'Parking in Motion' app screengrabJust a short note about two stories of mine that ran over the weekend.
The first was a sort-of review/riff on an app called “Parking in Motion.” Parking in downtown Austin keeps getting worse and worse and I think most people in town who have to go there are looking for some sort of silver bullet to avoid $10/per parking lots. The app, it turns out, doesn’t really solve that many problems, but it sure does look nice and may lead the way to something even better.
Of course, the name of the app implies that you might use it while… you know… you’re in motion? I guess? That’s probably not such a hot idea.
Work has been a little weird and a lot of interesting lately. My beat isn’t changing, but some of my day-to-day duties might in terms of what I’m working on for the paper and what we prioritize. I’ll be writing certain kinds of features more regularly, so that’s good since sometimes covering personal tech is a pretty large beast to try to get your arms around all the way.
I’m still trying to get a separate, more personal writing project off the ground and we’re about to finish another season of Trailers Without Pity. Summer, of course, is moving far too quickly for me to keep up and soon it’ll be too late to go toobin’ or to use that Schlitterbahn season pass. So, despite all the stuff I want to write, I’m trying hard not to spend these next few months stuck inside, away from the sun.
It’s a little out-there compared to the stuff I usually write for them, but with a few tweaks, they were willing to publish it as satire. I’m keeping an eye on the comments for this one because this time when people post, “This article is ridiculous and completely dumb!” I’ll be inclined to kind of agree.
Photo by me for the Digital Savant blogI might be doing stuff more pieces like this for CNN.com soon, which makes me very, very happy.
I always love chatting (or Tweeting) with Stacey and she proved to be a great, fun guest. I look for people who know a lot about tech but also don’t take it too deadly seriously and Stacey is a reporter with a great sense of humor. You can download it on the blog or grab it from iTunes.
I got to meet with him and his girlfriend and geek out a bit over the stuff he’s working on.
Also in the Statesman over the weekend was a reverse-published blog post I did about Turntable.fm, a DJ chat room/music service that my brother and I have gotten completely hooked over the last week. We’re planning on doing a horrible songs room, perhaps on Friday, and just playing the worst stuff we can think of. You should join us! You can find the room here.
Other cool stuff: I submitted an “I Am Not a Crackpot!” audio piece to my favorite podcast, Extra Hot Great and it appeared in an All-Crackpot episode. Lots and lots of fun and a great listen with lots of great submissions. You should subscribe to the podcast. My piece is about how we keep Closed Captioning on all the time. It comes in at around the 45-minute mark. I may not have convinced the podcasters, but I feel vindicated by the commenters on the site.
We had a pretty quiet 4th of July weekend. We didn’t travel anywhere and we had some family stay over. We took Lilly and Carolina to an insane place in New Braunfels called The Jumpy Place where they have giant bounce castles, like six of them in one giant warehouse-sized building. There are also comfy sofas and chairs for parents. But did we sit in them? We did not.
Were we supposed to go in the bouncy castles with the kids and climb the giant slides and jump around even though we are adults? We were not. Did we? Shit yes.
4th of July night was oddly quiet. No fireworks, no explosions. We’ve had a drought and there’s been a big ban on fireworks that, strangely, people actually observed. For the last few years, we’ve missed the fireworks. We used to go every year, especially when we were at S. Padre Island. We’d crowd as close as we could to Louie’s Back Yard by the water and watch the explosions.
The kids go to bed so early that for the last three of four years, we’ve just resigned ourselves to missing the displays. I got a guilty bit of pleasure knowing that nobody else was going to get fireworks this year, either, but then I felt bad sitting inside Monday night, waiting for the sound of Black Cats exploding in someone’s backyard nearby. The sound never came.
Oh, one other quick note — I was supposed to be teaching a class at the University of Texas this fall as an adjunct professor, but it looks like that has fallen through. I was approached about it last year and agreed to do it. Then, it got to be July and I started wondering why nobody had contacted me; shouldn’t I be preparing or something?
Turns out it never really materialized and I just found out. So maybe that’ll happen in the future, but most certainly not for the fall semester. That’s OK. I’m sure I’ll find ways to stay busy.
