Terribly Happy

Something I realized about myself at Austin City Limits Fest today.

Nook Color, one of the e-readers we mention in the guide

Not that the Digital Savant print column is a month into its life, it’s starting to feel more routine and I’m figuring out how to balance other larger-sized stories along with that deadline and the daily blog posts and other stuff that comes along from day to day.

On Sunday, I had a big back-to-school tech gift guide in the paper, this year focused on e-book readers and tablets for college students.

On Monday, the Digital Savant column is about the South by Southwest Interactive PanelPicker, which allows the public to vote on panels for the fest. As far as I’ve been able to tell, it’s the largest tech conference to do anything like that except for maybe BarCamp-style events where the programming is organized after the event starts.

The story I have due tomorrow should run next Sunday. I’ll write about it when it’s published, but it’s another part of the online identity series I’ve been working on.

Lilly turned four years old this weekend. It was not entirely unexpected. I mean, we had about four years to prepare for it (and some months more than that, even). Three-to-four is a bigger transition than two-to-three was; at least it feels that way in my life. She’s no longer a toddler and next year she’ll be in kindergarten. She left being a baby long behind her, I just hadn’t quite accepted it. Having an almost-two-year-old in the house does make it seem a little less like the end of an era, at least.

We had a pizza party for Lilly. She remembered last year’s and raved about it long enough that we figured we should do it again. She can sometimes be cranky and she’s very demanding, as I imagine most 3-4-year-olds are, but this weekend she really turned on the charm and was on her best behavior for almost the whole weekend.

She asked for specific things this year without prompting, based on trips she’s made to the store recently and, more disturbingly, things she’s started to notice her friends have at her school. That’s how she ended up with a purple unicorn Pillow Pet that, I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty jealous about.

I didn’t have any real work or writing projects or plans and we were able to spend more time than usual just hanging out with the kids all weekend. It was wonderful and brief, but it’s nice that we get to do it all over again next weekend and the weekend after that.

Photo by Alberto Martinez, AMERICAN-STATESMAN

I rode the shuttle! On Saturday, a story I wrote about San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting, Inc. and its employee shuttle to from Austin. I’d been meaning to visit Rackspace for a long time, but since we typically focus on Austin-based companies, it got to be one of those back-burner things for a while. But their Austin presence is growing dramatically and this ended up being more about commuter culture and how Austin and San Antonio are getting ever closer.

Reporting the story, though, involved getting up one morning, driving to Austin from New Braunfels, taking the shuttle down to San Antonio, taking it back to Austin, then driving back home to New Braunfels at the end of the day. Then I visited the Austin Rackspace office the following week. And I did a lot of my interviews on the shuttle itself as it was moving, so my handwritten notes were all jangly and messy, even more so than normal.

In Tech Monday, a column I wrote about Austin-based non-profit CLOUD, Inc., continues a series we started this month about online identity. This was material that was originally slated to be part of the Online Reputation story, but it just didn’t fit and it ended up being smart to cut it and spin it off into its own article. It takes a little bit of a running start to explain what CLOUD is trying to do and I’m not exaggerating when I say it took me months to figure out how to write about some of these concepts.

And finally, today is the debut of Digital Savant as a print column in the Austin American-Statesman. The debut column, about Craigslist, is similar to what we ran on the blog last week.

I’m a little scared having a weekly column deadline, but it helps that a lot of the stuff I already do for Digital Savant makes for good column material. The column run Mondays in Life & Arts.

On Saturday, we went to a going-away work party for our former business editor Kathy Warbelow, who accepted a voluntary retirement offer. She was one of the people who hired me when I started at the paper 14 years ago and she always felt to me like a guardian angel, always watching out for me, always happy to have something I wrote in her section and always excited about a juicy bit of industry news she heard about.

We had lots and lots of great conversations over the years and she was the reason I bought my first house. She’d lived in Detroit during the height of housing interest rates and assured me, in late 2001, that I was never going to have a better opportunity to stop being a renter. She was right.

On Sunday, we took the girls to a birthday party for one of Lilly’s classmates at a place of much jumping and bouncy-castle’ing.

