On Sunday, a travel gadget guide ran in the paper. It covers a range of different things you’d want on a plane or road trip as well as a few useful apps. The iPad also made this roundup, which says a lot about how quickly and indispensable the device has become, at least in my family.
We now have two iPads in the house which seems ridiculous at first, but we really have no plans to buy any new laptops or desktop computers anytime soon and we find that our computers are being used less and less as we rely on our phones and the tablets more and more.
Illustration by Don Tate II / Austin American-Statesman
Good editors will listen to a writer babble for an hour and pick out the one or two useful things they said among dozens of ideas and tell them, “You should write that.”
Such was the case with <a href="http://www.statesman.com/life/the-urge-to-purge-to-free-up-space-2130666 acheter pfizer viagra.html”>an article that appeared in the Saturday paper, on the subject of how we’re purging our physical media as we move inexorably to digital media. We were talking about how overwhelming it is to see all the DVDs (with their hours of extras) sitting on a shelf knowing you’ll never, ever be able to get through all of them, even then ones you really mean to get to. That led to the idea of a story about purging all those things we think we need, but really don’t.
As much of an advocate as I am for abandoning that which we no longer need or want, I’m terrible at it myself. I have yet to do my own CD/DVD/book purging and the shelves in our upstairs office is a testament to that. But writing the article has inspired me to at least try to cut half of what’s up there. At the very least, most of the CDs have to go. I honestly haven’t touched most of them since I imported them to iTunes and that was years ago. I do admire people who’ve already been through the process.
The illustration was again by Don Tate II, who always manages to knock it out of the park with only a very rogh idea of what the story’s going to be like (I often don’t know myself until I write it).
I found out this week that I’ll be taking a brief work trip to Atlanta, Carolina has been sick again with couching and respiratory junk and two people I know scored jobs and are moving soon. I can barely keep up with all the changes going on, but I’m keeping busy and have no complaints myself apart from wanting my kid to get over her coughing fits and for all of us to get through allergy season.
Sometimes things just work out. All year, my editor and I had a story scheduled for the release of the new game Star Wars: The Old Republic, the biggest game ever developed in Austin, and about two months ago I started working on it. The pieces (including a visit to the sizable studio) came together and this was one of the least stressy lead stories I’ve done in a while. The story ran on Saturday and I also posted a “Special Edition” follow-up collecting the deleted scenes and tidbits that didn’t make it into the article.
It was just fun writing about Star Wars, I guess, which I never get to do. In the image above is my character in the game, a Twi’lek named Maumauchowchow. Come say hi if you see me in there.
Christmas week got here so fast that we haven’t even done a holiday card yet (though I’m determined to somehow still make it happen, even if a time machine has to be involved), put up a lot of decorations (“Next year,” my wife says) or finished with the shopping. I’m on vacation next week, so whatever happens, I’ll be resting and trying not to ruminate too much on the year. I’ve never been one of those people to say, “Please let this year be over and bring on the new one” but this year I may be in that camp. Lots of changes, not all of them great, have me eager to move ahead and see what’s next.
If we don’t communicate like this again before the weekend, have a lovely holiday. Be safe, be merry, enjoy just being.
I rode the shuttle! On Saturday, a story I wrote about San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting, Inc. and its employee shuttle to from Austin. I’d been meaning to visit Rackspace for a long time, but since we typically focus on Austin-based companies, it got to be one of those back-burner things for a while. But their Austin presence is growing dramatically and this ended up being more about commuter culture and how Austin and San Antonio are getting ever closer.
Reporting the story, though, involved getting up one morning, driving to Austin from New Braunfels, taking the shuttle down to San Antonio, taking it back to Austin, then driving back home to New Braunfels at the end of the day. Then I visited the Austin Rackspace office the following week. And I did a lot of my interviews on the shuttle itself as it was moving, so my handwritten notes were all jangly and messy, even more so than normal.
I’m a little scared having a weekly column deadline, but it helps that a lot of the stuff I already do for Digital Savant makes for good column material. The column run Mondays in Life & Arts.
On Saturday, we went to a going-away work party for our former business editor Kathy Warbelow, who accepted a voluntary retirement offer. She was one of the people who hired me when I started at the paper 14 years ago and she always felt to me like a guardian angel, always watching out for me, always happy to have something I wrote in her section and always excited about a juicy bit of industry news she heard about.
We had lots and lots of great conversations over the years and she was the reason I bought my first house. She’d lived in Detroit during the height of housing interest rates and assured me, in late 2001, that I was never going to have a better opportunity to stop being a renter. She was right.
It’s impossible to get a phone photo of Carolina that’s not blurry; she’s moving constantly, all over the place, impervious to fatigue or falling on her face against bounce castle encased air.
It was exhausting, great fun.
On the way there and back, I put on Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black album and I wondered if my kids would know her music someday and regard her the way we look back on Hendrix and Joplin or, I guess, Cobain. It’s tough to listen to the album this soon, even beyond the obvious jarring bits like “I died a hundred times” in the lyrics. You can’t really listen to it anymore and just enjoy the music. It’s got bagged-on tragic context now and won’t ever sound the same.
It reminds me of how listening to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill feels to me now. It used to be one of my favorite albums. Now when I hear it, I just think about the follow-up album that never happened and all the years of music we missed while Ms. Hill has been raising kids and figuring her stuff out.
I wonder if I should just be happy with the music and the moments and the memories that do exist and not dwell on what never was.
It’s easy not to dwell at a giant warehouse with five big indoor bounce castles.
Illustration by Robert Calzada / Austin American-Statesman
It might have been right after South by Southwest Interactive, when my brain was a slick, goopy putty, that I told my editor I had an idea for a series of stories about online identity.
There was a fear in me that I didn’t have any decent ideas left (which I now chalk up to being mentally exhausted at the time), and maybe the online identity idea was a way of punting to some indeterminate date in the future as a way of not dealing with a huge project at that moment. But the funny thing about proposing a big project to an editor is that they tend not to forget that sort of thing and next thing you know, you’re actually writing this project, which of course is not at all the way things seemed like they were going to go in your head.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that I have a sizable project I’m working on at my job and the first chunk of it has been published. The series is about online identity — about the ways that our lives are being lived in large part online and what that’s doing to our sense of self — and it kicked off Sunday with a story that focuses on our online reputations and how they’re increasingly tying to our offline activity.
The first story was tough. I ended up with about 70 pages of notes and with a story that was about 30 or 40 percent longer than it needed to be. My editor Sarah got in there and helped tame this big, broad thing into something more tightly focused and when we both saw the story alongside the infographic/illustration and photos in its newsprint form we were a little stunned to see that it all worked somehow. The feedback was good. Got a lot of great comments via email, on Facebook, Twitter and even on Google+, where it attracted a lot of commentary. Even the comment trolls were pretty kind to me on this one. People I run with in online social media circles seemed to really get where the story was coming from and had a lot of useful stuff to add. It turned out to be a great experience.
(Great except for the stressful Friday afternoon when I was writing the piece and thought I was writing way too broad and nebulous for the story to be any good. That part sucked pretty hard.)
Next up on the agenda is a Tech Monday piece using some material that was cut from the reputation piece and then a story in August about how kids’ online identities and interactions are helping shape their offline senses of self.
I’ve been pretty obsessed the last few years at how all this time we’re spending online is shaping us (and will shape our kids). I don’t have a really solid answer, even when it comes to myself. I feel like I have fewer real-life interactions with friends, but that’s also due to having kids and not being able to go out as much.
I feel like I’ve met so many amazing people who would never have otherwise crossed my path had I not met them online, but I also feel like many of those relationships are as thin as stretched cotton candy. When it comes down to it, I’ve also been disappointed by online friends, betrayed even, and of those dozens or hundreds of people who dwell in my virtual neighborhood, only a handful would I ever call in an emergency or rely on for help with anything of importance.
…
What else is going on… On Monday, the Digital Savant blog is going to partially morph into a weekly print column in the Statesman. The first one runs Monday and I’m trying to mentally psyche myself for having a weekly column deadline. It’ll be a mix of how-to pieces, tech reviews and reported essays about tech, very similar to what’s in the blog but in a little bit more fleshed-out form, I hope.
In a few days we’re turning in our last Trailers Without Pityvideo for this season. We should be back in October or so, but I’m grateful for the break. The videos are a lot of fun as long as we have a finish line in sight for some rest.
Lilly turns 4 next month, and we’re a little freaked out about it. She starts Kindergarten next year and that’s a whole other kind of angst for us, the parents. Carolina isn’t yet 2, but she’s rapidly growing out of babydom, too, and that’s hitting me harder than it did with Lilly since we don’t plan to have more kids. I love my little pre-verbal, diaper-busting Carolina. That grinning, babbling toddler won’t exist in that form anymore and I’m getting teary just admitting that to myself.
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 blogI might be doing stuff more pieces like this for CNN.com soon, which makes me very, very happy.
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.
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.
