• Beachy

    We went to the beach and even though I didn’t do a lot of swimming, I could still feel the salt and the cool gulf water cleanse away a lot of the residue that this year has left on me.

    Not that I was in a bad way or needing saving or anything like that, but this has felt like like a very rough 2012 for a lot of people I know and although my year started badly and a few curveballs have been thrown my way, I feel very lucky overall.

    But the trip to New York City and now a trip we just took to south Texas for a wedding and a beach trip to South Padre Island both cleared my head to the point that I could see how foggy things have been in there for months. We hadn’t traveled in a very long while and I hadn’t taken a proper vacation in so long that I was just in a really bad way creatively and feeling completely uninspired in a lot of ways. I didn’t even want to write anymore for a short time; that’s how bad it got.

    But the break from the routine and have a change of scenery both with the girls (beach fun!) and without them (NYC!) really helped. I’m just in a better mood, and a little more inspired and my energy to create stuff, which felt completely sapped for most of the summer, has returned.

    In the week since we got back from South Padre, I wrote 10 new pages of the “Project,” successfully pitched a column idea to CNN (which I’m both nervous and excited to write this week) and got back in the routine of saving time for myself to jot stuff down and have real time to write instead of wasting my night in front of the TV or skimming Twitter and starting up way too late at night to get any real stuff done.

    The beach itself was a very short time — we were only at South Padre Island for a day, but it was the first time Carolina had ever been to the beach and only the third time Lilly had seen it. They loved it, just as we expected. It’s deep in their genes to love that place. My wife and I both grew up near there and spent big chunks of our childhood on that sand, playing in those waves. It was very important for me that the kids gets to visit it this summer, no matter what hassles might be involved in a road trip with two kids who are not the most patient travelers.

    We ate lots of seafood, let the kids run back and forth to the surf until the sun was setting and wished we could stay three or four more days. We’ll be back, I know.

    Even though I was on vacation for a few days the Digital Savant column continued like a mechanism with a ticking clockface. Last week’s column was a back to school tech gift guide where I tried to steer away from the more obvious laptop and tablet choices toward accessories and other must-haves.

    The Digital Savant Micro that week was a definition of “domain names”: what they are and (to some degree) how they work.

    The next column, which runs in the paper on Monday, is an explainer about the South by Southwest Panel Picker. Every year there are lots of misconceptions of how it works (and discussion about if it works), so this was an attempt to demystify it a little and explain why it’s next to impossible to go through all the proposals. (I usually just wait until the actual, finalized programming is announced since I don’t allow myself to vote for or against panels anyway in my role as someone who covers the fest as a journalist.)

    This week’s Micro is a definition of the term “YOLO” as it appears online.

    The CNN column I mentioned, if all goes well, should run at the end of this week. It’s tech-related, but it’s timed to next Sunday’s finale of Breaking Bad. Trust me, if I’m able to make this piece work, it’ll all make sense soon.

    The other big thing happening this week is that Lilly starts kindergarten in the morning. That means I have to go to bed, like, 10 minutes ago. I have to get her to school every day by 7:45 (or earlier), which given my morning crankiness seems like a superhuman feat. Her daycare was much more lax about such things and the girls were only required to arrive anytime before 9:30 a.m.

    7:45 a.m., it sounds like, is much earlier. I don’t really know because I have very little experience with 7:45. It sounds awful, frankly. I don’t know why people put up with such a horrible-sounding time of day. Are there better donuts at that hour? Public nudity? Something I’m not aware of that makes consciousness at that hour more rewarding than an 8:30 wake-up?

    I think I only have to keep doing this, the getting up far earlier than I would like, for something like 10 more years, so… we’ll see how that goes.

  • In the company of (many) women

    I did a weird thing I haven’t done before which was to mix a long-awaited week of vacation with a self-imposed writing/reporting assignment. While traveling.

    I do not advise it.

    We went to New York City, which I love, my wife, our good friend Jessica (of last year’s super fun Vegas trip) and I.

    The timing of the trip was for the big BlogHer conference, a convention for women bloggers, which I decided I should attend. And here’s where things get complicated.

