Terribly Happy

I wrote a Raising Austin column for the paper that ran in Saturday’s American-Statesman. It’s about iPad apps aimed at toddlers that are mostly bedtime stories with lots of interactive elements.

While pulling together the art for the piece, it was suggested at work that I try to get a photo of Lilly holding the iPad. I sat her in her bed, turned it on and tried to shoot photos but it became quickly clear that it was going to be impossible to get her to hold it away from her face but up to obscure it properly. (We didn’t want her entire face running in the paper; paranoid, maybe, considering her face is all over my Web site and online, but then you don’t see some of the letter and e-mail I get from readers of the newspaper.)

In about two minutes, her arms were too tired to hold up the iPad, resulting in a regrettable incident where she bonked herself in the nose with it and started crying. Photo shoot over.

We got one decent image, at least, and that’s what ran in the newspaper along with screen shots from some of the apps. The column also appeared as a Digital Savant blog entry earlier in the week.

Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez, Austin American-Statesman

In today’s paper, we ran a roundup of smart phones that I put together. It includes the iPhone 4, the Sprint EVO 4G, the Verizon Droid X, the T-Mobile Samsung Vibrant, the BlackBerry Torch and the Dell Streak (which is either a mini-tablet or a comically large Android-based phone depending on who you ask).

For the last few months, since right before the iPhone 4 came out, I’ve been pretty much flooded with devices. The EVO came first, then two iPhones (Apple wanted reviewers to be able to get wowed by FaceTime), then a burst of smart phones that arrived when I started requesting them for the photo shoot that would yield the image above.

The story was originally supposed to be what we call a “Charticle” (chart + article!), but for space reasons ended up a more traditional introduction + info box.

I’ll tell you that while it’s fun to get to play around with different phones and try them out, it’s not fun to have 6 or 7 phones in the house in addition to the ones we own ourselves. It becomes a constant game of keeping track of chargers, updating software, updating apps and navigating tons of menus. It’s a little stressful, if I’m being honest, and I’m kind of relieved to be sending a bunch of them back this week. (The Torch has already been returned and a batch of phones go back on Monday.) But then two more phones arrived late last week (Sprint Epic 4G and AT&T Captivate) for some follow-up reviewing.

It’s getting harder and harder to do real reviews of smart phones because they’re basically computers now with their own software ecosystem and people want to know not only how the phone performs but what apps are good for it. Reviewing a smart phone now without trying out some of the best apps available for it isn’t really acceptable anymore. (It always amuses me when I see some tech writers post a review of a smart phone the day it debuts when it’s clear they’ve only had an hour or two to play around with it. Way to be unhelpful to any potential buyer who’ll be stuck with it on a two-year contract.)

I also posted a blog entry with my reviews of the some of the phones in the roundup and links to other reviews for the ones I wasn’t able to get to. I had play time with all the phones in the roundup, but some I had a lot more time with than the others. The iPhone and EVO I had about two months to try them out while the BlackBerry had to be sent back within a week after we received it. (Plus, BlackBerry has an operating system that I’ve never been able to get my head around. )

On Monday, I was on NPR talking about seniors and new technologies that allow them to live at home longer and (in theory) more independently.

Or as independently as you can live with a house full of sensors and tracking monitors recording your every move. But then, that’s part of the whole discussion.

The blog post includes the embedded audio and links to some resources. You can find a link to the audio segment (and a transcript soon, I think) of the discussion here and a separate lead-in story that contains some of the more interesting reader/listener comments.

As in a segment we did last year about the elderly and tech, the subject of robots came up again. I’m not sure if my use of the phrase “Robot companions” seemed reassuring or extremely perverted. Both, I hope!

Illustration by Don Tate II, Austin American-Statesman

Where things have been busier than usual is at work where I’ve had three pretty large-scale, reporting-intensive stories in a row to work on in the summer. I don’t know what your office is like, but in the summer, our office changes quite a bit. There’s lots of people going on vacations, an influx of interns and a flood of summer movies, summer concerts, video games and, for me, lots of smart phones hitting the market.

