Tag: featured

  • We could not save him, we could not help him

    It almost sunk past before I saw it, the short Facebook status update in the Tweetdeck column. A friend had linked to a headline from Gizmodo that read, “The agonizing last words of programmer Bill Zeller.”

    I didn’t know at the time that it was reposted from MetaFilter, where Zeller was an active, cherished member of a large online community.

    I read it and Tweeted it, then I read it again last night, away from work desk, where I could give it my full attention. Needless to say, I went to bed devastated and heartbroken. There’s loss and hurt and then there’s the darkness Zeller describes that I can’t begin to imagine or process or to begin to place in the context of my own life.

    My good friend Tracy E. posted on Facebook that Zeller’s note rocked her, that it means something larger than any of us can understand. Its horror is so complete that it nearly defies analysis. We know trauma like this happen, but rarely are we told, specifically by the victim, how it has manifested over time, until the very end of a life.

    You don’t have to be a parent of young children to be horrified by Zeller’s story and to be haunted by the all-encompassing ruin that abuse had on his life. Can we learn from it? Contextualize it somehow? Stop it from happening again? I’m an optimist, but I’m note even sure I believe that we can. Some commenters on the sites I linked to took Zeller to task for making the wrong choice or for not simply taking the step of talking to someone, anyone. He needed help, but no one knew it. He needed a life vest, but nobody could see that he was drowning in the dark.

    Tonight, by coincidence, someone I’ve had some correspondence with in the past sent me a Twitter message telling me they are planning to commit suicide.

    Even if Zeller’s story wasn’t fresh in my mind, I would have still stopped what I was doing and tried to take some sort of action. I responded immediately by replying, telling this person that they are loved and that those who love them would be devastated. I reached out to someone much closer to this person I thought could help or at least find someone in the area who could check in.

    I didn’t know what else to do, so I waited. I waited for a reply, an acknowledgment, something to tell me that the worst had passed and that life continues.

    Right now, nearly an hour later, I’m still waiting. There’s only silence.

  • Soothsayer

    This week, I took a page from Twitter personality @Omarstradamus‘ playbook and made my predictions for the year in tech for an American-Statesman story. (That year, by the way: 2011.)

    I’ve been covering tech off and on since about 1995, so after a while it gets easier to spot cyclical patterns in the tech industry, to see through some of the marketing hype around a product that a company clearly has no real faith in seeing succeed and to sense when something is really a game changer instead of a flavor of the month. It’s been gratifying to see that a lot of the stuff I spitballed for the article appears to be arriving right on schedule at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (which exhausts me to even think about).

    I also did a column for Tech Monday this week on an author who wrote a book about wikis. Did you know they’re not just for gigantic government document leaks and online encyclopedias?

    And lastly, I did a three-part Digital Savant project on things you can do with your tech to make 2011 a lot easier. I think I screwed the pooch by naming it badly, but it’ll run in print on Sunday with a much better, less convoluted headline, so maybe people will read it then. Part 1 is about getting your photos and videos organized. Part 2 is about backing up your data and part 3 is on de-cluttering your files and your home office. Enjoy!

  • Trailers Without Pity Episode Guide

    Trailers Without Pity was a web video show written, voiced and edited by brothers Omar and Pablo Gallaga. It ran on NBC Universal/Bravo-owned TelevisionWithoutPity.com from October 2008 through 2012 for four runs of shows. Episodes typically ran 4-5 minutes long and featured the “Super Gallaga Bros.” in animated form talking about movie trailers, intercut with stills from the film (often with word balloons or captions) and stock photos.

    After several versions of a test episode called Trailers Trashed (“Season Zero”) for the movie Hancock were made in the Summer of 2008, the eventual format, which is more of a visual recap of a trailer rather than a re-enactment/puppet show, was settled upon and continued to be the template for the series. It was heavily influenced by the format of Daniel “djb” Blau’s The Week Without Pity videos.

    For the purposes of this episode guide, all links from the movie titles go to the original entries where they appeared on Terribly Happy/Bloggystyle. There, the context and back story of each videos is often explained. Due to issues with outdated video embed codes, TWOP links are also provided as direct links to where each video can still be viewed. If you’re trying to view the videos on an iOS device, you’re better off downloading the official iOS TWOP app, where the videos can be viewed on an iPhone/iPad, etc.

     

    Season Zero

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    Season One

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    Season Two

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    Season Three

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    Season Four

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  • Epic

    Warren Spector at his Junction Point office. Photo by Deborah Cannon/AMERICAN-STATESMAN on Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2010.

    More than three years ago, I had lunch with my then-co-worker Lilly Rockwell and game developer Warren Spector, who’d just sold his company to Disney. Warren was happy to meet us, but was clearly excited about a project he was completely unable to tell us about. We knew it was something big, but at the time, we had no idea what.

    Last summer, the leaks started happening and the world started figuring out that Warren’s project with Disney was Epic Mickey, a bold reinvention of Mickey Mouse (and, it turns out, the rebirth of a long-forgotten animated character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the precursor to Mickey).

