Slightly longer versions of my reviews of the Nike+ FuelBand (beautiful, baffling), the Xbox Live game “Fez” (indie, retro, cool) and the Swivl for camera phones (rotatin’ follow-you action).
And I saved probably the biggest news for last. Because I work for a large company that owns several large papers and is in the process of consolidating lots of things across them, my Digital Savant column will be appearing in the other ones as well. That means the column will run more regularly in Atlanta, Dayton and Palm Beach.
In Palm Beach, it started two weeks ago with a flourish. They interviewed me for a very nice introduction piece and ran a past column of mine that I suggested would be a good intro to the Digital Savant column. The first column brought me some very nice emails from South Florida from people either needing tech help or offering their own opinions about everything from LINUX to what devices are best for people suffering from disabilities like multiple sclerosis.
All that recent activity made me exhausted enough for a bad crash early this week. I got several pieces of bad or weird news on the same day, including one about a writing project that I was rapidly losing confidence about (one thing about that; when a writer loses confidence in one piece of writing it can often trigger a chain reaction that leads to thinking you can’t write ANYTHING, EVER AGAIN. That can be dangerous.). It took pep talks from several wonderful people in my life including my writing partner, my wife and my two daughters, who each suddenly became angelic and nice to their dad for once and then things were fine again. I got a good night’s sleep and then today, the day of my 8th wedding anniversary, everything seemed fine again.
It’s been a weird combination lately of big changes at work (not for me specifically but for the paper and the company in general), always feeling pressed for time at home and having gone on a jag of writing so much in a short period of time that the words began to ran together and I stopped processing. Add lack of sleep to that and things get worse really quick.
Now my priority is resting up, getting back into the exercise routine and getting recharged because it’s almost summer, I have a few big tasks ahead of me and I’m gonna need every ounce of energy I’ve can generate. (Just not Nike Fuel points because I’m starting to think those are just useless.)
It seems like the subject of comedy has been coming up a lot lately in my life, reminding me of how much I miss writing and performing for the stage (or for live-action video).
On Monday, my Digital Savant column was about how stand-up comics are using social media and other technology to attract fans, sell their own productions or even generate material. I spoke to several local comics who will be performing at the new Moontower Comedy and Oddity Fest as well as Aziz Ansari, who was nice enough to do a short phone interview with me for the piece to talk about his online special, “Dangerously Delicious.”
The LCP, incidentally, is about to put on a brand new show in May called “Los Abengers.”
My understanding is that some of my other comedy friends are also doing a different comedy show that’s being put together and it just got me thinking how fun it was to write together and to go through the process of editing and revising sketches. (Sometimes it was frustrating and tough, but the parts I remember best are just laughing and laughing, all around the table.) I’ve offered to write stuff from afar, but of course, it’s not the same as being at writing meetings and rehearsals and doing the work to get stuff on its feet. With the way my life is right now (kids, commute, other writing commitments), it’s just not possible to do that. But I do miss it.
I still have sketches that were written and never produced and a few ideas for new sketches, but the whole point of a sketch troupe is the collaboration, the whole being more than the individual parts, and doing something like that remotely, shooting in scripts by email or Google Docs and not being able to participate beyond that seems weird and maybe wrong. But we’ll see.
Other stuff going on recently: I did an interview with Dennis Tardan for his BlogTalkRadio show. We just talked about writing, inspiration, trying to be creative, all that. It was nice to talk about writing and not have it just be about stuff related to technology. He asked some great questions and the interview took place on a day off when I was able to lie on the couch and relax and really focus on the conversation.
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.
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.
A Tweet of mine that got posted on a sign during the SXSW Interactive craziness. Photo by Rob Quigley
I’ve been approaching this blog post with a weird trepidation that’s gotten worse the longer I’ve put it off. Typically when I have a column run in the paper or something significant I had published to share, I post it here right away. But for what feels like two months straight, almost everything I wrote about was related to South by Southwest Interactive and it got to be so exhausting posting and posting and posting about that elsewhere that I just had no gas left to come over here and repeat myself. So a month and a half of columns, two big pieces I wrote for CNN, literally dozens of SXSW-related blog posts, a major profile I did for the Statesman and more has just fallen through the WordPress cracks of non-updates around here.
How badly have I been procrastinating on this? I DID A MANUAL UPDATE TO WORDPRESS that had been nagging me for months just so I’d have an excuse to do something else before starting this post. I FTP’d my ass off just to delay the inevitable. “I can’t write the SXSW post,” I thought to myself, “not with an old version of WordPress! That would be disgusting!”
