Terribly Happy

Monday night, I spoke at an Online News Association meetup with Tolly Moseley about secrets of online writing. The above Slideshare presentation amounts to the slides that we emailed back and forth until we were satisfied we had enough visual ammunition in case words should somehow stop falling out of our mouths (it turns out this will never be a danger).

The session was good. It was a large crowd, it was downstairs from my work desk which made getting there supremely easy for me, and I brought two big bags of cheap candy (for eating) and a box of Kleenex (in case anyone should get emotionally overcome by our tall tales from the wilds of writing careers).

Great questions were asked, an abundance of visual Powers were Pointed at and at the hour and a half mark, we had to stop when we could have easily gone on another few hours. As we were packing up, Tolly mentioned that she was going to put up a blog entry on Wednesday summing up the panel. She confirmed this later over email, remarking that the Twitter response was great; some of those attending had taken great online notes, posting tidbits that I didn’t even remember us talking about just seconds after it was over.

What I expected would be a few short clips of warmed-over reminiscence was instead synthesized, powerfully, into a perfectly delicious 7-course goddamn feast (I’m not even counting the appetizer or dessert) baked with care by Tolly. Let me tell you something about Tolly: she does not say she’s going to do something and then not do it. Rather, she tells you she’s going to do something, to which you may reply, “Oh, that’s nice,” and then she doesn’t just do this something, she freakin’ WHALLOPS IT WITH A SHOVEL UNTIL THE THING IS DONE TO THE GREAT BEYOND WITH A QUICKNESS.

I had never worked with Tolly before on anything more than social chit-chat, but it turns out that when you work with Tolly, you’d best come correct, because if you come incorrectly, shirking as one does when there’s no money or long-term business commitment involved, you will be shown How It Is Done. It’s a good lesson to learn.

Holograms from Zebra Imaging. Photo by Laura Skelding / Austin American-Statesman.

My cat Cosa, who was sort of a star of this blog back when it was an online journal, died. I want to tell you about that and I’ve been writing that inevitable post, but there were some more developments and drama this weekend and I’m going to need a little more time. But a proper eulogy to a great, angry cat is coming very soon.

Instead, I’ll share what I’ve been working on the last few weeks. The first thing is really neat, something I was thrilled to share with people because my mind got blown as I was researching it and I felt like I really learned a thing or three. I did a column about “real” holograms (not the Tupac/Coachella type of holograms that are actually just a mirror and projection trick) produced by and Austin company called Zebra Imaging.

Zebra’s been around so long that one of my long-time coworkers was like, “Oh, THEM? What are they up to? They’ve been around forever!” It seems that the Tupac buzz has been good for them and that they’re coming out a long period of doing military stuff primarily and expanding into a lot of other areas for their truly amazing visual technology. Good for them.

Emerson Henriquez, a fan of Spill.com I met at their annual Spill Dot Con event. Photo by me.

The other new column runs in Monday’s newspaper and it’s about two very unique and fervently followed Austin websites, Spill.com and RoosterTeeth.com, both of which post very popular videos online and lots of other content that have earned this lots of fans. The success has led to real-world conferences that are bringing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people together to celebrate their mutual love of the enjoyable things they put out into the world.

I’ve known Korey and some of the other Spill.com folks since I moved to Austin in 1997 and although I’ve been so busy parenting and working that I never get to see them anymore, they were my first close friends in Austin. Korey also introduced me to Adrian Villegas and that led to the Latino Comedy Project, so there’s lots of memories and good times I associate with that bunch of very talented people.

When I saw Korey and Martin, they looked at me like they were seeing a ghost (or at least a guy who hadn’t been around much at all for several years). I grew up thinking friends were the most important thing in life and it always makes me feel really guilty when I realize I haven’t tended to friendships like I should.

But apart from that, I was glad I got to write an article about a site that we have really under-covered over the years as it’s gotten really popular. By the same token. the folks at Rooster Teeth are amazing people who have also been doing this online comedy/video thing for ages and have worked incredibly hard to earn the fans they have. It’s always a pleasure to let people know about it.

I also got to see some neat tech at a Freescale event in San Antonio last week. There wasn’t much for me to write about, but I did take some snapshots. I also chatted with the Consumer ELectronics Association’s Jim Barry (really nice, knowledgable guy; I really enjoy speaking with him) for a piece that ended up running in the newspaper last week.

