Tag: micro

  • Calamity

    Not my actual back, but this is my blog and I can pretend.
    Not my actual back, but this is my blog and I can pretend.

     

    Nothing major happened the last two weeks since I wrote that monster blog entry and promised myself that I would write much shorter entries more often.

    A few personal heroes died: Roger Ebert and Jonathan Winters. At home, lots of little horrible things happened that kind of destabilized things around here.

    The most significant was something I mentioned last time; our girls got a stomach bug. What I didn’t know at the time was that it would take a few days longer for them to fully recover and that the whole week after Easter was going to be a lot of changing work shifts and hoping that neither kid threw up at school and got send home. (That happened twice.) Luckily, my wife and I both fought off whatever the bug was, although we each had a dicey day where we thought we were getting it.

    Then my mother got it, much worse than the kids. Then my father in law got it. Then other members of the family reported other ailments. And this is right after I’d just been knocked on my ass for a full day with horrible allergies.

    Things were starting to go back to normal as the kids got over their bi-directional expulsion of bodily fluids and then suddenly I started getting a weird pain in my back.

    It wasn’t suddenly in one way: I began to feel some back issues right after South by Southwest and I thought a massage I got soon after had fixed most of it. But this one specific spot on my back kept getting worse and worse until finally it got to where I couldn’t stand for too long without a sharp pain mid-back, just to the right of my spine. It hurt to sit, it hurt to stand, it hurt even to lie down sometimes.

    Maybe it was from lugging a heavy laptop bag around during the festival or maybe I just pulled something at the gym. I had no idea what was up and it kept getting worse. So I saw a doctor.

    I don’t have a primary down here in New Braunfels, so I went through my insurance and just picked one at random. It turned out to be in a really nice house-like building that specialized in back pain, allergies and, I guess massage therapy.

    I won’t bore you with all the details, but the conclusion was this: they thought it was a muscle spasm and they injected a needle full of saline right the fuck in the muscle that was giving me problems. They warned me it would hurt and boy were they not lying. I stifled a scream as I stood there with a needle in me and my muscle spasming worse than ever.

    It started to feel better immediately and they prescribed me some anti-inflammatory meds and some serious muscle relaxer medicine that I can only take at night before I go to bed. That stuff knocked me out two days in a row and is not to be trifled with.

    The back feels a lot better but that spot of pain still comes and goes a little. I really don’t know how people who live with chronic pain do it. It’s at the point where all I want is to feel normal again and not have to worry about a physical problem getting worse and taking me out of commission. It seems like small potatoes given the health issues others have to deal with, but all this has been happening right around my 38th birthday and I am very aware that I’m at the stage where shit’s going to start breaking down, some of it irrevocably, and I should stop expecting my body to just stay the way it is forever without problems. There’s certainly more to come.

     

     

    As sometimes happens with this blog, I wrote the above and left it unpublished, planning to go back in the next day and add images and links to flesh it out.

    That was Sunday night. On Monday, Boston was bombed.

    I didn’t feel at all like going in and looking over what I wrote about back pain and a stomach bug and publishing it that night.

    Apart from something so significant making all of our problems look so much smaller, it just felt all too familiar to me and the gut-punch to the stomach never really goes away. Not after they figure out what happened, not after they find the person or people who did it, not after the punishment is dealt.

     

    Some new writing stuff: last week, my Digital Savant column was a sampling of reader emails about a column I did on technology gripes. The reader responses were so good, I rolled them together into a piece and gave my own feedback to their problems.

    Clay Shortall shows off some of the 3-D printing tools of his trade. Photo by Christina Burke, Austin American-Statesman
    Clay Shortall shows off some of the 3-D printing tools of his trade. Photo by Christina Burke, Austin American-Statesman

     

    This week’s column is about the future of 3-D printing and how quickly we may see it go mainstream. I think this is something that’s going to evolve really quickly and get into our homes a lot sooner than you might expect. Not everyone will need one that soon and it’s going to take a much easier learning curve, but I think it won’t be long before some version of 3-D printing becomes very, very popular and widespread.

    The last two Micro features were about Wi-Fi calling and Bitcoins.

    I had a few other things to say about Bitcoin on Twitter.

    I also had my first front-page story in a while, a Q&A on Google Fiber coming to Austin. (It was paired with the main Statesman news story, which you can find here.) There were rumors about it starting the Friday before the announcement and it snowballed into a pretty sizable national story by the time the official announcement happened. I was there and it felt a lot like a pep rally only instead of your football coach and principal, it was the mayor, the governor and a bunch of Google people telling us how lucky Austin is to be getting such a cool thing. We shall see how long it takes; if there’s one thing Austinites like to do is complain about things that don’t meet their expectations.

    And one other story I did was about Austin’s Rooster Teeth, who are going independent and closing in on 2 billion (yes BILLION) views on YouTube. There’s also a separate blog post with some more background info on their 10th anniversary.

