Tag: digital savant micro

  • All of the lights

    This year, for some reason, I got really into our Christmas lights.

    We had bins in the attic of lights including some we bought last year in the post-Christmas sales, but except for the ones we put on the tree or around the house, I never messed with trying to set up lights outside.

    It always seemed like too much of a hassle and I never had enough time as Christmas chugged, Polar Express-style, toward us at high speeds. (See also: why we haven’t sent out a family Christmas card in a few years.) It seemed exhausting and a little dangerous (what happens when it rains? Does your house just explode in a shower of sparks?) and I just had no solution.

    But maybe it was a sudden burst of energy I was having at the end of the year, or a restlessness of not doing enough stuff outside with my hands that got me going, but I made the decision to put up lights. Or lay them on the ground. Or something. There were going to be lights, dammit!

    So I started setting up the lights. In my mind, we had all the stuff necessary to do this stashed away, including extension cords, electrical posts, plenty of lights that all matched and (imaginary) items that would hold everything in place perfectly. It was all in the bin just waiting for me to set things up.

    In reality, it was a mismatched heap of tangled indoor lights, one shady-looking green electrical post that looked like it might shock me if I looked in its direction and maybe one set of six 3M sticky tabs that probably wouldn’t work with our stucco and stone outdoors.

    So I bought lights. And then I bought more lights. And then I bought some extension cords. Then I bought a bunch of hooks and adhesives and a holiday staple gun that shoots staples as well as plastic staple protectors, as if the stapler were afraid of getting a loathsome disease and is blowing through dozens of tiny little condoms.

    They also keep you from stapling through the electrical cord and killing yourself, I think, so sure, why not. Staple condoms.

    I set up a line of big bulb lights (not LED, it turns out, but the old school ones that burn you if you try to touch) along the yard. I didn’t have stakes or clips or anything to hold them down. In fact, three different gigantic stores told me they had sold out of crates and crates of these. So, I tried to make some makeshift stakes by tying the lights to some skewers and you can image how shitty and lame and ineffective that turned out. So the lights were basically just lying on the ground in a loose row, ready to be tripped on or blown away by a strong wind. Success!

    I had better luck with a set of tiny globe LED lights that I stapled up around the garage. Near the stucco is a spongy border and that turned out to be perfect for the staples. I set everything up, brought my wife and the kids out to see the glory of my gorgeous lights.

    Half of the set that I had just put up didn’t come on. I had forgotten to check before I put them up.

    Another trip to the store. More lights, Lots of cursing.

    I finally found some stakes at the grocery store and I was able to lock down the lights around the sidewalk, or at least keep them from wandering off.

    When it was all finished and I taped up the ends with Duct Tape to keep water out, it all looked really nice even if it was a pretty simple setup with nothing for the bushes or in our yard. We have the lights down the sidewalk, some lights around our garage, some lights going around the side of the house, a little LED tree and bear in the doorway and that’s about it. Next year, maybe we’ll add some stuff to the yard, but I felt pretty manly-man enough with just this first effort.

    I couldn’t tell you why I needed to to this this year. I think it’s that the kids (now 3 and 5) like it and the things I used to really not care about seem to matter a little more when there are kids involved.

    All this happened before recent events in the news made that even more clear to me. It’s so easy to just let the holidays fly by and to try to get through it and look forward to days off and a new year. But this year, I’m trying to enjoy it moment-by-moment and not let is rush past too quickly before I’ve gotten to really let the glow of the lights illuminate the darkness a little.

    Lights 2

    Recent writing stuff:

    I’m finally on vacation through January, but here’s what’s run recently (and one thing that’s running tomorrow that’s pretty significant).

    In the Digital Savant column, I did a piece going over my 2012 tech predictions from last year and then looked ahead and made more predictions for 2013. Will those pan out? Wait a year and find out! One neat thing was getting to see the word “Omarstradamus” in display headline type in the paper.

    The column for Monday, Christmas Eve, is a roundup of all the apps you should download if you happen to get a new smart phone or tablet. It’s impossible to list anything even close to comprehensive, especially if you’re trying to include more than just iOS and Android, but I tried to focus on stuff people who are new to these kinds of devices might need. Even trying to narrow it down, it was a pretty impossible task to cover all bases, but I think the list is a good start for most people.