It’s impossible to get a phone photo of Carolina that’s not blurry; she’s moving constantly, all over the place, impervious to fatigue or falling on her face against bounce castle encased air.

It was exhausting, great fun.

On the way there and back, I put on Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black album and I wondered if my kids would know her music someday and regard her the way we look back on Hendrix and Joplin or, I guess, Cobain. It’s tough to listen to the album this soon, even beyond the obvious jarring bits like “I died a hundred times” in the lyrics. You can’t really listen to it anymore and just enjoy the music. It’s got bagged-on tragic context now and won’t ever sound the same.

It reminds me of how listening to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill feels to me now. It used to be one of my favorite albums. Now when I hear it, I just think about the follow-up album that never happened and all the years of music we missed while Ms. Hill has been raising kids and figuring her stuff out.

I wonder if I should just be happy with the music and the moments and the memories that do exist and not dwell on what never was.

It’s easy not to dwell at a giant warehouse with five big indoor bounce castles.

This short week got full really quick! This morning, a CNN.com tech column I wrote appeared this morning about what would happen if the Dora Generation (kids 5-12) begin to join Facebook en masse.

It’s a little out-there compared to the stuff I usually write for them, but with a few tweaks, they were willing to publish it as satire. I’m keeping an eye on the comments for this one because this time when people post, “This article is ridiculous and completely dumb!” I’ll be inclined to kind of agree.

Photo by me for the Digital Savant blog

Today, I also posted Digital Savant Podcast #5, featuring GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham.

I always love chatting (or Tweeting) with Stacey and she proved to be a great, fun guest. I look for people who know a lot about tech but also don’t take it too deadly seriously and Stacey is a reporter with a great sense of humor. You can download it on the blog or grab it from iTunes.

Photo I shot for the Austin American-Statesman

I got to meet with him and his girlfriend and geek out a bit over the stuff he’s working on.

Also in the Statesman over the weekend was a reverse-published blog post I did about Turntable.fm, a DJ chat room/music service that my brother and I have gotten completely hooked over the last week. We’re planning on doing a horrible songs room, perhaps on Friday, and just playing the worst stuff we can think of. You should join us! You can find the room here.

Other cool stuff: I submitted an “I Am Not a Crackpot!” audio piece to my favorite podcast, Extra Hot Great and it appeared in an All-Crackpot episode. Lots and lots of fun and a great listen with lots of great submissions. You should subscribe to the podcast. My piece is about how we keep Closed Captioning on all the time. It comes in at around the 45-minute mark. I may not have convinced the podcasters, but I feel vindicated by the commenters on the site.

We had a pretty quiet 4th of July weekend. We didn’t travel anywhere and we had some family stay over. We took Lilly and Carolina to an insane place in New Braunfels called The Jumpy Place where they have giant bounce castles, like six of them in one giant warehouse-sized building. There are also comfy sofas and chairs for parents. But did we sit in them? We did not.

Were we supposed to go in the bouncy castles with the kids and climb the giant slides and jump around even though we are adults? We were not. Did we? Shit yes.

4th of July night was oddly quiet. No fireworks, no explosions. We’ve had a drought and there’s been a big ban on fireworks that, strangely, people actually observed. For the last few years, we’ve missed the fireworks. We used to go every year, especially when we were at S. Padre Island. We’d crowd as close as we could to Louie’s Back Yard by the water and watch the explosions.

The kids go to bed so early that for the last three of four years, we’ve just resigned ourselves to missing the displays. I got a guilty bit of pleasure knowing that nobody else was going to get fireworks this year, either, but then I felt bad sitting inside Monday night, waiting for the sound of Black Cats exploding in someone’s backyard nearby. The sound never came.

Oh, one other quick note — I was supposed to be teaching a class at the University of Texas this fall as an adjunct professor, but it looks like that has fallen through. I was approached about it last year and agreed to do it. Then, it got to be July and I started wondering why nobody had contacted me; shouldn’t I be preparing or something?

Turns out it never really materialized and I just found out. So maybe that’ll happen in the future, but most certainly not for the fall semester. That’s OK. I’m sure I’ll find ways to stay busy.

Lilly at Schlitterbahn.