     

     

    Our Space Monkeys addressed the situation in North Korea and dealt with breakfast cereal mascots.

    For my 38th(!) birthday, we kept it pretty low-key. We went to San Antonio for lunch, I saw a movie (The Evil Dead; it was fine, not great) with my brother and played “Zombicide” that night, which was lots of fun.

    Took the girls to the Children’s Museum this last weekend and they painted these for you:

  • Post-fest

    Honestly the best thing I saw at SXSW, maybe?

     

    The hardest blog posts to write, I’ve found, are the ones you don’t want to write but feel you have to write.

    Someone else has already wordplayed a term, “Oblogatory,” out of this, right? I’m afraid to Google it and fall down a rabbit hole.

    In fact this whole blog entry should have been called “Rabbit holes” because for the last few weeks, I’ve been allowing myself to slip down into them in order to not talk about South by Southwest Interactive.

    You guys, you have no idea how much I don’t want to talk about SXSW anymore. Last week, at a meeting with one of my editors, I fretted that I honestly have no idea whether I should keep mining the festival for stories and trends or move on in case readers are just completely sick of SXSW.

    And that’s the weird part. I’m not really sick of it. I had a pretty great time at the festival and I’m not one of those people who gets online and bitches every year about how it’s not the same as it used to be or that last year’s was so much better or whatever. Every year is different, even if some things stay the same on the reporting/working side of things and I found lots to be excited about and keep me busy.

    But it was the busy that really killed me this year. Some years, I have so much fun and so many cool things happen that they far outweigh the sense of work and I end up feeling euphoric about the experience. This year, as seems to happen on odd-numbered years, I came out more exhausted than exhilarated, my body a wreck from carrying a heavy laptop, walking and biking in rain, and just keeping incredibly long hours with not enough sleep.

    This was a problem even after the festival. The way it usually works is that I spend weeks gearing up, work the five days (Friday-Tuesday) straight through, come in to work Wednesday to write a wrap up and then take a few days off to rest and recuperate.

    Things went fine until I went in to work that Wednesday when the fest ended and was completely paralyzed, buried under a mountain of blog posts, essays and emails about the fest that I felt I had to get through before I could properly articulate what it all meant.

    Distractions kept coming up and by midday I wasn’t even close to getting through that stack. And then the day ended, my deadline passed, and still I had the barest flicker of an idea of what I had seen that could tie it all together. My brain was shutting down, having been scheduled to detach from the festival by day’s end. It ran away without me.

    I spent that night at home barreling through and writing anyway, trying to make something cohesive out of an experience that has gotten bigger than my ability to write authoritatively about it, at least in that moment.

    The column, much longer than budgeted, was turned in and pushed through the system to be published the following Monday.

    That Thursday night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept waking up, remembering things that should have been in that column, threads I should have followed and memorable bits I forgot to include. Then I would remind myself, half-awake, that the column was already too long and nothing more would fit. But my brain wouldn’t stop working. It just whirred and whirred.

    And that really scared me.

    It’s why instead of writing a bunch of follow-up articles and blog posts related to the fest, I’ve tried to move on, mostly unsuccessfully. Two months+ of obsessing about one thing and trying to outpace everyone else in somehow mastering it as a subject hollowed me out this year. It’s taken a while to not feel antsy even thinking about it, honestly.

    So enough about that. I’ll link later on in this post to most of the stuff I wrote/was a part of during the festival, but honestly, I can already use another break from talking about SXSW.

     

    Things that are not SXSW:


    Video games

    Post-fest meant I had some free time to do things like vacuum the filthy floor, which accumulates child-crumbs on the daily, and to finally play some video games for the first time in months.

    I finally got my hands on a Nintendo Wii U which is great in some ways (some of the games are OK, I love the overall design) and terrible in others (sloooooow menus, very limited GamePad connectivity range) and really cumbersome update/install processes that seem to come up with every single new game you insert or buy online.

    I also played a bit of Tomb Raider (much better than I was expecting), a great downloadable game called Bit.Trip Runner 2, Lego City Undercover and most of all BioShock Infinite, which is taking up most of my gaming time right now. BioShock was my favorite game of 2007, though to be fair, Team Fortress 2 came out that year and I’ve spent many more hours on that. But that’s only to say I’ve been waiting a long time for a proper follow-up after I was let down by BioShock 2, which I didn’t bother finishing.

    Infinite is gorgeous and brave in a way that so many games aren’t and I’m enjoying just falling into that world and taking my time with it.

    Kickstarter and tabletop gaming

    e552933abbf07c4ced415b7f0f4721bc_large

    Speaking of games, I seem to have developed a quick-spreading intense addiction to both Kickstarter and to tabletop/board games all of a sudden, mostly due to one great game called “Zombicide.”

