It’s nice to go into a comedy and know that you’re in competent hands for a change.
We’re still knocking out videos, but haven’t yet made a decision about what we’re doing after our contract is up in October. I think we could both really use the free time, but on the other hand, the videos are still a lot of fun to do and don’t seem to be taking as long to produce as they did when we started. In any case, enjoy! Here’s the link to the video if it doesn’t appear embedded below.
Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez, Austin American-Statesman
In today’s paper, we ran a roundup of smart phones that I put together. It includes the iPhone 4, the Sprint EVO 4G, the Verizon Droid X, the T-Mobile Samsung Vibrant, the BlackBerry Torch and the Dell Streak (which is either a mini-tablet or a comically large Android-based phone depending on who you ask).
For the last few months, since right before the iPhone 4 came out, I’ve been pretty much flooded with devices. The EVO came first, then two iPhones (Apple wanted reviewers to be able to get wowed by FaceTime), then a burst of smart phones that arrived when I started requesting them for the photo shoot that would yield the image above.
The story was originally supposed to be what we call a “Charticle” (chart + article!), but for space reasons ended up a more traditional introduction + info box.
I’ll tell you that while it’s fun to get to play around with different phones and try them out, it’s not fun to have 6 or 7 phones in the house in addition to the ones we own ourselves. It becomes a constant game of keeping track of chargers, updating software, updating apps and navigating tons of menus. It’s a little stressful, if I’m being honest, and I’m kind of relieved to be sending a bunch of them back this week. (The Torch has already been returned and a batch of phones go back on Monday.) But then two more phones arrived late last week (Sprint Epic 4G and AT&T Captivate) for some follow-up reviewing.
It’s getting harder and harder to do real reviews of smart phones because they’re basically computers now with their own software ecosystem and people want to know not only how the phone performs but what apps are good for it. Reviewing a smart phone now without trying out some of the best apps available for it isn’t really acceptable anymore. (It always amuses me when I see some tech writers post a review of a smart phone the day it debuts when it’s clear they’ve only had an hour or two to play around with it. Way to be unhelpful to any potential buyer who’ll be stuck with it on a two-year contract.)
I also posted a blog entry with my reviews of the some of the phones in the roundup and links to other reviews for the ones I wasn’t able to get to. I had play time with all the phones in the roundup, but some I had a lot more time with than the others. The iPhone and EVO I had about two months to try them out while the BlackBerry had to be sent back within a week after we received it. (Plus, BlackBerry has an operating system that I’ve never been able to get my head around. )
Our newest Trailers Without Pity is about the retired-assassins comic book adaptation Red, starring Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren.
The video gave me the opportunity to bust out the Morgan Freeman impression I’d been storing in the closet and, ironically, the opportunity to throw in Viagra and adult diaper jokes while taking the filmmakers to task for Viagra and adult diaper jokes we only can assume will be in the movie.
Clearly we hold filmmakers to a much higher standard than we hold ourselves. I am OK with that.
Illustration by Don Tate II, Austin American-StatesmanI haven’t done a lot of NPR this summer (but I’m supposed to tomorrow, no, really this time) and except for some CNN assignments that are long past, things have actually slowed down quite a bit. When Pablo and I aren’t doing our little videos, I’ve just been watching lots of TV-on-DVD, playing some video games and spending more time than usual with my daughters. It’s been nice.
Where things have been busier than usual is at work where I’ve had three pretty large-scale, reporting-intensive stories in a row to work on in the summer. I don’t know what your office is like, but in the summer, our office changes quite a bit. There’s lots of people going on vacations, an influx of interns and a flood of summer movies, summer concerts, video games and, for me, lots of smart phones hitting the market.
Feels like I’ve been working harder this summer than usual and there’ve been more opportunities to get on the front page or do big packages for the chunky Sunday paper. In today’s paper, I did a story about e-textbooks, which was an attempt to answer a simple question: “Where are we with electronic textbooks in Texas?” The answer was fairly complicated even though everyone I talked to on the subject for interviews was speaking along the same lines. There’s great potential, but we’re at the very start of what’s going to be a significant change in the way kids learn and interact with materials in the classroom. Obvious, yes, but the law changes in Texas are pretty major and will probably affect the way other states do things as well.
Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez, Austin American-StatesmanIn Monday’s paper, I have a shorter, much simpler story for the “There’s a Creator for That” series about an Austin company that did a Mountain Biking Trails app. I really love the photo that went with this one (at right). These app features have been a lot of fun to do and are easy to put together quickly. (Unlike e-textbooks, which took weeks.)
I mentioned earlier that I’m getting to spend more time with the kids. Lilly turned 3 a week and a half ago and we’re still trying to wrap our brains around having a 3-year-old in the house. She’s getting to be fun and funny and full of questions (some brilliant, others ones we wish she’d ask less frequently). We had a small pizza party for her birthday and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so excited. Today, we took her for an all-day trip to Schlitterbahn and she went on a tube ride that was much scarier than we were expecting. She was terrified the whole way and at one point got separated from me on a tall slide where you have to go one-by-one. My heart was breaking as she got caught up there, without me, starting to cry, but when she came down, after the splashing, she smiled hugely and said, “I did it!” She was so proud that she went down that huge incline alone.
It’s been like that a lot lately. I just watch her grow and conquer and everything feels like it’ll burst inside. It’s been a good summer.
It’s an interesting thing to make a video mocking a movie like this because it’s based on real people and events. I met Mark Zuckerberg a few years ago at South by Southwest Interactive and sat front row when he (perhaps unwittingly) threw a reporter to the wolves in front of an audience of several hundred people.
