Terribly Happy

Wurstfest '07. Photo by me.

I’m lucky to have an editor who reads my stuff (even on Twitter) and recognizes that when year after year I proclaim how much I love something, at some point it’s probably a good idea to assign that to me as a story for the paper.

That’s how I ended up writing a piece about Wurstfest for Thursday’s Austin360 section of the paper as a cover story. By completely coincidence, the year I was assigned to write this story is the 50th year of the festival here in New Braunfels and they had a lot of special things planned for this year including a giant mural and a visit from a German dignitary.

The story was a lot of fun to write and you can tell where I was cutting loose a bit from the normal reporting/writing; as I was writing, I imagined the people I had interviewed from Wurstfest seeing the article later and crying, “What the crap is this!?” to the parts of the piece that were a little more personal.

Then I imagined them banning me from the festival, me screaming at the gates, and being forevermore labeled as a “Sausage Interloper.” That’s a real thing in Germany, right?

Seriously, I do hope that doesn’t happen because we plan to go at least 3 or 4 times starting Friday. Bonus: in the print version, my wife got a full photo credit for a picture she took of Lilly and me on the carousel.

Other stories I wrote for the Statesman this week: on Monday, I had a piece run about “Dream Closet,” an iPhone app that helps you organize your closet from Austin company Appiction. And on Thursday, we published a special 24-page pink section in support of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. I did a short story about Komen Austin’s social media efforts.

Rick Orr, co-founder of the company behind the 'TabbedOut' app. Photo by Ralph Barrera, Austin American-Statesman.

A feature we started in the Statesman to feature mobile app creators in Austin appeared again in Monday’s paper. This one was about ATX Innovation, Inc., which makes an app called “TabbedOut” that allows you to open and pay off a bar or restaurant tab from your phone. Neat!

Also on Monday, I did my first NPR All Tech Considered segment in a while. It was about companies like Google and Microsoft racing to offer cloud-based e-mail and other services to government agencies and city governments like Los Angeles.

Here’s the blog post with the audio embedded and the page for the segment itself from All Things Considered.

More stories coming in the next few days! It’s been a strange few weeks and things are starting to feel like they’re going back to normal.

The plan is to write more actual blog entries (and short, stray thoughts) on Terribly Happy now that the new site format is live, but I still want to keep the stuff I’m working on and things that are published/produced elsewhere appearing here.

I can’t stress enough how much of a pain in the ass it had gotten to be dealing with Blogger the last few years. Half the time it wouldn’t publish, other times it messed up my HTML on something simple like adding a link to a post. Uploading an image was a chore and it never formated things the way I wanted it to.

If there were reasons I moved more to posting on Twitter and less on Bloggystyle, it was those. It got to be like having to visit a bad neighborhood where you used to live for a necessary errand that you keep putting off.

Anyway, here’s some of what I would have posted last week if the site had been accessible:

On Monday, I was on NPR talking about Apple (seems like we’re always talking about Apple, huh?). Specifically, iPad sales, the Gizmodo situation and the perception that Apple might be getting a little bit of a bad reputation in some circles. Here’s the audio from the segment and the blog entry I wrote with links to stuff we talked about.

Also last week, I had a story in the Saturday paper about location-based social networks like Gowalla and Foursquare. The story didnt make it online, mostly because I broke down and expanded it into three parts on Digital Savant (at least I think thats why it wasn’t online). The Digital Savant versions also include tips from power users and a few other tidbits we weren’t able to fit in the paper.

Basically, it’s a primer on how to use Foursquare and Gowalla if you’re not already using them (or maybe you are and you’re a little lost.

You can find those entries here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.