Terribly Happy

Happy New Year!

This was a 2012 of firsts. It was the first time I didn’t make it to midnight. In between watching and mocking the Rockin’ Eve With a Corpse, a Plastic Man, Jenny McCarthy and Fergie, I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic as I lay on the floor with the laptop and I literally fell asleep on the computer, my online Twi’lek avatar running fruitlessly into a wall. It was kind of pathetic. This was at 11:30 p.m. I gave up and went to sleep without observing the ball drop (I have two and I can see that whenever I like). (My wife and the kids had gone to bed hours earlier.)

It was also the first time I didn’t feel like I was missing out on going out and getting drunk. Staying home and lying under tons of blankets sounded way, way better.

(I’m boring. It’s OK. I’ve grown into it nicely.)

My vacation unfolded nicely and slowly over about 10 days. I wrote furiously in the two weeks leading up to vacation so that I wouldn’t have to think about work while I was gone and for once, that all worked out OK. I set up my work mail on my phone for the first time recently and rather than being an annoying distraction, it was actually nice to be able to peep in, delete messages and come back to work today without 1,000 unattended emails.

The column that ran in the paper on Monday was written more than two weeks ago, but it was a look ahead to some new stuff emerging in Austin (a neat little locator device for the iPhone, the City of Austin’s revamped website, the great website and app Make Pixel Art), and it was nice to cover three topics in one piece.

My first day back at work was productive and not nearly as stressful as I was expecting. I got myself organized, deleted even more emails and responded to the ones that needed attention, and got back to the business of being at work again. It was nice to put on actual pants that don’t have a drawstring and to hop into my car and drive purposefully toward a lucrative destination.

I even had time to write a list of tech resolutions for the blog.

I was pretty low key over the break, allowing myself to be really low-energy and in Ultra Chill mode. But now I’m ready to burst with energy again and do a bunch of stuff.

READY? LET’S GO.

No, not the Twitter account, just my now-annual attempt to gaze into the future of personal tech. It was Monday’s Digital Savant column, written ahead of vacation, predicting what I think might happen in 2012 in technological areas important to our lives such as:

• What’s the deal with Netflix?
• And Facebook? What’s up with THAT?
• OH MY GOD, WHAT ABOUT APPLE!? We should have asked about Apple first! Tell us, O Oracle!
• Will I die? Please be honest.

Incidentally, here were my 2011 predictions. I’m so glad I didn’t predict we’d be in flying cars by December like I had originally planned.

I have another column coming next Monday that I wrote before the lengthy vacation into which I am currently nuzzling my warm puppy nose.

In the paper this week, I also had some blog pieces reverse-published including this write-up of Grande Communications’ new TiVo Premere box and a review of Sony’s 24″ 3D Display.

Mostly this week it’s been quiet and I’ve been trying to rest up after a really, really busy weekend with family and with the girls. One break in the vacation that was a surprise, though, was that I got a call on Friday to appear on NPR’s Tell Me More. The live segment was produced on Tuesday morning and you can hear/read the whole thing on this page. It’s about Amazon’s Price Check app and small retailers. I had a whole page of notes about how the app works, where the tech comes from and who else is doing stuff in this area, but we didn’t really get to any of that. Instead, I got to say, in a nutshell, “Yeah, I can see why business owners would be upset.” Very different pace than All Things Considered or At Issue with Ben Merens, but the behind-the-scenes of it was that they run a very tight to-the-minute ship even though it sounds pretty free-flow. Even when things like this are unpaid (and the only time I’ve ever been paid for radio stuff was with All Tech), it’s still a good lesson to see how these shows work and to get a sense of what their producers do or don’t know about tech culture and trends.

The girls I mentioned before have been running us ragged, fighting over new toys and getting up at all hours of the night, completely wired and destabilized for the holiday season. They went back to daycare yesterday and I’ve been enjoying the relative daytime quiet before they come home and it turns into something out of Mad Max to get them bathed, fed and to bed.

On the other hand, it was nice not to have deadlines and a bunch of stuff to write and to be able to just hang out with them or with family without stuff hanging over my head like most years. Why was I thinking I’d be doing a bunch of work this week? That was dumb. I’m going to go run through like 20 hours of sitcoms, read some books and do some baking instead. Who wants cookies?