Don’t get into a procrastination contest with me. You will lose. Eventually. Years from now.
So in order to make this as painless as possible, I’ll just run through all the content. Please bear with me. I don’t expect anyone to go through and click and read through all of this material. It’s a giant mountain of writing and some of it is by now out of date and of no real use to anyone but me for the purposes of having it all in one place.
But despite all my grumbling about how much work it was and how exhausting I feel after it’s over, SXSW Interactive really was pretty great and magical and worthy of note, or we would never put the kind of effort we do into covering it the way we do. I have to keep reminding myself of that and remembering that I actually thought we did a better job this year and I had more fun and less frustration than in 2011 covering the event.
On March 11th, we did an interview with Jennifer Pahlka that ran as a Digital Savant column. She founded Code for America, a group that’s doing some amazing stuff nationwide with city data and an army (or brigade) of volunteers and fellows. She also delivered a keynote at SXSW Interactive.
I didn’t have a column in the paper on March 19th due to SXSW Music coverage, but the day before, I had a pretty large wrap-up of the festival in the Sunday paper detailing some changes this year and some of the hype and money pouring into the fest.
And this week’s column was about a big trend we saw at the fest, a bunch of financial services and mobile payment add-ons that count point to where we’re going as far as paying for stuff with our phones instead of with traditional cash or credit.
News and other articles
SXSW Interactive director Hugh Forrest. Photo by Julia Robinson, for the American-Statesman
We ran daily stories in the metro section wrapping up what was going on, like this one.
In the weird lead-up to the fest, Apple announced the new iPad and I ended up being mentioned in a CNN story about it because of a Tweet I wrote while it was being announced.
That’s far from all that I wrote and just a fraction of what the whole staff produced in the five days of Interactive. Looking back on it nearly a month later, I’m kind of amazed.
Photo by Vivien Killilea, via Getty Images Entertainment, provided by Mobli.
Personally
I only told a few people this last year and one of them, eventually, was my editor, but I think a week or two after 2011’s festival I swore to myself that this was the last year I was going to put myself through this, that somehow I was going to get out of covering the festival in 2012, no matter what.
As with having a second kid when you start to forget what having the first one entailed, I stopped thinking like that by the time March 2012 arrived and I’m glad. This year’s fest was busier, larger and crazier than the year before, but I think I did a much better job balancing work and fun. In 2011, the ratio was completely out of whack and I went home feeling like I’d burned myself out and missed it all with my head stuck in a laptop. This year, I made sure to devote lots of evening time to friends I never get to see, to be more open to ditching things on my schedule that weren’t absolutely necessary and, as always, resisted trying to set too many appointments and driving myself crazy trying to get from place to place.
On the Sunday of the festival, I forced myself to miss a panel and instead go see a band I’d been wanting to check out live, Wild Child, at a tiny, practically empty live show. That turned out to be one of the biggest highlights of the entire fest and it was a completely private moment away from from the throngs.
One of the nights of the fest I got to see Eugene Mirman, Kristen Schaal and other comedians do stand-up for a Bob’s Burgers event.
I took my bike to the fest this year. First of all, I forgot I had a bike. I had to pump the tires and wipe off the dust and ride it to make sure the damn thing still worked. Work it did. I even bought a fancy bike lock, transported the bike to Austin and rode it around. The first two days of the fest, it rained, so that was useless, but the rest of the festival it got me where I needed to go much faster, and was a nice way to end each night, crossing the Lady Bird Lake bridge to the newspaper parking lot when I’d usually be trudging back on foot.
I took care of myself more. On two nights of the fest, I stayed at my brother’s new apartment in Austin instead of commuting back to New Braunfels. I made a point of finding decent food to eat and drinking tons of water instead of just skipping meals like I usually did.
And I brought more phone chargers and gear (like a simple plastic bag to put in my bike seat when it rained) that saved me lots of headaches.
Mostly, though, my editor and I just planned the crap out of the festival. We went through 1,000+ panels multiple times, had scads of Google Docs we shared and just really got our heads in the game a lot earlier than we usually do (and our planning usually begins in January). We were just better prepared this year and that preparation paid off, especially when we were thrown curveballs. (In case you haven’t figured it out by now my editor Sarah is really organized and great at planning.)
Good experience, pretty amazing festival, and I don’t even feel exhausted or burned out talking about it.
But talk about it I will stop because it’s practically all that’s come out of my mouth for months and that needs to end. Until, you know… January of 2013.
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.
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!