    My brother owns it and was part of the original Kickstarter last year.  We’ve played the game a few times and I really have grown to love it. It’s complex and takes forever to play, but it’s just really well-designed, has gorgeous miniatures and just really puts you in the mindset of trying to survive a zombie apocalypse; it’s basically a high-end Walking Dead board game.

    This year, they rolled out a much more ambitious Kickstarter campaign for a Season Two game and an expansion.  At first, I was just going to let it go by because my brother was planning to get it anyway and he’s the only person I play with. But he said, “What if I move someday?” and that got me thinking I should get my own copy and then I decided I should just get all three and then the stretch goal items hooked me in even more and before I knew it I had pledged a couple of hundred dollars to a game I’m not even sure I have room in the house to store.

    You guys, the Kickstarter was so exciting. I downloaded the Kickstarter app and started checking it every day for updates and new stretch goal items and it was just such a sorely-needed rabbit hole for me to fall into at the time. The campaign finally ended on (Easter!) Sunday at more than $2.5 million, making it break the record for a Kickstarter board game project. Last I checked there were over 30,000 comments from geeks completely obsessing over every detail of the game, its components and its (incredibly generous) stretch goal prizes.

    I won’t get the games until September, but I’ve also fallen into a sub-rabbit hole of looking into how I’ll paint the figurines. Suddenly I’m researching acrylics and brushes and X-Acto knives and watching paint tutorial videos.  I’ve also been playing the “Penny Arcade” card game and I gave my brother a copy of “Cards Against Humanity” for his birthday.

    I’ve unwisely mentioned this ugly new hobby to a few people (which I haven’t even started; I’m in pre-hobby mode). A co-worker astutely noted that this was also a hobby of the 40-Year-Old Virgin. Other friends expressed sorrow and chagrin at the way I’ve managed to find a new geek low on the eve of my 38th birthday. Hey, better late the never! Now go away. I’m gonna be painting some zombies. I may dip them in Army Painter dark shader.

    Disney World

    Here we go...

    We booked a trip for June to Disney World. I’ll have a lot more to say about this soon, I’m sure, but we waited until the girls were both potty trained and until they were old enough to appreciate the trip.  It’s crazy expensive, but we’ve been planning to do this pretty much since Lilly was born so we’re just going to hand over the wallet and enjoy it.

    Easter: a stomach bug intrudes

    Easter weekend was great except for the part where Carolina threw up four times in one day. She rallied enough to enjoy the first of two big Easter egg hunts and you wouldn’t have known she was sick (except for the puking), but by the next day, she was tired and much worse for wear, having gotten gunshy about eating anything.

    She seemed to be getting better but then Lilly threw up and suddenly we had two sick kids in the house and the terror of worrying that we’d get it too.

    So far, so good on that front. The girls are recovering, we haven’t gotten sick ourselves (yet! hope not!) and after juggling our work schedules around and waiting through a day when no more puking happened, they should be back at school soon.

    Like I said, it didn’t seem to slow them down during Easter:

    Cascarones '13

     

    Lilly makin' faces

     

    Carolina gets aggressive

     

     Writing stuff

    It sure doesn’t look like it around here, but I’ve actually been writing every night, even when I’ve been feeling sick from brutal allergy attacks. The only time I didn’t write was during SXSW and that was, of course, lots of work writing.

    I hit a writing milestone this week, the halfway mark on something I’ve been working on since December, and that filled me with hope. It’s probably the most sustained amount of time I’ve spent on one writing thing in a really long while and I just keep thinking, “If I can just keep writing three pages a day, it will get done. Just three more pages. Three more pages.” I tell myself that every night, even when I’m nearly falling asleep at the keyboard.

    Screen Shot 2013-04-02 at 11.10.56 PM

    The comic plugs along, proudly posting every single Wednesday even during crazy festivals that may draw my and Pablo’s time and attention away.

    Since last we spoke, Meany has tried some terrible stand-up comedy, our Kickstarter addiction was turned into a comic and we addressed the cute sloth from the movie The Croods.

    The sketch show/play I helped write, Pulga Nation, that I mentioned last time went really well. I didn’t think I’d get to see it, but it turned out the Friday night of SXSW Interactive allowed me enough time to slip away and catch 20 minutes of the early show and the entirety of the late-night show. I was thrilled to see it and so tickled to hear two audiences laugh at these jokes we wrote. There was a talk-back after the first show in which a person asked me why we killed off an elderly character so soon in the show. The same person told me afterward that the same sketch I wrote did not need a blowjob joke. “But that was the best part!” I said brightly. The man was not amused and shot back, “No, no it wasn’t.”

    Blowjob joke notwithstanding, the production did very well and we’re already meeting to talk about what’s next. I don’t know if the show will be re-mounted, toured or what, but it sounds like everyone involved wants to keep working together and that there’ll be more Mexcentrics in the future. So that’s really good news.

