Tag: cnn

  • I Disappear

    I’m about to disappear into the hidey hole of South by Southwest Interactive, tomorrow in fact, which is not new. It’s become so routine, in fact, year after year that at my house we don’t even panic and scramble over it, we just know that those five days, Daddy is gone and we need a little extra help and planning.

    But there’s some weirdness that this is the most public I’ll be all year, out from around 10 a.m. till probably 1 or 2 a.m. every night, meeting new people and seeing old friends. But at home, I’m just gone and disappeared. It’s like SXSW Interactive, for one week of the year, is a second family and I’m all Charles Kuralt up in there.

    And then I’ll be so exhausted when it’s over I’ll stay home and miss all the Music fest stuff as I hibernate. My kids already think I’m some kind of bear, so perhaps this will comfort them.

    ANYHOO!

    Here’s all the stuff I’ve been working on the last few weeks. I’ve been writing and typing so much for so long lately that I truly feel my fingers might fall off and it was all I could do to round this up, but I know that if I don’t do it now, on the eve, it will have to wait till after the festival and the hole will be much, much deeper.

    Here’s the roundup and thank you for your patience. I’d like to write more essays here but the truth is that I feel like I’m spending lots and lots of time writing either for work or for the other projects I’ve mentioned that there’s barely anything left but fumes by the time I’m done. I’m hoping things will settle down in a few months because some of these things are winding down or eventually they’ll be completed.

     

    Work stuff

    I hadn’t written anything for CNN in a long while for lack of me pitching them any ideas, but they were kind enough to let me write about SXSW Interactive as I was already gathering intel for the Statesman and doing lots of interviews.

    CNN-SXSW 2013

    My article, which was actually written almost a week ago, was about whether the hype at SXSW Interactive is dying down and if the festival has peaked (and whether that’s a good thing.) Since the article was sent in, my email inbox has a’sploded and now, I fear, the hype is even bigger/worse than last year. Somehow I had forgotten that people like to knock on our door at the very last minute with news and information and that this always makes life harder for everybody. But I think there’s still some good insights about the fest from the people I interviewed.

    For the Statesman, of course, things have been hugely busy leading up to the fest.

    This Thursday, I did a big Life & Arts story on free official events at Interactive.

    Tardar Sauce (aka Grumpy Cat) Photo by me

    In a very strange series of events, I met Grumpy Cat, the Internet meme sensation and even took a photo and shot a Vine video (below).

    Emma Janzen and Tina Phan on our staff did a great video and I make a short appearance getting all cat-love on poor Grumpy Cat.

    Further back, I did a Digital Savant column rounding up reviews of an Acer W700 Windows 8 tablet and the great Studio Ghibli-animated game Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. This week’s column was also about SXSW Interactive, a preview of the first two keynotes from adventurous entrepreneur Elon Musk and design guru Tina Roth Eisenberg.

    The recent Micro features were “What is jailbreaking?” and “What is Google Glass?”

    Speaking of Google Glass, I was on NPR’s On Point With Tom Ashbrook recently talking with Amber Case and Ben Chigier about wearable computers and user interfaces. It’s a full hour, but there was lots of great discussion and questions from readers. (An emailer told me I talk too fast and that they could not listen to me.

    And from the random files, I interviewed LeVar Burton about a Holodeck project AMD is working on as well as Demand Media CTO Byron Reese about his upcoming SXSW presentation.

    I also drew a very ugly picture of what the PlayStation 4 might look like.

     

    Non-work stuff

    The new sketch show that I helped write, Pulga Nation featuring the Mexcentrics, opened tonight.

    It’s weird not being there for the opening and with the festival starting, not even being 100 percent sure I’ll be able to see the show. I caught a rehearsal the other night and all the nights spent in theaters rehearsing during the 10 years of Latino Comedy Project came flooding back and I remembered how much I missed it.

    It’s a mix of people I’ve worked with for many, many years and new people. It’s exciting and fun and seeing words that I wrote up on a stage again, especially when the words are coming out of the mouth of my friend Patti, who makes me laugh always, has been a thrill. The show runs through Saturday. If you’re in Austin, please try to catch it.

    Grumpy MeanyOur Space Monkeys continue to thrive. Their Twitter account is starting to take off and the new comics, I think, have been really good. And we’ve been consistent, posting every week, no exceptions.

    New comics include one about the horrible game Aliens: Colonial Marines, a strip about an evil Higgs boson particle and this week’s comic about Grumpy Cat (kind of a coincidence, that). I also did a surprise birthday ¡Pescados del Mar! comic for my brother, drawn in my own horrible scrawl.

    And because I hate to leave the girls out, here’s a Vine I posted of them playing at a gymnastics center for the first time. Those children lost their damn mind having so much fun.

    I’ll be back after SXSW, post-hibernation.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The Social

    Facebook went public last week. You might have heard about it. They sold some stock or something.

    In the big lead-up to the big let-down, I wrote a piece for CNN.com about why I’m staying on Facebook and why people should just accept that the kingdom of Zuckerberg is just a fact of life and that people should just get used to it.