And just yesterday, I attended an all-day conference called MomComAustin. It’s research for a writing project I’ve mentioned here before, as is a trip I’m taking to New York in August for BlogHer. I’m devoting a lot more of my limited free time to these things and what before felt like a very nebulous project is beginning to feel like real work, but in a good way. In a way that feels less like waiting and more like acting. I had great conversations, listened to some really good speakers and even though I was literally the only man registered to attend (a few women asked me what I thought of that or gave me a pat on the back for being there), everyone there was great and super helpful when I asked questions prix viagra ligne. I have lots of transcribing and organizing to do, but it feels great to have that information in hand instead of just making plans to get that information, you know? Any kind of incremental forward movement I can get I’m thrilled to get.

Last thing I’ll mention for now is that tomorrow night I’m speaking at an ONA (Online News Association) Austin event about online writing with the incredibly talented and gracious Austin Eavesdropper Tolly Moseley. Tolly is someone I always enjoy chatting with when I run into her (I think we both have a bewildered, wide-eyes approach to writing and meeting other people, though I’m probably much crankier) and it was great of Rob Quigley, who is organizing this talk, to pair us up. We have some very entertaining, potentially embarrassing slides and stories to share.

Here are the new things first, then I’ll get into the rest.

Last week’s Digital Savant column was a guide for retweeting. My editor mentioned at one point that she liked how careful I was about not retweeting things that weren’t confirmed and suggested I do a full-on rant about people who are more careless. The piece on reckless retweeters maybe wasn’t so much a rant as some helpful suggestions from someone who’s been annoyed for a long time, but it did earn me a new nickname in the newsroom: “Cranky Omar.” I’ll take it!

On Thursday, I had a “Coffee with…” feature in the paper about Amanda Lepre, a musician who writes videogame-inspired songs and who is the frontwoman for the videogame cover band Descendants of Erdrick. She was a fun interview and it was great to get a story about her into the paper. I took the photo that ran with the story with my tiny Canon camera.

Leetleweelie, my Diablo III Witch Doctor.

And since I’m not sure when I’ll update next, here’s the next column, which runs on Monday. It’s about how my videogaming habits are changing as I get older. It was a chance to drop mentions of Diablo III and the word “escrow” in the same column.

I’ve been brain-dumping a lot here on the blog because really, where else can I do that without it being weird and uncomfortable? It still sometimes feels a little strange to me that I get paid at work now to frequently write in the first-person for the column and that, based on emails from new readers in other cities where it now appears, things seem to be working out OK on that front.

But here, at least, I can say things like “I feel tired and old!” Or, “shitbag!” Or tell you a whole graphic and embarrassing story involving a vasectomy (which I won’t, don’t worry).

This used to be a blog (or, rather, an online journal back when I was updating three times a week rain or shine or blocked) where I wrote long diary essays or made funny lists or created complex conceits about hunger-striking pets or sold plastic goods. Now it’s sort of where the website started — a place to let people know about stuff I’m working on elsewhere. Because all my time and energy is going to work, to an ongoing writing project that I’m working on with my friend Tracy and whatever freelance stuff pops up for Kirkus Reviews, CNN and elsewhere.

That’s not a bad thing, it just means that when I come back here and sit down to write a catch-up entry, it means I usually have a lot of pent-up thoughts and emotions that didn’t end up anywhere else and that I still need to share (or overshare).

Like the thought that this week I was really having a hard time with some writing, so much so that I wrote Tracy a long, desperate writer’s-blocky email saying, basically, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” And then that night, I went home and cleared my head and wrote and then everything magically seemed better. I went to bed and slept well, woke up and went to work, had time to hit the gym and everything seemed 150 percent better than it did just 24 hours before. And the rest of the week and into the weekend has been beautiful, wonderful, filled with just cool family stuff, pleasant surprises on Twitter and in emails, and just a flurry of sudden activity, doing things I’d been putting off a while like donating a bunch of stuff to Goodwill and ordering some stuff online that I’d been on the fence about buying.

I’m just finding that I feel like a big set of dials and controls, all these variables that turn into a great machine when the variables are correct. They include exercise, sleeping enough, not being lazy when the opportunity presents itself and having enough time to not feel overwhelmed with it all. When the settings are off for too long, I start to crash and get wiggy and it all starts to affect my outlook and attitude in general.

