Terribly Happy

'Snuggle Mountain,' an app mentioned in this week's Digital Savant column

My energy level is up in a major, scary way, one of those “LOOK OUT, WORLD!” feelings that the world, it turns out, has largely seen before.

For a few weeks I wasn’t going to the gym as often and I was eating… not great, and my energy level was just total shit. I was getting sleepy at 10 p.m. even when I’d had a decent night’s sleep and just was getting no writing done in at night, never mind actual house stuff or getting organized.

Maybe it’s that it got hot again for a weird week, but now that the cool weather is coming back I feel like I’ve got my second (cool) wind. It’s nice. Stuff’s getting done. Waste paper is landing in basketball-hoop-style trash can novelty toys. The blood feels like it’s moving again.

It’s a good thing because this morning was the first time I’ve done an NPR thing since March. I was invited to go on the show On Point with Tom Ashbrook to talk about the Amazon Kindle Fire and the tablet wars in general. (TABLET WARS! THEY’LL SLATE YOU… THIS CHRISTMAS.) You can listen to the one-hour segment (there were other guests as well) on their web site or just download the MP3 here. I think it went well. I did a ton of cramming and reading over the weekend in preparation, but went in with minimal notes and, in a big departure from when I used to do All Tech Considered, I was able to keep my laptop open and have an Internet connection. Something about having Twitter running in the background and access to information if I need it just calms me. Feeling hermetically sealed often makes me talk faster and feel less confident. Either way, it was nice to be back on the air.

A few other new things: today we ran a Digital Savant column about an upcoming digital storytelling symposium for children’s book authors and illustrators. There’ll be a lot of talk about ebooks and children’s apps and I’m all over that.

Last week, I wrote a blog post that ended up running in the paper about the future of vending machines. It was pretty snacky.

That’s about it right now. I’m looking at a few more weeks of knocking out some stories and columns before I take another vacation in early November, right after Halloween. We’re trying to potty train Lilly at night (no more Pull-Ups!), but that’s challenging. Carolina has learned how to fight back when her sister takes items away from her and that’s… loud. Our fall looks like zoo visits and Wurstfest and putting away the plastic swimming pool and, for once, I’m OK with that. I had a great summer and I don’t feel bitter that it’s gone like I usually do, especially with the awfulness of the temperatures and the drought this year.

Work is work; a few more staff members are leaving or shifting into other roles and I have a hard time remembering when things were “normal” or if that was ever really a state of being there.

One thing I saw today really affected me. I went to Goodwill Computer Works to interview someone for a story. As I was wandering around, I saw this hanging up near the front:

The air went out of my lungs and I just stared, mouth agape. I wrote the story in 1997. I’d just been hired a few months before and it was one of the first big, ambitious stories I wrote. It’s still one of my favorites, a piece about the Apple Lisa back when it looked as if Apple might not even exist in a few more years. A rush of emotions filled me, but I just turned away, smiling. The man I was interviewing walked into the room and it was time to get to work.

A few weeks ago, I was making jokes on Twitter about a ridiculous $600 vacuum cleaner from Dyson that they sent me a press release about. Then they saw the Tweets. Then they sent me the vacuum. Then I used. Then I wrote this Digital Savant column about my experiences which were… suckily illuminating.

A few interesting things that came out of it: our house and my car are much cleaner now, thanks. Also, I got a lot of emails and several voice mails and Tweets today after the column appeared, plus lots of Tweets and Facebook and Google+ comments when I mentioned I was working on the piece. Not one negative word about Dyson from the two or three dozen or so responses I got, not even a, “$600 is crazy for a vacuum!” No one told me a horror story about their faulty Dyson vacuum not working or anything like that. If the products are overhyped or overpriced, you wouldn’t know it from the people who told me they own one and would never go back to another brand.

We ended up buying one of our own (the Animal was just a loaner and will soon be shipped back). Woot had an earlier, cheaper model on sale for $179 and we went ahead and snagged it. We’ll see how that goes and if it’s much different with our experiences using what amounts to cleanliness overkill for us. If we had large pets we kept indoors, we’d probably spring for one of the newer Dysons.

Here’s some dirt I took a photo of after we cleaned our house. You’re welcome!

I mentioned in the last post that we went to Austin City Limits Fest. I didn’t really talk about how it went. The first day, I was doing some work at the fest, but I got to stick around in the evening to see some music.