    Fairway Solitaire: current addiction

    I included Fairway Solitaire, the mobile game I’m currently addicted to. Please don’t download it. It will eat your life.

    The Walking Dead: my video game of the year

    Other stories I wrote since the last blog entry: a piece about the Statesman’s new digital offerings, a story about top Austin searches on Google for 2012, a review of the full first season of the brilliant “Walking Dead” video game and a write-up of two Austin-made games, God of Blades and Arcane Legends, that are worth a look on iOS.

    For Digital Savant Micro, I wrote about why you might need a dual-band router, what the Hell Snapchat is and what a “Chromebook” laptop is all about.

    I was also on the radio last week, talking about holiday tech gifts (it’s a bit late for that, I know, but maybe you’ll get some ideas for post-Christmas gift exchanges) with The Daily Circuit on Minnesota Public Radio. You can hear the full audio by following the link. The other guest was Dana Wollman from Engadget.

    The last thing is that Carolina turned 3 on Friday. As much as Lilly keeps us on our toes constantly, it’s Carolina who makes us laugh, who always does or says something completely unexpected, and who seems to always have mischief and smiles in her eye for everyone she meets.

    I’m not sure if it’s a phase or if it’s just part of her personality that she constantly tells us she loves us. I hope it lasts a good long while.

    Carolina at 3

    IMG_1971

  • This is better than rejuvenation!

    Things improved dramatically, almost all at once, to the point where I wondered if it was all a coincidence or if it was a chain reaction, a one-thing-leads-to-another fixx, if you will, where the outlook becomes brighter on everything because of self-fulfilling optimistic action.

    Maybe it was all coincidence.

    I’m not going to complain or question. I just know that things that felt stuck just over a week ago seem to have greased their way past the logjam. Not only am I working on one of the things I thought was hopelessly stalled, but I have a totally new thing that popped into my head that I can’t wait to work on as well, something that sounds so fun that it’s all I can do to stop myself from putting everything (including my day job, eating and sleeping — I mean my day job AND ALSO eating and sleeping, not my day job, which involves eating and sleeping for money, though holy shit, wouldn’t that be awesome?) aside to start working on it immediately.

    Our girls have been behaving better lately and getting more sleep, which seems like some kind of pre-Christmas miracle because it means that I, too, get more sleep and am less cranky.

    And on top of all that, work has been pretty good lately, I have vacation coming up and a friend of mine invited me to come help pitch a completely and totally separate thing that could turn into something that might be a cool thing that I would like to do and share with you should it become an actual thing!

    Things! They are happening.

    Also, and perhaps because of the flow of good things lately, I came out of my upside down turtle shell a bit and invited a few close friends out for lunch, a sign that I really don’t want to be at home all time bitterly wondering why I’m at home all the time. And I’m having fun writing again. That sounds like a given, but I’ve had real dread and anxiety about writing this year that simply wasn’t there before. Being able to look forward to writing instead of dreading it is kind of a radical thing for me right now. It has me bouncing off the walls with new energy, feeling renewed.

    There’s renewal and newness in the air all around.

    One friend of mine just had a baby, another friend is about to have one and a third friend has a slightly older, but pretty recently newborn baby. Babies are coming out, people are getting engaged, other people are breaking up or moving away or moving back to Austin or selling things or making things and for the first time in a while, I feel like I’m part of the community of things happening and people doing. It’s a good feeling, one I really missed.

    Here’s some of what I’ve been writing lately at work.

    Photo by Jay Janner / Austin American-Statesman

    I did a column about the usability testing as it’s taught at the University of Texas School of Information. I got to meet a really great professor and some scary-smart students who are trying to make the future of product design a little brighter and smarter.

    Image courtesy Acura

    Last week’s Digital Savant column was about the increasing amount of technology in our cars. Since I’m not into cars and don’t know much about them, it was a bit of a shock for me to realize that this is stuff I should be paying a lot more attention to as a tech writer. A woman wrote me a terse email a few days after the column asking, basically, “What happens if you’re on the highway and you’re about to hit a semi in a collision and all this technology fails?” I responded, “You crash?” I mean, honestly, I’m not sure what else could happen.

