Tag: apple

  • Many viewpoints

    ‘Do we look too hot for this apocalypse or what?’

    I’m having fun lately — not, Oh my God, that roller coaster was insane! fun — but some satisfied fun, the kind I can allow myself when I feel like things are rolling along and I’m not somehow lagging behind.

    I hit a goal on the writing project I mentioned earlier and I started working on something with my brother that we hope to roll out in a little while. We’re going through some big system/software changes at work, but this time the stuff we’re being trained on seems to me like a pretty big improvement over some of the things we’ve gotten used to and in one big way, it’ll offer me a lot more flexibility with how and where I do my job, so that’s nice.

    So, I’m not doing cartwheels or anything, but I’m pretty happy. OK, I did a cartwheel. One cartwheel. Just now, I’m sorry you missed it, it was a tiny cartwheel, you shouldn’t have blinked.

    Part of the fun has been settling in to a rhythm with the Digital Savant columns and the newer Micro mini-features we introduced more recently.

    This week’s column allowed me to flex my dormant TV critic muscle in talking about the new, ridiculous, kinda wobbly J.J. Abrams-branded pilot episode of Revolution. It turns out that I haven’t forgotten how to write about goofy, earnest fantasy sci-fi, and in this case my editor had the great idea of writing about the show’s plot of a mass blackout in terms of how we live with technology.

    What I did not anticipate was how badly the show wants to be The Hunger Games.

    I mean, look at this guy. Just LOOK:

    Last week’s column was about Mike Daisey’s one-man play The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which he performed in Austin for three nights.

    Photo by Kevin Berne, courtesy of UT-Texas Performing Arts
    I hadn’t seen the show before we spoke, but of course I’d read all about it and listened to the infamous This American Life “Retraction” episode.

    The phone interview we did was good, I thought. Daisey was generous was his time, thoughtful in his answers and only a little cagey and indirect when I asked him whether he regretted participating in “Retraction,” which is how the column ends.

    What surprised me much more was seeing the actual show, more than a full week after I’d written the article. I didn’t have any obligation to review or follow up the column, so I was able to attend the show without a notebook in front of my face and to just see it as a theatergoer.

    It was funnier than I was expecting. I was expecting a depressing, searing lecture on human rights abuses and that does come toward the end and sprinkled inside some pretty amusing thoughts on what it is to be a geek, an Apple Fanboy and someone suddenly thrust in the spotlight and suddenly interacting with people like Steve Wozniak.

    It played to about half an audience; the night I went it had the bad luck of being scheduled at the same time as an away UT football game and the theater was on campus.

    The play had some very recent updates, including mentions of a recent Chinese student labor scandal and some thoughts about the iPhone 5 launch. Daisey suggested at the end of the show (after accusing all of being complicit and not doing enough to stop Apple and Foxconn’s shoddy labor practices overseas) not that we stop buying Apple products, but that at least in the case of the iPhone 5 that maybe we should wait a few weeks. Big product launches tend to be where the worst of the working conditions take place and not rushing to be the first to own the new iPhone might relieve some of that pressure.

    Judging from what pre-orders look like, it’s a message hardly anyone heard or heeded.

    The Digital Savant Micros are starting to feel a little more substantial and newsy when we can make them so, like one we recently did explaining Reddit and tying it to an event that was in the news. This week, we did a Micro about how you can tell why a website’s not loading tied to last week’s GoDaddy outage. (Which actually did affect a website I own, but since that site gets single-digit traffic per day, I’m sure nobody noticed.)

    Other recent stuff I wrote included a follow-up on Ken Starks, a man I wrote about two years ago, who has been having some health problems and got some much-needed support from the Linux community and, of course, a wrap-up of the iPhone 5 announcement. (And no, I’m not upgrading this time. Perfectly fine with my 4S and my wife, who is out of contract, has no interest in getting a new phone right now).

    Every year I always lament the passing of summer because here in New Braunfels, that’s when all the fun stuff seems to happen (except Wurstfest. Oh, Wurstfest, you cannot get here soon enough).

    This year, we went to the beach, I got to go tubing, we made plenty of trips to Schlitterbahn and it was a mild enough summer that we actually got to go outside and even got some rain, not like last year’s endless drought.

    So instead of complaining that the cool weather got here too soon and that the season is behind us, I’ll just enjoy these pictures and be glad that as the girls are getting older, they’re getting to enjoy more of the summertime as they start transitioning into school every August.

    Oh, one more thing. I have a story about my car that I’m going to save for next week. I would write it tonight, but something else just happened and I want to see how the story turns out tomorrow before I put it into words. But it involves a collision, a court appearance, a missing antenna and several other twists and turns.

    You won’t be able to put it down! Or click off of it, or whatever.

  • Breaking news


    There was a little bit of worry that the euphoria bump from some recent trips might go quickly away, that things would settle back into the pre-trip rut before too long, but that’s not what happened.

    Instead, in a really nice way, that renewal held and, just as shit has a way of snowballing downhill, so do good things move the opposite way if you’re willing to get behind the boulder and push a little.

