Terribly Happy

This is what I look like in the 'Star Wars' universe. Hey, shut up, Bantha are DELICIOUS!

Back in August, we started running Digital Savant in the paper once a week (a lot of it generated by the long-running blog that I write) as a column. Work-wise, it’s not a whole lot different, perhaps just a little more structured than writing the same kinds of topics on the blog and with a firmer weekly deadline. Sometimes I’m so caught up in updating the blog and working on other stories that I forget that the column runs in the paper on Mondays and that once a week newspaper readers are subjected to my grinning face, often way too early in the morning.

But it’s been nice to have that routine. I was initially dreading it and, in truth, there are some weeks when my Wednesday deadline looms and I think, “This is going to be embarrassing for all involved,” but it usually turns out OK, and sometimes better than OK. Sometimes I’m really pleased at how the columns turn out and that they definitely have a voice and a point of view that isn’t otherwise represented in the paper. (That point of view I’ll call “Extreme goof dad nerd” until I come up with a better description.)

I haven’t posted about the last two columns because I took a trip to Atlanta or a social media panel that I was moderating (I found out a week before that they wanted me physically present; I thought I was going to be beamed in somehow via Internets and telephonies and magicks). Someone emailed me, “How are your travel arrangements coming” and I stared stupidly at my screening, thinking, “My what?”

Going to Atlanta was lots of fun since I never get to travel, but I’m still catching up with everything that this brief 36-hour trip pushed aside.

So here’s the two columns that ran recently.

The first one is a sort-of review/set of impressions about the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I’ve been playing pretty regularly since the holidays. In the column I make clear how much of an MMO newbie I still am. I found a way to embarrass myself even in an online game where I don’t know anyone.

It’s very tough to review an MMO, impossible, really. It would take months, if not years. The best you can do is relate some of your own experience and compare it to other gaming experiences you’ve had.

The other column ran this Monday and it’s a list of conversation-starters for South by Southwest Interactive, which is less than a month away. I also posted a blog version that’s full of links to all the panels I talk about in the piece.

On Saturday, I attended TEDxAustin and followed it up with a big, detailed blog post rundown of it. It really was an inspiring day, full of great ideas and speakers who are out there kicking ass and (presumably) creating big-data ways to take names and do something with said ass-kicking/name-taking database. I’m still processing what I can take away from the experience personally, but one thing I hope to do is just get out of my own head a little bit and get out there in the community more. I feel like I’ve been living the last two or three years in a hidey hole, trying to hold down the parenting fort and the work fort and several other forts that perhaps are not build up to code and Tweeting or writing from behind a protective screen. It needed to be that way, but perhaps that isolation is going away a little.

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.

This short week got full really quick! This morning, a CNN.com tech column I wrote appeared this morning about what would happen if the Dora Generation (kids 5-12) begin to join Facebook en masse.

It’s a little out-there compared to the stuff I usually write for them, but with a few tweaks, they were willing to publish it as satire. I’m keeping an eye on the comments for this one because this time when people post, “This article is ridiculous and completely dumb!” I’ll be inclined to kind of agree.

Photo by me for the Digital Savant blog

Today, I also posted Digital Savant Podcast #5, featuring GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham.

I always love chatting (or Tweeting) with Stacey and she proved to be a great, fun guest. I look for people who know a lot about tech but also don’t take it too deadly seriously and Stacey is a reporter with a great sense of humor. You can download it on the blog or grab it from iTunes.

Photo I shot for the Austin American-Statesman

I got to meet with him and his girlfriend and geek out a bit over the stuff he’s working on.

Also in the Statesman over the weekend was a reverse-published blog post I did about Turntable.fm, a DJ chat room/music service that my brother and I have gotten completely hooked over the last week. We’re planning on doing a horrible songs room, perhaps on Friday, and just playing the worst stuff we can think of. You should join us! You can find the room here.

Other cool stuff: I submitted an “I Am Not a Crackpot!” audio piece to my favorite podcast, Extra Hot Great and it appeared in an All-Crackpot episode. Lots and lots of fun and a great listen with lots of great submissions. You should subscribe to the podcast. My piece is about how we keep Closed Captioning on all the time. It comes in at around the 45-minute mark. I may not have convinced the podcasters, but I feel vindicated by the commenters on the site.

