Tag: kindle

  • Pointedly

    'Snuggle Mountain,' an app mentioned in this week's Digital Savant column

    My energy level is up in a major, scary way, one of those “LOOK OUT, WORLD!” feelings that the world, it turns out, has largely seen before.

    For a few weeks I wasn’t going to the gym as often and I was eating… not great, and my energy level was just total shit. I was getting sleepy at 10 p.m. even when I’d had a decent night’s sleep and just was getting no writing done in at night, never mind actual house stuff or getting organized.

    Maybe it’s that it got hot again for a weird week, but now that the cool weather is coming back I feel like I’ve got my second (cool) wind. It’s nice. Stuff’s getting done. Waste paper is landing in basketball-hoop-style trash can novelty toys. The blood feels like it’s moving again.

    It’s a good thing because this morning was the first time I’ve done an NPR thing since March. I was invited to go on the show On Point with Tom Ashbrook to talk about the Amazon Kindle Fire and the tablet wars in general. (TABLET WARS! THEY’LL SLATE YOU… THIS CHRISTMAS.) You can listen to the one-hour segment (there were other guests as well) on their web site or just download the MP3 here. I think it went well. I did a ton of cramming and reading over the weekend in preparation, but went in with minimal notes and, in a big departure from when I used to do All Tech Considered, I was able to keep my laptop open and have an Internet connection. Something about having Twitter running in the background and access to information if I need it just calms me. Feeling hermetically sealed often makes me talk faster and feel less confident. Either way, it was nice to be back on the air.

    A few other new things: today we ran a Digital Savant column about an upcoming digital storytelling symposium for children’s book authors and illustrators. There’ll be a lot of talk about ebooks and children’s apps and I’m all over that.

    Last week, I wrote a blog post that ended up running in the paper about the future of vending machines. It was pretty snacky.

    That’s about it right now. I’m looking at a few more weeks of knocking out some stories and columns before I take another vacation in early November, right after Halloween. We’re trying to potty train Lilly at night (no more Pull-Ups!), but that’s challenging. Carolina has learned how to fight back when her sister takes items away from her and that’s… loud. Our fall looks like zoo visits and Wurstfest and putting away the plastic swimming pool and, for once, I’m OK with that. I had a great summer and I don’t feel bitter that it’s gone like I usually do, especially with the awfulness of the temperatures and the drought this year.

    Work is work; a few more staff members are leaving or shifting into other roles and I have a hard time remembering when things were “normal” or if that was ever really a state of being there.

    One thing I saw today really affected me. I went to Goodwill Computer Works to interview someone for a story. As I was wandering around, I saw this hanging up near the front:

    The air went out of my lungs and I just stared, mouth agape. I wrote the story in 1997. I’d just been hired a few months before and it was one of the first big, ambitious stories I wrote. It’s still one of my favorites, a piece about the Apple Lisa back when it looked as if Apple might not even exist in a few more years. A rush of emotions filled me, but I just turned away, smiling. The man I was interviewing walked into the room and it was time to get to work.

  • E-books, panel picking and a 4-year-old

    Nook Color, one of the e-readers we mention in the guide
    I have a big story due at work on Monday, so my last week has been a crunch to try to make sure all the pieces are aligned for that (and that pieces I might have had missing could be rounded up through some reporting I did last week and over the weekend).

    Not that the Digital Savant print column is a month into its life, it’s starting to feel more routine and I’m figuring out how to balance other larger-sized stories along with that deadline and the daily blog posts and other stuff that comes along from day to day.

    On Sunday, I had a big back-to-school tech gift guide in the paper, this year focused on e-book readers and tablets for college students.

    On Monday, the Digital Savant column is about the South by Southwest Interactive PanelPicker, which allows the public to vote on panels for the fest. As far as I’ve been able to tell, it’s the largest tech conference to do anything like that except for maybe BarCamp-style events where the programming is organized after the event starts.

    The story I have due tomorrow should run next Sunday. I’ll write about it when it’s published, but it’s another part of the online identity series I’ve been working on.

    Lilly is 4

    Lilly turned four years old this weekend. It was not entirely unexpected. I mean, we had about four years to prepare for it (and some months more than that, even). Three-to-four is a bigger transition than two-to-three was; at least it feels that way in my life. She’s no longer a toddler and next year she’ll be in kindergarten. She left being a baby long behind her, I just hadn’t quite accepted it. Having an almost-two-year-old in the house does make it seem a little less like the end of an era, at least.

    We had a pizza party for Lilly. She remembered last year’s and raved about it long enough that we figured we should do it again. She can sometimes be cranky and she’s very demanding, as I imagine most 3-4-year-olds are, but this weekend she really turned on the charm and was on her best behavior for almost the whole weekend.

    She asked for specific things this year without prompting, based on trips she’s made to the store recently and, more disturbingly, things she’s started to notice her friends have at her school. That’s how she ended up with a purple unicorn Pillow Pet that, I’m not gonna lie, I’m pretty jealous about.

    I didn’t have any real work or writing projects or plans and we were able to spend more time than usual just hanging out with the kids all weekend. It was wonderful and brief, but it’s nice that we get to do it all over again next weekend and the weekend after that.