Tag: statesman

  • I salute sausage (salutes)

    Wurstfest ’07. Photo by me.

    I’m lucky to have an editor who reads my stuff (even on Twitter) and recognizes that when year after year I proclaim how much I love something, at some point it’s probably a good idea to assign that to me as a story for the paper.

    That’s how I ended up writing a piece about Wurstfest for Thursday’s Austin360 section of the paper as a cover story. By completely coincidence, the year I was assigned to write this story is the 50th year of the festival here in New Braunfels and they had a lot of special things planned for this year including a giant mural and a visit from a German dignitary.

    The story was a lot of fun to write and you can tell where I was cutting loose a bit from the normal reporting/writing; as I was writing, I imagined the people I had interviewed from Wurstfest seeing the article later and crying, “What the crap is this!?” to the parts of the piece that were a little more personal.

    Then I imagined them banning me from the festival, me screaming at the gates, and being forevermore labeled as a “Sausage Interloper.” That’s a real thing in Germany, right?

    Seriously, I do hope that doesn’t happen because we plan to go at least 3 or 4 times starting Friday. Bonus: in the print version, my wife got a full photo credit for a picture she took of Lilly and me on the carousel.

    Other stories I wrote for the Statesman this week: on Monday, I had a piece run about “Dream Closet,” an iPhone app that helps you organize your closet from Austin company Appiction. And on Thursday, we published a special 24-page pink section in support of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. I did a short story about Komen Austin’s social media efforts.

  • Scoop McNewsboy

    Just a short update on some stories that ran in the paper today. I’ve had a really good few days with a bunch of stories I’d been working on or planning for a while suddenly appearing all in a row this week.

    On the front page I had a story run about how the gubernatorial candidates in Texas for the November election are using social media. This was a story that had been on our budget for a while and that I was dreading. Whenever I write anything to do with politics and technology I always promise myself not to let myself get pulled into doing that again. My dread continued as I reached out to the campaigns and found that they were so busy it was tough to schedule interviews and get the ball rolling.

    But then the last two weeks before the stories were due, the interviews started happening and then, to my surprise, I was given access to the candidates themselves. The last week leading up to the story running got exciting and once I had all my interviews done I was suddenly thrilled to be writing it since I actually knew what I was talking about after all the reporting I’d done. It’s a nice place to be where you have much more information than you could possibly fit into a long story. Over the weekend some edits were made that condensed a chunk of the story; I wasn’t thrilled with that, but overall I’m happy with the way the whole piece turned out.

    The other story I had in today’s paper was some news we broke about South by Southwest Interactive starting up a Texas education-themed conference next March called SXSWedu. Not sure if I’ll be covering that myself or if people on our newsrooms education will be doing that, but it’s nice that we got the story first.

    The next few says I’ll be visiting the Game Developers Conference Online and doing a little coverage at the Austin City Limits Festival on some of the behind-the-scenes tech stuff being shown off and seeing if the cell networks hold up (something we end up having to check up on every year, it feels like).

  • That time I defended a billionaire from Facebook

    Aaron Sorkin. Photo by Ralph Barrera, American-Statesman
    I posted a few days ago on Twitter about this big pipeline of stories I’ve been working on that are suddenly going to appear one right after the other for the next few days. The flood started today with a movie review I wrote for the Statesman of The Social Network (B+).

    I also did separate interviews with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the movie, and actor Armie Hammer.

    A condensed version of the interviews ran as one piece in today’s paper, along with the review.

    I loved the movie, but had a problem with how Zuckerberg was portrayed. Making him meaner and colder than he is in real life makes for a much more entertaining movie and certainly a more dramatic one, but I was still bothered a little, enough to point it out in the review and to bring it up in different ways to Sorkin and Eisenberg, who both had very good reasons for approaching the story the way they did. But, having met Zuckerberg briefly and having seen him speak live several times, I’m pretty confident that a large swatch of his personality and his goals simply don’t come across in the movie. Not to take anything away from Eisenberg. I think he does a great job playing a character. It’s just that the character is not exactly Zuckerberg, at least not the Zuckerberg of the last few years. I think the movie also betrays Sorkin’s inability to see much that’s positive in what Facebook has become.

    That’s his prerogative. Facebook is gigantic and growing and scary.