We had a pretty quiet 4th of July weekend. We didn’t travel anywhere and we had some family stay over. We took Lilly and Carolina to an insane place in New Braunfels called The Jumpy Place where they have giant bounce castles, like six of them in one giant warehouse-sized building. There are also comfy sofas and chairs for parents. But did we sit in them? We did not.

Were we supposed to go in the bouncy castles with the kids and climb the giant slides and jump around even though we are adults? We were not. Did we? Shit yes.

4th of July night was oddly quiet. No fireworks, no explosions. We’ve had a drought and there’s been a big ban on fireworks that, strangely, people actually observed. For the last few years, we’ve missed the fireworks. We used to go every year, especially when we were at S. Padre Island. We’d crowd as close as we could to Louie’s Back Yard by the water and watch the explosions.

The kids go to bed so early that for the last three of four years, we’ve just resigned ourselves to missing the displays. I got a guilty bit of pleasure knowing that nobody else was going to get fireworks this year, either, but then I felt bad sitting inside Monday night, waiting for the sound of Black Cats exploding in someone’s backyard nearby. The sound never came.

Oh, one other quick note — I was supposed to be teaching a class at the University of Texas this fall as an adjunct professor, but it looks like that has fallen through. I was approached about it last year and agreed to do it. Then, it got to be July and I started wondering why nobody had contacted me; shouldn’t I be preparing or something?

Turns out it never really materialized and I just found out. So maybe that’ll happen in the future, but most certainly not for the fall semester. That’s OK. I’m sure I’ll find ways to stay busy.

I hate rushing reviews for tech stuff.

This is a bit antithetical to what the industry is like now. Everybody wants their hands on a gadget first and to put out the earliest review (usually right when an embargo lifts) and rack up those page views from curious Googling readers.

But given the kinds of stuff we’re talking about — tablet PCs, smart phones, stuff that you really have to live with a while to get your head around and really sort usefulness from novelty, I just don’t think you can review something like an iPad or a radically new kind of phone in a few hours or even a day or two. So I tend to play with stuff over time and then realize that a month has gone by and I still haven’t written anything about (insert name of gadget). Right around the time the PR people start e-mailing me, asking, “So, uh… are you ever gonna review this thing and mail the product back?” is when my crack timing, motivation and work ethic kick in and I write the damn thing. Sometimes I write two in the same article just to clear the decks.

So, here’s some recent stuff that ran in the paper. I did a review that appeared as a Sunday secondary taking a look at the Motorola Xoom tablet and the T-Mobile G-Slate. I liked them both for different reasons, but not as much as the iPad, which should be no surprise to anyone who’s spent some serious time with an iPad or iPad 2. The article in the paper was reverse-published from a Digital Savant blog entry from a little while ago.

A bit of a companion to that is a first-impressions I did of the BlackBerry PlayBook this week.

I’ve got a more detailed story about migrating to a tablet running June 11 that’ll offer tips, app ideas and more to those thinking about moving away from a laptop or desktop to something a little more portable.

Also had a review of the new Mortal Kombat game, which I quite liked. Spent a lot of nights trudging through that story mode (which was ridiculously awful/awesome) and getting back my moves from all those years of Kombo muscle memory.

And on Saturday, I wrote a lengthy “Raising Austin” column about kids, security and Facebook. I got to talk a little about a trip I took to Dallas last year to speak at a panel for Jewish Family Services on the topic and to tie it in with some recent news. Sometimes I do speaking stuff or freelance and worry that it won’t be useful for anything but making a little money, but other times it pays off in other ways and helps me a lot at my day job.

That’s about it for now. Summer has kicked off her in New Braunfels and we went to Schlitterbahn three times in one weekend. That is how the Gallagas roll when it is hot outside and we have season passes.

With all the time off I took in the last month, it was starting to feel I was barely employed and that my name was disappearing from the newspaper. Then, I had three short stories run on consecutive days, as sometimes happens.

Last Friday I did a piece about Starhawk, a game being developed for Sony by an Austin studio called LightBox Interactive. I had a chance to play the first level of the game and was surprised how good it was since it’s still nearly a year before the game will probably be released for the PlayStation 3. I posted a few screen grabs from the game on Digital Savant.

On Saturday, I had a Raising Austin column about an app developed by two Austin lawyers and moms that dispenses tips and advice for pregnant women. It’s called “Your BFF During Preganancy.”

