Tag: digital savant

  • The columnist

    This is what I look like in the 'Star Wars' universe. Hey, shut up, Bantha are DELICIOUS!

    Back in August, we started running Digital Savant in the paper once a week (a lot of it generated by the long-running blog that I write) as a column. Work-wise, it’s not a whole lot different, perhaps just a little more structured than writing the same kinds of topics on the blog and with a firmer weekly deadline. Sometimes I’m so caught up in updating the blog and working on other stories that I forget that the column runs in the paper on Mondays and that once a week newspaper readers are subjected to my grinning face, often way too early in the morning.

    But it’s been nice to have that routine. I was initially dreading it and, in truth, there are some weeks when my Wednesday deadline looms and I think, “This is going to be embarrassing for all involved,” but it usually turns out OK, and sometimes better than OK. Sometimes I’m really pleased at how the columns turn out and that they definitely have a voice and a point of view that isn’t otherwise represented in the paper. (That point of view I’ll call “Extreme goof dad nerd” until I come up with a better description.)

    I haven’t posted about the last two columns because I took a trip to Atlanta or a social media panel that I was moderating (I found out a week before that they wanted me physically present; I thought I was going to be beamed in somehow via Internets and telephonies and magicks). Someone emailed me, “How are your travel arrangements coming” and I stared stupidly at my screening, thinking, “My what?”

    Going to Atlanta was lots of fun since I never get to travel, but I’m still catching up with everything that this brief 36-hour trip pushed aside.

    So here’s the two columns that ran recently.

    The first one is a sort-of review/set of impressions about the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I’ve been playing pretty regularly since the holidays. In the column I make clear how much of an MMO newbie I still am. I found a way to embarrass myself even in an online game where I don’t know anyone.

    It’s very tough to review an MMO, impossible, really. It would take months, if not years. The best you can do is relate some of your own experience and compare it to other gaming experiences you’ve had.

    The other column ran this Monday and it’s a list of conversation-starters for South by Southwest Interactive, which is less than a month away. I also posted a blog version that’s full of links to all the panels I talk about in the piece.

    On Saturday, I attended TEDxAustin and followed it up with a big, detailed blog post rundown of it. It really was an inspiring day, full of great ideas and speakers who are out there kicking ass and (presumably) creating big-data ways to take names and do something with said ass-kicking/name-taking database. I’m still processing what I can take away from the experience personally, but one thing I hope to do is just get out of my own head a little bit and get out there in the community more. I feel like I’ve been living the last two or three years in a hidey hole, trying to hold down the parenting fort and the work fort and several other forts that perhaps are not build up to code and Tweeting or writing from behind a protective screen. It needed to be that way, but perhaps that isolation is going away a little.

  • 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.

  • Triple play

    Happy New Year!

    This was a 2012 of firsts. It was the first time I didn’t make it to midnight. In between watching and mocking the Rockin’ Eve With a Corpse, a Plastic Man, Jenny McCarthy and Fergie, I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic as I lay on the floor with the laptop and I literally fell asleep on the computer, my online Twi’lek avatar running fruitlessly into a wall. It was kind of pathetic. This was at 11:30 p.m. I gave up and went to sleep without observing the ball drop (I have two and I can see that whenever I like). (My wife and the kids had gone to bed hours earlier.)

    It was also the first time I didn’t feel like I was missing out on going out and getting drunk. Staying home and lying under tons of blankets sounded way, way better.

    (I’m boring. It’s OK. I’ve grown into it nicely.)

    My vacation unfolded nicely and slowly over about 10 days. I wrote furiously in the two weeks leading up to vacation so that I wouldn’t have to think about work while I was gone and for once, that all worked out OK. I set up my work mail on my phone for the first time recently and rather than being an annoying distraction, it was actually nice to be able to peep in, delete messages and come back to work today without 1,000 unattended emails.

    The column that ran in the paper on Monday was written more than two weeks ago, but it was a look ahead to some new stuff emerging in Austin (a neat little locator device for the iPhone, the City of Austin’s revamped website, the great website and app Make Pixel Art), and it was nice to cover three topics in one piece.

    My first day back at work was productive and not nearly as stressful as I was expecting. I got myself organized, deleted even more emails and responded to the ones that needed attention, and got back to the business of being at work again. It was nice to put on actual pants that don’t have a drawstring and to hop into my car and drive purposefully toward a lucrative destination.

    I even had time to write a list of tech resolutions for the blog.

    I was pretty low key over the break, allowing myself to be really low-energy and in Ultra Chill mode. But now I’m ready to burst with energy again and do a bunch of stuff.

    READY? LET’S GO.

  • Omarstradamus returns

    No, not the Twitter account, just my now-annual attempt to gaze into the future of personal tech. It was Monday’s Digital Savant column, written ahead of vacation, predicting what I think might happen in 2012 in technological areas important to our lives such as:

    • What’s the deal with Netflix?
    • And Facebook? What’s up with THAT?
    • OH MY GOD, WHAT ABOUT APPLE!? We should have asked about Apple first! Tell us, O Oracle!
    • Will I die? Please be honest.

    Incidentally, here were my 2011 predictions. I’m so glad I didn’t predict we’d be in flying cars by December like I had originally planned.

    I have another column coming next Monday that I wrote before the lengthy vacation into which I am currently nuzzling my warm puppy nose.

    In the paper this week, I also had some blog pieces reverse-published including this write-up of Grande Communications’ new TiVo Premere box and a review of Sony’s 24″ 3D Display.

    Mostly this week it’s been quiet and I’ve been trying to rest up after a really, really busy weekend with family and with the girls. One break in the vacation that was a surprise, though, was that I got a call on Friday to appear on NPR’s Tell Me More. The live segment was produced on Tuesday morning and you can hear/read the whole thing on this page. It’s about Amazon’s Price Check app and small retailers. I had a whole page of notes about how the app works, where the tech comes from and who else is doing stuff in this area, but we didn’t really get to any of that. Instead, I got to say, in a nutshell, “Yeah, I can see why business owners would be upset.” Very different pace than All Things Considered or At Issue with Ben Merens, but the behind-the-scenes of it was that they run a very tight to-the-minute ship even though it sounds pretty free-flow. Even when things like this are unpaid (and the only time I’ve ever been paid for radio stuff was with All Tech), it’s still a good lesson to see how these shows work and to get a sense of what their producers do or don’t know about tech culture and trends.

    Riding' presents. Merry Christmas!

    The girls I mentioned before have been running us ragged, fighting over new toys and getting up at all hours of the night, completely wired and destabilized for the holiday season. They went back to daycare yesterday and I’ve been enjoying the relative daytime quiet before they come home and it turns into something out of Mad Max to get them bathed, fed and to bed.

    On the other hand, it was nice not to have deadlines and a bunch of stuff to write and to be able to just hang out with them or with family without stuff hanging over my head like most years. Why was I thinking I’d be doing a bunch of work this week? That was dumb. I’m going to go run through like 20 hours of sitcoms, read some books and do some baking instead. Who wants cookies?