It’s weird because I thought that by 37, I’d already gotten well past that and figured out my emotional equilibrium. And for the most part, I think I’m pretty even-keel, but lately I’ve been measuring my worth more in word counts and time spent with the kids and the ability to not let unexpected disappointments throw me off and put me into bad moods.

The stuff that puts me in a good mood lately tends to put me in a really good mood, so much so that I have trouble putting it into words. So I’ll just show it in a photo from Lilly’s dance recital. Apart from the star herself, my favorite bit is how her sister looks like her publicist, asking people to hold off on questions until after all the pictures have been taken.

I think I’m actively seeking more things to be inspired by. Whether it’s movies or books or just being outside and enjoying some fresh air or having great conversations.

It’s really easy to get jaded because there’s so much good stuff around us right now that we don’t even have time to get to most of it. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking things are mediocre because the base level of the stuff you’re exposed to constantly is so high that you start to expect and demand that everything you plug into resonates at that level.

So I’m trying to promise myself that I’ll enjoy the things that are great. Because I’m finding there’s no shortage of that around me. Noticing and appreciating it all in the moment is the bigger challenge.

True story: I wrote an article, the column that has my face on it and runs in the paper on Mondays, that was part two of an occasional series we’ll do defining tech terms that are either confusing or that aren’t easily explained in the barrage of tech-related marketing that’s thrown at us every day.

This second Digital Savant glossary includes words like “Airprint” and “animated GIF,” things that are common parlance to geeks and Internet bottom-dwellers like us, but that I get asked about by readers in emails and blog comments all the time. (I had to go and research, “3-D printer” to make sure I knew exactly what those are and, holy mac-n-cheese, that’s amazing! And a future source of legal problems, surely.)

Soon after the column ran, someone who reads my stuff regularly told me, “I read your piece. Didn’t understand a word of it.”

I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or what, but before I had time to let out, “But… that was… kind of… the point… of…” the moment had passed and I was left to go deflate.

It was one of those, “Now why am I doing this again?” moments, which I’ve seemed to have a lot of lately. Weird bursts of deflated, defeated lack of purpose and paralysis mixed with (often Twitter-driven) bouts of self-congratulatory confidence and frenzied catch-up activity. Is this what it’s like to start going bi-polar? Is there a take-home urine test for that or something? A Facebook quiz?

Anyhoo! The other thing I wrote this week that was in the paper was a preview of the new season of Red vs. Blue, which afforded me the opportunity to virtually chat with the folks over at Rooster Teeth, who are inspiring like a lot of people in Austin who just keep putting out high levels of creative stuff over a very long period of time until the Internet has no choice but to notice and to follow raptly. Anyone who has a modicum of interest in the Austin film scene or Internet video in general should be standing on their chairs and applauding that crew for what they’ve done.

Interrupted…

Everything up to this point I wrote last night. And in the middle of writing and previewing the post, the site went down. The entire host of the site went down. I waited a few minutes and the site, WordPress, everything… still down.  The editing page was still in the browser, so I copy/pasted the text into Google Docs and went to bed.

Which led me to… maybe I wasn’t supposed to write this?  Or I needed to take another look? Or I just need a new webhost?

Or perhaps just some perspective.  This has been a spectacularly up and down week.  My wife and I had a great three-day weekend that included a pool party, lots of eating out, lots of time having fun with the kids and then, boom, a weird stomach ailment that felled us both right as Memorial Day was ending.

At the AT&T Spursachampionatorium

Then I recovered enough to go to an NBA game in San Antonio and that was a blast even as I was struggling to climb up stairs to our seats and trying hard not to bring back on the headache that had been plaguing me all day.  The game and its screaming, dancing, San Antonio-puro-pienche-people crowd was, weirdly, restorative.  Even as I tried not to move too much, I was totally digging the scene and the great game and feeling very much at home.  It was wonderful.

A friend mentioned a piece that ran on this site a while back in an article she wrote for Bitch Magazine about people asking you to do work for free.