Then on Sunday, a shortened version of a review I did of the excellent video game Portal 2 ran in the paper. You can read the full-length version in this Digital Savant post.

I have a few stories related to tablets coming up (including a dual review of the Motorola Xoom and the T-Mobile G-Slate) in the paper as well as a few other odds and ends.

It feels good to be busy again.

For about a month and a half, starting at the beginning of February and ending less than a week ago, my whole life was pretty much South by Southwest Interactive.

The festival takes place in Austin every year and for the last two has been growing at a rate of more than 35 percent, year-over-year. Like smartphones and apps, it’s become one of those things that only becomes a bigger and bigger part of my job. It’s not just a national tech story that publications like Wired, CNet, The New York Times and others pay attention to, it’s a local story for us. And as the lead reporter on it for my paper, I get really, really competitive and territorial about our coverage. It’s probably the only time of the year that this journalistic bug hits me, where I turn into one of those guys with the hat with “PRESS” on it and bark things out like, “You’re not gonna scoop me, ya out-of-towner, see?”

The “See?” is probably unnecessary.

But it really does take over my life for a good while. I turn down freelance assignments and other offers to do stuff with, “I can’t. South by Southwest.” We coordinate a schedule of babysitting help for my wife with the explainer, “South by Southwest.” When I go to get a bite to eat at a restaurant and they ask what I want, I say, “South by Southwest.” Then they bring me back a soggy sandwich and I wonder if perhaps I’ve gone too far.

What is the festival? I don’t really know anymore. It was once a funky, centralized festival for CD-ROM producers, digital artists and people dabbling in online porn (“dabbling” is a good word for that, don’t you think? It’s dirty-but-not-quite-dirty-sounding).

Today, it’s a massive social media event, a place where start-ups try to get a foothold with early adopters and a place where huge companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their brands in front of bloggers, top Twitterers and the press.

For me, personally, it’s the hardest I work all year on any one project. It’s also the only time of the year I have a free pass to stay out as late as I want for a whole week and to really throw myself into coverage.

I won’t bore you with the play-by-play because I pretty much did that with Twitter for a whole week (and then some) to the point where I wondered if one more post with the hashtag “#SXSW” was finally going to drive my friends away for good.

I took last Thursday and Friday off after the fest and am scheduling some vacation time soon.  You’ll see why below.

Here’s a lot of what I wrote in that blaze of pre-festival, mid-festival and post-festival activity.

• The Monday that the festival ran, I did a piece with NPR on trends at the fest.  We recorded it via Skype from the press room of the Convention Center (which was much more convenient than going to the studio where we usually record).
• Before the fest, I did a profile of 4chan and Canvas founder Christopher Poole that ran in our Insight section and covered the actual keynote. I also profiled SCVNGR chief ninja (and founder) Seth Priebatsch, who ended up doing a great job on his keynote.
• On the Saturday of the fest, I had a story/essay run about so-called “Social Media Gurus” that featured a photo of me that all my editors found very amusing.  I just tried very hard to avoid making eye contact with the photo.  Overall, I thought it turned out really well. It’s a piece my editor and I have wanted to get into the paper for a while.
• I also wrote about the backlash against the festival in 2010 and how Interactive is dealing with growing pains and emerging as a huge social event. (2011 would eventually prove a lot of this even truer). I was surprised to see that piece pop up on Techmeme.
• A Tweet I posted about Apple’s surprise pop up store became a Twitter top Tweet, featured on the front page of Twitter.com! (It wasn’t even linking to a story I wrote. Our great real estate writer Shonda Novak covered that.)
• We covered a ton of panels, posted lots of photos and just did a lot of write-ups on the fest programming.
• Post-festival, I wrote about how it grew to more than 19k attendees and how SXSW Interactive can be fixed for 2012 (not that it’s broken).
• At the fest, I was in videos for Access PR and Gen Connect, being interviewed about SXSW Interactive.
• I created a Flickr set of some of my SXSW photos as well as the Statesman Texas Social Media Awards, where I was a judge. I’m still tweaking pics and putting more of them up.

• I shot a video of Trey Ratcliff’s amazing downtown Austin photowalk. Bonus was that I got to hang out with Jackie Danicki, a long-time Internet friend. You can also see a video I shot of an IBM Watson demo and a stand-up I did wrapping up the fest embedded below.