels.  I made a point of finding decent food to eat and drinking tons of water instead of just skipping meals like I usually did.

And I brought more phone chargers and gear (like a simple plastic bag to put in my bike seat when it rained) that saved me lots of headaches.

Mostly, though, my editor and I just planned the crap out of the festival.  We went through 1,000+ panels multiple times, had scads of Google Docs we shared and just really got our heads in the game a lot earlier than we usually do (and our planning usually begins in January).  We were just better prepared this year and that preparation paid off, especially when we were thrown curveballs. (In case you haven’t figured it out by now my editor Sarah is really organized and great at planning.)

Good experience, pretty amazing festival, and I don’t even feel exhausted or burned out talking about it.

But talk about it I will stop because it’s practically all that’s come out of my mouth for months and that needs to end.  Until, you know… January of 2013.

A few more pics:

Where to begin? Crazy season in my life starts around mid-February and doesn’t let up until mid-March. For about a month, my life revolves around South by Southwest Interactive and somewhere in there I’m also celebrating my brother and mom’s birthdays and trying to enjoy the suddenly awesome spring weather that only lasts a few weeks before the crushing summer heat returns.

I start thinking about how I’ll handle my DVR duties (MUST. WATCH!) when I’ll be gone for five or six days, how we’ll juggle the kids’ daycare and my middle-of-the-night commuting and even what I’ll be packing in my work bag, which became the subject of last week’s Digital Savant column.

(No column this week due to the Oscars).

I haven’t followed my own advice and purchased a little power strip yet, but I plan to do that tonight. The other thing I plan to do differently this year is to take my bike. The one I never ride that’s been sitting in the garage forever. I bought a fancy bike lock and checked to make sure the tires aren’t flat. I plan to dust it off, lube it up and ride (we’re still talking about the bike here). So if you see someone in downtown Austin in two weeks swinging wildly on a bike with a heavy work bag causing imbalance, that’s probably me. Say hi.

I had two other pieces run in the paper last week, reverse-publishes of a post I did about Code for Austin’s Saturday Hackathon and a guide to finding (and RSVP’ing to) parties at SXSW Interactive.

Also, I’m writing about the official app, the guy from Stratfor who’s speaking at the fest and the co-founder of Pinterest. (Oh, I’m on Pinterest, by the way. Come watch me pin things.)

Have a lot more pieces about the fest in the works including some stuff for CNN.com.

I’m trying to spend as much time as possible at home with the kids because I know I won’t be seeing them a lot in mid-March. When I wasn’t looking, Carolina went from the pre-verbal baby to a kid who can repeat pretty much any word and who’s talking nonstop and grabbing EVERYTHING. Grab grab grab, baby STOP! OK, not a baby, but STILL. Toddler, QUIT!

Here she is. We dig her crazy style.

And one of Lilly for good measure:

This is what I look like in the 'Star Wars' universe. Hey, shut up, Bantha are DELICIOUS!

Back in August, we started running Digital Savant in the paper once a week (a lot of it generated by the long-running blog that I write) as a column. Work-wise, it’s not a whole lot different, perhaps just a little more structured than writing the same kinds of topics on the blog and with a firmer weekly deadline. Sometimes I’m so caught up in updating the blog and working on other stories that I forget that the column runs in the paper on Mondays and that once a week newspaper readers are subjected to my grinning face, often way too early in the morning.

But it’s been nice to have that routine. I was initially dreading it and, in truth, there are some weeks when my Wednesday deadline looms and I think, “This is going to be embarrassing for all involved,” but it usually turns out OK, and sometimes better than OK. Sometimes I’m really pleased at how the columns turn out and that they definitely have a voice and a point of view that isn’t otherwise represented in the paper. (That point of view I’ll call “Extreme goof dad nerd” until I come up with a better description.)

I haven’t posted about the last two columns because I took a trip to Atlanta or a social media panel that I was moderating (I found out a week before that they wanted me physically present; I thought I was going to be beamed in somehow via Internets and telephonies and magicks). Someone emailed me, “How are your travel arrangements coming” and I stared stupidly at my screening, thinking, “My what?”

Going to Atlanta was lots of fun since I never get to travel, but I’m still catching up with everything that this brief 36-hour trip pushed aside.

So here’s the two columns that ran recently.

The first one is a sort-of review/set of impressions about the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I’ve been playing pretty regularly since the holidays. In the column I make clear how much of an MMO newbie I still am. I found a way to embarrass myself even in an online game where I don’t know anyone.

It’s very tough to review an MMO, impossible, really. It would take months, if not years. The best you can do is relate some of your own experience and compare it to other gaming experiences you’ve had.

The other column ran this Monday and it’s a list of conversation-starters for South by Southwest Interactive, which is less than a month away. I also posted a blog version that’s full of links to all the panels I talk about in the piece.

On Saturday, I attended TEDxAustin and followed it up with a big, detailed blog post rundown of it. It really was an inspiring day, full of great ideas and speakers who are out there kicking ass and (presumably) creating big-data ways to take names and do something with said ass-kicking/name-taking database. I’m still processing what I can take away from the experience personally, but one thing I hope to do is just get out of my own head a little bit and get out there in the community more. I feel like I’ve been living the last two or three years in a hidey hole, trying to hold down the parenting fort and the work fort and several other forts that perhaps are not build up to code and Tweeting or writing from behind a protective screen. It needed to be that way, but perhaps that isolation is going away a little.

Illustration by Don Tate II / Austin American-Statesman

Good editors will listen to a writer babble for an hour and pick out the one or two useful things they said among dozens of ideas and tell them, “You should write that.”

Such was the case with an article that appeared in the Saturday paper, on the subject of how we’re purging our physical media as we move inexorably to digital media. We were talking about how overwhelming it is to see all the DVDs (with their hours of extras) sitting on a shelf knowing you’ll never, ever be able to get through all of them, even then ones you really mean to get to. That led to the idea of a story about purging all those things we think we need, but really don’t.

As much of an advocate as I am for abandoning that which we no longer need or want, I’m terrible at it myself. I have yet to do my own CD/DVD/book purging and the shelves in our upstairs office is a testament to that. But writing the article has inspired me to at least try to cut half of what’s up there. At the very least, most of the CDs have to go. I honestly haven’t touched most of them since I imported them to iTunes and that was years ago. I do admire people who’ve already been through the process.

The illustration was again by Don Tate II, who always manages to knock it out of the park with only a very rogh idea of what the story’s going to be like (I often don’t know myself until I write it).

The other story that ran on this, a particularly crazy week, was a Digital Savant column about steps you can take to protect your identity if you’re the victim of a data breach (say, as a Zappos customer when they were recently hacked).

I found out this week that I’ll be taking a brief work trip to Atlanta, Carolina has been sick again with couching and respiratory junk and two people I know scored jobs and are moving soon. I can barely keep up with all the changes going on, but I’m keeping busy and have no complaints myself apart from wanting my kid to get over her coughing fits and for all of us to get through allergy season.