And then, today, I did a Skype session with some students visiting my alma mater in Oklahoma, journalists from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. It was very similar to a session I did last year for the same event and just like last time, they asked incredibly insightful questions about everything from blogging to curating content to the future of social media to how to handle news in a country where broadband Internet just isn’t spreading to people fast enough.  I actually had answers and insight and stories and even a few funny bits of experience to share.  The comments they posted immediately after the session to Facebook, the friend requests I got and the personal thanks some of them sent (again, immediately after; they’re young and super-quick) made me feel like I’d actually helped them figure some things out.

Weird, wonderful week.

And then I just got interrupted again. Diaper failure causes 2-year-old’s crib to be soaked in urine, requires immediate sheet and clothing changes. She was a trouper, smiling the whole time and cheering me on as I lifted up her crib mattress and “Daddy fix it.”

The thing that’s hovering over what’s been a fitful couple of weeks is that a friend and I finally figured out what we need to be doing with a writing thing we’ve been working on for a long while and now we’re at the actual doing point and it’s scaring me.  There’s so much information we’ve collected and conversations we’ve had and things that we want to say and my brain can’t seem to hold and process and filter-distill and dispense it to my satisfaction. And that’s freaking me out. It’s making me think I need to print out pages and put things in an accordion folder and search-cloud-tag-up material and put stickers on papers and that I’m going to sit right back down with everything organized and still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing.

So that’s what’s really troubling me. Because, except for stomach bugs that come and go, most everything else has been pretty awesome lately.

Facebook went public last week. You might have heard about it. They sold some stock or something.

In the big lead-up to the big let-down, I wrote a piece for CNN.com about why I’m staying on Facebook and why people should just accept that the kingdom of Zuckerberg is just a fact of life and that people should just get used to it.

Of course, every time Facebook has shown vulnerability or made a bad decision in the past, they’ve found a way to sidestep criticism and come roaring back. This stock market thing shows a much deeper, perhaps more fundamental weakness in the company that we really haven’t seen before.

And since was a column that was meant to be a little contrarian in the first place, I find myself wondering if it’s going to be a piece of writing that I’ll come to regret in a few short years. We’ll see, won’t we? I certainly was anticipating the flurry of negative comments this time around and was able to enjoy them from backstage, twirling my mustache and saying to myself, “Job well done, villain.”

What I wasn’t expecting was for CNN to slap it on the front page center with my name out there for the world to see. That was pretty amazing-cool, but also terrifying at the same time. I felt like I’d been called out by my own words, made to stand before a crowd and justify my opinion. Lucky for me, I have a lot of opinions about Facebook, even if they’re not even always consistent or right.

Dustin Maxey (right) and his friend Larin Frederick, talk about “GroupWink,” a group dating app Maxey is planning to launch this summer. Photo by Julia Robinson for the Austin American-Statesman

Another big piece I wrote that ran this week was in the Statesman and it was about ambient/serendipity apps like “Highlight” that pair you up with people nearby, social network-like, even when you’re not actively using them. The piece evolved into an article about the line between convenient and creepy and how future apps are going to have to overcome that label.

I had some great conversations in the interviews I did for the article and as usual it was just a lot of material that needed to be condensed into one good-sized story. I hope it didn’t lose too much in that process and that it made enough sense to people who don’t follow this kind of tech.

I’ve had a weird thing lately, just the last few days, where I’m getting a little tired and bored with the whole social media thing. It’s not that I’m not posting; I still do that. But I’ve also found myself not posting a lot when in the past I would have responded to something or had a thought I wanted to share. Some of it may be that I’ve been writing so much about social media lately that I’m a little burned out on thinking about it, but some of it is also that I know that if I respond to certain posts that I’m going to get into a whole conversation with someone and of late, I’ve been so pressed for time that I’d rather just not even get into it, you know?

A guy I know, Loren Feldman, is working on a documentary about social media and I’m dying to see how it turns out because he and I have a very similar view on a lot of what’s going on, only he’s able to say a lot of the things I can’t in ways that I don’t. We both feel the bubble is close to bursting and that in a few short years, people will have moved on to something else, even if it’s just faster/more efficient ways of doing what we’re doing now.

Or it could just be that I get bored of hearing my own voice (typed, rather, and online) and that I get the sense a lot of other people are chirping along with very little to say, too, at times. It gets boring sometimes, doesn’t it? That can’t just be me that feels it, right?

Another theory: summer is here (we get it early in New Braunfels) and I’d rather just be outside, swimming or tubing. That’s probably it, honestly.

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!