    Really, I’ve been good except for the parts where I was so sick I had to stay in bed for most of a Saturday because of allergies or the part where my daughters have been vomiting as if for comedic effect. Spring came early and it’s filled me with hope and purpose in some ways and frustration and impatience with the parts of my life that don’t feel like they’re keeping up.

    Anyway, here’s the SXSW coverage and other Statesman stuff I was busy writing since the last update. It’s a long list. Strap in!

    Some Vines I shot at the fest (Mashable listed me in ones to follow during SXSW):

    And a few more photos, ending with my encounter with Grumpy Cat.

    LEGO Man

     

    My beautiful work lawn

    Daniel Tiger + Curious George

    Peter Sagal, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer

    Guitar Shawn is guitaring, probably named Shawn

    Tina, Me, Emma and Grumpy

    Damn, girl, you’re telling me.

     

  • This is better than rejuvenation!

    Things improved dramatically, almost all at once, to the point where I wondered if it was all a coincidence or if it was a chain reaction, a one-thing-leads-to-another fixx, if you will, where the outlook becomes brighter on everything because of self-fulfilling optimistic action.

    Maybe it was all coincidence.

    I’m not going to complain or question. I just know that things that felt stuck just over a week ago seem to have greased their way past the logjam. Not only am I working on one of the things I thought was hopelessly stalled, but I have a totally new thing that popped into my head that I can’t wait to work on as well, something that sounds so fun that it’s all I can do to stop myself from putting everything (including my day job, eating and sleeping — I mean my day job AND ALSO eating and sleeping, not my day job, which involves eating and sleeping for money, though holy shit, wouldn’t that be awesome?) aside to start working on it immediately.

    Our girls have been behaving better lately and getting more sleep, which seems like some kind of pre-Christmas miracle because it means that I, too, get more sleep and am less cranky.

    And on top of all that, work has been pretty good lately, I have vacation coming up and a friend of mine invited me to come help pitch a completely and totally separate thing that could turn into something that might be a cool thing that I would like to do and share with you should it become an actual thing!

    Things! They are happening.

    Also, and perhaps because of the flow of good things lately, I came out of my upside down turtle shell a bit and invited a few close friends out for lunch, a sign that I really don’t want to be at home all time bitterly wondering why I’m at home all the time. And I’m having fun writing again. That sounds like a given, but I’ve had real dread and anxiety about writing this year that simply wasn’t there before. Being able to look forward to writing instead of dreading it is kind of a radical thing for me right now. It has me bouncing off the walls with new energy, feeling renewed.

    There’s renewal and newness in the air all around.

    One friend of mine just had a baby, another friend is about to have one and a third friend has a slightly older, but pretty recently newborn baby. Babies are coming out, people are getting engaged, other people are breaking up or moving away or moving back to Austin or selling things or making things and for the first time in a while, I feel like I’m part of the community of things happening and people doing. It’s a good feeling, one I really missed.

    Here’s some of what I’ve been writing lately at work.

    Photo by Jay Janner / Austin American-Statesman

    I did a column about the usability testing as it’s taught at the University of Texas School of Information. I got to meet a really great professor and some scary-smart students who are trying to make the future of product design a little brighter and smarter.

    Image courtesy Acura

    Last week’s Digital Savant column was about the increasing amount of technology in our cars. Since I’m not into cars and don’t know much about them, it was a bit of a shock for me to realize that this is stuff I should be paying a lot more attention to as a tech writer. A woman wrote me a terse email a few days after the column asking, basically, “What happens if you’re on the highway and you’re about to hit a semi in a collision and all this technology fails?” I responded, “You crash?” I mean, honestly, I’m not sure what else could happen.

    And the column that runs on Monday (but appears early online in the blog) is about how we deal with grieving online, particularly on social networks. Every year is suck-filled with death, of course, but this year it hit me personally a few times and many people I care a lot about and I’ve been paying a little more attention to it than in the past. In the column, I reference my grandmother’s death, which I wrote about earlier this year on this blog.

    Other new stuff: a Micro about making digital photo albums and a Micro offering advice on Xbox games for 6-year-olds.

    I was also on the radio, speaking on the “At Issue with Ben Merens” show about holiday tech gifts. You can listen to it on this page or download the audio directly.

    What else… we bought a fridge! I kinda got the bug seeing all the huge price cuts during Black Friday time and it reminded me how much I hated our fridge, which was so small and cramped and always made me curse when I’d load it up with groceries. It was so cramped I would not buy things because I knew what a pain in the ass it would be to try to cram them into the freezer or find space in the fridge. So we’d run out of stuff really fast, creating a cycle of fridgefrustration (or fridgestration for short).

    The new fridge is not even as big as they come. We have a narrow space to fit one in, so a full-sized 30-square-foot one would be banging on the sides whenever the doors opened. We ended up with something smaller/narrower, but still gigantic and spacious and luxurious compared to our old one. It has French doors, but they’re not that snooty, and two drawers the kids can easily pull on to get their own damn yogurt and frozen waffles for once.

