Author: Omar Gallaga

  • Goodbye Summer sun

    Photo by Mark Matson, for Austin American-Statesman

    I looked up from my computer screen and summer was over. This makes me sad every year because even though we spent lots of weekends at Schlitterbahn and I even went tubing for the first time in years (with Glark and his nephew on the Colorado River), I always react with shock when it gets to be September and I realize I didn’t spend as much time as I wanted in water, on a beach (we didn’t go to any beach at all this year) or doing other outdoorsy stuff.

    It’s happened every year since we moved to New Braunfels in late 2004. I always imagine the summer will involve me working from home every day and typing from next to the water at Landa Park and taking afternoon dips in the Comal and then spending my evenings at Schlitterbahn. It never quite works out that way for myriad reasons.

    I’ve noticed that I tend to be a lot busier at my day job in the summer. Maybe it’s because lots of other people go on vacations and we’re often short-staffed in these months or maybe I just work better under harsh sunlight. But it’s when I tend to do a lot more stories for the front page and when I came back roaring after my annual post-SXSW Interactive exhaustion.

    I did a column for this week’s Tech Monday about an upcoming Clean Energy Venture Summit and in yesterday’s paper was a pretty length piece about Fantastic Arcade, a new indie video game festival in Austin spinning off from the very famous Fantastic Fest for films.

    Haven’t done NPR lately and the CNN articles I did early in the summer are the only ones I’ve worked on. Yet the despite of extracurricular work, it feels like I’m busier than ever and at night, after the girls are in bed, I just slump on the couch with exhaustion, unable to get myself to the computer to do my own blogging or to update other sites or do much of anything but trying to catch up with the overfull DVR or to try to avoid snacking into the wee hours.

    Speaking of the girls, Carolina is now crawling and seems much more adventurous and prone to grab things and put them in her mouth than her older sister did. Lilly turned 3 last month and is taking a dance class at her daycare that she loves.

    I’m trying to get my energy level back up so I can think about what I want to do next, especially if we stop doing Trailers Without Pity, like I mentioned in the last blog post. Pablo and I really want to start doing our comic again, but even that is a time commitment that might be difficult for us to coordinate. He’s got his own set of projects he’s working on (like doing recaps of Undercovers for TWOP) and his own social life to keep up with.

    If it sounds like I’m bitching about being tired and having no time, I’m really not. I’m thrilled that things are busy at work (as opposed to being boring), my daughters are happy and healthy, and I’ve actually had time over the summer to read books, catch up on TV shows I’d been meaning to watch and to do things like take walks outside every evening and pay my bills, which is always nice.

    I just wish summer had lasted a little longer and that I’d gotten myself into deep pools of water a little more often.

  • Trailers Without Pity: Morning Glory

    This one was a lot of fun. Morning Glory is a holiday movie starring Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton and Rachel McAdams about a national morning TV show, which I’m sure will make for lots of mockery. (It sure made for some easy second-hand mockery on our part.)

    We’re still figuring out the future of Trailers Without Pity; I think it’s most likely that we’ll either stop doing them after October or at least take a very long break. I’ll let you know when we know for sure. In any case, if either of those things happens, we’re probably down to the last two or three videos.

    Anyway, here it is, the Trailers Without Pity for Morning Glory, which includes a fresh new background from Pablo. Follow the link if you can’t see the video embedded below.

  • Trailers Without Pity: Due Date

    Our latest Trailers Without Pity is about the upcoming Robert Downey, Jr. / Zach Galifianakis comedy Due Date, directed by the guy who did The Hangover and Old School.

    It’s nice to go into a comedy and know that you’re in competent hands for a change.

    We’re still knocking out videos, but haven’t yet made a decision about what we’re doing after our contract is up in October. I think we could both really use the free time, but on the other hand, the videos are still a lot of fun to do and don’t seem to be taking as long to produce as they did when we started. In any case, enjoy! Here’s the link to the video if it doesn’t appear embedded below.

  • Lilly in the paper

    I wrote a Raising Austin column for the paper that ran in Saturday’s American-Statesman. It’s about iPad apps aimed at toddlers that are mostly bedtime stories with lots of interactive elements.

    While pulling together the art for the piece, it was suggested at work that I try to get a photo of Lilly holding the iPad. I sat her in her bed, turned it on and tried to shoot photos but it became quickly clear that it was going to be impossible to get her to hold it away from her face but up to obscure it properly. (We didn’t want her entire face running in the paper; paranoid, maybe, considering her face is all over my Web site and online, but then you don’t see some of the letter and e-mail I get from readers of the newspaper.)

    In about two minutes, her arms were too tired to hold up the iPad, resulting in a regrettable incident where she bonked herself in the nose with it and started crying. Photo shoot over.

    We got one decent image, at least, and that’s what ran in the newspaper along with screen shots from some of the apps. The column also appeared as a Digital Savant blog entry earlier in the week.

  • My Life Is Phones

    Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez, Austin American-Statesman

    In today’s paper, we ran a roundup of smart phones that I put together. It includes the iPhone 4, the Sprint EVO 4G, the Verizon Droid X, the T-Mobile Samsung Vibrant, the BlackBerry Torch and the Dell Streak (which is either a mini-tablet or a comically large Android-based phone depending on who you ask).

    For the last few months, since right before the iPhone 4 came out, I’ve been pretty much flooded with devices. The EVO came first, then two iPhones (Apple wanted reviewers to be able to get wowed by FaceTime), then a burst of smart phones that arrived when I started requesting them for the photo shoot that would yield the image above.

    The story was originally supposed to be what we call a “Charticle” (chart + article!), but for space reasons ended up a more traditional introduction + info box.

    I’ll tell you that while it’s fun to get to play around with different phones and try them out, it’s not fun to have 6 or 7 phones in the house in addition to the ones we own ourselves. It becomes a constant game of keeping track of chargers, updating software, updating apps and navigating tons of menus. It’s a little stressful, if I’m being honest, and I’m kind of relieved to be sending a bunch of them back this week. (The Torch has already been returned and a batch of phones go back on Monday.) But then two more phones arrived late last week (Sprint Epic 4G and AT&T Captivate) for some follow-up reviewing.

    It’s getting harder and harder to do real reviews of smart phones because they’re basically computers now with their own software ecosystem and people want to know not only how the phone performs but what apps are good for it. Reviewing a smart phone now without trying out some of the best apps available for it isn’t really acceptable anymore. (It always amuses me when I see some tech writers post a review of a smart phone the day it debuts when it’s clear they’ve only had an hour or two to play around with it. Way to be unhelpful to any potential buyer who’ll be stuck with it on a two-year contract.)

    I also posted a blog entry with my reviews of the some of the phones in the roundup and links to other reviews for the ones I wasn’t able to get to. I had play time with all the phones in the roundup, but some I had a lot more time with than the others. The iPhone and EVO I had about two months to try them out while the BlackBerry had to be sent back within a week after we received it. (Plus, BlackBerry has an operating system that I’ve never been able to get my head around. )

  • Trailers Without Pity: Red

    Our newest Trailers Without Pity is about the retired-assassins comic book adaptation Red, starring Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren.

    The video gave me the opportunity to bust out the Morgan Freeman impression I’d been storing in the closet and, ironically, the opportunity to throw in Viagra and adult diaper jokes while taking the filmmakers to task for Viagra and adult diaper jokes we only can assume will be in the movie.

    Clearly we hold filmmakers to a much higher standard than we hold ourselves. I am OK with that.

    Enjoy! Here’s a link to the video on Television Without Pity if you’re unable to view the embedded video below.