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Sometimes things just work out.  All year, my editor and I had a story scheduled for the release of the new game Star Wars: The Old Republic, the biggest game ever developed in Austin, and about two months ago I started working on it.  The pieces (including a visit to the sizable studio) came together and this was one of the least stressy lead stories I’ve done in a while. The story ran on Saturday and I also posted a “Special Edition” follow-up collecting the deleted scenes and tidbits that didn’t make it into the article.

It was just fun writing about Star Wars, I guess, which I never get to do.  In the image above is my character in the game, a Twi’lek named Maumauchowchow. Come say hi if you see me in there.

I also had a Digital Savant column run on Monday. This one was about posting your whereabouts online (or your holiday travel plans) and whether that can lead to getting robbed. It turns out it can!

Christmas week got here so fast that we haven’t even done a holiday card yet (though I’m determined to somehow still make it happen, even if a time machine has to be involved), put up a lot of decorations (“Next year,” my wife says) or finished with the shopping.  I’m on vacation next week, so whatever happens, I’ll be resting and trying not to ruminate too much on the year.  I’ve never been one of those people to say, “Please let this year be over and bring on the new one” but this year I may be in that camp.  Lots of changes, not all of them great, have me eager to move ahead and see what’s next.

If we don’t communicate like this again before the weekend, have a lovely holiday.  Be safe, be merry, enjoy just being.

Sure, this movie is directed by Steven Spielberg, is being released on Christmas day and has a tie to an acclaimed Broadway production, but my number one criteria for us doing a video for War Horse was simply, “We will get to make lots and lots and lots of horse jokes.”

And so we did. At the very least, I knew there’d be an endless supply of stock photos of horses to choose from. (There were.)

As to what the movie will actually be like, I thought for sure this was going to be amazing, but the closer it gets to the release date, the move I’m convinced it’s going to be a manipulative weepie that perhaps I may not actually want to see in a theater.

The other notable thing about this video is that it contains one of maybe five of my favorite jokes of all the videos we’ve done. The visual just really cracks me up. It’s near the end of the video and involves the equine embodiment of pure evil. Nevermind that it’s a joke recycled from Twitter, I still laugh at it every time I see the photo Pablo put together.

Next up for us: the weirdly hypnotic trailer for Liam Neeson’s The Grey.

Just a quick note about this week’s Digital Savant column, which was about an Austin startup called vivogig, which pools photos that people take at concerts. Pretty neat idea; I hope it catches on.

I’ve also been working on some video game reviews. I did a write-up of Super Mario 3D Land and one today for Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. Both good games, but neither one is close to perfect.  I have a big story about the new Star Wars MMO running in Saturday’s paper that I’ll link to when it’s available.

Also have some recently posted reviews on Kirkus for more kids apps including Hiding Hannah and The Blue Jackal.

Since we’re close to midway through December, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how this year went and what changes have happened.  Some new things have started up, writing-wise, and a few other things have kind of gone away and other things, like the videos we do for TWOP and my Kirkus app reviews are ongoing and steady and good because they’re each still challenging in their own ways and they pay well for not a whole lot of time commitment.

Mostly, I think the problem I’m having right now is that I found something to work on that I really enjoy and that’s making all the other writing I do seem to pale in comparison in terms of my interest and excitement.  That’s hard and I’m trying to work through it by just keeping my energy high, but it’s tough to do that with all the weather changes and allergies and the kids getting up at randomly at night and a drag of a commute that’s been made worse lately by worsening traffic and the incredibly shrinking morale issues we have at work these days.

But then I think those are all just excuses to stay frustrated and scared instead of embracing change and fully committing to what I want to be doing right now (I think I know what that is, but I’m afraid to even type it).   Mostly it’s that I’ve let the gigs I’ve lucked into or worked my way up toward define who I am professionally and, though I try to be very loyal when that happens, I’ve not pushed very hard to define or push out my own work, the stuff I really own, not for a long while.  Because it’s a lot easier to have bosses and editors and people in charge than to try to do it for yourself.  That’s really, really tough for me.  But I know I need to try.

So that’s what’s been on my mind.  I’m not sure I even knew it consciously until I just wrote it, so good thing for this blog, eh?

Is that enough pre-holiday whining? I think it is. Merry two weeks before Christmas, folks!