    I work for a newspaper and do freelance stuff for other outlets but the decision to go to BlogHer and write about it (without even knowing for sure whom I’d be writing for in the short term) was entirely my own. And here’s where we need to discuss something I’ve intentionally not talked about here or anywhere else publicly. I feel like I’ve told many of my friends, my family, some of my co-workers and pretty much every person I met at BlogHer, when they would inevitably ask, “Wait, why are you here?”

    And that thing is this: I was at BlogHer because I was doing research for a writing project. If it were finished or much further along, I would call it a “book,” but it has been such a struggle and there are not nearly enough pages yet to call it a book, so it is a “project” until it gains some respectable paper weight. It’s about mom bloggers.

    The other part of this thing is that it’s actually been something I’ve been working on for a while. A long while. So long that I don’t even want to say how long it’s been given how little progress I feel has actually occurred, writing-wise.

    But, and this is the part that’s been keeping me sane, I’m not doing it alone. A while back, when this whole idea started, I approached a good friend of mine, Tracy O’Connor, a woman I’ve known and been penpals with since I was 15, about working with me on this. She’s a great writer, she’s very funny, she ran a message board with lots of proto-mom bloggers on it, and as a mom of five boys, she knows a lot about culture of these online groups. Together, we’ve had lots and lots of conversations, done research until our eyes were ready to fall out and have done quite a bit of actual writing. Unfortunately, we had to put aside a lot of it when we realized we were going to have to start over due to some plotting issues. This happened earlier in the summer. It was a bit of a confidence rattler.

    This summer in particular, as I’ve watched several friends go through the process of completing and publishing books, has been tough. I keep screaming in my own head, “Why can’t you do this? What the Hell? What’s stopping you?” And the only answer I have is that it scares me. A lot. The bigger the writing assignment, the more I freak myself out about the scale and scope of it and the less I end up just enjoying the process and letting the good vibes and word counts flow. It’s started to affect my other writing, where I just want to avoid the keyboard altogether (like this delayed blog post, for instance) when the thought of writing in general begins to fill me with anxiety. Which it shouldn’t. I mean, come on. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve written millions of words. But I was unprepared, probably, for what a different beast something like The Project could be and how much you have to commit. I’m used to writing things, sending them out and moving on to the next thing. When the things I write are done, they are done. Living with one piece of work for so long has really messed with my head in unexpected ways.

    But I’m also filled with determination to see this through and to do my best writing (and self-editing) with Tracy and see what we end up with. The earlier draft we did, the one that ended up pointing in the wrong direction plot-wise, I actually really liked. We were writing at a good clip and more than 100 pages were produced, pages that we were genuinely proud of. I know we can do it again and push it through the right way.

    So that’s what’s been in the works: a “project” about mom bloggers. It’s fiction and we think we know where we’re going, but boy have there been setbacks and writer’s block (which I used to say I never got; ha ha, good one, brain) and frustration, but also in many ways it’s been very fun and challenging to get into someone else’s head and explore a world that is in very few ways my own.

    Tracy has kept my spirits up at times when I would have just packed it in and moved on to something else and my wife at one point asked, “Isn’t rewriting and starting over normal for something like this?” I had to confess to her that I had no idea. I guess? Yeah. Probably. Damn.

    I’m glad we’re sticking with it and I’m glad I went to BlogHer. It was a huge help seeing for myself a lot of what’s at the heart of what we’re trying to write.


    But trying to balance a for-fun trip with a for-work conference that I was already really nervous about attending completely wiped me out. I was stressed and not sleeping well and came back from the trip more exhausted than when I left.

    That’s even with eating lots of fantastic bagels, going to the Top of the Rock for the first time and doing some enjoyable Times Square people watching when I did have time to go out and enjoy myself.

    Tell me this doesn’t look like fun:

    OK, it wasn’t all nearly naked guys in Times Square. We did have time for a little sightseeing and delicious pies from Pie Face.

    BlogHer ’12

    As for the conference itself, I laid out most of my official thoughts and observations in this week’s Digital Savant column, where I discuss the state of blogging through the prism of the conference.

    I could have written a lot more (hey, maybe a book’s worth!) about the conference, really. There were lots of great insights in the panels I attended, a frenzy over products and swag I couldn’t quite get my brain around, and many good conversations I had with women who — when they learned what I was working on — offered not only great advice and stories, but who pointed me in the right direction to other bloggers, websites and events that I should look into.