    And the column that runs on Monday (but appears early online in the blog) is about how we deal with grieving online, particularly on social networks. Every year is suck-filled with death, of course, but this year it hit me personally a few times and many people I care a lot about and I’ve been paying a little more attention to it than in the past. In the column, I reference my grandmother’s death, which I wrote about earlier this year on this blog.

    Other new stuff: a Micro about making digital photo albums and a Micro offering advice on Xbox games for 6-year-olds.

    I was also on the radio, speaking on the “At Issue with Ben Merens” show about holiday tech gifts. You can listen to it on this page or download the audio directly.

    What else… we bought a fridge! I kinda got the bug seeing all the huge price cuts during Black Friday time and it reminded me how much I hated our fridge, which was so small and cramped and always made me curse when I’d load it up with groceries. It was so cramped I would not buy things because I knew what a pain in the ass it would be to try to cram them into the freezer or find space in the fridge. So we’d run out of stuff really fast, creating a cycle of fridgefrustration (or fridgestration for short).

    The new fridge is not even as big as they come. We have a narrow space to fit one in, so a full-sized 30-square-foot one would be banging on the sides whenever the doors opened. We ended up with something smaller/narrower, but still gigantic and spacious and luxurious compared to our old one. It has French doors, but they’re not that snooty, and two drawers the kids can easily pull on to get their own damn yogurt and frozen waffles for once.

    They moved our old fridge, which had not budged an inch in about eight years, and there was a Leviathan dust monster back there I had to defeat in just moments before they wheeled in the new one. Rugs were moved, doors were attached to metal frames and a burly man taught me how to push a button to magically generate water. “But don’t drink it,” he warned, like a grizzled shaman, “it’s full of charcoal.” It turns out that is temporary, you just have to drink two gallons of water before the water gets good. Mmmm charcoal. I just realized he said DON’T drink it. I was distracted by the stainless steel.

    It doesn’t have a TV or Internet, but the new fridge keeps stuff cold and spits out ice and doesn’t make me not be able to buy more than one damn frozen pizza at a time, so I think it goes solidly in the win column.


    Talk to ya soon. I’ll keep updating every week or two, but I’m really hoping to have some actual news/announcements to share with you before the end of the year about some old friends who will soon be returning. December is getting really exciting all of a sudden.

  • Turtle back

    If you have been the parent of a kid older than 2 or 3, you probably have experienced the thing where the kid lies down on the floor and doesn’t want to do anything.

    It usually happens as you’re trying to get them ready for school/day care or when they’ve had a bad sleep night. They’re tired and frustrated and revert to a state where they not only don’t want to remember how to put on socks, they won’t even stand upright. It’s incredibly frustrating for the parent, but sometimes, if I’m not going crazy at that moment, I try to imagine how frustrating that moment is for the kid. Their emotional range hasn’t caught up with their inability to process certain kinds of stress and they just turn baby.

    They flop on their back and, like the turtle, can’t seem to right themselves without help. So they wail and cry or kick or get mad at you when you do try to help and basically nobody’s happy. It sucks, to the BIG TIME.

    I’ve experienced that a lot on the parental side lately in the months since our sleep schedule changed, but I also have finally had time off enough this week to realize that I’ve been doing some of that myself.

    The last few months I’ve been the upended turtle, flapping around, but not really doing anything, expecting someone to help right me and just sort of letting out these little weak turtle bleats.

    They go, “Behhhhh. Behhhh.”

    It sounds fucking disgusting and the worst part of hearing it is knowing it’s coming out of my own turtle mouth.

    So that’s what I’m working on right now. Trying not to feel so stuck and overturned and waiting for something to happen and going “Behhhh” and having one sock on and the other sock across the room because I flung it over there in frustration. Things feel like they’re not moving at all, at least relative to all the movement in the world, but then I have to remind myself that I’m the turtle, the one on its back, the one that’s not moving.

    And that’s what needs fixing.

    Behhhh.

    I’m on a little four-day weekend for Thanksgiving, but work continues and there’s been a lot of writing still going on there.

