Tag: digital savant column

  • Text in effect

    He's just not that into (seeing) you

    Every now and then we hit on something in the column that I don’t think is being written about much elsewhere and which I fight as hard as I can to get right. This week, the Digital Savant column was about the false intimacy we have with texting (which is as popular as ever and actually still growing in the U.S.).

    It’s couched in a column that seems like it starts out saying, “Yay for texting, here’s why it’s not going away) but then takes a bit of a left turn to talk about cheating, the way we communicate with loved ones, why voice calls still matter (even as we make less of them) and then, in a sort of coda, a short bit about our wedding anniversary last week. (Which, per my wife’s request to be mentioned as little as possible online, I didn’t really talk about. Aha, but she didn’t say I couldn’t mention her in a column for the newspaper. Loophole!)

    I mentioned that I was writing something along these lines last week on Twitter and Facebook and I got some really helpful, thoughtful responses that did help shape what I ended up writing. It’s one of those topics that everyone has an opinion about as I learned today when a reader emailed me:

    “It’s just cool to become a gibbering idiot who is no longer obligated to spell correctly and string together coherent thoughts.”

    Indeed, sir. Thx 4 the msg.

  • Facebook is a maze with 850 million mice

    I’m always amazed that something as popular as Facebook has so much wrong with it. It works, sure, in ways that Twitter didn’t for a very long time (like just being available most of the time) and that MySpace never did (still and always ugly, forever and ever). But so much stuff is impossible to figure out or changes at a moment’s notice or simply doesn’t work across all platforms.

    Anyway, you get what I’m saying if you’ve ever been a heavy user (or a slightly-more-than-casual one) over in Zuckerbergville. This week’s Digital Savant column was an attempt to answer some of those nagging, weird questions about how to do things that should be a lot more intuitive on a site that serves so many. I didn’t have answers for all the questions that friends were kind enough to contribute, but I did learn a lot while writing it.

    I also did a blog post this week about PC gaming optimization tips (more interesting than it sounds!) based on the habits of those on the pro gaming circuit. It made me pine for the days when I used to crack open PC cases and install my own mother-ba-boards and Riz-NAMs, but not enough to give up my Apple laptop and go back to those endless tinkering hours.

  • Travel gadgets and iPad apps

    Yay, after a very busy few weeks I’m finally caught up!

    This week’s Digital Savant column, which ran in today’s American-Statesman, was a roundup of what some of the newer apps I’ve been using on the iPad are that best encapsulate where we are in the life of Apple’s two-year-old tablet. Slightly longer version ran as two blog entries last week.

    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.

  • The (physical) purge

    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).

    The other story that ran on this, a particularly crazy week, was a Digital Savant column about steps you can take to protect your identity if you’re the victim of a data breach (say, as a Zappos customer when they were recently hacked).

    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.

  • Definition

    Illustration by Don Tate II / Austin American-Statesman

    Even though I was out of the office most of last week, the Digital Savant column rolls along, this time with something we thought would be a fun idea; defining some of those jargony tech words that pop up so much in coverage of events like the Consumer Electronics Show.

    So if you’re wondered exactly what “Droid” means or why there’s no such thing as an “iTouch” music player, you should check out the article.

    Next week’s column will be about protecting your identity when breaches like the Zappos hack attack occur.

  • Listening

    This has been a strange and terrible week, but then on the other hand I spent a lot of time with family and we took our first road trip with the kids (it was torture going one way, not so bad coming back).

    Being out of the mix in the middle of the week — and not during a holiday — was weird and made me feel dislocated. It was the week of the Consumer Electronics Show and I found myself completely out of that news bubble for a few days and then struggling to catch up days later.

    On Monday, I had a column published which was basically a review of Ultimate Ears custom earbuds. I spent a few weeks thinking about it (the fitting I describe in the column happened, I believe, back in November) and was really happy with the way the piece turned out right after I wrote it. Then a few days later, it was completely forgotten as I had other things to deal with and I barely noticed when it ran in the paper. (I got a few really nice emails about it, but nothing like the reaction we got with the Dyson vacuum piece.)

    As it happened, the Klipsch earbuds I describe in the article broke right as I was wrapping the column up and sending it to my editor. They were still under warranty so the company sent me a brand new pair,after I called tech support, then emailed them a copy of the gift receipt and described what went wrong. The package arrived today — brand new earbuds, new packaging, everything. I was super impressed; it’s a two year warranty and I’m still only six months into owning them. I didn’t even have to send in the broken pair of buds.

    The other thing that ran in the paper this week of mine was a reverse-publish of the blog post I previously mentioned, my tech resolutions for 2012.

    I haven’t really written anything yet about my grandmother, but I’ve been thinking about her a lot and trying to wrap my memories together somehow into some thoughts that make sense. But it’s hard; I don’t really know where to begin.