Tag: npr

  • Something silly, something serious

    'The Iron Man'

    Last week, I asked my folks at NPR if I could do a blog post about how methods of holding your new iPhone 4 might sound really dirty. They asked, “How dirty?” It was a fair point. My list included things like, “FaceTime Fingering.”

    Glark helped brainstorm some ideas with me and by the time we were done, the piece shifted into a photo gallery with photos by Glark and text by me. I think the result, “12 New Ways To Hold Your iPhone 4” turned out pretty great. It’s far less dirty than what I originally imagined, but given that this story was mostly told in photos, that’s probably a good thing.

    Even more fun is imagining Glark in his home studio setting up lights and gathering props to do these. Or imagining his face, with an iPhone in his mouth, on the front page of NPR.org. He’s got full-sized images on his site. Wow! Check them all out.

    Jared and Juanita Esquivel. Photo by Jerrad Henderson, American-Statesman
    The other important thing from this week was a story that ran on the front page of today’s Austin American-Statesman. It took me a few months to write and, as with any long project, I went through all the states of hating the story, wishing I’d never even started it, and then, as it started coming together in the end, passionately defending it and wanting to make everything about it perfect.

    That’s never possible, but this one, from my point of view, comes close. All the graphic and photo elements came together, almost all the pieces made it onto the online version and there were no last-minute crazy changes that needed to be made. It was as smooth an experience as I’ve ever had with a story like this. I’m pretty thrilled to have it finished.

    I wrote a blog entry setting up the story and another one with lots of background and notes I couldn’t fit in the actual story (“deleted scenes”) if it’s a subject that interests you. I had no idea I was so passionate on the subject until I was pretty much done writing it all.

    Bonus: the comments on the story are actually unintentionally hilarious, or racialtastic. Here’s one:

    Yeah but you know how the economically disadvantaged, among other “classes” score on the TAKS. Maybe homie just don’t got the brain power to see that $70 for access for the whole family is cheaper than a net-capable phone in every hand. Plus I got idea that texting my posse is quite a bit more important than looking up some BS about getting a job or school. That’s uncool. The men in pookie’s gang just wouldn’t approve of it. Here the bottom line isn’t necessarily the bottom line.

    Dude. Classic! The same guy made a “pork-n-beans” reference in another post. To be honest, I was expecting far, far worse in terms of comments.

  • On iPad uses and library tech woes

    My second column for CNN ran this morning, surprising me a bit. It’s the second one I’ve written and I haven’t gotten any word yet on whether there’ll be any more. This one’s about alternative uses for an iPad, including audio recording, photo editing and bedtime storytelling.

    Also yesterday, I did a segment for NPR’s All Things Considered about a new national study on public libraries and the challenges their digital services (free Wi-Fi, computer access, etc.) face. Here’s the blog post (with audio embedded) and a transcript of the segment.

    I’m working on a digital divide/mobile story for the Statesman, so the reporting I’ve been doing matched up nicely with the piece. My story is due soon and it’s been a very, very tough one to get my head around, but things are starting to fall into place.

    Other new stuff: had a great Father’s Day with my girls and also got to spend time with my mom, dad and brother. I blinked and Carolina is already starting to scoot around on her belly and roll over. I swear she was just a immobile infant a week or two ago. Lilly loves it, of course, and can’t wait for her sister to crawl and walk. We’ve been through this before, but I still find this stage absolutely amazing.

    We have a new Trailers Without Pity that I haven’t even had a chance to post and just finished scripting and recording the next. I’ll get that up sometime later today. We’re weighing our options right now on the future of the videos beyond the end of our current contract, but Pablo and I have both been so slammed we haven’t had much time to make any decisions.

    That’s it! Back to the grindstone (with my nose).

  • Cup

    It’s been a few weeks, but yesterday I was on NPR’s All Things Considered with a segment about how the World Cup is affecting Internet traffic, how to watch it online or on your phone and the debut of 3-D TV sports on ESPN.

    report-itThe audio of the segment is here and you can see the blog post I wrote to go with it on the All Tech blog.

    Apart from the fact that I don’t follow World Cup too much (especially now that they allow a million bees in the stadium), there was another little curveball with this segment: I was chosen as the guinea pig for an experiment.  We did my half of the segment not in the KUT studio like we usually do, but with an app called “Report-IT” on my iPhone.

    The app was able to connect to their ISDN line and apparently the sound was pretty good.  The only thing I notice in hearing it back is that the room I was in sounds very echo-filled, but that’s the room’s acoustics, not the app’s fault. I could have switched to a sound-proofed room in my work building (yes, we have one), but the Wi-Fi connection I was using didn’t reach that far and when we tried it with 3G, the quality dropped considerably and there was too much lag.

    The best part was talking to Michele Norris while an engineer instructed me to move the phone to different positions around my mouth. “Now hold it upside-down and away from you at a 45-degree angle, like you’re talking across the top of the surface of the phone.”

    These guys know audio.  It’s incredible how well they know what works and what doesn’t.

    Not sure if I’ll be back on a regular schedule on NPR, but at least for this week I got to feel a little bit like a radio pioneer. (Or “test subject” or “guinea pig.” I’m fine with any of those.)

  • Shhhh… Facebook is listeni– oh, HI, FACEBOOK!

    'Hey, I look at porn at work, too!'

    Today on NPR’s All Tech Considered, we did a segment about Facebook and privacy, an issue we keep coming back to every few months because every few months Facebook is like, “Hey, we changed everything again. Deal with it.”

    The blog post on NPR contains a lot more links to news stories and information if it’s a topic that gets your undergarment of choice in a wadded state. (The audio is embedded on the blog post, too.)

    I’m not exactly sure what audio you’ll be hearing, though. We recorded the segment early in the afternoon and later we found out that something we said in the piece was wrong and I had to run back to the studio and re-record. I thought we were only subbing in one line but instead we did an entire re-over, so the piece I ended up hearing on the radio was more accurate, but was not as info-packed as the version we did earlier in the day. Such is life. Nothing’s ever perfect, especially when you’re on deadline.

    And yes, I realize the irony of talking about Facebook privacy when I just added Facebook “Like” buttons to my entire personal Web site.

    I know.

    OK.

  • What was missed

    The plan is to write more actual blog entries (and short, stray thoughts) on Terribly Happy now that the new site format is live, but I still want to keep the stuff I’m working on and things that are published/produced elsewhere appearing here.

    I can’t stress enough how much of a pain in the ass it had gotten to be dealing with Blogger the last few years. Half the time it wouldn’t publish, other times it messed up my HTML on something simple like adding a link to a post. Uploading an image was a chore and it never formated things the way I wanted it to.

    If there were reasons I moved more to posting on Twitter and less on Bloggystyle, it was those. It got to be like having to visit a bad neighborhood where you used to live for a necessary errand that you keep putting off.

    Anyway, here’s some of what I would have posted last week if the site had been accessible:

    On Monday, I was on NPR talking about Apple (seems like we’re always talking about Apple, huh?). Specifically, iPad sales, the Gizmodo situation and the perception that Apple might be getting a little bit of a bad reputation in some circles. Here’s the audio from the segment and the blog entry I wrote with links to stuff we talked about.

    Also last week, I had a story in the Saturday paper about location-based social networks like Gowalla and Foursquare. The story didnt make it online, mostly because I broke down and expanded it into three parts on Digital Savant (at least I think thats why it wasn’t online). The Digital Savant versions also include tips from power users and a few other tidbits we weren’t able to fit in the paper.

    Basically, it’s a primer on how to use Foursquare and Gowalla if you’re not already using them (or maybe you are and you’re a little lost.

    You can find those entries here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.