    The new stuff is:

    I did a pretty sizable holiday tech gift guide for last Sunday’s newspaper. This year it was focused on gaming, led by Nintendo’s Wii U. I don’t have a lot to say about the Wii U itself. For the first time since maybe the GameCube (including portables), Nintendo didn’t sent a review unit to try out ahead of the launch, which is a little weird, so my only hands-on with the device was in a little trailer the company brought into town. I’m not buying one myself because, frankly, there are lots of other games to review that I don’t have time to get to and I think, based on my limited time with the demo and what I’ve been reading from reviewers who did get hardware, Nintendo has released a product that wasn’t ready for retail. We’ll see how it’s faring after the holidays.

    I also did a tech gift guide, as I do every year, for Television Without Pity. It’s more of a photo gallery, with text by me, but not focused just on video games.

    One thing I’ll add to both of those guides: at the time I wrote them, only four of the five episodes of The Walking Dead: The Video Game were out. Since then, I played the last episode of the first season and I can only recommend it even more. It made me cry, it broke my heart, it’s an absolutely high-water mark in video game narrative and character work. Such a great accomplishment.

    This week I also wrote about three other games I’ve been playing a lot (including the fantastic Penny Arcade/Rain-Slick Episode 3, which I actually completed) and I got to witness Chris Roberts achieve $6.2 million+ in his crowdfunding venture for the future game Star Citizen and posted a really lengthy interview with “Epic Mickey 2” game developer Warren Spector.

    The day I did that interview, Warren Spector was kind enough to invite me to his house(s) to see some of his amazing collection of artwork, movie geek wares and Disney stuff. What I learned is that if Warren Spector ever invites you to his house to see any of his collections, you go, no matter what. It was inspiring and very cool.

    On the Micro feature, I briefly defined Quora, the Q&A website.

  • The story of the car troubles (plus, ACL Fest comin’)

    I’ve been promising this story of woe and ridiculousness in regards to my car and here it finally is.

    First, though, quickly, let me just update you on the stuff from work this week.

    The Monday Digital Savant column was about apps that can help you get to and get around Austin City Limits Festival, which I will be attending this weekend. Some Austinites act like they’re totally so over the fest, and yet it sells out every year and people seem to manage to have a good time despite all the sighs and grumbling. I plan to have a good time and eat one or five of these Tiffblitzes. Please tell my family I love them when I die of sugar.

    Also in the paper on Monday was a Digital Savant Micro defining “DLC,” or “downloadable content.”

    Online, I was sad to report the end of one of my favorite online games, the quiz app “Qrank.”

    RIP, Qrank. I will miss you.

    OK, on to the car thing.

    This whole nightmare started on my way to work one Thursday evening in early August. I got pulled over on the highway for a law I didn’t even know existed. I was in the right lane and a police had pulled someone over, lights flashing. I would normally change lanes in a situation like this, but there was traffic, so I stayed in the right lane and was extra careful passing.

    A few minutes later, the same police officer pulled me over and told me that it was a fairly new law, about three years old, that you have to either change lanes or slow down 20 miles per hour in that situation.

    OK. Fine. Consider me duly warned.

    Except I also had an expired inspection sticker, which I had completely lost track of in another universe I wasn’t even connected to anymore (I didn’t say that out loud. Best not to.). So, all right, I probably deserve a ticket for that. But the part about the passing lane thing was a lot less clear and even the officer couldn’t remember what to cite on the ticket. (He was, it sounded like, winging it.)

    Double ticket. He was nice enough and told me that if I got the inspection taken care of soon, it would be dismissed, but he had no idea what I was in store for on the other part. I drove home and planned to take care of everything on the weekend when I’d have time to get the car inspected; I wasn’t planning to do much driving before then.

    And then I had my car accident.

    The accident (or, “Look FORWARD when you drive”)

    It was on Saturday, the same day I was planning to wait until the kids took a nap to go get my car inspected while my wife watched them.

    That morning, I took the kids to the library while she ran errands. We were having a great time.

    On the way back home, right in front of the New Braunfels Police station, there was a horrible accident. There were two motorcycles laid out and a truck. It did not look good and I was pretty sure, just from the number of ambulances and police cars, and the tarps on the ground, that somebody must have died.