    The organizers of the conference allowed me to attend as press, which made the whole venture much more official for me and allowed me to go into work mode while I was there. I took lots of notes, shot photos and tried to remember as much as I could so I could share with Tracy later (she was unable to attend).

    As much as I tried to blend in and observe, it was never far from the surface that I was one of the few men attending the conference. There were others, of course; BlogHer has more than 5,000 attendees, including expo exhibitors and they’re not all women. But I was so in the minority that my presence itself became a topic of conversations I had. I kept getting asked how it felt to be there with so many women, jokes were made (not by me!) about the estrogen levels in the rooms and, especially at the evening party events, I became very aware of how outside I was of these groups of bloggers who have made a pretty large, diverse community for themselves.

    I can sit in a panel and absorb presented information like anybody else, but I can’t go to a party and pretend that I don’t know a single person there.

    I had been warned by friends who’d attended before that the conference would be overwhelming and that the parties and swag are out of control. I’m not sure if that’s true since I wasn’t invited to some of the more private events, but I did witness an awful lot of grabby-grabby at the one swag event I was able to crash and in the expo halls, where everything from health supplements to iPhone cases to brightly colored dildos were being given out like Halloween candy.

    It was fun to see some of the veteran bloggers react incredulously when bloggers who haven’t even been writing for more than six months asked why they don’t yet have a big audience or sponsors. The stories of successful bloggers who’ve quit their day jobs to do it full time have become so typical that everybody thinks they can do it. I’ve been getting paid to write for going on 20 years and I still don’t have the guts to do that. It’s hard out there and even the pro bloggers are killing themselves trying to keep the money coming. Yes, they get free trips and lots of product samples and ads on their sites, but my sense is that even for that top tier of bloggers, the money is not nearly as plentiful and the lifestyle as carefree for them as people might think.

    Like I said in the column, it was a really well-run, well-structured, professional conference. I’m glad I was there and when I returned, I felt a rush of confidence for The Project. We have a lot more material to work with now.


    A few other things: the column the week before the BlogHer thing was a collection of reviews, one of the Telltale “Walking Dead” video game (really good, surprising and well-written) and Sphero, a robotic toy ball.

    There were also Digital Savant Micro features about what display mirroring means, one about RAW images and one this week answering a reader question about getting old photos scanned to digital.

    Miss Lilly
    We came back from our trip to two little girls who certainly missed us, but who weren’t as distraught about it as on our trip last year. In fact, they were really giddy and well-behaved when we got home. We were expecting sulking and a few nights of disrupted sleeping patterns.

    Before we left, we had a small, early birthday party for Lilly. Weeks later, this last Monday, she turned 5.

    It’s been easy to get distracted parenting her because she has a younger sister and the two of them have built their own little world of playtime and fights and giggly jokes. Unless we physically separate them, it’s sometimes hard to remember what it was like when it was just Lilly and how laser-focused we were on her, on every little milestone of growth and development.

    With two kids, it now feels like those things just fly by as we’re barely able to keep up with each new thing.  It seems so recent that Lilly wouldn’t give up the green plastic pacifier or that we were still struggling with potty training, but when I look at the calendar I realize that was actually a lot longer ago than I remember and that her sister dealt with those things on a completely different timetable (longer on the potty training, much shorter time with the paci).

    Time seems so short that we rarely even have time to look back on our family photos and videos and see what has changed.  I’ll admit that sometimes I don’t like to do that.  It just reminds me how quickly it’s happening, how many stages the girls area already past (Lilly was a newborn, then an infant, then a long stretch where she was a toddler; now she’s 5. She’s not a baby, a toddler, any of that anymore.  And I miss it.)

    I see in comparing the pictures that even her face has changed. I have to just marvel at how cruel it is that these changes pass right in front our eyes in ways that we can’t even see as they happen.

  • Kids and cars

    Sophia Rayne Cavaliero. Photo provided by Cavaliero family.
    This was a story that turned out to be a much easier to write than it was to research and report. It’s Monday’s Digital Savant column, which runs a bit longer and bigger than usual as a lead Life & Arts story.

