Terribly Happy

"It's an MP3. I wrapped it myself. Sex?"

My editor and I got to talking in one of our meetings about the shift we’re all going through from physical media (CDs, books, DVDs) to digital and what that means. I don’t remember how the conversation got started but we were also talking about the holidays and the idea came up that there’s really no solid etiquette for gifting these digital items that are becoming so common in our lives.

That was the origin of this week’s Digital Savant column, where we ask the question, “How exactly do you wrap up an MP3 album or an ebook?” Luckily, I know some people to ask.

Also this week, I helped report on Gowalla’s deal with Facebook that’ll end Gowalla and start a few staffers from that company on the road to helping Facebook with its Timeline feature. This one caught us off guard Friday night and we chased it until it was official.

I also had a story run in the paper about Snoball, an Austin-based company helping people automate donations to nonprofits.

Late last week, I also appeared on the radio, talking about tech gifts on the WPR show “At Issues with Ben Merens.” You can listen to it here.

The Trailers Without Pity train keeps a-chuggin’ with the latest from indisputably potent director David Fincher, the adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

As with Valkyrie, I’m always puzzled when something so insanely dark and grim is trotted out as holiday fare, but then, as we say in the video, maybe that’s the antidote people need when their late December gets a little too sugary and sweet.

I still haven’t read the books, but I’m tempted to make a sprint through the first one before the movie comes out. Worth it? Let me know in the comments and enjoy the video.

“Why are you playing so many videogames all of a sudden?”

— my wife, two weeks ago

Every year around this time, I end up playing a lot more videogames than usual as the usual holiday pileup of titles begins to pile up. In truth, I’ll only get through maybe 3-5 percent of what comes across my desk, so it becomes a matter of being really picky and choosy about what I want to spend my time with and what’s worth reviewing (if, indeed, there’s even time to write full reviews for work).

I always try to give priority to games developed locally, and it was this kind of thinking <a href="http://www achat viagra pharmacie.statesman.com/life/the-year-in-austin-gaming-1997711.html”>that led to a Digital Savant column that ran Monday about the year of Austin gaming. Everybody’s sort of holding their breath for the release of Star Wars: the Old Republic, a huge Austin-developed MMO that is the biggest game ever created here. I’m working on a larger piece about that game to run in mid-December.

I got to talk to a few Austin game studios for a separate Tech Monday column about how companies that run online games deal with trolls and bullies. It was an offshoot of a previous story I did on trolling; we had to cut a big chunk out of it about online gaming and I ended up spinning that information off into its own article.

And completely separate of all that, I played with and reviewed a fitness gadget called Striiv that also has its own gaming components (racking up points and using them in a Farmville-like virtual game.) A version of that review ran in the paper, too, as did a short interview I did with Trey Ratcliff about his new iPad app, “Stuck on Earth.”

(I just realized I didn’t mention what I’m actually playing right now. It’s Uncharted 3, Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7 and the Star Wars: Old Republic beta. At some point I’ll go back and play Call of Duty: MW3 and Batman: Arkham City, which I’ve beed sad to miss.)

We had a pretty great Thanksgiving, really restful, little bit of shopping, lots of eating, some exercise to make up for the eating, more eating because the exercise made us hungry and wanting to do more shopping.

Work is still work. I haven’t been doing much freelance at all lately, but a separate writing project I’ve been working on for a while is coming along really, really well. I’ve been devoting a little bit of time on it nearly every night and as much as I dread and fear screwing it up, when I sit down and slip into that little portal, it’s always a good feeling, one that gets more comfortable and enjoyable the longer I stick with it. If all goes well, I hope to have a lot more to say about it as the year comes to a close.

Every year around this time I usually put together a holiday tech gift guide for the Statesman and a separate one for Television Without Pity, working off a big master list and then deciding which items should go where (with a little bit of overlap).

This year the gift guides diverged a little more than usual because we decided to make the Statesman one more locally focused with products produced by Austin companies or powered by Austin technology (or, in a few cases, just stuff that would appeal to Central Texans). So the TWOP gift guide ends up being a lot more general and TV-focused while the Statesman one has a more local feel.

This is probably way more information than you care to have.

Which is all to say that while these packages often look really easy: just a bunch of product images with really short descriptions, they’re a huge challenge to put together. I save email pitches all year in a folder called “Gift Guide Tech” and I literally go through those emails one by one when it’s time to put these stories together. This year there were about 170+ emails and more kept coming in as I was working on it. Some of those emails included information for 10 to 20 products each. I used to put all my picks in one big Excel spreadsheet and work from that, but this year I ditched the spreadsheet and just made a simple list and that saved me a little bit of time.

I’ve been trying in general to save time on the things I do and not waste it, especially at work where it feels like deadlines are closing in and the year is already drawing to a close.

Like most of you, I’m just hanging on for Turkey Day, looking forward to just relaxing for a day or two and not thinking too hard about what’s left to do in 2011, which has proven to be a challenging, very weird year for me that I’m still trying to figure out.

Sometime in my early-early 30s, I went from flying by the seat of my pants on assignments and tasks to being a full-on productivity nerd. I’ve written about GTD a few times and at least once or twice a year I end up reassessing whether the software/apps I’m using are really working for me or if I should try something new.

(It helps a lot that my editor is also into GTD and is very organized; you should see her desk. There aren’t huge piles of papers and junk on it like everybody else in the newsroom. It’s kind of amazing.)

That’s enough preamble to say that I <a href="http://www.statesman.com/life/whats-next-on-the-to-do-list-make-1966882 viagra pour acheter.html”>wrote a story for the Statesman about to-do list apps, websites and tips. I finished working on it last week and didn’t read it again until today and I was pleased with how it turned out. The print version ran with really huge artwork and the whole package works well, I think. Some of the artwork was of my actual real-life to-do list and it ran so large you could actually see what I was doing last week (and what deadlines I had missed). I’d be embarrassed, but I think I lost the capacity for that when they started running my photo with the column every week.

The other thing I wrote this week that ended up in print was about the night that Rick Perry made a mistake in a debate, Joe Paterno was fired and Ashton Kutcher mis-Tweeted something and the Internet got really mad.

We went to Wurstfest a few times, which the kids are getting old enough to appreciate on a whole other level. They are now aware that this is a place that has not only sausage and music they dig but also rides and booths that give you prizes if you give a grownup enough tokens that you get from your dad.

The holidays are getting here too quickly, but I’m enjoying the ride. So is Carolina:

Our new Trailers Without Pity is for the new Garry Marshall romantic something, New Year’s Eve. If it sounds familiar, it’s because he also directed Valentine’s Day and this one is basically the same thing with a new, cheap paint job.

I can only remember one such romantic comedy I’ve actually watched in the last three or four years and that was Going the Distance and it didn’t. And a movie overstuffed with characters and storylines and meet-cutes and a midnight deadline to declare your love… that just sounds exhausting. How do singletons do it? Texting? Dating via Facebook? The belly folds and dank alleyways of this culture are a mystery to me, as nebulous in my mind as a monster’s deep, foreboding pit.

Anyhoo! This is our second video of the season and things are rolling along. We should be back next time with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Speaking of dank, foreboding and mysterious.

You can check out the video below or on TWOP. Please watch the video since we dressed up in tuxedos for it.