    The girls in the backseat were staring at the sirens and I suddenly got scared that they were going to see something horrible as we passed slowly next to the scene. The road had been reduced to one lane and the line was backed up. We were going very slow, stop and go, stop and go, not even two or three miles per hour.

    I turned to the backseat to see what the girls were doing. I turned to the left to see what they could see of the accident. I turned back to the girls again. And then I turned forward and saw that I was heading, very slowly, right into the truck in front of us.

    There was a bump and a lurch as I hit the brake, but we barely felt a thing. We did hit the truck, though. Just really slowly.

    We pulled off to the side, as did the truck in front of us and I got out to see the damage. It looked like the photo at the top of this blog entry.

    Here’s what the back of the truck I hit looked like:

    Why no damage, Tacoma? WHY NO!?!?

    The guy in front of me was an older gent. It turned out he’s retired military, just like my dad, and the guy could not have been nicer. He kept asking me about my girls and if they were OK and did not even act a tiny bit put out that some random person hit him from behind and now all of a sudden his time was being wasted on insurance bullshit when his truck was barely even touched.

    He said he was on his way home from a grocery run and I imagined him sitting at home on the couch with a cold beer instead out of in the hot sun with me while my daughters sat patiently in the air conditioning waiting to go home. He did not even act like it was a thing, and I was incredibly lucky the guy was so cool about it.

    A police officer saw our (my) wreckage told us that they had some other stuff to deal with (“Yes! We’re sorry, please go see to that, sorry!”), so for us to both go pull into the police station parking lot and wait.

    This is what the area looked like:

    The guy kept saying he’d never been in an accident and wasn’t sure what to do, so we took photos of each others’ insurance information and he called his insurance person while I called my wife and asked her to come pick up the kids because I didn’t know how long things would take.

    It turns out these things take a long time, especially when they’re in proximity of a much more serious incident. So we waited, awkwardly. Ages later, a police officer came and told us that we could fill out an accident report since no crime had occurred and that was fine by us. We exchanged the paperwork and since my vehicle was hideous, but drivable, I went home.

    I called my insurance agent’s service; the person on the line did not express any surprise that I did something so stupid and, to their credit, did not judge. While I was on hold, I Tweeted:

    The insurance agent told me everything was cool and asked if I wanted to take my car to the body shop that did some work on my car the previous year. That was fine. I was set to take the car in on Monday and get a rental. Problem solved, right?

    Well, no. I still needed an inspection sticker (I figured they frown upon you bringing in a wreck for that) and still had a court date. But that was weeks away, no biggie, right?

    Kind of a biggie

    There’s a local body shop that did work on my car last year that was superb. I mean, the damn car looked brand new and the bumper issue I was having was totally resolved. I know that’s what body shops are paid to do, but I was still stunned by what great work they did. So it was a no-brainer to use them again for this job.

    Funny about that…

    Everything seemed great at first. They told me the job would only take a week or two and that my insurance (with deductible) would cover my car rental.

    The rental, you guys. It was PIMP! I know it was only a Ford Taurus, but my car is five years old and paid off, this car was brand new and had stuff like satellite radio built in (instead of my jerry-rigged batch of wires and ugly antennas) and Bluetooth streaming.

    BLUETOOTH STREAMING! Of music and stuff!

    And it was a big, smooth-riding beast, much bigger than my car, but way more comfortable for my long commute.

    I took the rental car to the City of Kyle, where my ticket was issued, and went to the quaint City Hall building. I was told I would need to come to the court in about a month to get the inspection thing resolved for a fee and for the driving lane issue, I’d have to pay $107 and take a defensive driving course, which involved more fees.

    Two weeks later, when I called for the third time to check on my car and was told by the collision center that they needed more time, I asked, “Is the car rental still covered?”

    They said it was.

    “Shit, take your time!” I bellowed, singing along with a happy song in my head, “take as long as you need!”

    That was probably a mistake.

    Because the week before my court date, I was starting to worry. No car. No inspection sticker. The collision center told me the car rental time was up but that they would cover the difference. That didn’t seem like good news.

    I began to call every day as the status of my car kept slipping. The woman I was talking to, I think, was starting to dodge my calls.

    Finally, she agreed to let me have my car back and even agreed to take the car to get the inspection done the day I was to pick it up, one day before my court date.