    It’s about the horrible phenomenon of children left in cars who die of heat stroke. It happens 33 times per year nationwide on average and shows no sign of abating despite calls for more awareness and efforts to incorporate technology into vehicles that could prevent these cases from happening. In 2010, the number peaked at 49 and as of this writing, 15 such deaths have already been reported for 2012.

    My goal was not to write any kind of definite article about this because that has already been written. The heartbreaking, rigorously reported, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 Washington Post story, “Fatal Distraction” by Gene Weingarten is the starting point for any discussion on what happens. (And if you are one of those people who believes as a parent that it could never happen to you and that parents who lose a child this way accidentally should be prosecuted as criminals, please read the Weingarten article before commenting.)

    I also found the transcript of a live chat that Weingarten held after the story was published to be incredibly helpful. And by helpful, I mean that my wife came upstairs asking if I was OK when she heard me upstairs in the office gasping and crying halfway through the original article. It’s a tough read, but also a must-read.

    Instead of rehashing that excellent piece, my article was meant to look at the tech aspect of this — why there hasn’t been technology built into vehicles yet to prevent such accidents and if such technology does exist, why it’s not selling like gangbusters to parents who otherwise buy every safety apparatus out there. The whole article idea started when I was emailed by a local inventor hoping to sell just such a technology and that led to the other sources in the story.

    As I say in the article, I’m haunted by the idea that something like this could have happened to me in the hazy, forgetful, incredibly stressful first year of parenting (and even after that) and I think writing this story helped me deal with that fear to some degree. (You can also read the Statesman.com version of the article here.)

    I’m on vacation right now.

    It’s the first official vacation on the books I’ve taken all year and by around June I was getting really, really antsy about needing a break. I was also sweating quite a bit, but I bet that had more to do with the start of summer than stress.

    Later this week, I’m attending BlogHer to do some writing research, but also hoping to have some great food and enjoy New York. My wife and a good friend of ours are going and we’ve already got tickets to The Book of Mormon and plans to eat bagels until we can’t walk.

    I worry that we’re trying to cram too much into a trip where I’m already booked up for two solid days at the conference, but I don’t care. I miss traveling so much that I’ll take it.

    I have a bunch of stuff I wrote in advance running in the paper over the next week, but I’ll wait till I’m back in town to go over all that. For now: NYC! Excitement!

  • Big photo help (mostly for myself)

    The last two Digital Savant columns that ran in the paper have been how-to columns where I’ve been trying to help myself as much as I’m trying to guide readers.

    Over the last couple of years, I’ve managed to get a few of my little organizational projects off the grounds. I scanned in every business card I ever got and turned those into digital address book contacts. I started (and am still working on) digitizing some stray VHS tapes that have stuff on them I’d actually want to keep.

    But with photos, I’m still a bit a of a mess. I back up everything to a very reliable Drobo drive enclosure (it holds multiple hard drives and if one dies, which has never happened, you can just swap the bad one out and your data’s still safe). I’ve put the most important photos of ours online in a few strategic places. But I still haven’t done a full backup to somewhere off-site or online of the photos, videos and documents we can’t afford to lose. And we still have photos scattered across two computers, two phones, optical discs and other places. So it’s a work in progress.

    That doesn’t mean I can’t advise others to do better! In part one of the how-to, we talk about how to sort and organize photos and, with the help of a professional archivist, we talk in part two about ways to store and protect your photos and videos so they stand the test of time.

    Would I pass that test? Not yet, but I’m working on it!

    The other new Digital Savant things of note are Micro features defining what’s an SSD (“Hey, what’s SSD with YOU?”) and the definition of “IRL,” a good suggestion from my co-worker Addie Broyles.

    The SSD in particular has been on my mind because I’ve been thinking about upgrading my laptop with one of those for the BLAZING SPEEDS. But they’re pricey. I almost pulled the trigger in a 480 GB drive for $360 (which sounds expensive until you see what these things normally cost at that size), but hesitated too long and lost the deal. Plus, I was thinking that I didn’t really feel like opening up my computer and fiddlin’ around with that right now, although truth be told, I want desperately to be upgrading. I recently bought a Neat scanner (which arrived DOA and is being replaced), upgraded our home router on a whim and am in general doing little upgrades here and there, perhaps as much out of restlessness than out of a genuine need to incrementally improve our little home office.