    This was the first movie review I’ve written in a long time and I really enjoyed getting back to it, if only briefly. I worked very hard on making it well-written and I hope it comes from a slightly different point of view than most of the ones I’ve seen.

    The other thing that ran in the paper today was a short story that’s been prompting some discussion on Twitter and might only be of interest if you’re in Texas and into politics. It’s about Twitter and the gubernatorial election.

    It’s a walk-up to a much longer, more detailed piece about how Texas Governor Rick Perry and his November challenger, former Houston mayor Bill White, are using social media in their campaigns. That story, which I’ve been working on for weeks, is scheduled to run in Saturday’s paper (whups, it moved to Monday), hopefully on the front page (fingers crossed). I’ll link to it when it hits the Web.

    Other updates: Lilly has started dance classes at her daycare. Carolina is driving us nuts because she wants to crawl everywhere, grab everything and put all foreign objects in her mouth. Not much else to report. Keeping busy, trying to get enough sleep at night, still missing summer, looking forward to the holidays.

  • Goodbye Summer sun

    Photo by Mark Matson, for Austin American-Statesman

    I looked up from my computer screen and summer was over. This makes me sad every year because even though we spent lots of weekends at Schlitterbahn and I even went tubing for the first time in years (with Glark and his nephew on the Colorado River), I always react with shock when it gets to be September and I realize I didn’t spend as much time as I wanted in water, on a beach (we didn’t go to any beach at all this year) or doing other outdoorsy stuff.

    It’s happened every year since we moved to New Braunfels in late 2004. I always imagine the summer will involve me working from home every day and typing from next to the water at Landa Park and taking afternoon dips in the Comal and then spending my evenings at Schlitterbahn. It never quite works out that way for myriad reasons.

    I’ve noticed that I tend to be a lot busier at my day job in the summer. Maybe it’s because lots of other people go on vacations and we’re often short-staffed in these months or maybe I just work better under harsh sunlight. But it’s when I tend to do a lot more stories for the front page and when I came back roaring after my annual post-SXSW Interactive exhaustion.

    I did a column for this week’s Tech Monday about an upcoming Clean Energy Venture Summit and in yesterday’s paper was a pretty length piece about Fantastic Arcade, a new indie video game festival in Austin spinning off from the very famous Fantastic Fest for films.

    Haven’t done NPR lately and the CNN articles I did early in the summer are the only ones I’ve worked on. Yet the despite of extracurricular work, it feels like I’m busier than ever and at night, after the girls are in bed, I just slump on the couch with exhaustion, unable to get myself to the computer to do my own blogging or to update other sites or do much of anything but trying to catch up with the overfull DVR or to try to avoid snacking into the wee hours.

    Speaking of the girls, Carolina is now crawling and seems much more adventurous and prone to grab things and put them in her mouth than her older sister did. Lilly turned 3 last month and is taking a dance class at her daycare that she loves.

    I’m trying to get my energy level back up so I can think about what I want to do next, especially if we stop doing Trailers Without Pity, like I mentioned in the last blog post. Pablo and I really want to start doing our comic again, but even that is a time commitment that might be difficult for us to coordinate. He’s got his own set of projects he’s working on (like doing recaps of Undercovers for TWOP) and his own social life to keep up with.

    If it sounds like I’m bitching about being tired and having no time, I’m really not. I’m thrilled that things are busy at work (as opposed to being boring), my daughters are happy and healthy, and I’ve actually had time over the summer to read books, catch up on TV shows I’d been meaning to watch and to do things like take walks outside every evening and pay my bills, which is always nice.

    I just wish summer had lasted a little longer and that I’d gotten myself into deep pools of water a little more often.

  • My Life Is Phones

    Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez, Austin American-Statesman

    In today’s paper, we ran a roundup of smart phones that I put together. It includes the iPhone 4, the Sprint EVO 4G, the Verizon Droid X, the T-Mobile Samsung Vibrant, the BlackBerry Torch and the Dell Streak (which is either a mini-tablet or a comically large Android-based phone depending on who you ask).

    For the last few months, since right before the iPhone 4 came out, I’ve been pretty much flooded with devices. The EVO came first, then two iPhones (Apple wanted reviewers to be able to get wowed by FaceTime), then a burst of smart phones that arrived when I started requesting them for the photo shoot that would yield the image above.