    They moved our old fridge, which had not budged an inch in about eight years, and there was a Leviathan dust monster back there I had to defeat in just moments before they wheeled in the new one. Rugs were moved, doors were attached to metal frames and a burly man taught me how to push a button to magically generate water. “But don’t drink it,” he warned, like a grizzled shaman, “it’s full of charcoal.” It turns out that is temporary, you just have to drink two gallons of water before the water gets good. Mmmm charcoal. I just realized he said DON’T drink it. I was distracted by the stainless steel.

    It doesn’t have a TV or Internet, but the new fridge keeps stuff cold and spits out ice and doesn’t make me not be able to buy more than one damn frozen pizza at a time, so I think it goes solidly in the win column.


    Talk to ya soon. I’ll keep updating every week or two, but I’m really hoping to have some actual news/announcements to share with you before the end of the year about some old friends who will soon be returning. December is getting really exciting all of a sudden.

  • Turtle back

    If you have been the parent of a kid older than 2 or 3, you probably have experienced the thing where the kid lies down on the floor and doesn’t want to do anything.

    It usually happens as you’re trying to get them ready for school/day care or when they’ve had a bad sleep night. They’re tired and frustrated and revert to a state where they not only don’t want to remember how to put on socks, they won’t even stand upright. It’s incredibly frustrating for the parent, but sometimes, if I’m not going crazy at that moment, I try to imagine how frustrating that moment is for the kid. Their emotional range hasn’t caught up with their inability to process certain kinds of stress and they just turn baby.

    They flop on their back and, like the turtle, can’t seem to right themselves without help. So they wail and cry or kick or get mad at you when you do try to help and basically nobody’s happy. It sucks, to the BIG TIME.

    I’ve experienced that a lot on the parental side lately in the months since our sleep schedule changed, but I also have finally had time off enough this week to realize that I’ve been doing some of that myself.

    The last few months I’ve been the upended turtle, flapping around, but not really doing anything, expecting someone to help right me and just sort of letting out these little weak turtle bleats.

    They go, “Behhhhh. Behhhh.”

    It sounds fucking disgusting and the worst part of hearing it is knowing it’s coming out of my own turtle mouth.

    So that’s what I’m working on right now. Trying not to feel so stuck and overturned and waiting for something to happen and going “Behhhh” and having one sock on and the other sock across the room because I flung it over there in frustration. Things feel like they’re not moving at all, at least relative to all the movement in the world, but then I have to remind myself that I’m the turtle, the one on its back, the one that’s not moving.

    And that’s what needs fixing.

    Behhhh.

    I’m on a little four-day weekend for Thanksgiving, but work continues and there’s been a lot of writing still going on there.

    The new stuff is:

    I did a pretty sizable holiday tech gift guide for last Sunday’s newspaper. This year it was focused on gaming, led by Nintendo’s Wii U. I don’t have a lot to say about the Wii U itself. For the first time since maybe the GameCube (including portables), Nintendo didn’t sent a review unit to try out ahead of the launch, which is a little weird, so my only hands-on with the device was in a little trailer the company brought into town. I’m not buying one myself because, frankly, there are lots of other games to review that I don’t have time to get to and I think, based on my limited time with the demo and what I’ve been reading from reviewers who did get hardware, Nintendo has released a product that wasn’t ready for retail. We’ll see how it’s faring after the holidays.

    I also did a tech gift guide, as I do every year, for Television Without Pity. It’s more of a photo gallery, with text by me, but not focused just on video games.

    One thing I’ll add to both of those guides: at the time I wrote them, only four of the five episodes of The Walking Dead: The Video Game were out. Since then, I played the last episode of the first season and I can only recommend it even more. It made me cry, it broke my heart, it’s an absolutely high-water mark in video game narrative and character work. Such a great accomplishment.

    This week I also wrote about three other games I’ve been playing a lot (including the fantastic Penny Arcade/Rain-Slick Episode 3, which I actually completed) and I got to witness Chris Roberts achieve $6.2 million+ in his crowdfunding venture for the future game Star Citizen and posted a really lengthy interview with “Epic Mickey 2” game developer Warren Spector.

    The day I did that interview, Warren Spector was kind enough to invite me to his house(s) to see some of his amazing collection of artwork, movie geek wares and Disney stuff. What I learned is that if Warren Spector ever invites you to his house to see any of his collections, you go, no matter what. It was inspiring and very cool.

    On the Micro feature, I briefly defined Quora, the Q&A website.

  • Discomfited / Unstoppable

    Weird couple of weeks here, all over the place.

    Lots of strangeness and change and tension in some areas and then all of a sudden these amazing moments of grace and clarity and reenergizing.