    Summer is flying by, but this year I’m weirdly OK with it. No, I haven’t gone toobin’ yet and I’ve only been to Schlitterbahn a few times, but I’ve spent a lot more time with the girls recently than I had earlier in the year and we’ve gotten to see more movies and done more relaxing stuff than our schedule usually allows, so it’s all cool in my book.

    We’re taking a trip to New York soon and then another trip to the beach, so I feel like there’s plenty to look forward to even if it’s not involving getting soaked here in town.

    Oh, and Carolina ate a lot of sushi the other day and that made me really happy. My 2-year-old is the opposite of a picky eater. She’s absolutely indiscriminate about what she eats, something I hope lasts for at least another year or two. At this point, if she orders lobster off the menu with a side of caviar, I’m inclined to just give it to her and grin.

  • Monday in the Car with Carolina, a short play

    Me: “You’re a cutie.”

    Carolina: “YOU’RE a cutie, Daddy.”

    Me: “YOU’RE a cutie, Carolina.”

    Carolina: “YOU’RE a cutie, OMAR!”

    THE END

  • FOMO, protect yo and mellow

    And the medal for beating three deadlines does NOT go to you. Suck it up.

    You know what this blog post won’t have in it? Dead cats. You’re welcome.

    So, how are you? I am good. I am fine. Things are finegood.

    It’s been raining this week in our part of the world, breaking up what is usually an unbearable, dry, stultifying, soul-reapening summer season into something pretty manageable. The (relatively) cooler weather and season slowdown of life in general has made for a really mellow week.

    But work does not stop, of course. It only seems a little slower for me right now because I’m caught up on most stuff, trying to work ahead when I can. I beat a set of three small freelance deadlines by several days, which never happens. I looked around my home office expecting to be presented with a polished medal or a crown of flowers of some sort, but none of that materialized. When I looked around the room, it was still empty, the deadline beaten its own virtuous reward.

    What a fucking shitty reward.

    Anyhoo! Time to catch up on the stuff I’ve been writing the last two weeks. The two big ones, the Digital Savant columns where thusly:

    • I wrote about “FOMO” or “Fear Of Missing Out,” an Internet-borne affliction I suffered (I’m proud to say mostly in silence until now) when Radiohead played two shows in Austin, including a long-awaited Austin City Limits taping that I had to missed on account of I wasn’t invited. Yes, it still stings.
    • This week’s column was about protecting your digital gadgets (phones, e-readers, tablets and the like) from the scorching sun, the gritty sand and the remarkably wet water.

    We also introduced a new weekly feature in the paper that I neglected to mention before called Digital Savant Micro. It’s a bite (or “byte!” Ha! Sorry!)-sized little article where we define one term, answer a question from a reader or offer a quick tip or event information on the front of the Life & Arts section. The ones that have run so far include the definition of “Retina Display,” an alert about the SXSW Interactive Panel Picker, a definition for “bandwidth throttling,” and tips on what to do with a failing laptop battery.

    Seperately, I reviewed Apple’s new Retina Display MacBook Pro. Do I recommend everyone go out and buy one right now? The answer… may surprise you. (It’s “No.”)

    I have some pieces coming up about organizing and storing your digital photos, and something else that’s much darker and harder to discuss that I’ll hold off on sharing until a little later.

    Let’s see, what else is going on… I finished Messy, which I really enjoyed; am currently reading Suffering Succotash, which is making me laugh and learn a lot.

    Been watching, in no particular order, America’s Got Talent, The Eric Andre Show, Metapocalypse, Bunheads, Louie, among others, and gearing up for Breaking Bad, which is my favorite show currently on TV.

    We caught up on some movies, including Brave (really, really good), Horrible Bosses (funnier than I was expecting), X-Men: First Class (great for an hour and then baffling and shitty toward the end).

    See? Mellow. Spending lots of time with the girls, lining up all my writing stuff for the fall, trying to keep up with work until I go on vacation in August.

    It’s a good summer so far. Face-melting heat index so far surprisingly low.