    I checked in that morning. It still wasn’t done. I was told my car would not be ready until 5:45 that evening, right when I was supposed to be with my daughter at her dance class.

    “What time do you close?” I asked.

    “5:45.”

    “So I have to be there at exactly…”

    “Yes.”

    Shit.

    I took my daughter to dance class and asked the teacher if she’d be OK if I ran across the street (the collision center was not far away) to get my car. She said it was fine, though Lilly was not thrilled that I wasn’t going to be in the waiting area the whole time.

    So I rushed over with my pimp rental car and waited and waited and waited until they finally brought my car out.

    They forgot to do the inspection. The woman said she sent a different, probably already-inspected car, because she got confused.

    I transferred the car seats, cleaned up as best I could, and moved all the rest of my stuff over to my own car. Fine, it wasn’t inspected, but I had my car back. I drove quickly back to the dance studio and waited for Lilly to finish.

    Things were almost back to normal.

    Not back to normal

    The next morning, I went to get my car inspected on the way to work. That went fine; it only took a few minutes.

    Then, about 10 minutes on the highway toward work, a bunch of warning lights in my car came on, including a signal saying something might be wrong with my brakes.

    The car dealership where I get my oiled changed is on my route, so I was able to make an emergency stop there.

    Half an hour later, they figured out that it was a hybrid water pump that needed replacing.

    My car has about 150,000 miles on it. It’s paid off, which I love, but I’ve learned that when something needs fixing, it needs to just get fixed, no matter what the cost. This one was going to be $600, on top of the deductible I’d just paid for my wreck. So not having a car payment was not working out so well for these two or three months.

    They had no idea how long the fix would take, but the estimate was looking like around three or four hours. My court date was that evening in Kyle, about 30 miles up the road toward Austin.

    I called my wife and told her I was at the car dealership with a car problem.

    “But what about your inspection?!” she asked.

    “What? Oh… no, that’s taken care of, this is a whole other set of bullshit I’m dealing with now.”

    I wondered if my car sitting for so long at the collision center may have caused the problem. It didn’t help my mood.

    With some weird luck, they were able to fix my car a lot more quickly than expected. I got out of there by lunchtime and headed to work.

    #NightCourt

    Night court was one of the most depressing places I’ve ever been and I’ve lived in Mississippi.

    It was a mix of teens, families, people who just got off work based on the uniforms they wore and random others in homogeneously bad moods. Nobody talked, everybody waited in fear, there was no, “So what are you in for?” chit-chat. Some people messed around with their phones because, you know, this is America, but there was no mirth or camaraderie. With some tweaking, it could have been The Hunger Games without weapons.

    I signed in and waited for two straight hours, Tweeting about #NightCourt to keep myself awake.

    So, that happened.

    My case was dismissed, but I still have to do defense driving. I plan to do it online, very soon, but it’s a loose thread I’m still dealing with.

    And then this other stuff happened:

    I got charged for the rental car after all, almost $100. It turns out it was because Hertz thought I left a huge mess (I did not) and didn’t put enough gas in the car (I actually put more than what they gave it to me with and never agreed to pay for gas). But the Hertz Twitter account had my back and helped get that charge reversed.

    I noticed later that the hood of my car was sitting unevenly. That required another trip back to the collision center where they fixed it, I shit you not, in 20 minutes.

    I watched some Night Court clips on YouTube and found they were much funnier than my experiences.

    I like my car and not having a car payment, but at some point in the next few months, I’ll probably end up buying a new one.

    And that’s it. I hoped you enjoyed THIS TALE OF TOIL AND WOE.

  • I Tumblr for ya / Flavor Country

    I went to Winston-Salem / Wake Forest University this week, which as near as I can tell specializes in tobacco legends and beautiful campuses with sexy trees. I will tell you about that in a bit.

    First, let me fill you in on what I’ve been working on the last few weeks on these, our very best Internet delivery systems.

    Last week, I did a Digital Savant column explaining how to get up and running on Tumblr. Tumblr, which I have sometimes derogatoraliciously compared to Livejournal, is actually a really great, simple blog platform and if you are already a Tumblr Pro, this will probably seem pretty elementary to you.