    I don’t know what to make of it all, so I won’t even try, but for a lot of this year I’ve felt like things have just been in this weird, boring, waiting lull, me waiting for things to happen or for things to present themselves instead of chasing or working toward them. These last few weeks have been the opposite of that with permanent change going on all around and me asking myself, “Well, are you going to do something or just watch?”

    Mostly, I just watch.

    But I also did a lot recently, a lot more than usual. I reached out to a few people I haven’t talked to in a while. I finished an archive/migration project for a new website that took me so much longer than I was expecting, but damned if it isn’t done now. I spoke to a group of mom bloggers and was able to Skype in my writing partner for a session that was supposed to only be about 20 minutes, but lasted much longer and really inspired and reinvigorated my energy levels for something that has been a long-term struggle.

    (Here’s a photo of that a blog post about the event. The photo is from Nicole at Livemom.com, I believe)

    And, weirdly, I volunteered myself to go to a (totally hypothetical) plastic surgery consultation, which I think honestly may be the bravest thing I’ve done in a while (more on that in a minute).

    My daughters, who in recent weeks have been behaving like little, possessed zoo animals have turned a corner and are starting to behave like the sweet girls that I remember from before the new school year hours made them into cranky kids.

    So, strange times lately, but I’m actually kind of excited about the rest of the year and hoping to take a few more risks after what’s felt like almost a full year of stasis with only the occasional curveball (like going to New York City or restarting an old project I hope to help debut before 2013).

    A few days later… I wrote the above almost a week ago and since then, the 2012 presidential election happened, I went to Wurstfest and had another week just like what I describe above.

    The holidays are on us like a loose freight train and, weirdly, I’m not stressed about it in the “gotta get stuff done” sense, but more in the looking back and wondering how so much time passed so quickly from summer till now. Outside of work, I don’t feel like I’ve gotten much done at all even though I feel busy all the time.

    We’ve been having a hard time with a few things like figuring out how to deal with two kids 5 and under who are angels half the time and tantrum machines at other times.

    Work is still in major transition with a lot of things up in the air right now.

    And due mostly to lack of sleep (caused by the above-mentioned girls who have also added waking up at 5 a.m. for no reason to the mix), I’ve had a really hard time staying up late enough to write anything, or being clear-headed enough to even have the energy to get myself to the keyboard. And of course, that leads to a self-loathing cycle of feeling like I should be doing more even though I know I don’t have the energy or the right mindset.

    Really frustrating.

    So instead of more whining, I’ll try to focus on some positives.

    I’m working with my brother on something I’m excited about. I’m working with some old friends I used to work with in the Latino Comedy Project on a comedy thing for next year that we’re very excited about. And I’m working with a writing partner on the ongoing thing, which is still slow in progressing, but is still happening.

    I don’t trust myself to work on stuff along right now outside of the usual freelance stuff because mentally I’m just not motivated right now. If something isn’t assigned to me or given a deadline or pushed along in some small way by someone I’m working with, I probably won’t do it And that’s frustrating too. Wait, positive! This was supposed to be the bright side.

    OK, here’s this. I feel like the only place I’ve been really productive the last few weeks is at work (SEE ALSO: deadlines, teamwork, stuff assigned to me). I’ve written a lot of stuff, it feels like, but only there.

    There was a Digital Savant column I was pretty happy with about how to spot online fakers and scammers, which I hope came in handy as the election craziness was ramping up (and which is an issue now that holiday shopping is in season).

    Speaking of that, I did a column that runs in Monday’s paper about what’s new this year in online shopping. I tried to do a story like that a year or two ago and it didn’t seem like a lot had changed, at least not enough to warrant a big article. This year, I do feel like there are some new trends that are just starting to take off, so the piece is a roundup of those new shifts.

    I had some hands-on time with Windows 8 and the Surface tablet (neither of which Microsoft was able to provide review units for, not that I’m bitter). I don’t think I held anything back in that write-up, but I’ll that for myself, I don’t really like using Windows 8 on a computer with a keyboard and mouse. It doesn’t seem built for that, and I don’t plan to go through the trouble to upgrade my PC (or my Boot Camp on Mac) to Windows 8 anytime soon.

    I wrote about an Austin restaurant called Lucky Robot (where Zen on S. Congress used to be) that uses iPads for its menus and ordering. It was a mixed-bag experience.

    For the Micro feature, I defined 4K TV (or Ultra HD), and what the deal is with Windows RT (the OS running on the Surface tablet).

    And then there was the nose job story. We got pitched an item about this 3D plastic surgery image and both my (former) editor and I thought it would be fun, interesting story. Then, at one point, as we were trying to figure out if the story could lead the section and if we would have enough artwork to go with it, I suggested, “Maybe I should do the imagine and we could use those photos.”

    That was when the story went from a pretty standard thing to me standing in an office with my face being swabbed and put in front of a machine to have my nose critiqued.