I love going to ACL with a group of friends or family, but I also really love, it turns out, just wandering out among the masses on my own and sitting in the grass checking out music by myself. I saw Bright Eyes, which sounded really great. They played a surprising amount of older stuff from one of my favorite albums and from where I was sitting, everything sounded great. I missed Christian Bale, though. I must have been jotting some notes down or not paying attention when that happened.

Internet was spotty at the fest, but I had just enough connectivity to see some Tweets about Santigold’s set, so I rushed over to that side of the park and caught the last half of her set. Holy crap, she was fantastic. I’d never really heard much of her music before, but the booming bass, the dancing, the great sound, everybody in the crowd dancing as the sun set. It was magical and I became a fan right there. I was really impressed.

Then it was time for Kanye. I stopped listening to him for a while when I got fed up with his antics and was less and less impressed with his music. But I thought last year’s My Beautiful Twisted Dark Fantasy was a complete revelation and the new album with Jay-Z isn’t too shabby, either. Well, he was pretty amazing. Everybody was expecting guests, but nobody showed up. It was all Kanye, his dancers and DJs. It was still harrowing, dramatic, energetic, veering on cringeworthy drama at a few moments, but pretty spellbinding. I think Kanye has all kinds of personal issues and I’m worried he’s going to flame out. That’s one reason I was so determined to see him live; I wonder how long he’ll keep touring and putting together music as well as he’s doing right now. I’m so glad I went even if the middle of the set, with a bunch of songs from his Autotuned heartbreak period, weren’t my cup of tea. The opening salvo of songs more than made up for that.

We saw Cee-Lo the next night, but were so far away it felt like we were watching him on a tiny TV. Then we scooted up for Stevie Wonder, which was pretty fantastic. It’s hard to describe, but it was just great song after great song on a perfect, not-too-hot night. We got separated when my wife went to the bathroom and never came back, but we had a meeting spot and found each other there. There were just so many people it was tough to get through the crowd. But it was worth all the trouble. Stevie sounded and looked better than I could have expected and he was clearly into it.

The weather cooperated and I got to spend more time at ACL than I expected to this year. It sucked to miss Arcade Fire, but getting to be outside when it’s not 105 degrees and getting to eat ACL fest food took the sting off that. Great time this year.

Last thing: we took the girls to the Comal Count Fair on Saturday. It was a great time; I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I do have some photos.

And one more pic we took at home this weekend:

It was a good week.

There’s a lot to talk about so let me get the housekeeping out of the way first. The video above is part of a story that’s running in Saturday’s newspaper, part of the ongoing online identity series.

I shot and edited the video and I think it’s the best video I’ve done, content-wise. It says exactly what I wanted to get across and is very close to what the story says. I dread editing video and it always feels like I’m having to learn how to do it all over again, but I feel like the time I put into this one was worth it.

Going back a week, I did a story in advance of the big Austin City Limits Festival about some of the technology from AMD, Dell and others behind the scenes and how they were planning to live-stream big chunks of the fest. There was also a video I shot for that you can find below.

On the day of the Emmy Awards, I had a piece run in which I tried to make the case that Friday Night Lights should win the Best Drama Emmy. Of course, it didn’t, but I was still thrilled that the show won a writing award and that Kyle Chandler walked away with an Emmy for acting. I’d call it even.

And in Friday’s paper, I wrote about a large grant awarded to the University of Texas Advanced Computing Center to build a giant, devastating supercomputer called “Stampede” that will one day rule us all (benevolently, I hope).

I recorded and posted a new Digital Savant podcast, the first one in about two months, with Michelle Greer, who is leaving the Austin tech community, a loss for all of us in the area.

And lastly, this week’s Digital Savant column was about Fantastic Arcade.

That’s a lot of stuff, right? Allow me to explain.

The week before Labor Day, right before I went on vacation, our editor abruptly resigned. I tried really hard not to think about it and to dwell on that during my time off, but when I came back to the office, the mood around the office had changed and ever since I’ve been feeling the void.

Fred is someone that I had always tried really hard to impress in all my time working on his staff. In that way, he was very much like a parental figure for me. He’s not an easy person to blow away and when I knew I’d done good work that earned praise from him, it always meant a lot to me. He’s also a very funny person (in a bone-dry Texas summer kind of way) and I respected his opinion and his hard-assedness about things even when I didn’t agree with him.

The one time I ever cried in frustration about something work-related, it was in his office. He kindly, quietly, passed me a box of Kleenex.

His leaving has left me feeling a bit adrift, as have other changes as the paper. I’m not job hunting or worried for my livelihood or anything, it’s just big changes in a short amount of time. We’re all adjusting, some staffers more than others. For me, I think I’ve been working harder, trying to take on more things, unwilling to allow myself to pace myself like I should. I’m panicking, maybe, and probably unnecessarily.

