Tag: oklahoma

  • Voyage to the past

    Official 20-Year Reunion Photo

    10 years ago, I went to my 10-year reunion and it never even occurred to me that I was already writing on this site at the time and that of course I documented it. I sometimes forget I have this whole diary thing that dates back to 2000.

    But in a way, I’m glad I didn’t read what I wrote before I flew to Oklahoma City on Saturday for a super-quick round-trip 20-year reunion. I’m glad that the fog of parent brain and 10 years passed made me go into it with no expectations other than that at least two good friends of mine would be there and that I really wanted to see them.

    Because it turned out to be a weird night in a lot of little, wonderful ways.

    I can’t imagine there is anyone who goes to a 1o- or 20-year reunion and doesn’t find it a little strange, unless you live in the place you went to school and are in close contact with all the people who came up with you. I imagine reunions have always been a little weird, a mix of the people you remember clearly, the people you remember but never really spent much time with even when you were in close daily proximity and then the people who unfortunately completely left your brain and don’t return in memory even when the older version of them is standing right there in front of you.

    And then there’s the Facebook effect. I’m pretty sure a lot of people didn’t come to the reunion specifically because they feel they already get the nostalgia/curiosity hit they need from The Social Network and that a $400 plane ticket and accommodations aren’t going to add much to their mental picture of how their peers ended up.

    I went alone. My wife has no interest in going to her reunion and had much, much less interest in going to mine and I completely agree with that decision. Unless you’re into people-watching and hearing second-hand stories of glorious old inside jokes, it’s just an uncomfortable thing to be the spouse at these things unless your relationship is new and you’re still in the figuring-out-your-mate stage where everything is a window into their past and personality. If you’ve been with something for 15+ years, it becomes more of the same shit that you’ve heard hundreds of times, more like.

    The reunion did make me more aware than ever of the strange things constant online contact (again, mostly Facebook) have done to us. There were people at the reunion who spoke as if they interest nearly every day and the people that I do actually talk to on Facebook seemed like people I’d seen around within the last few months, not 10 whole years. When the night was winding down and people were saying their goodbyes, it wasn’t, “I’ll see you in 5 or 10 years,” it was, “I’ll post some pics and tag you” or “I’ll let you know on Monday what I find out.”

    The people who want to stay in touch are still in touch. Even the people we didn’t really want to be in touch with necessarily all the time we’re still talking to.

    Me, Marcus, Candace and Jeremy
    Me, Marcus, Candace and Jeremy

    I’m not saying that’s good or bad; for me it’s nice in a lot of ways and only negative once in a blue moon. But it is different, it is weird and I’m not sure that my generation has figured out what to do with it beyond simply ignoring it and moving on.

    I did have a good time, though. It took place in a strange and awesome building in downtown Oklahoma City (I went to school in nearby Midwest City) at some eccentric rich person’s house. I mean rich like having the kind of money where you say, “Screw it, I’m putting cars in the living room and getting poker playing dog throw pillows. And putting a DJ on the rooftop!” It completely blew away our 10-year reunion, which was in a boring ballroom that nobody remembers.

    I’m glad I went, the expense was worth it and at the end of the night, I had gotten to spend (not enough) time with some very close friends I never get to see. Sometimes just a few minutes of that is worth the money and the trouble.

    Some photos and Tweets from that night:

    This was, no joke, the entrance to my 20-year reunion. It turns out it's a freight elevator to an amazingly eccentric rich person's house. Bruce Wayne, maybe.
    This was, no joke, the entrance to my 20-year reunion. It turns out it’s a freight elevator to an amazingly eccentric rich person’s house. Bruce Wayne, maybe.

     

    Marcus and dog mentioned in Tweet below
    Marcus and dog mentioned in Tweet below

     

    Nope, nothing weird about this!
    Nope, nothing weird about this!

     

     

     

    Work stuff and monkey stuff

    I was on vacation for a week when the Digital Savant column and Micro didn’t run, but it’s been nearly a full month since I’ve updated, so here’s what I’ve had in the paper in the interim:

    Colin Anawaty, left, and Jason Bornhorst are co-founders of Filament Labs. Photo by Mark Matson for the American-Statesman
    Colin Anawaty, left, and Jason Bornhorst are co-founders of Filament Labs. Photo by Mark Matson for the American-Statesman

     

    I wrote a column about how complaining on social media about a product or service doesn’t always reward you with a happy ending (though it does work for some people). Last week’s column was about whether health- and fitness-related apps can really change your habits and make you a better, happier person. A MyStatesman account is required to view that article, but I also wrote a free blog post with supplemental information on the topic.

    This week’s column was about civic hackathons and the impact they’re making on the Austin community. Like the last one, it’s on MyStatesman, but I’ve been told a few times via Twitter by readers that it’s also available elsewhere on the web. I have nothing to do with that if that’s the case.

    The Micros recently were about movie-related apps Anything After and RunPee, a definition of the digital locker concept UltraViolet, what to do with old VHS movie tapes  and an explainer of Google+ Hangouts. We’ll be doing a Hangout on Tuesday to coincide with a column that runs that day in the paper. (Info on that in the Hangouts Micro.)

    I kept busy with a few other stories and blog posts: there was a story about Austin tech guy Whurley and his UnGrounded innovation flight to London; a story about the Win8 version of the ACL Access app and Dell’s involvement with that; a post about coping with the end of Google Reader; a post about an Austin-made orthodontics app called Mighty Brace (which will run next week as a “Raising Austin” column in expanded form); and a short story about family mobile company Famigo.

    Vacation sketch

    Space Monkeys! has rolled along with a new comic about parking problems and, because Pablo and I were both traveling, two vacation-themed sketches over the last two weeks, one themed to Costa Rica, the other themed to my Disney World trip.

    A bit’a meta 

    Wow, that’s a lot for having been on vacation. Speaking of which, I wrote a huge chunk of blog about my Disney World trip, which happened before my reunion, but this blog post is already far too long so I’m splitting it into two blog entries.

    The good news is that it’s already written, but I’m saving it for next week to time it to my next column, which ties directly in with that trip.

    Sorry for the long break. It’s just been busy-as-crazy around here and I’m excited that I’m very close (days close) to finishing up a huge writing project that I’ve been working on since December. It’s been a lot of that and very little blogging here, but that ratio should change soon as I get done. Hope to tell you more about that in just a bit.

  • Moves

    Changes

     

    This seems like a good transition time, what with all the graduations and weddings and new jobs and people up and moving across the country that I’m seeing.

    Add to that the birthdays and the births, the deaths and the cancers; right now feels like the opposite of those increasingly few times when you go a few days wondering if anything’s happening. Boredom doesn’t really feel like an option anymore if I’m paying attention. It’s just this incoming stream of stuff, stuff, stuff and it’s sometimes tough to allocate the appropriate amount of attention and care and congrats +/- sympathy when it’s so much at once. The extreme emotions can cancel each other out and you’re just left with a feeling where you’re not sure in which direction to aim your being and be present. Sometimes, unfortunately, it ends up being not in any one in particular.

    I haven’t had any of those things listed above except a birthday last month. The only real transitions for me have been some relocating at work. We’re all changing desk locations due to a large-scale building renovation, not just me. I posted something about it online when I was moving my stuff into boxes to transport a few dozen feet and someone on Google+ assumed I’d lost my job. Funny thing, Google+ always feels a little disconnected like that.

    The desk move wasn’t bad at all. We have new carpet, I purged a bunch of stuff and have a neat desk again (but for how long!?) and my new spot is a lot less isolated than my against-the-wall former work home.

    The other move at work was more recent; we’re switching blog software, which was a big dreaded thing many of us were worried about that not seems like much less of a big deal in that it works and it not that difficult to use. The old blog and archives are up and we’re hoping there’ll be a solution to moving them over, but for now, the new blog home looks nicer and solves some of the quirky problems we had before (like not being able to use Chrome to blog with or our links showing up as garbled teases on Facebook) while introducing some new quirky problems that are not as visible to readers.

    I wish I had some stories to tell you about the last few weeks, but they have been boring in the most happy way. I’ve been spending more time than usual at home with the kids and as frustrating as that can be in small moments (“No, Carolina, no, put the pen down, no, don’t write on the cabinets, stop, please, no, put down the pen, give me the pen, HERE, THE PEN, HAND ME THE PEN, STOP WRITING, OK, why are you crying, I’m sorry, here’s the pen back, NO STOP WRITING ON THE CABINETS!”) it is also kind of wonderful in hundreds of completely boring ways that amount to me watching my kids do their thing and just charm me and warm my heart.

    Sometimes I post videos or photos when they do something particularly visual, but it doesn’t come close to capturing what it’s like when they really turn on the magic. Maybe they’re singing along to a song or making a little gesture I’ve never seen before or saying something random and hilarious (My wife: “Omar, get the stuff out of the car.” Lilly: “Yeah, OMAR, get the stuff out of the car!”).

    There’s a trade-off, of course, there always is. I don’t think about moving my family to another city because that’s off the table. That’s something we decided pretty firmly once the kids were born. I don’t travel much away from the kids, maybe only once or twice a year. My going off to do stuff like working on videos or attending conferences (especially on weekends) or taking advantage of attending really cool stuff in Austin just doesn’t happen as much anymore. I miss an awful lot. I turn down a lot of things and beg off a lot on things that are not entirely unreasonable.

    When they were much smaller, it was a lot harder to do that. I really did feel like I was exchanging my youth and Good Times for boring, frustrating babysitting. Now it’s really not hard to make those decisions. I think about what it’ll mean not to be able to tell them goodnight myself or how being away for an entire weekend means I can’t take them to the park or the zoo or Schlitterbahn, or the Jumpy Place or even just the Donut Palace on a Saturday morning (their new favorite hangout) and how I would feel if my dad was always gone.

    Wanting to be here and having to be here can be two very different things, but sometimes they go together and you feel like you’re spending your time well.

    Work and other stuff

    I mentioned earlier that I moved to a new blog for Digital Savant. Here’s the link for the new blog and the address for the old blog where the archives are still housed for anything older than last week.

    HTC One

    Last week’s column was a big review piece featuring four smart phones, the BlackBerry Z10 (the one without the physical keyboard), the HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Nokia Lumia 920.

    It was a little crazy having four extra cell phones in the house. If I had them turned on at the same time, one Twitter reply or email would set them all chiming at once, which begins to make you feel like a hamster responding to the ring of a bell.

    This week’s column was a roundup of travel apps. I don’t travel a lot, so I relied on the wisdom of my friends and co-workers who do. It turns out they had great suggestions and I plan to use some of these apps when we go on a big family trip this summer.

    The Digital Savant Micro for the last two weeks included one about Adobe’s Creative Cloud (their subscription service) and “Rougelike,” a genre of computer role-playing games I’d only heard about recently even though they’ve been around a while. I also did one recently about gesture recognition, like the air swiping you find (but which doesn’t work very well) on the Galaxy S4 phone.

    3-D printers discussed by monkey and sloth

    The “Space Monkeys!” are still at it on our comic strip site. Meany pumped some iron in this strip and the possibility of self-reproducing 3-D printers were taken to their logical conclusion in this strip.

    Lastly, this has nothing to do with me, but my former wonderful bosses who founded Television Without Pity have gotten back together to launch a brand-new TV site, Previously.TV. Just a week after it went live, it’s already got some must-read regular features and if you know what the original TWOP was like, you won’t be surprised by the sharp writing and the gorgeous site design.

    Postscript

    This seems to keep happening: I write a blog post (like the one above), sit on it a day to add images and fine tune it, and then something happens that seems to render everything I wrote less important (or beside the point, at least).

    Tonight, it’s the horrifying tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma, a place where I still have friends and just up the road from where I lived for years in Norman and in Midwest City. I watched the awful dark clouds churn at work on a live video feed and when I saw what it looked like, I knew it was going to be bad.  Even without seeing where it was touching ground and what damage it was doing, it looked like the end of the world. It wasn’t going to be anything but devastating.

    This happened before after I’d moved away, in 1999, and for months I heard stories about the devastation and the loss. The 1999 tornado apparently passed less than a half mile from where my family lived when we were there.

    Tonight, the death toll in Oklahoma is at 51 and many of those are children. There’s nothing I can say or offer. As with the 1999 storm and even further back to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, I feel the same helpless sorrow.  It somehow makes it a little better to know that Oklahomans will respond the way they always have to these horrible events. They will respond with strength and grace and they will rebuild. It’s also a little worse to know that. Why should the people of Oklahoma, some of the finest people I’ve ever met, have to suffer through this again.

    If I think about it too much, it just makes me hurt and hurt. Right now, it’s just heartbreak. I’m waiting and hoping they find more of those kids.

    Please help if you can.