    Dr. Jennifer Walden, a plastic surgeon, checks out the old Gallaga beak. Photo by Deborah Cannon / Austin American-Statesman

    The trick to doing a story like that if you have even an ounce of shame and vanity is to have a deadline the same day as the office visit. When I got there, our photographer said she didn’t think she could do that and I told her that at that point, I had no choice; there was no way to back out with my deadline looming.

    And that’s how I’m able to trick myself into doing things I would never, ever want to do otherwise — having my nose the focus of the front of the Life & Arts section on a Monday. I’m too numb about it to even be horrified at this point.

    I’m sure there’s lot more I’m not thinking of at the moment, but those are the high/low lights. I’m really trying to get my energy back up and not end the year in the doldrums. I’m going to try to get to bed earlier and to stop stressing about the writing so much. It’ll happen when it needs to happen, I really hope.

    I have some photos I want to post, but I’ll save those for a separate blog entry. If you can’t wait, you can probably see most of them over here on the Flickr or on my new Instagram profile page. For now, here’s one I really like that I took last week at Wurstfest:

  • In the company of (many) women

    I did a weird thing I haven’t done before which was to mix a long-awaited week of vacation with a self-imposed writing/reporting assignment. While traveling.

    I do not advise it.

    We went to New York City, which I love, my wife, our good friend Jessica (of last year’s super fun Vegas trip) and I.

    The timing of the trip was for the big BlogHer conference, a convention for women bloggers, which I decided I should attend. And here’s where things get complicated.

    I work for a newspaper and do freelance stuff for other outlets but the decision to go to BlogHer and write about it (without even knowing for sure whom I’d be writing for in the short term) was entirely my own. And here’s where we need to discuss something I’ve intentionally not talked about here or anywhere else publicly. I feel like I’ve told many of my friends, my family, some of my co-workers and pretty much every person I met at BlogHer, when they would inevitably ask, “Wait, why are you here?”

    And that thing is this: I was at BlogHer because I was doing research for a writing project. If it were finished or much further along, I would call it a “book,” but it has been such a struggle and there are not nearly enough pages yet to call it a book, so it is a “project” until it gains some respectable paper weight. It’s about mom bloggers.

    The other part of this thing is that it’s actually been something I’ve been working on for a while. A long while. So long that I don’t even want to say how long it’s been given how little progress I feel has actually occurred, writing-wise.

    But, and this is the part that’s been keeping me sane, I’m not doing it alone. A while back, when this whole idea started, I approached a good friend of mine, Tracy O’Connor, a woman I’ve known and been penpals with since I was 15, about working with me on this. She’s a great writer, she’s very funny, she ran a message board with lots of proto-mom bloggers on it, and as a mom of five boys, she knows a lot about culture of these online groups. Together, we’ve had lots and lots of conversations, done research until our eyes were ready to fall out and have done quite a bit of actual writing. Unfortunately, we had to put aside a lot of it when we realized we were going to have to start over due to some plotting issues. This happened earlier in the summer. It was a bit of a confidence rattler.

    This summer in particular, as I’ve watched several friends go through the process of completing and publishing books, has been tough. I keep screaming in my own head, “Why can’t you do this? What the Hell? What’s stopping you?” And the only answer I have is that it scares me. A lot. The bigger the writing assignment, the more I freak myself out about the scale and scope of it and the less I end up just enjoying the process and letting the good vibes and word counts flow. It’s started to affect my other writing, where I just want to avoid the keyboard altogether (like this delayed blog post, for instance) when the thought of writing in general begins to fill me with anxiety. Which it shouldn’t. I mean, come on. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve written millions of words. But I was unprepared, probably, for what a different beast something like The Project could be and how much you have to commit. I’m used to writing things, sending them out and moving on to the next thing. When the things I write are done, they are done. Living with one piece of work for so long has really messed with my head in unexpected ways.

    But I’m also filled with determination to see this through and to do my best writing (and self-editing) with Tracy and see what we end up with. The earlier draft we did, the one that ended up pointing in the wrong direction plot-wise, I actually really liked. We were writing at a good clip and more than 100 pages were produced, pages that we were genuinely proud of. I know we can do it again and push it through the right way.

    So that’s what’s been in the works: a “project” about mom bloggers. It’s fiction and we think we know where we’re going, but boy have there been setbacks and writer’s block (which I used to say I never got; ha ha, good one, brain) and frustration, but also in many ways it’s been very fun and challenging to get into someone else’s head and explore a world that is in very few ways my own.

    Tracy has kept my spirits up at times when I would have just packed it in and moved on to something else and my wife at one point asked, “Isn’t rewriting and starting over normal for something like this?” I had to confess to her that I had no idea. I guess? Yeah. Probably. Damn.

    I’m glad we’re sticking with it and I’m glad I went to BlogHer. It was a huge help seeing for myself a lot of what’s at the heart of what we’re trying to write.