    The story was originally supposed to be what we call a “Charticle” (chart + article!), but for space reasons ended up a more traditional introduction + info box.

    I’ll tell you that while it’s fun to get to play around with different phones and try them out, it’s not fun to have 6 or 7 phones in the house in addition to the ones we own ourselves. It becomes a constant game of keeping track of chargers, updating software, updating apps and navigating tons of menus. It’s a little stressful, if I’m being honest, and I’m kind of relieved to be sending a bunch of them back this week. (The Torch has already been returned and a batch of phones go back on Monday.) But then two more phones arrived late last week (Sprint Epic 4G and AT&T Captivate) for some follow-up reviewing.

    It’s getting harder and harder to do real reviews of smart phones because they’re basically computers now with their own software ecosystem and people want to know not only how the phone performs but what apps are good for it. Reviewing a smart phone now without trying out some of the best apps available for it isn’t really acceptable anymore. (It always amuses me when I see some tech writers post a review of a smart phone the day it debuts when it’s clear they’ve only had an hour or two to play around with it. Way to be unhelpful to any potential buyer who’ll be stuck with it on a two-year contract.)

    I also posted a blog entry with my reviews of the some of the phones in the roundup and links to other reviews for the ones I wasn’t able to get to. I had play time with all the phones in the roundup, but some I had a lot more time with than the others. The iPhone and EVO I had about two months to try them out while the BlackBerry had to be sent back within a week after we received it. (Plus, BlackBerry has an operating system that I’ve never been able to get my head around. )

  • Linky-links and summer still

    Illustration by Don Tate II, Austin American-Statesman
    I haven’t done a lot of NPR this summer (but I’m supposed to tomorrow, no, really this time) and except for some CNN assignments that are long past, things have actually slowed down quite a bit. When Pablo and I aren’t doing our little videos, I’ve just been watching lots of TV-on-DVD, playing some video games and spending more time than usual with my daughters. It’s been nice.

    Where things have been busier than usual is at work where I’ve had three pretty large-scale, reporting-intensive stories in a row to work on in the summer. I don’t know what your office is like, but in the summer, our office changes quite a bit. There’s lots of people going on vacations, an influx of interns and a flood of summer movies, summer concerts, video games and, for me, lots of smart phones hitting the market.

    Feels like I’ve been working harder this summer than usual and there’ve been more opportunities to get on the front page or do big packages for the chunky Sunday paper. In today’s paper, I did a story about e-textbooks, which was an attempt to answer a simple question: “Where are we with electronic textbooks in Texas?” The answer was fairly complicated even though everyone I talked to on the subject for interviews was speaking along the same lines. There’s great potential, but we’re at the very start of what’s going to be a significant change in the way kids learn and interact with materials in the classroom. Obvious, yes, but the law changes in Texas are pretty major and will probably affect the way other states do things as well.

    Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez, Austin American-Statesman
    In Monday’s paper, I have a shorter, much simpler story for the “There’s a Creator for That” series about an Austin company that did a Mountain Biking Trails app. I really love the photo that went with this one (at right). These app features have been a lot of fun to do and are easy to put together quickly. (Unlike e-textbooks, which took weeks.)

    Last week, I had a story appear in the paper about a local Pokémon champ. It was from a blog post on Digital Savant, where I’ve been doing tons of blogging lately.

    I mentioned earlier that I’m getting to spend more time with the kids. Lilly turned 3 a week and a half ago and we’re still trying to wrap our brains around having a 3-year-old in the house. She’s getting to be fun and funny and full of questions (some brilliant, others ones we wish she’d ask less frequently). We had a small pizza party for her birthday and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so excited. Today, we took her for an all-day trip to Schlitterbahn and she went on a tube ride that was much scarier than we were expecting. She was terrified the whole way and at one point got separated from me on a tall slide where you have to go one-by-one. My heart was breaking as she got caught up there, without me, starting to cry, but when she came down, after the splashing, she smiled hugely and said, “I did it!” She was so proud that she went down that huge incline alone.

    It’s been like that a lot lately. I just watch her grow and conquer and everything feels like it’ll burst inside. It’s been a good summer.