Terribly Happy

Photo by Laura Skelding, Austin American-Statesman

The series of blog posts I mentioned before under the label “Project 2011 Tech-Awesome YOU!” (eh, maybe that name needed a little work) resurfaced as an article in the Life & Arts section of the Statesman on Sunday. It had a reworked lead and was tightened up quite a bit, but was probably more digestible than the three-part blog opus of last week.

The advice on de-cluttering comes just as my wife and I are in the process or reorganizing our house, starting with our upstairs home office. Over my vacation, I spent two days (OK, maybe just a few hours spread over two days) getting rid of cardboard boxes that were littering the office, organizing review products to send back and putting together a stack of stuff to take to Goodwill and to donate to a local family organization. After it was all over, the office was much improved (we could actually walk around in it, not like before) even if I didn’t get to the CDs, books, software and other items that need sorting.

We’re buying new desks and, possibly, a new computer since we find ourselves both working at home at the same time some weeks and I can’t spend a whole work day on a little laptop. Buying desks, it turns out, is way more complicated than buying a new computer. I’m learning a lot about what kind of workspace I’d like. Feel free to offer suggestions because I’m absolutely lost.

The other piece that ran in the paper this week of mine was a reverse-published interview with the head of Austin’s Sony Online Entertainment studio about the launch of DC Universe Online.

I’ve also been writing up a storm of iPad chlidren’s iPad reviews for Kirkus. In two weeks I will have written 50 of them, which I honestly didn’t think was possible when I started on them in November.

And after months of uncertainty, I might have some good news to share on the NPR front soon. Here’s hoping.

This week, I took a page from Twitter personality @Omarstradamus‘ playbook and made my predictions for the year in tech for an American-Statesman story. (That year, by the way: 2011.)

I’ve been covering tech off and on since about 1995, so after a while it gets easier to spot cyclical patterns in the tech industry, to see through some of the marketing hype around a product that a company clearly has no real faith in seeing succeed and to sense when something is really a game changer instead of a flavor of the month. It’s been gratifying to see that a lot of the stuff I spitballed for the article appears to be arriving right on schedule at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (which exhausts me to even think about).

I also did a column for Tech Monday this week on an author who wrote a book about wikis. Did you know they’re not just for gigantic government document leaks and online encyclopedias?

And lastly, I did a three-part Digital Savant project on things you can do with your tech to make 2011 a lot easier. I think I screwed the pooch by naming it badly, but it’ll run in print on Sunday with a much better, less convoluted headline, so maybe people will read it then. Part 1 is about getting your photos and videos organized. Part 2 is about backing up your data and part 3 is on de-cluttering your files and your home office. Enjoy!

'I am seriously going to reach through this phone line and kill the next person that calls it an iTouch.'

On Monday, I had a story run in the American-Statesman about getting good tech support/customer service, which is an issue that seems to hit critical mass a day or two after Christmas after the dust and eggnog have settled. There’s some good resources in the piece and, knock on wood, I haven’t had to use any of them yet this year. Enjoy!

I’m on vacation right now and trying to do as little as possible that doesn’t involve pajamas, television or ice cream. So far, I’ve been wildly successful.

This was a really big week for us. Carolina turned one, Lilly had her first dance recital and then, oh yeah, Christmas and a lengthy, much-needed vacation for me. I’m not back at work until Jan. 3.

Lilly’s dance thing was the culmination of several months of classes at her daycare. We went to San Antonio and the whole thing took place in a big workout room. The kids were adorable and, of course, we thought ours was the absolute best. She got flowers and we went out for a nice dinner to also celebrate Carolina’s first birthday.

Their personalities are so different that even people who don’t spend much time with them both pick up on it right away. Lilly is methodical and demanding, a Type A toddler who is used to having things a certain way, but is also sweet and organized and generous. Carolina, on the other hand, is hilarious and destructive and just wants to get her hands on everything and/or put everything in her mouth, even things that might choke her. The dynamic between the two of them is already developing nicely.