So I’m trying to be better about that. I do miss Fred, though. He was a looming authority figure in my life — in the best possible way.

Outside of work, I’m working on a few writing projects and the summer laziness has given way to trying to remember what it’s like to be busy again and be juggling a bunch of things.

The big writing project I’m working on with my friend Tracy is actually making some progress and it’s scaring me a little. I write a lot, all the time. but I’ve never actually written a single volume of anything longer than about 100 or 200 pages (and that was unfinished). You could add up all the recaps I did for Smallville and it would be a few thousand pages, probably, but it’s not the same as trying to build something cohesive and I’m trying really hard not to scare and intimidate myself into being paralyzed into not doing it. Apart from Tracy being one of the friends I’ve kept the longest and being a funny and knowledgeable writer, I think I want to write with her because I’m been fearful of doing it completely alone.

That’s one reason I’ve never written a book. I’ve been too afraid of failing at it or doing it and realizing it’s not good enough to get published.

Lilly is getting old enough that she’s aware of the concepts of tomorrow and of wishes and, strangely, unicorns, which she wants to see at a county fair we’re going to this weekend.

She’s reached the age where she can see what tomorrow might be like and hope for things to be there. She’s not afraid of that future; she wants it to get here as soon as possible.

I’m trying to shed some fear, too, and to build a life where my kids embrace possibilities and don’t shut down their own abilities before they even have a chance to get used.

I’m going to try to lead by example.

I need to write. Because, clearly, I can’t draw.

Something I realized about myself at Austin City Limits Fest today.

Evernote's Rich Warwick. Photo by Laura Skelding / Austin American-Statesman

I keep meaning to update here, but over the last week I wrote so much at work in anticipation of vacation this week that I just never had the energy. Late at night, when I usually do updates or catch up on tying up loose ends, I would just go to bed early, exhausted. You know I’m tired when I don’t even have the stamina to stay up till 1 a.m. watching bad TV.

Last week, I had a lot of stories run in the paper and even more on the Digital Savant blog. I haven’t been doing lots of freelance writing lately and that’s partly because the summer head just drained me from wanting to add more stuff to my plate. Also, I actually got to enjoy the summer more this year: more trips to Schlitterbahn, more tubing, more time with the girls. It’s been a good trade-off and I’ve really been enjoying myself.

Monday last week, I broke a little bit of news. Evernote, the company that makes some really good note taking software across lots of different platforms, let us know early that they’re opening an Austin office and doing lots of hiring. Given that most of my stories and columns are planned out pretty far in advance, it’s not often I get a real news scoop, so I was pretty thrilled to have this out there before anyone else.

The same day that story ran, I had a Digital Savant column about McCartney Taylor, a local beekeeper

Photo by me

This week’s Digital Savant column was a collection of mini-reviews of the MacBook Air (wow, thin, fast), T-Mobile’s Rocket 3.0 Laptop Stick and their 4G Slide Android phone and, lastly, Time Warner Cable’s Wideband Internet service. These were bite-sized versions of much longer reviews of each that I did for the Digital Savant blog. (It’s much easier for me to write long and then cut than to write short and leave tons of questions unanswered.)

And lastly, I had a story reverse-published into the paper about a local meme/website called Stocking is the New Planking. The designers who created it were a lot of fun to talk to and I’m glad they’re getting lots of attention for this very fun thing they’re doing.

As I mentioned, I’m on vacation this week. I don’t have any huge plans. We thought about going to South Padre Island but ended up tabling that until early next year when Carolina is (hopefully) potty trained and we’re a little more prepared for a lengthy road trip. So instead, I’m enjoying New Braunfels stuff this week (like tubing, below; APOLOGIES for the shirtless pic. I will pay your therapy bill if necessary).

It always seems to happen when I go on vacation that a major news story happens and this week, it’s wildfires across Texas. I was offline for a lot of Sunday and Monday, but I caught up in little bits and pieces and by the evening we started getting nervous that these fires were getting close enough to our area that we should start thinking about what we’d do if we needed to evacuate. We pulled together birth certificates, passports, IDs and talked about how we’d pack up the girls, our computer backups and other valuables if we needed to go.

The air has been hazy and we can smell smoke outside. The photos from the fires have been horrifying.

The wildfires aren’t THAT close to our town, but given how dry it’s been, what the winds have been like and how many other people in our area have already either had to take off or watch the news nervously, it never hurts to have some kind of plan.