Jeff Roane of MiCommand, Inc. Photo by Zach Ornitz, Austin American-StatesmanI must have some kind of obsession with the idea of smartphones and tablets taking over the functions of remote controls, probably because of the mishmash of A/V equipment in our living room that all has to work together. I find myself writing about it again and again.
I’ve given up trying to get our trusty Harmony Remote to make everything work perfectly. There’s still times when the receiver, TV and satellite box all turn on just fine, but there’s still a blank screen that requires pressing “TV On/OFF” on the remote to get the HDMI connection to wake up. Don’t even ask. I’ve spent way too much time stressing about it.
"Sweet" John Muehlbauer, from my tablets story. Photo by me.
I feel a bit like I lost my Eye of the Tiger (I blame the stupid, eyeless tiger) for a while after South by Southwest Interactive, as I wrote before, but things seem to finally be ramping up again. After months of feeling too tired and overwhelmed to pitch outside of work, I’ve had a few things start to materialize (more on that later) and at work, I’ve had two section-front stories appear this week that I think turned out really well.
The first is a story is an advice/how-to piece on transitioning to a tablet like the iPad 2 from a laptop or desktop computer. This is probably not a full-blown trend yet, but I’m starting to hear of people ditching their heavy laptop on business trips in favor of a tablet or just finding they have less use for a full-blown computer the majority of the time. We were hoping we were a little ahead of the curve on this. I think by the holidays, we’ll see a lot more of this going on as that market grows. This piece ran in Sunday’s Life & Arts section.
Austin writer Gabrielle Faust. Photo by Zach Ornitz, Austin American-Statesman
The common thread I heard in my interviews was that it scales up really fast and becomes unmanageable in a short amount of time unless a famous person devotes staff or a significant amount of time to it. (Even then, it can get beyond their control.) Something to think about for those who are gaining popularity online with their art or business.
This is a bit antithetical to what the industry is like now. Everybody wants their hands on a gadget first and to put out the earliest review (usually right when an embargo lifts) and rack up those page views from curious Googling readers.
But given the kinds of stuff we’re talking about — tablet PCs, smart phones, stuff that you really have to live with a while to get your head around and really sort usefulness from novelty, I just don’t think you can review something like an iPad or a radically new kind of phone in a few hours or even a day or two. So I tend to play with stuff over time and then realize that a month has gone by and I still haven’t written anything about (insert name of gadget). Right around the time the PR people start e-mailing me, asking, “So, uh… are you ever gonna review this thing and mail the product back?” is when my crack timing, motivation and work ethic kick in and I write the damn thing. Sometimes I write two in the same article just to clear the decks.
I’ve got a more detailed story about migrating to a tablet running June 11 that’ll offer tips, app ideas and more to those thinking about moving away from a laptop or desktop to something a little more portable.
Also had a review of the new Mortal Kombat game, which I quite liked. Spent a lot of nights trudging through that story mode (which was ridiculously awful/awesome) and getting back my moves from all those years of Kombo muscle memory.
And on Saturday, I wrote a lengthy “Raising Austin” column about kids, security and Facebook. I got to talk a little about a trip I took to Dallas last year to speak at a panel for Jewish Family Services on the topic and to tie it in with some recent news. Sometimes I do speaking stuff or freelance and worry that it won’t be useful for anything but making a little money, but other times it pays off in other ways and helps me a lot at my day job.
That’s about it for now. Summer has kicked off her in New Braunfels and we went to Schlitterbahn three times in one weekend. That is how the Gallagas roll when it is hot outside and we have season passes.
With all the time off I took in the last month, it was starting to feel I was barely employed and that my name was disappearing from the newspaper. Then, I had three short stories run on consecutive days, as sometimes happens.
Last Friday I did a piece about Starhawk, a game being developed for Sony by an Austin studio called LightBox Interactive. I had a chance to play the first level of the game and was surprised how good it was since it’s still nearly a year before the game will probably be released for the PlayStation 3. I posted a few screen grabs from the game on Digital Savant.
On Saturday, I had a Raising Austin column about an app developed by two Austin lawyers and moms that dispenses tips and advice for pregnant women. It’s called “Your BFF During Preganancy.”
