Tag: gadgets

  • Gifts!

    Every year around this time I usually put together a holiday tech gift guide for the Statesman and a separate one for Television Without Pity, working off a big master list and then deciding which items should go where (with a little bit of overlap).

    This year the gift guides diverged a little more than usual because we decided to make the Statesman one more locally focused with products produced by Austin companies or powered by Austin technology (or, in a few cases, just stuff that would appeal to Central Texans). So the TWOP gift guide ends up being a lot more general and TV-focused while the Statesman one has a more local feel.

    This is probably way more information than you care to have.

    Which is all to say that while these packages often look really easy: just a bunch of product images with really short descriptions, they’re a huge challenge to put together. I save email pitches all year in a folder called “Gift Guide Tech” and I literally go through those emails one by one when it’s time to put these stories together. This year there were about 170+ emails and more kept coming in as I was working on it. Some of those emails included information for 10 to 20 products each. I used to put all my picks in one big Excel spreadsheet and work from that, but this year I ditched the spreadsheet and just made a simple list and that saved me a little bit of time.

    I’ve been trying in general to save time on the things I do and not waste it, especially at work where it feels like deadlines are closing in and the year is already drawing to a close.

    Like most of you, I’m just hanging on for Turkey Day, looking forward to just relaxing for a day or two and not thinking too hard about what’s left to do in 2011, which has proven to be a challenging, very weird year for me that I’m still trying to figure out.

  • Holiday tech support

    ‘I am seriously going to reach through this phone line and kill the next person that calls it an iTouch.’

    On Monday, I had a story run in the American-Statesman about getting good tech support/customer service, which is an issue that seems to hit critical mass a day or two after Christmas after the dust and eggnog have settled. There’s some good resources in the piece and, knock on wood, I haven’t had to use any of them yet this year. Enjoy!

    I’m on vacation right now and trying to do as little as possible that doesn’t involve pajamas, television or ice cream. So far, I’ve been wildly successful.

  • 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.