We’ve been having a lot of fun this week with Lilly and Santa. This is the first year she’s really grasped the concept and we did the whole bit with the cookies and the milk, the stockings, the whispers before bed about making sure not to get up and surprise him because he has a heart condition. It’s been surprisingly satisfying and fun being on this end of the Santa equation.

The vacation caps off a year of really just a damn lot of work. I thought things would slow down as things began to cycle down on the NPR front, but just as that was happening, I got approached by Kirkus Reviews to start doing app reviews of children’s story books for the iPad.

Kirkus has been doing book reviews since the 1930s. I mean, I remember seeing the Kirkus review blurbs in the Stephen King paperbacks I read as a teenager and authors I know have told tale of getting their first review from Kirkus.

This project is a fairly large shift for them. They moved their headquarters to Austin and are planning to push hard into new kinds of reviews and digital content. So I’ve been quietly spending the last two months downloading iPad apps, reading them with Lilly at night and working up reviews in the short, extremely refined way that Kirkus does things. I’ve been lucky enough to be paired with an amazing children’s books editor who is also learning about the app world along with me. It’s been a very cool experience. All told, I’ve agreed to write 50 reviews, through the end of January. Just last week I hit the halfway mark.

The first batch of them appears in the Statesman tomorrow, Christmas Day, a bit of a partnership between Kirkus and my newspaper. The reviews will also be appearing on the Kirkus website. It’s been a really fun, cool project.

On the Statesman front, I also recently wrote an update on the Season for Caring project and the Gomez family.

Photo by Mark Matson, for the American-Statesman

And, lastly, I did an app feature recently in the Statesman on a family that creates apps under the name IMAK Creations for There’s a Creator for That. Their app is called “Who Is the Smartest?”

During my downtime, I plan to watch a ton of movies I haven’t had time to see, get the upstairs office organized and de-cluttered and work on my Christmas cards, which have somehow turned into New Year’s cards as I lost track of time.

I’ve had two days off already before Christmas to chill out, stop racing to the next deadline and to just think about how great things have been this year (with only one or two speed bumps), and how lucky I’ve been to have so many wonderful people in my life who aren’t just watching out for me, but for my girls as well.

Thank you, everybody, for reading and for being in our lives.

A few months ago, I wrote a foreword for a book by two men I don’t know. As people I don’t know go, they’ve been great to deal with. They wrote a book about a frankly fascinating topic (what happens to all your digital schtuff after you shuffle off this analog coil) and, based on the premise alone (and a sample chapter or two), I was thrilled to contribute. It was all done over e-mail and couldn’t have been a more pleasant experience, especially for something so firmly rooted in the discussion of death.

The book is out and you can find it here and here, among other places. In fact, on Amazon, you can read the entire two-page foreword in their book preview. But if you go and do that, you owe it to the hardworking authors to at least buy the book, so please do if you can.

Warren Spector at his Junction Point office. Photo by Deborah Cannon/AMERICAN-STATESMAN on Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2010.

More than three years ago, I had lunch with my then-co-worker Lilly Rockwell and game developer Warren Spector, who’d just sold his company to Disney. Warren was happy to meet us, but was clearly excited about a project he was completely unable to tell us about. We knew it was something big, but at the time, we had no idea what.

Last summer, the leaks started happening and the world started figuring out that Warren’s project with Disney was Epic Mickey, a bold reinvention of Mickey Mouse (and, it turns out, the rebirth of a long-forgotten animated character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the precursor to Mickey).

Today, a story my editor and I have been talking about for more than a year finally appeared on the front page of the Statesman. Sometimes sitting on a story for that long can suck the wind out of it or put so much pressure on it that you wish it would just go away. That happened once or twice as I was putting it all together, but in the end, I couldn’t be more pleased that we were able to tell Warren’s story (and that I was able to work on it with Brian Gaar, who wrote a separate piece for the business section about the development of the game).

We also ran a photo gallery online and our videographer Jenny Jones shot a great video (below). Stories like this make me feel incredibly lucky to do what I do. Some people here in town regularly do amazing, world-changing things and when I’m fortunate, I get to write about it.

Video, by Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon, is here: