Tag: austin

  • At ‘One Page Salon’

     

    This is a piece I read in front of an audience at last week’s “One Page Salon” at the North Door in Austin. Thanks so much to Owen Egerton for the invite.

     

    It’s going to be all right.

    I can tell from your face that you’re not so sure if that’s true, so this is supposed to be reassuring. It’s all right. You’re going to be OK.

    Unless something happens. Or things don’t work out. That’s definitely possible. Things go wrong for people all the time. They make a wrong turn, some barely-there decision, and suddenly they’re neck deep in manure. Not real manure, figurative manure. Do you know much manure you’re need for it to be up to your neck in literal manure? Even if you’re short? That sounds expensive. And trust me, you don’t have money to be spending on that right now.

    Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you can’t afford shit. I just meant you probably shouldn’t be spending money right now on THAT MUCH SHIT.

    We’re getting way off track here.

    So. Things seem a little weird. I get that. Maybe recapping will help.

    You got divorced. Pretty quickly. After being married a really long time. That has to be jarring. The not-being married part. And you bought a house. Buying a house is a huge, ridonk headache, but you did it and now you live in that house and it even has pretty plants and a beautiful patio. Well done.

    But then you stopped co-hosting a podcast you loved, one you’d been doing for five years and that stung a little. And, related: you stopped doing the podcast because you took a buyout and left a job you’d been at for 21 years. 21 years! That’s half your life! Wow! And now you’re freelancing, which is a very nice way of saying you’re an unemployed writer. Self-employed. Self-employed sounds better than unemployed or underemployed.

    That’s lot of stuff that happened. And see, I think the problem — not that there’s a problem, things will be fine! — is that most people deal with stuff like that over a period of a few years, but you went and did all that in like three months. Some people have a mid-life crisis, you had … like… a midlife Cuban Missile Crisis.

    But it’s going to be OK. Unless it’s not, but let’s not think about that.

    You’re worried about money, but that’s never been your problem. You hustle, you work hard, you’ll make do. You’re worried that you don’t know what to do next. But remember all those days you sat in an office wishing you weren’t sitting there and feeling like you were wasting your time? At least you can waste your time on your own couch now. That’s an improvement, right?

    You’re worried that you have stopped doing the thing that defined you, that everybody knew you for, the thing that gave you worth.

    But what if it’s going to be all right?

    And it’s just time for some new definitions?

  • ACL Fest 2012: the photo gallery

    ACL Fest was a ton of fun for me this year even though I only went for two days (Friday, Saturday) of the three and went home like a decrepit old man each time before the headliners even performed.

    I don’t care! I ate and walked around and people watched and saw some wonderful bands (Wild Child, Alabama Shakes, Andrew Bird, The Roots to name a few).

    Instead of boring you with all the details of a fest that’s already two weeks gone and which has been covered extensively elsewhere, I’ll just offer a YouTube video to show one of my favorite sounds of the fest and the photos I took in a gallery below.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKw6-xD50nA

    Excited for next year already!

    Click on any of the pics to go into the photo gallery.

  • Treaties, musical treats and teeny, tiny sensors

    I had a whole post planned out, but I had a sudden thought that I have to share before I go into all that.

    I live in a neighborhood/housing area where a lot of people have turned their garages into second living areas. They’ve mounted a TV on the wall, put a couch up in there and instead of parking their car or giant truck in there, like you would in a garage, they sit out there in the evenings and watch baseball games or boxing or presidential debates or whatever the Hell.

    It was one or two houses when we first moved here, and over the years it’s become A Thing, with probably about a dozen nearby, including our neighbors right across the street.

    I’ve been trying to articulate for a while — years, honestly — why this would even bother me. And for a long time, I thought it was because I was a little jealous. Why can’t I watch TV in my cat-litter-smelling, funky, dirty, humid garage like these Manly Men who live near me? Why do we have to have half our garage full of bins and junk and the other half occupied by a car? Why can’t I have a damn man cave (or a cave that opens up into direct sunlight and is well-ventilated as caves are, I guess).

    Then I realized, it’s not that I’m jealous, it’s that I’m embarrassed. When I go outside, I feel like I’m walking past a stranger’s living room as they watch whatever they watch. Which, to me, is kind of mortifying. I barely like people in my own house to know what I’m watching on TV, much less total strangers walking by on the street.

    I hate feeling like I’m interrupting something, even when I’m not, and I really just don’t care to know what my neighbors are watching. It’s baseball 90 percent of the time, which is as boring as things get. I know I’m in the minority here. I know nobody else cares about my obsession with garage living rooms. Just let me vent a little here.

    OK. Done venting.

    This was a good, overfull writing week.

    I had an idea for a CNN column, a peace treaty for Apple and Samsung Fanboys, who seem to be taking their smart phones a little too seriously lately.

    As I’ve said before, CNN seems to really like it when I pitch them weird, out-there ideas and this one hit the sweet spot between silly and relevant, I think.

    What I didn’t really think about when I pitched the idea what how much work it was going to take to get the language of an actual peace treaty correct. For several days, I hit the pediawikis, researching the wording of different kinds of peace accords dating back several hundred years. The result is a hybrid of different treaty types, but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. It turns out I can broker peace if I really work at it!

    The article got a write-up on the popular tech blog Gizmodo and one blogger compared me to Kofi Annan. That’s a winning week right there.

    Last week, the Digital Savant column was shorter than usual due to tight space from our Austin City Limits Fest coverage, so I did a grab-bag column talking about the game “Borderlands 2” and a few other topics, briefly.

    The Micro was about Kickstarter. This week, I did a micro defining the term “Placeshifting.”

    This week’s column started out being about wearable computers (fitness sensors, sleep monitors, that sort of thing), and then ended up being about how sensors are turning our tech from bulky to wearable to completely invisible. A professor from UT’s iSchool gave me some insight that gave the column a little more weight, I thought. In it, I mention a sleep monitor that I tried out. I got it at the BlogHer conference and, seriously, if you want to look like a total dork while unconscious, try the Zeo. But it did give me some insight into how badly I was sleeping at the time and made me adjust my habits a little bit.

    Then on Wednesday, three stories broke at around the same time. I wrote a story I’ve been sitting on for a little while, about how South by Southwest Interactive is starting a new startup-focused conference in Las Vegas next August, a piece about layoffs and a studio shutdown at Zynga and an interview with Matthew “The Oatmeal” Inman about his Austin appearance this week.

    The SXSW story ran on the front page of the paper and the Zynga thing made some national headlines. Lots of busy time at work.

    Other crazy things that happened recently:

    I went to Austin City Limits Fest, which was wonderful, and I took a bunch of photos, but I want to post those separately and I’m not done editing the images, so I’ll post that sometime over the weekend.

    Had my first parent-teacher conference for Lilly at her kindergarten. She’s very shy at school, not shy at home, is what it came down to. At least she’s well-mannered and behaved in the classroom, which is more than we could ask for.

    I also did a creativity conference for work on design thinking that was really great and forced me to tackle problems and ideas in a different way. Honestly, I can’t even tell you what changed because I’m still figuring it out, but I had a few “A-ha” moments that I need to work through and integrate into my life a bit more.

    My editor, who I mention a lot in talking about my stories and columns, has taken a job at UT-Austin and next week will be her last in our office. I’m sort of numbing my brain to not have to think about it because as awesome as it is for her, I can’t even imagine doing my job without her guidance and great ideas, so it’s going to be an adjustment, to put it mildly.

    And that’s it. I’ve had lots to think about and process and reflect on, but to be quite honest, the changing weather has just made me very sleepy and most nights I just want to crawl into bed instead of staying up late and writing. Hoping I catch up on sleep soon and get a second wind before winter freezes me all up.

  • Conan in Austin

    Photo by Thao Nguyen for the Austin American-Statesman. Go read TV critic Dale Roe’s review.

    Last night, we went to see Conan O’Brien at Austin Music Hall. This involved a convoluted set of babysitting maneuvers — my in laws are out of town this weekend and my mom was due for minor surgery Friday morning (it was cancelled at the last minute), so we took the girls up to Austin with us to go stay with their aunts.

    We love Conan. We saw him in New York years ago and he was no less funny, although it was strange to see him in Austin and I could have done with about three fewer indulgent musical numbers. But the videos, the monologue, the bits with my hero Andy Richter, were all fantastic.  It almost made up for the fact that Austin Music Hall is a hellhole. Even though it’s been remodeled, it has seats that feel like they cost about 25 cents and jab into your back, the acoustics are still shit and, as O’Brien pointed out, it looks like it could be cleared out for cockfighting.  The show also ran so long that we missed seeing visiting friends Tara and Glark afterward (yes, we have turned into those parents who can’t ever stay out past 11 p.m.).

    But I’m glad we went — it feels like something we might never get to see again and depending on how things go for Conan on TBS, he might never have the cultural lightning in a bottle he’s got right now to pull off a tour like this again. The mood in the room was certainly electric and the show brought out two of Austin’s most vibrant communities — dorks of Austin (if you wear a porn moustache and straw election hat, you are an Austin dork. Sorry) and comedy nerds.  As far as the content of the show, I agree with pretty much everything our TV critic Dale Roe said about the performance. I would have liked more comedy bits and fewer songs, but most of the comedic stuff killed and I was gasping for breath during the sublime Walker, Texas Ranger handle bit (which still works. Brilliantly.).

    I did a story in the Statesman earlier in the week about social media and ticket sales related to the show. Still pretty amazing how quickly it sold out given, as O’Brien himself pointed out, this is the first time audiences have paid to see him perform.