Feels like I’ve been working harder this summer than usual and there’ve been more opportunities to get on the front page or do big packages for the chunky Sunday paper. In today’s paper, I did a story about e-textbooks, which was an attempt to answer a simple question: “Where are we with electronic textbooks in Texas?” The answer was fairly complicated even though everyone I talked to on the subject for interviews was speaking along the same lines. There’s great potential, but we’re at the very start of what’s going to be a significant change in the way kids learn and interact with materials in the classroom. Obvious, yes, but the law changes in Texas are pretty major and will probably affect the way other states do things as well.

Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez, Austin American-Statesman

Last week, I had a story appear in the paper about a local Pokémon champ. It was from a blog post on Digital Savant, where I’ve been doing tons of blogging lately.

I mentioned earlier that I’m getting to spend more time with the kids. Lilly turned 3 a week and a half ago and we’re still trying to wrap our brains around having a 3-year-old in the house. She’s getting to be fun and funny and full of questions (some brilliant, others ones we wish she’d ask less frequently). We had a small pizza party for her birthday and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so excited. Today, we took her for an all-day trip to Schlitterbahn and she went on a tube ride that was much scarier than we were expecting. She was terrified the whole way and at one point got separated from me on a tall slide where you have to go one-by-one. My heart was breaking as she got caught up there, without me, starting to cry, but when she came down, after the splashing, she smiled hugely and said, “I did it!” She was so proud that she went down that huge incline alone.

It’s been like that a lot lately. I just watch her grow and conquer and everything feels like it’ll burst inside. It’s been a good summer.

Ken Starks of The HeliOS Project. Photo by James Brosher, Austin American-Statesman.

On the front page of Sunday’s newspaper, a lengthy profile I wrote about Ken Starks of The HeliOS Project ran. It was the second front-page story I’ve had in about a month (after many many months of no front-page stories), and the two articles tie together a bit and have a lot in common.

For one thing, each story took several months to report and write, and were such large projects that I went through the thing many reporters do where you have so many pages of notes and memories and observances that you forget what it is you wanted to write and begin to panic and get stress headaches.

Luckily, I have a very understanding editor and was given the time to sort it all out. I’m really proud of this story in particular because it’s one I’ve wanted to write for a long time, ever since I first learned what Ken and his organization does (they raise, rebuild and distribute donated computers to Austin’s poorest kids and community groups). It literally got me teary-eyed the first time I grasped the work they do and one thought just kept pounding in my head for almost two years after: I want to help. In some way, I want to help these guys. So I wrote a story. I hope it will help. I put a lot of work into it.

On Monday, a different story I wrote, for Tech Monday, runs. It’s a column about how there aren’t as many BarCamp-style events in Austin as their used to be and about an upcoming “ProductCamp” event that’s bucking the trend. Nothing earth-shattering, but the ever-helpful Whurley helped offer some perspective on the subject and it’s always fun to chat with him.

No NPR segment this week, but I’ve got some other things I’m working on, including a new Trailers Without Pity that was just posted and a separate blog post about a rash I had. Yes, for real.

Rick Orr, co-founder of the company behind the 'TabbedOut' app. Photo by Ralph Barrera, Austin American-Statesman.

A feature we started in the Statesman to feature mobile app creators in Austin appeared again in Monday’s paper. This one was about ATX Innovation, Inc., which makes an app called “TabbedOut” that allows you to open and pay off a bar or restaurant tab from your phone. Neat!

Also on Monday, I did my first NPR All Tech Considered segment in a while. It was about companies like Google and Microsoft racing to offer cloud-based e-mail and other services to government agencies and city governments like Los Angeles.

Here’s the blog post with the audio embedded and the page for the segment itself from All Things Considered.

More stories coming in the next few days! It’s been a strange few weeks and things are starting to feel like they’re going back to normal.