    Today, a story my editor and I have been talking about for more than a year finally appeared on the front page of the Statesman. Sometimes sitting on a story for that long can suck the wind out of it or put so much pressure on it that you wish it would just go away. That happened once or twice as I was putting it all together, but in the end, I couldn’t be more pleased that we were able to tell Warren’s story (and that I was able to work on it with Brian Gaar, who wrote a separate piece for the business section about the development of the game).

    We also ran a photo gallery online and our videographer Jenny Jones shot a great video (below). Stories like this make me feel incredibly lucky to do what I do. Some people here in town regularly do amazing, world-changing things and when I’m fortunate, I get to write about it.


    Also running the same day was a story I contributed to the Statesman’s big, annual Season for Caring project. I got to meet an amazing family that really needs help and I hope what I wrote can make a difference because the balancing act they’re pulling off now is frankly stunning. If you can help, please do. They are absolutely deserving of assistance for the love they’re giving to these kids.

    Video, by Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon, is here:

  • Holiderring-do

    It’s Thanksgiving in two days and, like I said last time, things seem to be accelerating grimly, spinning outward as if by centrifuge, instead of settling into tedium and sugarness, like my famous (OK, Luby’s famous) sweet potato casserole.

    I spent the end of last week finishing up what I thought would be a front-page story (in the end: not so much) about a University of Texas study about how students and recent grads are using Facebook. S. Craig Watkins, who led the study, is one of the smartest, most interesting people I get to interview regularly and it’s always fun to catch up on what his thoughts are on the state of social media and tech.

    For several weeks before that, I’d been working on a holiday tech gift guide for the Statesman, an annual tradition that always ends up being more work than I remember from the year before. We focused on Internet-video-on-your-TV products like Apple TV, Roku and the Logitech Revue with Google TV. I’ve tried two of those three products and am curious about the third (Apple TV), especially since iPads and iPhones can now do a neat trick with it.

    There’s also a helicopter that flies around and shoots video. You’re welcome!

    Another annual tradition is a similar gift guide I do for Television Without Pity. It’s more a photo gallery than a story, much shorter and with some different items. If you like things like Karaoke Revolution Glee, you may like this guide.

    This week, I’ve been finishing up a profile of game designer Warren Spector, who is releasing Disney Epic Mickey next week. The reporting for that story has been pretty epic itself; I’ll tell you more about it after the story runs on Sunday.

    What was I talking about again? Oh, right! Sweet potato casserole! I gotta get on that for Thursday.

  • Stories and glories

    It’s been a really busy two weeks, at work and at home.

    Off stage, out of sight, we were dealing with a family medical issue that had us feeling worried and vulnerable all of a sudden. Then we got some good news that made things not-so-scary, but we’re still reeling from having even dealt with the problem in the first place. It’s something I really hope to write about soon, but I promised I’d hold off until we had some kind of resolution and we’re just getting there.

    Even with some of the sick time I had to take off, things actually seemed to speed up at work. As the holidays approach, our deadlines are getting tighter and I seem to be just writing and writing and writing.

    The biggest surprise and bright spot recently was that CNN.com approved of a crazy, weird column idea I had months ago about Facebook theology. I pitched it tentatively, sure it would be a strange and unwelcome fit, but the editor I work with over there took a chance on it and ended up liking the result. The piece ran on the site today and this time at least I was prepared for abusive comments and ridicule. (Sample comment: “No disrespect to the author, but this is the dumbest idea for a news article I have ever read.” Right. No disrespect.) It actually hasn’t been as bad as I was expecting and the article has been shared more times on Facebook already than the previous two columns I wrote over the summer. And how adorable is that illustration up there? I really like it.

    The CNN thing made up for having to try to explain to people why I’m not on NPR every week anymore (short answer: I don’t actually know and am afraid to ask). After a rough couple of weeks, it was a nice boost I really needed.

    On the Statesman front, I had a story on the front page today about Gowalla’s big parks deal with Disney, did a story recently about Texas State professor Cindy Royal’s online war of words with Wired over a recent boobalicious magazine cover, a review of the Xbox 360 Kinect that ran in Tech Monday (longer, more exhaustive blog version here) and a Tech Monday column about next week’s Austin intellectual property summit.

    As of this writing, I have another A1 story scheduled for Saturday (fingers crossed), tech gift guides running Sunday in the Statesman and later on Television Without Pity, a profile of Epic Mickey game designer Warren Spector and a Season for Caring story about an amazing Austin family I am lucky to have met. Shit got really busy lately, I’m telling you.

    And on top of all that I’m working on an iPad-related writing project with an Austin company that I’ll tell you more about soon. Busy times, but it’s not all work. I’m watching tons of TV after Lilly and Carolina go to bed at night, trying to finish Franzen’s book Freedom (50 more pages!), listening to great podcasts on my way to and from work and trying to enjoy life right now. I looked back on the summer and realized I was really having a hard time adjusting to our new reality (having a toddler and an infant in the house) and was really crabby a lot of the time.

    Given the recent things that have happened, I’m letting myself enjoy the situation a little more and trying not to stress out so much. I know that if I don’t relax and enjoy it, I’m going to regret missing out on some really wonderful times with my girls.