    Of course, every time Facebook has shown vulnerability or made a bad decision in the past, they’ve found a way to sidestep criticism and come roaring back. This stock market thing shows a much deeper, perhaps more fundamental weakness in the company that we really haven’t seen before.

    And since was a column that was meant to be a little contrarian in the first place, I find myself wondering if it’s going to be a piece of writing that I’ll come to regret in a few short years. We’ll see, won’t we? I certainly was anticipating the flurry of negative comments this time around and was able to enjoy them from backstage, twirling my mustache and saying to myself, “Job well done, villain.”

    What I wasn’t expecting was for CNN to slap it on the front page center with my name out there for the world to see. That was pretty amazing-cool, but also terrifying at the same time. I felt like I’d been called out by my own words, made to stand before a crowd and justify my opinion. Lucky for me, I have a lot of opinions about Facebook, even if they’re not even always consistent or right.

    Dustin Maxey (right) and his friend Larin Frederick, talk about “GroupWink,” a group dating app Maxey is planning to launch this summer. Photo by Julia Robinson for the Austin American-Statesman

    Another big piece I wrote that ran this week was in the Statesman and it was about ambient/serendipity apps like “Highlight” that pair you up with people nearby, social network-like, even when you’re not actively using them. The piece evolved into an article about the line between convenient and creepy and how future apps are going to have to overcome that label.

    I had some great conversations in the interviews I did for the article and as usual it was just a lot of material that needed to be condensed into one good-sized story. I hope it didn’t lose too much in that process and that it made enough sense to people who don’t follow this kind of tech.

    I’ve had a weird thing lately, just the last few days, where I’m getting a little tired and bored with the whole social media thing. It’s not that I’m not posting; I still do that. But I’ve also found myself not posting a lot when in the past I would have responded to something or had a thought I wanted to share. Some of it may be that I’ve been writing so much about social media lately that I’m a little burned out on thinking about it, but some of it is also that I know that if I respond to certain posts that I’m going to get into a whole conversation with someone and of late, I’ve been so pressed for time that I’d rather just not even get into it, you know?

    A guy I know, Loren Feldman, is working on a documentary about social media and I’m dying to see how it turns out because he and I have a very similar view on a lot of what’s going on, only he’s able to say a lot of the things I can’t in ways that I don’t. We both feel the bubble is close to bursting and that in a few short years, people will have moved on to something else, even if it’s just faster/more efficient ways of doing what we’re doing now.

    Or it could just be that I get bored of hearing my own voice (typed, rather, and online) and that I get the sense a lot of other people are chirping along with very little to say, too, at times. It gets boring sometimes, doesn’t it? That can’t just be me that feels it, right?

    Another theory: summer is here (we get it early in New Braunfels) and I’d rather just be outside, swimming or tubing. That’s probably it, honestly.

    Schlitterbahn is pretty empty today. More water for us!

  • I got to bag it up

    Where to begin? Crazy season in my life starts around mid-February and doesn’t let up until mid-March. For about a month, my life revolves around South by Southwest Interactive and somewhere in there I’m also celebrating my brother and mom’s birthdays and trying to enjoy the suddenly awesome spring weather that only lasts a few weeks before the crushing summer heat returns.

    I start thinking about how I’ll handle my DVR duties (MUST. WATCH!) when I’ll be gone for five or six days, how we’ll juggle the kids’ daycare and my middle-of-the-night commuting and even what I’ll be packing in my work bag, which became the subject of last week’s Digital Savant column.

    (No column this week due to the Oscars).

    I haven’t followed my own advice and purchased a little power strip yet, but I plan to do that tonight. The other thing I plan to do differently this year is to take my bike. The one I never ride that’s been sitting in the garage forever. I bought a fancy bike lock and checked to make sure the tires aren’t flat. I plan to dust it off, lube it up and ride (we’re still talking about the bike here). So if you see someone in downtown Austin in two weeks swinging wildly on a bike with a heavy work bag causing imbalance, that’s probably me. Say hi.

    I had two other pieces run in the paper last week, reverse-publishes of a post I did about Code for Austin’s Saturday Hackathon and a guide to finding (and RSVP’ing to) parties at SXSW Interactive.

    Also, I’m writing about the official app, the guy from Stratfor who’s speaking at the fest and the co-founder of Pinterest. (Oh, I’m on Pinterest, by the way. Come watch me pin things.)

    Have a lot more pieces about the fest in the works including some stuff for CNN.com.

    I’m trying to spend as much time as possible at home with the kids because I know I won’t be seeing them a lot in mid-March. When I wasn’t looking, Carolina went from the pre-verbal baby to a kid who can repeat pretty much any word and who’s talking nonstop and grabbing EVERYTHING. Grab grab grab, baby STOP! OK, not a baby, but STILL. Toddler, QUIT!

    Here she is. We dig her crazy style.

    Happy theater goer.

    Hangers-on

    And one of Lilly for good measure:

    Getting whooped at princess checkers.