    But trying to balance a for-fun trip with a for-work conference that I was already really nervous about attending completely wiped me out. I was stressed and not sleeping well and came back from the trip more exhausted than when I left.

    That’s even with eating lots of fantastic bagels, going to the Top of the Rock for the first time and doing some enjoyable Times Square people watching when I did have time to go out and enjoy myself.

    Tell me this doesn’t look like fun:

    OK, it wasn’t all nearly naked guys in Times Square. We did have time for a little sightseeing and delicious pies from Pie Face.

    BlogHer ’12

    As for the conference itself, I laid out most of my official thoughts and observations in this week’s Digital Savant column, where I discuss the state of blogging through the prism of the conference.

    I could have written a lot more (hey, maybe a book’s worth!) about the conference, really. There were lots of great insights in the panels I attended, a frenzy over products and swag I couldn’t quite get my brain around, and many good conversations I had with women who — when they learned what I was working on — offered not only great advice and stories, but who pointed me in the right direction to other bloggers, websites and events that I should look into.

    The organizers of the conference allowed me to attend as press, which made the whole venture much more official for me and allowed me to go into work mode while I was there. I took lots of notes, shot photos and tried to remember as much as I could so I could share with Tracy later (she was unable to attend).

    As much as I tried to blend in and observe, it was never far from the surface that I was one of the few men attending the conference. There were others, of course; BlogHer has more than 5,000 attendees, including expo exhibitors and they’re not all women. But I was so in the minority that my presence itself became a topic of conversations I had. I kept getting asked how it felt to be there with so many women, jokes were made (not by me!) about the estrogen levels in the rooms and, especially at the evening party events, I became very aware of how outside I was of these groups of bloggers who have made a pretty large, diverse community for themselves.

    I can sit in a panel and absorb presented information like anybody else, but I can’t go to a party and pretend that I don’t know a single person there.

    I had been warned by friends who’d attended before that the conference would be overwhelming and that the parties and swag are out of control. I’m not sure if that’s true since I wasn’t invited to some of the more private events, but I did witness an awful lot of grabby-grabby at the one swag event I was able to crash and in the expo halls, where everything from health supplements to iPhone cases to brightly colored dildos were being given out like Halloween candy.

    It was fun to see some of the veteran bloggers react incredulously when bloggers who haven’t even been writing for more than six months asked why they don’t yet have a big audience or sponsors. The stories of successful bloggers who’ve quit their day jobs to do it full time have become so typical that everybody thinks they can do it. I’ve been getting paid to write for going on 20 years and I still don’t have the guts to do that. It’s hard out there and even the pro bloggers are killing themselves trying to keep the money coming. Yes, they get free trips and lots of product samples and ads on their sites, but my sense is that even for that top tier of bloggers, the money is not nearly as plentiful and the lifestyle as carefree for them as people might think.

    Like I said in the column, it was a really well-run, well-structured, professional conference. I’m glad I was there and when I returned, I felt a rush of confidence for The Project. We have a lot more material to work with now.


    A few other things: the column the week before the BlogHer thing was a collection of reviews, one of the Telltale “Walking Dead” video game (really good, surprising and well-written) and Sphero, a robotic toy ball.

    There were also Digital Savant Micro features about what display mirroring means, one about RAW images and one this week answering a reader question about getting old photos scanned to digital.

    Miss Lilly
    We came back from our trip to two little girls who certainly missed us, but who weren’t as distraught about it as on our trip last year. In fact, they were really giddy and well-behaved when we got home. We were expecting sulking and a few nights of disrupted sleeping patterns.

    Before we left, we had a small, early birthday party for Lilly. Weeks later, this last Monday, she turned 5.

    It’s been easy to get distracted parenting her because she has a younger sister and the two of them have built their own little world of playtime and fights and giggly jokes. Unless we physically separate them, it’s sometimes hard to remember what it was like when it was just Lilly and how laser-focused we were on her, on every little milestone of growth and development.

    With two kids, it now feels like those things just fly by as we’re barely able to keep up with each new thing.  It seems so recent that Lilly wouldn’t give up the green plastic pacifier or that we were still struggling with potty training, but when I look at the calendar I realize that was actually a lot longer ago than I remember and that her sister dealt with those things on a completely different timetable (longer on the potty training, much shorter time with the paci).

    Time seems so short that we rarely even have time to look back on our family photos and videos and see what has changed.  I’ll admit that sometimes I don’t like to do that.  It just reminds me how quickly it’s happening, how many stages the girls area already past (Lilly was a newborn, then an infant, then a long stretch where she was a toddler; now she’s 5. She’s not a baby, a toddler, any of that anymore.  And I miss it.)

    I see in comparing the pictures that even her face has changed. I have to just marvel at how cruel it is that these changes pass right in front our eyes in ways that we can’t even see as they happen.