    For me, pushing has meant going from, “I just don’t want to write anymore” to writing a lot and not feeling so drained by everything. I pitched an article idea to CNN for the first time in ages (more on that in a minute), started feeling more energized about Ye Olde Work Blog and had an annual evaluation with my editor that left me feeling really supported and appreciated through some tough work times.

    All those good things led to other good things and suddenly, things feel normalized. Or stabilized. Something “lized,” for sure.

    It’s hard enough to clear your head enough to let your mind wander around an idea for a while and to generate something, and nearly impossible when you feel low on energy and your head is buzzing with a bunch of other stuff. But the recent clarity (and some fortunate early holiday deadlines) allowed me to spend some real time working on this Digital Savant column about the echo-chamber effect of social media.

    My editor and I had been talking a while about how we might approach a story about the 2012 election cycle without repeating the obvious stories about the campaigns using social media and What That All Means. So instead, over several weeks, we chatted about it in our meetings, brainstorming out loud about our social media habits and what we were/weren’t seeing and the column is a direct result of those conversations.

    One post-note: the day after I wrote that column, but the day before I put it online, my Twitter stream suddenly was flooded with Tweets about the Republican National Convention, including posts from one person who I had to unfollowed when he (of course it was a he) dropped the C-word in reference to a female politician on TV. So, perhaps I wrote the column a tiny bit too soon, but I think what it has to say about how we silo ourselves within our social networks applies to a lot more than politics.


    Paired with that column, which runs in print on Monday, is a Digital Savant Micro about the humble USB Flash Drive, which also goes by other names. There was also a video game review I did of “10000000,” an iPad game that I was completely hooked on while on the trip to NYC. Sorry to pass along this crippling addiction if you choose to download the the game.

    Now, about that CNN story. Like a lot of people, I’m obsessed with Breaking Bad and at some point in mulling over a recent episode, I had the idea that Walter White’s empire building reminded me a lot of Apple and that his rise to the top was only going to make things more dangerous for him and his family.

    I wrote up a few paragraphs of notes and pitched it in an email to my CNN editor, fully expecting that this was going to be too zany an idea and that I might need to consider pitching it elsewhere or publish it on my own here. Despite my editor not being a Breaking Bad fan, he greenlit the column and it ran on Friday after a few days where I nervously wondered if the piece would get sidelined before the half-season finale.

    The comments were exactly what I expected this time: a few notes of support and many more decrying the ridiculousness of the piece and CNN’s silliness in running it. To one commenter, who said it was just more flotsam on an Internet full of junk, I ended up replying, “I stand by my flotsam.”

    The thing is, I know the article is a stretch. I’m comparing the world’s most successful company to a homicidal meth kingpin. But that doesn’t mean the TV show doesn’t have some things to teach us about greed, about karma, about how bad decisions can doom even the best of intentions. Once I pitched the column and got to writing, I was terrified that I wouldn’t have enough material to pull it together. Instead I wrote about 300 words past my word count and had to stop myself from including more threads of comparison.


    Right before I started writing this post, the piece was posted on the front page of Slashdot. It’s been fun watching the reaction from some of the smartest people on the Internet (it was also on some of the Apple news sites and on Hacker News), even the ones who think I’m an idiot for writing the column. Call me an idiot, call me wrong, call the entire premise absurd, just read it and talk about it and I’ll be over the moon for days.

    Another reason I had a little thundercloud trailing overhead all summer was because I dreaded, absolutely dreaded, the idea that starting in August, I was going to have to get my ass up super early, which I may have mentioned last time.

    Is has not been so bad! I mean, it’s not great, but my kids have been handling it well and on the nights I’ve been able to get to bed, it’s been pretty OK. 6:30 a.m. is still much lamer and darker than 8:30 a.m., but the advantage of dropping my kids off so early is that I get to go back home and either nap for an hour or hang around and make some eggs or check email and get a jump on work or do pretty much whatever I want until traffic dies down and I head to Austin.

    I’m in a lot less of a rush and the day feels longer. So, perhaps the early risers kind of have a point. It’s not like it’s up for debate. This is the new reality for a very long time and in just a few days, my kids were already fully adjusted to the new rise time. I’m still not quite there, but it’s not the disaster I thought it might be. The kids are too tired at that hour to put up a fight about their clothes or breakfast preferences and Lilly has been enjoying kindergarten too much to make her dad miserable in the morning.

    In fact, the only tears came on the first day of school. Not from her. She was beaming. Her dad, though, may have gotten misty over how grown-up a 5-year-old can already seem.

  • Fires

    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
    who has gotten pretty popular on YouTube with his beekeeping videos. He was nice enough to invite me and a photographer out to do a honey tasting and to check out the bees. We weren’t wearing any beekeeper gear (and McCartney wasn’t even wearing gloves), so there were a few moments where I stood perfectly still while a bee sat on my neck. But the honey was totally worth it. In the column, he gives some really good tips for improving your YouTube videos. One of his suggestions, on getting the point more quickly, has already inspired me to want to change the format a little on our Trailers Without Pity videos when we come back from our hiatus in a few months.

    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.