Mark’s a very smart guy and seems to truly believe what he says about privacy going away and Facebook’s potential to be a huge avenue for change in the world. He’s got a very young man’s confidence and all the resources in the world at his disposal right now. Which is also what makes him a little scary and very hard to relate to. When people like Diane Sawyer interview him, they will ask a perfectly reasonable question, and he’ll give a perfectly reasonable-sounding answer to a question that is different than the one which was asked. It’s a neat trick, but not one that endears you to people, really.
I can’t wait to see how the movie portrays him. I just saw Zombieland a few nights ago and really liked Jesse Eisenberg in it and think he’ll do a great job.
As for the video, it’s nice that all the time Pablo and I wasted on Facebook has finally paid off in some small way; this was a very easy script to write.
This was my arm, just one of the places the rash spread. WTF?Last week, I had a rash. It was really bad.
Let me just say that I must be getting old enough not to care or mature enough to be comfortable in my own (fucking itchy) skin because 10 years ago when I started this site, I would never have started a journal entry admitting to a rash I had. I wasn’t married and that’s not the kind of thing you say when you want the ladies to think you are disease-free and ready to party. (These days I am disease-free, but not at all ready or able to party.)
We’ve come a long way, you and I, so I know that when I tell you that I developed a terrible, itchy rash all over my body, that you won’t automatically assume it involved venereal parts and naughty fluid exchanges. Not that kind of rash.
Of course, that makes it much harder to diagnose. What happened was that on Monday of last week, I got home and noticed a pretty raw, itchy rash on both sides of my neck and along my waistline where you sometimes get those lines if your belt is on too tight. I was wearing a fairly new shirt. It had been washed and worn before, but I figured since we’ve hit triple-degree heat in Austin, it was no big deal.
That night, the rash spread to my stomach, my arms and the tops of my feet and got crazy, stupid itchy. I was scratching all night. I didn’t sleep and kept shuffling to the bathroom to see where it was going. It was like watching those Wargames computers show where all the missiles would hit in a global thermonuclear war. Except all the hot spots were on my person and it sucked.
The next day I worked from home and saw a doctor. They gave me a shot on my ass (yes, bent me over the exam table and put it right on my ass. Not the hip. Not the thigh. Right on my ass.) and prescribed steroids and a cream. They told me it could be a mite (might it?) or an allergic reaction to something, but had no real way of knowing for sure, so the doctor said we should treat both. The medications seemed to do the trick, after I slathered myself in cream and slept in the guest room that night.
By this point, Rebecca hadn’t gotten any rash and Lilly hadn’t either, even though she often sleeps in our bed with us. I hadn’t eaten anything unusual in the days leading to the rash and hadn’t been outside anywhere that I’d be exposed to any weird weeds or plants.
I went to work that Wednesday with the rash fading and the itching going away. I noticed a moldy mug of tea on my desk and got rid of it, wondering if that might have triggered an allergic reaction. Everything seemed fine until I got home and the rash came back full force, and in different areas. It never went near my tenders and biscuits, but it was now on my thighs, the backs of my legs, all around my armpits and, most alarmingly, around the edges of my face. I spent another shitty, sleepless night scratching and being miserable in the guest bed.
I called in sick Thursday and went straight back to the doctor. This time, they prescribed a different cream and a different steroid treatment, but also set me up for a blood test to rule out anything more serious. That was fun, especially when I found out I was being tested for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, presumably the most itchy and spotted of the Rocky Mountain fevers.
Again, it went away. By Friday it was faded and by the weekend it was completely gone. What happened?
The initial round of blood tests came back negative for anything bacterial. A week later, I got a call that the doctor wanted to see me in person to discuss the results of the rest of my blood tests. I tried not to worry or think too much about it, but when you get a phone call like that it’s hard not to imagine the horrible scenarios that could happen in that tiny exam room.
I wondered how I’d react if I found it was something life-threatening or even if I was told, “It’s cholesterol poisoning. You have to never eat a Dorito again.”
After waiting two days to get to an appointment and another hour in the exam room, I was told, cheerily, “You tested negative for syphilis.”
I didn’t know I’d been tested for that. “That’s… good!” I said.
I also tested negative for the Rocky Mountain stuff and for everything else they screened. My white blood cell count wasn’t elevated and everything else was normal. No answers.
Of course, that didn’t stop the Internet, via Twitter and Facebook, from instantly diagnosing me the moment I posted the photo above and said I had a rash. Several said it was a contact allergy, probably poison ivy. Others said it could be a gluten allergy (never mind that I eat wheat bread, rice, pizza and every other starch in the world on a daily basis with no reaction). One person offered (and actually did) send me magic Bentonite clay that is supposed to draw out the ions. Of course. Fucking IONS! The clay got here after the rash was gone, so I didn’t get to test it out for that, unfortunately.
It’s a mystery still and I feel fine now. The rash hasn’t returned. But it made me very aware suddenly of how quickly an unexpected health problem could completely upturn my life. I missed a full day of work and had to work from home a second day so people at my office wouldn’t see my hideous skin-of-fire. I paid about four separate co-pays, which were all cheap, but would have been crazy if I didn’t have decent insurance. And thank goodness it was nothing contagious that the kids might catch. We’re a very healthy family; we hardly ever get sick, but this was a reminder that we often take it for granted that we’re not constantly suffering from some ailment or another.
I mean, it was just a rash. It was itchy and uncomfortable and unsightly and it nearly drove me insane when it spread at one point to the damn palms of my hands to the point where even typing felt horrible.
But it could have been a lot worse.
I mean, damn. Genital warts, you know? Imagine that.