    I started a Tumblr blog a while back when we were still doing Age of Lasers and a second one I set up with just my name lay fallow for a few years, Tumbled, if you will.

    So I revived it and got back in there, tickling the Tumblr until I felt satisfied I could properly discuss it. Your own satisfaction may vary.

    That same week, I did a Digital Savant Micro about WordPress, the software running this here very blog thing you are just now mind-melding with. Seems like those two things would go well together, like peanut butter and … a butter knife?

    I wrote about Yellow Cab Austin’s new tech upgrades (which will be part of a future column on Austin transportation stuff) and tomorrow’s column is about how we Photoshop ourselves online. The Micro for this week is about Apple’s new Passbook app in iOS 6.

    You may have noticed in there that statesman.com and austin360.com have been completely redesigned. It’s part of an entire content management system upgrade we’re doing that has been the subject of lots of training and discussion in the newsroom. It’s a lot to get used to, but we’re all trying to keep our heads up through so much change this year.

    We also made the transition to have our pages laid out elsewhere and the lights went out officially on our copy desk. I would talk more about this, but honestly it would just make me incredibly sad and blubbery. I’ll just say that some of these people shifted into other jobs and that’s fantastic, and other people left and that sucks so hard that every one of us working there feels it, badly.

    It happens every now and then that someone will ask me in an email to go somewhere to talk (or to ask questions so that other people can talk while I nod with understanding).

    Often, these conversations end abruptly when I say I can’t do it because it takes work to go somewhere, even if the talking itself is not as much work as the going. Things usually break down over travel, which I try to avoid when it involves being away from home for more than one night, or money, which is frequently not offered at all.

    Sometimes, I’ll get asked what it will take to get me to go somewhere and I’ll throw out some information and then never hear back, as if the information was trapped in a bottle thrown to sea.

    But maybe once a year, all the details work out and I actually go somewhere.

    This time, it was to North Carolina to moderate a forum on cyber-communication.

    At one point, I wasn’t sure if this was to be a solo presentation or if I were going to moderate, but as the weeks got closer, I double checked to make sure I didn’t need to be spending many backbreaking hours in the PowerPoint salt mines (salt mines with a very bland border and text that slides in from the right) or that there was no A/V I needed to work out on my end.

    This thing, it turns out, was more geared toward radio as it was a public radio station (and the generous Forsyth Education Foundation) brining me in. They were more concerned with getting decent audio than showing faces on a screen. So I did a pre-interview with the station (click here to hear me ramble about tech and kids for five minutes).

    I coordinated with the other panelists over emails, putting together a list of questions and when I arrived, we went through everything again, resulting in what I thought was a really good panel covering a pretty broad set of topics, from cyberbullying to online defamation to what the future is for digital natives. You can hear and read some highlights from the panel here.

    As for the trip itself — you guys! Have you been to North Carolina?! It’s totally beautiful and awesome! Everyone was super nice and the trees were all clumped together and endless and I ate shrimp and grits while two charming older people regaled me with tales of their college years and the place I stayed was a B&B in Old Salem, which is like hundreds of years old and… wow. For the fewer than 20 hours I was there, I just kept wishing I could stay longer to check out the bakeries and walk around and just experience it a little more because what I saw was great. I saw a statue of R.J. Reynolds! The Nabisco guy! (He’s not the Nabisco guy.)

    I mean, check this out:

    That thing pumps real water!

    And this fire station probably predates actual fire!

    My breakfast was a really great feast, which this photo only shows a fraction of. See that? That granola is homemade, yo!

    The fun continued after the panel when my hosts took me out for drinks. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t drunk. I mean can you get drunk from two mint juleps? Oh, you can? If you’re a gigantic pussy?

    Well, that’s me, I guess, because I went back to my room and started Tweeting strangely about how much I love the trees in Winston-Salem.

    I also sent some @replies that probably sounded even worse to anyone who saw them out of context:

    The next morning, I may have expressed some regret.

    And… finally:

    So all that happened.

    And I got a pretty photo before I left.

    I haven’t forgotten that I promised you a funny car story. That’s coming, I swear, very soon.

    Something else is coming, not sure how soon, but it’s on the way. Here’s a little visual clue:

  • 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.